Rose Thorn's New Writeups

The Everything credibility problem (idea)

2002-11-06T20:24:44Z

Let's for a second look at other factual (or "factual") works that people rely on: dictionaries and encyclopedias. I'm not only going to show that E2 is almost identical in its form to those literary forms, but that if you have a problem with this in a hypermedium, the answer is a radical overhaul of our metadata management.

Consider the Encyclopedia: a collection of short articles summarising topics. Organised by title in alphabetic order, and searched by title. Uses "see also"'s to reference other articles. E2 nodes are searched by title, but often found using links within other articles. E2 also associates author metadata, and original date metadata with articles. Votes are also a form of metadata. As authors can be traced and called-up on the content of their nodes, E2 WU should be more accurate than the anonymous write-ups in an encyclopedia. E2 nodes also have a guide as to how old (and hence out-of-date) they are, which encyclopedia entries lack. As…

Food poverty (idea)

2002-11-06T16:13:01Z

This is a state in which people cannot afford to have sufficient good food. This is not just absolute food poverty, which is the state of not being able to afford enough daily calories to maintain one's health, but also the state of being able to afford enough daily calories, but not to consistently form a balanced diet.

Symptoms of this are eating various processed foods and junk food, as they have much more energy per unit cost than fresh foods. When feeding children comes into the equation, parents often have to take account of how fussy children are, and so need to buy socially acceptable (in this context, socially mediocre) foods. Children are like that: stupid.

While there is food poverty in the UK, it is incredibly difficult to get any information about it, especially recent information. I wish I had more to tell you.

November 6, 2002 (thing)

2002-11-06T15:59:19Z

Picture the scene, dear reader: A beautiful English autumn morning in Hampshire, the rain driving, concrete and metal all around, I walk into Booker's Cash and Carry dressed like the frickin' man from del Monte. It was just an accident: I didn't think about the colours when I threw my clothes on this morning. For some reason, this seemed to imbue me with extra authority this morning, causing the cash-and-carry staff to defer to me rather than the more darkly clothed William, despite the fact that he's rather more used to our arrangements with Bookers.

3 fuckin' hours buying crap for my hall shop. Now I have inflicted some of that time wasting on you. It's not nice, it's not clever, but fuck it.

Yo! Bum Rush the Show (thing)

2002-11-05T21:40:48Z

The first album released by Public Enemy, pub 1987. Copyright Def Jam Music Inc.

From their first album, Public Enemy displayed their anger at the system as they perceived it, covering such topics as racism, police harassment, drug abuse, and "Sophisticated Bitch"es (judge this track for yourself). The whole disc sounds incredibly pared-down compared to the hip-hop of today it is incredibly effective, totally unlike the poncey crypto-jazz beats you get today. The sounds are characterised by synth sounds, a few drum machine beats, and a lot of scratching. Interestingly, the sleeve notes credit no samples; this is the only album not to feature copious samples from their previous albums (For obvious reasons).

The cover shows a bunch of dudes standing around two dudes: one reaching from the shadows on the far left of the picture to touch a record on a turntable, the other only visible in his arm in the lower left foreground, clutching a mic, the business end…

A.J. Ayer (idea)

2002-11-03T16:40:09Z

There are those who caricature Ayer (And the other Positivists), saying "AJ Ayer said that 'Any statement that is not empirically verifiable is nonsense'; Unfortunately this statement isn't empirically verifiable, therefore it is either untrue or nonsense." They are ill-educated cockweasels, fatuously trying to score points.

Ayer considered statements to be "literally meaningful" if they were either empirically decidable, or if they were analytic statements. Analytic statements are statements concerning a formal system. These systems need to start with certain postulates and definitions. The definition of literal meaning is just that: a definition that underlies the entire Positivist discourse.

If you find anyone caricaturing the positivists in this way, kill them. It's better for all of us. If you are a beginner at this, the best way is with "Language, Truth, and Logic" (The revised edition with the giant introduction acknowledging the flaws in the work).

nontheist (person)

2002-11-02T13:32:26Z

My favourite exponent of non-theism has for a long time been A.J. Ayer, and in fact the other positivists, due to his simple statement of non-theism: To ask whether God exists is simply not meaningful.

In this context it means that no-one can produce evidence one way or the other as to God's existence; there is no test, positive or negative. You cannot formulate a model of the world with God, and the world without God, and then compare the universe as it is to your models. The problem inheres on at least two levels: First, God is seen as being outside the universe; second, you only have one universe.

Concerning anything outside the universe, one can have no statements, for the universe is the entirety of what we can experience, and hence know. The only way god could conceivably "exist outside the universe" is if it were some sort of mathematical theorem. As we only have one universe, we cannot speculate what universes with…