DeltaAro

The last episode reminded me of Kim Jong-un, though. I so hope “The Expanse” does not get cancelled. The ratings (I know ratings are outdated, but still) aren't that good. Roughly the same as “Dark Matter”1, which got cancelled. But the show is – by all indications – far more expensive than “Dark Matter”. If that happens, at least I can read the books for the conclusion. 1 as cheesy, silly and full of hackneyed Sci-Fi-tropes as it was, I still liked it.

Yes! Love it!

… and religion. And if they only cared about that they were married to Jesus (Catechism of the Catholic Church 923).

But that's true! // Welcome back!

Oh you're back again!!

addendum (26/3): okay, I thought about it a bit deeper. 1.) The concept of biological sex is deeply entrenched in biology. For humans it is applied in pure binary form at a sufficient level of abstraction; biological sex has explanatory and predictive power. So if sex is a social construct, then also biology itself must be – partially. We must reject that biological concepts necessarily latch on or correspond to real properties in the world. 2.) One could then instead accept “resemblance nominalism” (a particular object has some property if and only if it suitably resembles a certain paradigm case) for gender. But talking of a “paradigm of femaleness” seems quite weird (to say the least)… is it like we have to find a woman who looks super feminine in outward appearance possesses all the stereotypical behavioral traits (passive, weak, nurturing, adaptive, agreeable) in a very pronounced way works as a florist ?? And even “resemblance nominalism for gender” would, at a first glance, conflict with self-identification. Okay, maybe the “private sense of one's own gender” comes from a subjective, intuitive examination of one's qualities (especially psychological) and feeling if overall there is a suitable resemblance (perhaps motivating oneself to increase one's visible, outward resemblance) – still confused about this, though! In the end, the drawback would be, of course, that “female”, “male” etc. lose clear, fixed meaning. Probably this inconvenience can be justified because for many people identifying with a gender is an important factor for happiness. Though personally I couldn't care less.

Probably one of the most aromantic things any of us here has ever done.

Why does Margaret Hamilton look like Amy Farrah Fowler? Further important news for today: (source)

This is a very confusing issue for me, too. If you completely sever gender identity from biological sex1 and gender expression that is, you conceive it purely as an internal experience, the whole theory seems highly vulnerable to private language type arguments. The total severance with 1. results in puzzlement why we use words like “female” or “male” for gender. Severance regarding 2. is even graver, the whole concept runs the risk into becoming unintelligible. Let's say a firefighter, overcoming their fear by willpower, enters a burning industrial site to close a fuel valve. This means that fear is not necessarily associated with the typical behavioral patterns like flight from danger. But if such situations wouldn't be an exception, how could we ever associate the word “fear” with this special, shared subjective experience of fear? How could we ever infer that we're talking about the same thing? Similarly if you cut all ties to anything empirically observable regarding words like “female”. 1 if you like it or not, it's SEX that's written in the passport. And I have no reason to doubt that they really do mean biological sex (as encountered in its most ”purified” form in textbooks about population genetics) here and they also really do believe it's the only game in town.

Okay, sorry. I didn't want to insult anybody. To me it seemed such a mild, humorous remark, I mean if you end it like this: I didn't call fanfiction crap or bashed it like the above mentioned Anne Rice (and many other authors). Didn't say “lower art form”; that would mean that no matter how talented the writer is, if they write fanfiction it would turn out to be substandard. That's not my position. The question is more if a serious, talented writer would decide to take up writing fanfiction permanently. Reuse of characters or the universe from another work can constitute copyright infringement. Here I'm actually on the side of fanfiction: this dissolves the idea-expression dichotomy, which is not okay. Copyright suddenly acts like patents, protecting ideas (e.g. the idea of Harry Potter, not just the text Rowling wrote), but with an insanely longer duration than patents. But still, that's the law and it's unlikely to change anytime soon. That one's work might be illegal (for a very banal reason – not like a political satire might be illegal) is a bad situation for a genre. Of course, in ancient times it was different, when copyright didn't exist and the attitudes about strongly derivative works were more favorable. It's pretty funny for modern standards how Virgil in the Aeneid brazenly lifted the hero Aeneas from Homer's Iliad to concoct a story in which the Romans are descendants from Trojan refugees. Still it's considered as one of the greatest works in Latin literature. Propertius thought it was even greater than the Iliad. But those times are over (for now). Also the works on which (according to my cursory review) the bulk of fanfiction is based on … are … Twilight, Harry Potter, Naruto … PS: Okay, I've edited this post, to make it more palatable. If I had only known that anybody takes fanfiction as seriously as you two, @arokaladin, @Jot-Aro Kujo! Please enjoy your hobby and don't be too mad at me!

