Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Again: Is everyone okay?, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
The hint to me was that a fire engine pulled up so close behind him it looked like it was actually going to hit him. He never noticed.
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Does anyone actually know if international calls will affect the congestion?
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A friend from Australia just called to chat with my wife - she was a little surprised when I said she'd have to call back in a few days because of the quake. "Isn't that in Christchurch?", and "should I call back on a land line?". "No, no, I'm sorry, we're fine, goodbye". I txted to apologize - even that went really slowly.
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Emma seems to be OK, she's heard Karl has Rhiana, and is praying her phone battery lasts as she heads out of town.
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So worried about those on the autistic spectrum and other disabled people already struggling to survive week by week and already prone to anxiety.
Hell yes. The image of a poor case worker trying to actually deal rationally with an autistic person is rather amusing, but I'm sure the reality would be very nasty for both of them.
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do you know, the vast majority of so-called ice-age engravings/pictures were made by yer usual grubby-minded adolescents depicting their pricks or their scores?
I can see why it caught on. I believe that the most small popular primitive sculpture is that of a woman with large breasts and a big bum, though. So they were thinking of their mums, too.
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Muse: Shelf Life: The Dying Elephant in…, in reply to giovanni tiso,
What he said was that there is no outside-text, that is to say, there is nothing outside context.
See, that almost makes sense to me. In my mind context is still the main thing modernists fail to explain, although to their credit they do try. Always they seek "context-free" knowledge. This is the aim of mechanized knowledge. The modernist approach is to enumerate contexts, and try to engineer the knowledge within them. This works to a limited degree. The problem is that there seems to be no end to the number of contexts humans operate within. To engineer the knowledge in every possible context is a task so enormous we don't even have any way of knowing how far into it we are. It also seems rather strange that humans pick up how to do it in only a couple of decades, just by hanging out and watching. You could say that's on account of millions of years of evolutionary history, but this does seem like a cop-out when explaining how it is that humans can master environments that have only been in existence for a few years.
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Islander, I'm touched. That means a lot to me.
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However, grammar is dependent on humans in a way that numbers aren't. If people had never existed, grammar wouldn't exist. Numbers, though, would.
Depending what you mean by grammar, I'm not sure there's much difference. Formal grammars, which are used to define computer programming languages, and other languages too, are highly abstract concepts in just the same way numbers are. Mathematics has grammars galore, and grammars are studied mathematically. Logic seems to me much like numbers in abstract existence. eg
If A then B.
A.
Therefore BWould be valid whether or not anyone could ever appreciate that.
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Muse: Shelf Life: The Dying Elephant in…, in reply to DCBCauchi,
Go on then. I have to know. Who's got the biggest infinity of them all?
That did come up. The answer? No one. There is no biggest infinite set. This is because you can always form a bigger set when you take the set of all subsets of a set. So the "set of all sets" is a logically contradictory notion.
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