Blog moved

If you've been going to my blog via thomaswebb.net, then no need to do anything (except the RSS is now different), but if you've been reading it at thomasjwebb.blogspot.com, please update your bookmarks.. There's already been many, many new posts under the new (wordpress) system!

What is Worldview?

Envision a line out of rocks.. This is the world, the laws of physics, of psychology, of anatomy... It is the shape of a lake, or a fjord or a fog..

Then see another line. It is glowing and almost geometric... it almost approximates kinda the first line..... Where it is closer to the center than the rock line, it is a taboo, and where it goes out beyond, it is magick... the land where ladies come back as lilies for their lover...

...

Ignorance keeps the glowing shape simple,
and wishful thinking keeps it beautiful

Mac OS X vs. My Keyboard

I like Mac OS X and all, but there's just one thing that really bugs me about the Mac - Apple's contempt for the keyboard. I wanted to know if any of you out there know the answer to these problems:

• In Windows or Linux, you can hit the end key to go to the end of the line you're typing or the home to get to the beginning. This neither works on my mac laptop nor my mac mini with a pc-keyboard.
• On any other OS, you can hit the tab key while editing a form and the tab not only goes to the text fields, it goes to radio buttons, select boxes, etc. But on Mac, these are skipped right over. Why?! Can I change this? It doesn't matter what browser I use; I could use the same browser on all platforms with the same problem only on Mac.

These issues waste more time for me than even writing this blog! The keyboard is so fast and I want to bypass Mac's Mouse-ocracy. As a programmer, these things are particularly frustrating!

Asimov and Animism

I had an idea yesterday when scrambling to make sure I didn't lose any Mexican jumping beans from a bag I spilled. I was concerned about their safety even more than my future ability to hassle these clicking owl-heads. And lord knows I like to hassle those who can't fight back! (just ask my baby half-brother, mwa-ha-ha)

Here's the idea: in I, Robot, there was talk about how some little girl was treating ill her robot. She told him to do all sorts of things without considering the bot's robo-feelings. Though there were no direct ill consequences of this (the robots are programmed to enjoy this!), the idea was that she would learn to treat other humans the same way. So, what's the consequence of us treating objects as mere objects?

Traditional cultures had/have a worldview in which everything is alive and in which other animals are our (humanity's) brothers and sisters. Even things that weren't strictly living had spirits (like rocks, rivers, etc.) Is our seeing of this as all false inadvertently making us just a little less civil, a little more cold in our dealings with other people?

Axis 1 - Intensity

A few hours ago, I took the trash out, and had to dump collected weeds out of one of the cans. It has been raining slightly the past few days, so a sort of tea was created in the bottom of the can. The smell was a concentrate of the natural smells I expect from the area, disarming me with an overpowering version of what are usually pleasant smells.

This is the component of a sensory experience that one might mistakenly see as not changing the nature of it - intensity. Louder music isn't the same music, but louder. It's different music. A "pleasant" smell is so often nothing but a subtle smell and the opposite with bad and pungent smells. A woman who, noticing her perfume smells good, decides to bathe in it, and your typical modern sound mastering engineer who obsesses with making music loud neglects this fact.

Oh yeah, and how good coffee tastes is well correlated with how hot it is, but that actually has nothing to do with what I'm talking about here.

The difference between evangelists and fundamentalists

I know many outside the "faith" community are insensitive and fail to differentiate evangelists and fundamentalists, lumping them together as some sort of boogie men. Well, let me set the record straight, they are different. We faithless people are insensitive, and must learn the subtleties of the respective movements. Evangelists are people who wish to widen the breadth at which their cult enstrangles* humanity. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, are those who wish to deepen the depth at which their cult enstrangles humanity.

On the subject of evangelism, this is a bit of Jesus-humor that is lost in the translation (kinda, like the riot, "Peter, you are my rock" HAHAHAHAHA HAHAHA!) You see, evangelist comes from the ancient Greek for "bringer of good news", which is funny because they mostly warn about how hell is a real place that's reserved for not doing what the good news-bringer tells you to do, which usually involves leaving your family and your culture and accidentally drowning yourself.

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*enstrangle is a perfectly crumulent word

Natural Affirmative Action

Once upon a time, a natural sort of affirmative action existed, one that has become extinct, unfortunately. When the wealthy got comfortable, their bodies became weak through disuse, overnutrition, undernutrition and cocaine. The lower-class became strong through their hard work, and this would occasionally allow them to ooze above the upper crust.

Diseases such as beri-beri, anemia and pellagra were caused by consumption of fancy polished grains (white rice, white bread, etc), which were once available only to the wealthy. The industrial revolution slowly brought the privilege of these problems to the masses (now, the FDA requires fortification of refined grains, so these epidemics have become rare). In addition to undernutrition, many of the wealthy suffered from overnutrition - becoming fat and sluggish through overindulgence. The proletariat remained lean and mean.

Cocaine (and many other recreational drugs) used to be available only to the rich. It's use as a recreational drug (in powder form) goes back to the 1860s. It was common for nobility to grow long fingernails on their pinky fingers to snort the stuff. So, as soon as the wealthy stopped having malnutrition, they had cocaine.

But as of the 1980s, a chemical and marketing product mix known as crack came about, and now for once cocaine gained the ability to ruin poor peoples' lives too. Oh yeah, and through farm subsidies and new technology, food is really cheap, meaning the poor are just as vulnerable as the rich of obesity. Thank you, McDonald's!

So, are there, or will there be in the future, any natural forms of affirmative action? That is, are there phenomenon that naturally equalize situations where class might otherwise be a noose people are born in? Avoid the obvious answers (complacency). Discuss...