Never searched for fanfiction and don't understand the appeal of it. I don't waste the considerable effort it takes to read fiction on anything that's not high art. My guilty pleasures are authors like Calvino and Bulgakov, snob snob. Would you be shocked to find someone who doesn't know what “xargs” is? Did you know what it is? “A/B/O” or “Alpha/Beta/Omega” are even more obscure.

Daaaaaamn… seriously?!?! I mean, seriously? I wish I hadn't looked – now I have to suffer the just consequences for straying from the Emperor's guidance: THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY: IGNORANCE IS BLISS IGNORANCE IS A VIRTUE IGNORANCE IS YOUR BEST DEFENCE BE STRONG IN YOUR IGNORANCE (source: various Warhammer 40,000 codices and rulebooks)

huh?

From what I've been told, they're more robust and easier to repair than single taps.

A computer without a power button. Oh well, those actually exist.* * technically a computer. And I'm using a similar one right now… not the weak Raspberry Pi but a 100 € SBC… still without a power button! yesterday my real PC fried.

Texhnolyze Black Lagoon (sometimes a bit too childish or lack of realism = silly, though) Cowboy Bebop (for nostalgic reasons ) Serial Experiments Lain Ergo Proxy Psycho-Pass

Maybe Blade Runner 2049 is anti-romantic? There's a romantic subplot between the human replicant “K” and the holographic AI “Joi”, and Denis Villeneuve shamelessly recycles an idea from Spike Jonze's Her in it, namely what happens in the surrogate-scene; but in the end it's all deconstructed / subverted1. 1 At least in the “standard interpretation”; Blade Runner 2049 is very opaque (yet boldly so – not resulting from artistic infighting as its predecessor). Like taking the hints in the Final Cut of Blade Runner (1982) seriously would give the movie a dramatically different meaning, here already the theatrical cut is thoroughly suffused with paranoia that will not get dispelled.

I'm not so good at describing this; much recycling took place, but still it was more varied, more complex and heavier than the TFA one. The biggest improvement was how it was utilized, contrary to TFA it really always fit the scenes and it was used more effectively (didn't interfere with the sound effects – you sometimes barely perceived the soundtrack in TFA). Yes, I mean that every frame looked just fantastic … and the scene of Admiral Holdo's sacrifice … wow. Now the costumes… yeah, ‘The Phantom Menace’ had Queen Amidala's costume, which is simply the most memorable of the whole saga, and it had tons of widely different costumes. There's not this massive variety in TLJ, of course. But it looks all very stylish, for example Leia finally looks great, who looked pretty rough and tumble in TFA. There's a lot to see in the Canto Bight casino scene (of the botched subplot). Now, every guest was dressed in black and white there; that was very likely the right decision to catch the elegant flair of the casino, but of course imposed a limit for variation – it's still pretty amazing what was done just with black and white costumes. Snoke's Elite Praetorian Guard is probably kind of controversial, they're Samurai-like and look more aggressive and ready to fight, less ceremonial than the Emperor's Royal Guard – and they're bright red, they take us a bit back to Sci-Fis of the 1960s, but IMHO it fit the style of Snoke's throne room which seems to have a Kubrick-esque vibe to it.

Who has seen “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”? Oh daaaaaamn… the script. Though overall TLJ is far superior to “The Force Awakens” in many ways (scenes, visual effects, aesthetics, cinematography, soundtrack [way better utilized than in TFA], sound effects [TFA was just too constantly loud]…), the script was even worse. If there's one hackneyed plot device in bad TV soaps it's lack of communication, which creates situations that could otherwise have been easily avoided. You know that one, right??? Well, “The Last Jedi” has that, too, massively. Also a long filler side plot that doesn't go anywhere and lack of motivation of the characters. Again, like TFA such a script is simply baffling for a $ 200 million production. The problematic “safe” decisions regarding the backstory (recycle, recycle ♲) set some limits to how good the script could be, but that still doesn't excuse it. So, it's a mindless soapy script with liberally applied weak slap stick humor and also destroying iconic characters in a ham-fisted and deliberately mean way. Of course, if you want to just watch something that looks and sounds great, you will enjoy it. It's the visually most beautiful Star Wars movie and one of the most visually beautiful ones ever. Anyway, now there's romance in it!! Oops… so strictly this post is off-topic…

