Slooooooow

as anti-gravity snails

I like this story. Jonathan Lethem is a pretty cool guy, and I am wayyyyy behind the times. What to do.

It's official

And I believe I can call this:

Boston Legal has jumped the shark. Or nuked the fridge, if you prefer it that way.

What makes me say this: the teaser sequence for the eight episode of season five. When you resort to slo-mo action sequences, badly choreographed "fight" scenes with funny noises, you have lost.

The show was increasingly looking this way anyway; it's a formulaic show, and this was bound to happen. It's a heady mix of legal procedural utopianism with high-quality, high-caliber actors, even if I can't stand some of them; James Spader, shithead with that hypnotically powerful voice; Shatner, oh Shatner, with your despicably fantastic acting; and that royal vixen and diva that is Candice Bergen, who is still so damn hot at her age. It so happens that this formula David E. Kelley concocted was one with remarkable staying power.

Oh christ, an addendum: This episode continues ascend the hill of mediocrity; hot-button issues and excessive self-reflexivity does not bode well for your future.

Seriously

Is there anything Bruce Lee can't do? In this, he sells me a phone:



Purchase his product! Otherwise, he will turn those nunchucks on you.

Long overdue accounts

Amidst all these recounts, I felt I should I add my own.

I realise that I haven't been entirely honest recently. This is not an admission of wrongdoing. I have mainly been omitting, possibly embellishing, rather than fabricating. Very few things survive in thin air.

Most of this has come from oversight, tiredness, impulse, laziness and acquiescence: this is not an admission of blame. I'm wondering, however, whether it be worth my time to fully figure out all my reasons and dealings, and in fact deliver a more fleshed out account of the 'facts', so to speak. Interestingly, figuring out what to correct is in itself a somewhat opaque enterprise.

I need an excuse to write and think anyway. I can admit I haven't done much of that recently.

And as the 1790 race heats up

The first attack ads begin to arise:

Is THIS the kind of man you can trust with YOUR perception of reality?

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Yes, I realise that Nietzsche was born 40 years after Kant. but treat this as a cute anachronism. For all we know, all these people were time travelers.

Psychic time travelers *dun dun DUNNN!!*

It's really not what you're thinking

I really don't like kids, but I don't think even I would go so far...maybe.

WARNING (especially to you members of the fairer sex who like whiny poop machines): A kid gets hurt in this. The Internet finds this funny.

Especially the parts of the internet the fairer sex is distinctly non-prevalent, except in jpeg form.



Yes, yes parenting fail, zomg lols and all that. It is amusing, in that way bottoms of barrels are.

The main reason i'm actually posting this is for some hoped-for commonality and information: am I the only person who thinks the break-dancing in this video is, frankly, awesome? It's one of the more impressive displays of athleticism and gymnastics i've seen. Which leads to me to my second point, which is, does anyone know where the fuck this took place? I've skimmed the comments on both Youtube and Failblog, and predictably, most of them center around the 'LOL' or 'ROFLMAO' or 'LOLROFLMAO' variety. Seriously, I want more footage of that particular event, and especially if that dude did more breaking. I swear, the move he used to take out the kid with was most definitely from Tekken...

That's just unfair

Ouch. ASIDE: I should start agglomerating these into a best of slashdot or something. There exists something like that already (Seen on Slash) but that better for teh funnyz. And lots of comments require more context, though they do a pretty good job of that since i've last seen them. On with the show!

Someone makes a (slightly) ignorant comment:

Actually, "philosophy" means "love of wisdon", not "love of knowledge". While not claiming philosophical rigour about the definitions, "knowledge" is basically "acquired information", whereas "wisdom" is "applicable knowledge".

To which this guy decides to slam back...and thinks the only way to do it is to nuke it from orbit. Christ, never fuck with a guy who has intimate knowledge of Ancient Greek, and knows the Unicode for it:

That's simply incorrect. The literal translation of the Greek Sophos (Slashdot doesn't allow greek, but put & #931;& #959;& #966;& #959;& #962; [note: remove spaces if you want to actually see the greek, you weirdo] in your browser) is able, skilled or clever, and was applied as a title to those with the training to read the future from objects, as opposed to the innate ability. The word is in specific opposition to the modern term "wisdom." There isn't a word in ancient Greek for Wisdom, as they seperate between scholarly-attained internal wisdom and naturally-attained internal wisdom as two distinct topics. In Greek, scholarly wisdom is called skholastikos, and innate wisdom is referred to with the now largely forgotten word bleptor (which has largely been replaced by the Latin "vidensi" whence we retain "evident.")

A philosopher is a lover of knowlege, skill, ability, and cleverness, not a lover of wisdom, experience, or history. The word you're looking for is the extinct term "philobleptorist," which you can see in several contemporary references to Greek great minds, particularly Herotodeus, Aristotle, Anaximander, Democritus, Protagoras and so on; it's also occasionally used in the proto-Renaissance during the "omg Latin = smart" phase, and so you see it bandied about for people like Bacon, Newton and Galileo often.

By example, consider Mike Michaelmiker from WZZZ TV, John Brown from the Brown Family Farm and The Great Mage Darkcloud from Avalon. All three people are able to read the weather. Mike uses doppler radar. John uses what farmers have figured out over the last few thousand years. Darkcloud summons a demon and binds it to just go look at the future.

