If you're keeping track of current events, then you're well aware of the hypocrisy (but then, they only pretend to care about principle....) of those in power condemning the protests today. Yes, windows were broken. Apparently, someone was even shot and died. Given the sheer scale of the protests, the fact that we don't have half the city burned down like a much smaller "mostly peaceful" BLM or (but-they-don't-exist) antifa "protest" would, is of course a miracle. And of course, the powers…
It's been quiet over the holidays, yet not. If anything, one of the problems with finding things to write about the last few weeks was the overabundance of current-events cruft, and yet the same kind of cruft over and over again, so nothing truly new. Nevertheless, it was a good week or two with family. So, a few odds and ends that I found or came up. First - an article on how many of the supposed pagan origins of Christmas are not [https://historyforatheists.com/2020/12/pagan-christmas/]. I…
May all of you and yours be blessed with joy and grace in the upcoming year. May the light of beauty and Truth shine upon you all.…
"The map is not the territory [https://infogalactic.com/info/Map–territory_relation]." It's both simple, and difficult to unpack. It's also related to the old saw about "the difference between theory and practice." The short version is that the "map", the model we hold in our heads, the very language that we use, has a relationship to objective and underlying reality, but it isn't actually the reality. It's an abstraction. A roadmap you look at on paper or on a screen isn't the…
The phrase in the title was applied to computer games by a friend of mine. As in, "You're not playing a game, you're communing with code." I'm not going to say that computer games, or even solitaire, aren't games. They have rules and win conditions. Nevertheless, they are also in a very real sense algorithmically driven - even if randomized - puzzles without the variability or stakes or psychology that having a human opponent brings to the table. As I noted in my last post re: Battletech gripes…