Romantic love causes global warming! I have a driver's license, yeah. So I'm slightly less aloof than Dr. NullVector. But I too delayed it! Never owned a car, though. I wonder how much can you impress your date if you use a car like this? With “Car Sharing” (or maybe some especially stupid “sassy” variation of that) written on it in gigantic letters… and also so many car sharing companies impose a zero BAC limit. There are some serious consequences, some even might permanently ban you, if you violate zero BAC. Bad for dating. PS: is image embedding broken? It doesn't seem to work anymore…

maybe “holding hands on the beach when you're going to die” counts as romance now…? Seriously, people get false memories of a kissing scene?

To put it succinctly: on the level of kinematics, there's no contradiction, only on the level of (Newtonian) dynamics there is. And the light intensity isn't a problem too for the geocentric model. But that's not an uninteresting question. Sure, not many people get that upset and obsessed about greysexuality... So it now boils down to an argument of authority. Nick Huggett and Carl Hoefer claim that the scientific consensus tends more in the direction that absolute states of motion do exist; hopefully they got that right.

I'm also not a native English speaker, and I seriously stumbled at ze/zir before I saw the use of "they" as singular pronoun. "they" in singular meaning seems so weird to me, I practically see my English teacher behind me saying "You failed and now must take remedial English". I would prefer ze/zir, not that clunky imho. But 'xe' is a bit difficult to pronounce for a word that aspires to become very common. It also reminds me of Xenon, Xerox ... and Lucy Lawless.

Yeah, well, from the standpoint of Newtonian mechanics it's easy: There are inertial systems and the Sun is at rest in one of them, while the Earth moves around the Sun etc.. And so the flight paths of the probes are as the calculations predicted. Case closed. Similar with Foucault's pendulum. But if we go to general relativity, that argument doesn't seem to work anymore... if there is no absolute space, how can we say what revolves around what? Still the SEP link already mentioned above contradicts the site to which NullVector linked a bit in the sense that it claims that most physicists aren't convinced that GR has really done away with absolute states of motion. But I'm not a physicist, so don't let this transform into some exhibition of the Dunning-Kruger-effect. For the classical geocentric models that would be right, but if you'd do a complete transformation of the all the movements to the coordinate system which moves with the Earth (so Earth is at rest in this coordinate system), there is no such contradiction.

What can be said without having to resort to the concept of space in physics, though, is that even in the most advanced geocentric models, which were ever seriously proposed (Christian Severin, William Gilbert), the Sun's distance to the other fixed stars changes periodically over a year. And this is not true. Instead one would need a complete transformation of all the movements of celestial bodies into the coordinate system in which the Earth does not move. Sadly, I don't know that much about general relativity; there are again sites contradicting the statement you linked. It seems to be a similarly vexing situation as with Goedel's theorems: There is one key element left out of this success story, however, and it is crucial to understanding why most physicists reject Einstein's claim to have eliminated absolute states of motion in GTR. [continued] PS: regarding to your link, allow me one feuilletonistic remark... It seems that modern physics is in general more friendly to ancient cosmology than classical physics. Like Aristotle's distinction of natural movement (which happens without a cause) vs. enforced motion. The movement of the planets and gravity he considered "natural movement", like today they are not seen as caused by a gravitational force but as movement in the curved geometry of spacetime. Similarly his idea of potentiality and actuality fits better with quantum mechanics than with classical physics. But maybe that's all just because things became so complicated that we slip into some postmodernist vagueness where any old idea contains some kernel of truths. Aren't there some members of the "Grey Tribe" here so that we can have some action? Yeah, Amazing Nontheist, Shoe0nToe, Fortified Skeptic, Cynic of Science, Shepherd of Logic, D4wkins F4n .... where are you guys? Well, the stituation is similar as in the following story told by William James: And so one would also have to first ask what they mean by "the sun revolves around the earth".