Mike Michaelmiker is a philosopher of weather. He understands how weather works. He understands why a tornado happens, and can evaluate data to estimate the likely upcoming weather patterns. With sufficient tools, his predictions are highly accurate in the near future. Mike doesn't need significant historical data for the local terrain; a map, some hardware and a few hours are sufficient for him to get up and going. However, without tools he cannot function.

John Brown is a philoblapterer of weather. He is aware of the historic trends for weather in the area. He knows dozens of signals from the natural world - if the air smells like metal, then an electrical storm is likely; if the air feels wet and drops rapidly in temperature, then rain is likely; if the wind seems faster at the ground than ten feet up, then local weather is about to turn from cloudy to clear. He doesn't know that the metallic smell is loose ozone from electrical interactions in the clouds, or so on; he just knows that that smell is an indicator of a well known process. With a few weeks to get a sense of the pattern and provided that his knowledge is locationally appropriate, his predictions are also highly accurate, but for completely different reasons. John is only effective in terrain he knows the history of, because even similar terrain can have radically different weather contexts, but needs no real tools other than some time.

Darkcloud is meteonephelamancia, and lord only knows how he works. The point was to distinguish between academics and learned innate knowledge. The Greeks believed that there was a block of knowledge waiting to be unlocked piecemeal inside each of us, and went as far as to distinguish that from scholastic information right in the language. Sophos is clearly knowledge of skill, not innate wisdom, by the very nature of the Greek lexicon.

The counterpart by scholarly skill is an academician; it was common but not required for a philosopher to be an academician. Counterexamples, however, include Pythagoras, who never attended a day of school in his life and proudly attested to that (people who call the Akousmatos a school are mistaken; it was a think-tank and a borderline cult. People went there to work, not to learn.) Pythagoras is remembered among other things as a great Philosopher, but it would be a mistake to call him an academic. Granted in the modern sense academic has begun to blur with researcher, but remember at that time it had not. The Chaerephon notwithstanding, Socrates is probably another philosopher which was not an academic; though what we know about him is second hand, several of his students including Plato indicate that he frequently denied accepting money for his "public conversations" which others viewed as teaching, and there is the supposition that he relied on wealthy friends, presumably Crito, Euclides and eventually Stilpo.

The counterpart by innate knowledge doesn't have a title, because you don't really get people who choose to have innate knowledge. However, when that knowledge was believed to be derived of gods or powerful beings, these people were called Oracles from the Greek "orare" to pray or plead. Otherwise, it would be typically referred to as a magician with respect to some specific topic, rather than as a group, such as sciomantia - someone who speaks with shadows and shades (the idea of referring to them as dead is modern, since referring to a dead creature as dead back then was taboo and believed to be a good way to get haunted, so you never would have heard necromantia.) By the way, -mantia has turned into the modern "-mancy," whence we get rhabdomancer, pyromancer, osteomancer and so on.

They believed in all sorts of weird divinations, and as such referred to them almost like professions; they had, say, leatherworkers and ironworkers, but no word for tradesmen, by metaphor. (That is, there were arithmantia and alectryomantia and oneiromantia, but no generic "mantia.") My favorite is gyromantia. It's funnier than it sounds; look it up.

By the by, the myth that sophia comes from wisdom comes from the mistranslation applied in the 1600s by someone in reference to Hippocrates' identification of what we now call Wisdom Teeth as "sophronisteres," or teeth which come in once the person is characterized of self-control (adult teeth, in the modern vernacular; the ancients would call us intensely age-discriminatory.)

At any rate, don't argue with people because someone told you something. That someone is frequently wrong, and the person you're arguing with frequently isn't. Argue with other people only when you know the specifics, which in the case of etymology means the particular path the word has taken to get to where it is today. It is especially important to not argue the meanings of words in a language you apparently don't speak.

The best thing about arguing the definitions of words in ancient Greek is that you can't pull the "well that's what it means today because there are a lot of people making the same mistake" routine.

I agree, llamas are out of control

Seriously, this is entirely worth it just for the end bit.

That is so true

Steven Seagal really does do that.

DILEMMA(esque): I want to support this by purchasing said product. But said product is only available overseas (Amazon), and were I to purchase said product, I would be paying (relatively) exorbitant fees in terms of exchange rates and shipping costs and so on, probably more than the actual cost of the product itself. It deeply lessens my feeling of supportage for this. I might just give in and download the damn thing *soupir*

I gotta turn this into a slogan, a motto, a creed

a proverb, an adage, a precept, but best of all: the reductionist rhyming chant.

"In my experience, experience is about as useful in learning about the world as every single other method of learning about the world; that is to say, absolutely useless. (and perfectly valid)"

Wrangling out essays and thoughts. My vocab, my expressiveness (my perspicacity, to be ever so droll) isn't there...right now? It's a discomfiture I can do without. You shouldn't ever take a cane from a blind man, or the ________ from a ________. I feel like poeting, which isn't a valid instinct for me. I also have a hunnerd or so articles on my Reader (goddamn Economist), so I should get through that, maybe. Here's one I like, with accompanying enticing morsel of illustratum:

McCain FTW

Fails to win?

Amusing. It's all over, and yet I feel exactly like this.

IT NEVER ENDS

I got out of the house. It's a good feeling! But back to non-essaying! Yay.