Mizblog

So I’ve been listening to some older Loveline archives, from the Adam Carolla days. There’s a site: http://www.lovelinearchive.com where you can grab many older issues.

I used to think Adam was just a jerk, but he’s actually really funny and has some good insights into the human condition.

Adam Carolla on Religion
Adam Carolla on Society and Drugs

I don’t know, and you don’t either!

Today another experimental module was deemed “good enough for subjects”. This time we’re teaching the idea of common denominators through the task of dividing up one bar into equal sized parts, then cloning one of the parts a number of times to achieve a desired length. I’m proud of this experiment even though the only part I had in making it was the server, database, and framework for showing the problems and collecting data. Problems were designed by Zipora Roth, and problem presentation was done by Warren Longmire. Credit where credit is due. It’s come together into something quite nice.

Some of my friends and relatives are using a Ghandi quote as their e-mail signature.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Sounds nice doesn’t it? Until you think about it. To me this translates as

Don’t plan for the day after tomorrow, and don’t be in any hurry to learn anything.

I hate that quote. It reminds me of everything I dislike about Taoism and Buddhism. I can’t respect their teachings that promote stupidity.

When I first registered to vote, I registered under the Natural Law Party. I did this because I saw all politicians as corrupt, and the most corrupt were drawn to the two most powerful parties.

As you can infer, I did not register thus because of my belief in Natural Law (whatever that was). But lately I’ve come to wonder what it was that I’d been signed up for all this time.

The first thing I found out is that the Natural Law Party has been subsumed by the US Peace Government. Soooo I’m now a registered “Independent”.

The second thing I found out is that Natural Law is mainly an assertion of the objectivity of moral norms. Now we’re getting somewhere interesting. I’ve got to study this Natural Law thing some more.

Yesterday I saw a tree fall on some girl. It happened right in front of me. I saw the tree start tipping and it just kept going. This girl was on her cellphone and walking away from the tree, when my coworker yelled “Look out!” so of course she stopped and turned around just in time to see the leafy top of the tree land right on here. Luckily for her the only solid things that hit her were the little top branches (which hit her leg) but maybe if it wasn’t for that warning shout she’d have escaped contact entirely.

We decided, my coworker and I, that it was probably a message from God. We failed to agree on its meaning, however. He asserted that it was a commentary on our previous conversation, while I argued that if it was a message, it was sent to the girl upon whom it landed and that in any case we couldn’t know its meaning.

What does it mean to be a good person? Does it depend on the opinions of all the people around you, or is it something you can do by yourself? If you were alone on an island, would “being a good person” have any meaning? Is it a social or an absolute construct? This is the big question of meta-ethics.

I think it must be social because all of the examples I can think of involve other people, either directly or indirectly. This is ethical subjectivism. This is not to say that there is no universal way to be a good person and that all morality is relative. The fact is that we’re all human and within this common framework there could very well be a set of behaviors which are always good or always bad independent of the community. My tentative conclusion is that the question is irrelevant outside of the context of a community.

My coworker pointed out that the question of what makes a good person only matters to the person making the evaluation of whether or not you actually are a good person. People have mixed opinions on whether or not I am a good person, for example. And since you yourself are a person, you should behave in such a way as you see yourself as a good person.

This is the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It reduces in the individual case to “do unto yourself as you would have yourself do unto you” or “treat yourself however you would want yourself to treat you” or “do whatever you want yourself to do to yourself to yourself”.

What’s the difference between forgetting something and never having known it in the first place?

There have been a couple of commercials on TV lately that have been bothering me. I’d like to share my thoughts with you.

First there’s the Sprint “Fair and Flexible” commercials. This is where unlimited calling starts at 7pm. “7pm?!? That’s…that’s…” “Let’s spin the wheel of adjectives.” Okay, that’s not so bad. It used to be that you only got like 10,000 “nights and weekends” minutes per month, but now they’ve upped it to unlimited. Big whoop. The kicker though is when they tell you “So you control your plan; it doesn’t control you.” What?!? I don’t see how having to wait until 7pm to call people can be construed as “controlling your plan”.

Anyway, the other one is a beer commercial. “I’m just here for the Bud Light.” Now maybe it’s just me, but the message I receive from these commercials is that if you have Bud Light, no-talent jerks will come and crash your party and steal your beer. I guess they’re targeting no-talent jerks as the primary consumers of their product, so this might not be stupid on thier part. It just bothers me, that’s all.

It’s 2am. I’m awake. Got a meeting downtown at 8am and I’m not going to oversleep. I’ve already slept 5 hours tonight. Dreamed that I broke off a tooth, and it had wooden roots.

Been doing PLM development hot and heavy for weeks now, and there’s no break on the horizon.

Went to church at St. Joseph the Worker last Saturday. It was their 50th anniversary as a parish. Lots of Vietnamese and hispanic people there now, which is neat. They sing stuff in Vietnamese. Sounds funny. Anyway, I remember feeling very sorry for all those people. The rituals that bind them together and comfort them also blind them and fetter them. Knowledge is a frightful and terrible thing, but Faith will enslave you. The thing that bothers me the most is all the evil crap that gets tied into all the good parts. I agree that it’s good to be nice to others and that violence sucks, but the Bible has mixed opinions on the subject. Interesting that no modern church focuses on the war and killing in the scriptures, but it’s all in there. You should read it for yourself sometime, and think about what you’re reading!