Posts by Silent Lion

  • CTRL + V

    Firstly, our opinions on the benefits of suffering will differ. For example, if Christians believe suffering is due to the fall, then it follows that suffering serves a punitive purpose, gives us a redemption to work for, etc. Clearly this is not compatible with atheism. Also, 'Natural suffering existed for billions of years' A) isn't a stated reason, and B) implies a refutation of the Christian belief that has already been proposed and answered by the Christians here. In fact, it's a little irrelevant.

  • Ask the next person a question.

    If I was a lesser man, I could say "my wife!"...

    I can't think of anything THAT bad (THAT referring to 'fucking', not 'my wife')
    Yelled at the kid for screaming? Closest I can get.
    The cake I made yesterday was fucking aweful, though.

    Maybe I should pass this on.

    What's something fucking bad you've done recently?

  • How did you meet your soulmate?

    People who make long distance relationships work have my reverance. It must be very difficult. If anything displays commitment and reliability, that has to be it.

    I met my other half in the city I was studying at. I'd just broken up with someone and was thinking, "I really can't deal with romance for a while." That lasted about three hours, because after a short train journey back from my home-town to my sudy-town I ran into a friend who coaxed me into a night out. A bit of disctraction and company seemed like a good idea. And one of the girls with us that night turned out to be my future wife.

    It's funny, because all my run-ins with girls prior to that had been full of drama and fireworks, and always ended ugly. But not with her. After spending the first night together, we stayed together, shopped together, ate together. No drama. It was just the most normal thing in the world. A week or so in, she said "Oh, we haven't changed our FB status yet". And that was the closest either of us came to being 'asked out', because no asking was needed. It just was.

    The soppy bit of the story is the first night, because we didn't get up to anything. I'm not a chivalrous kind of guy, it's not like that. But she was telling me how guys liked to take advantage, so when she made a move in her apartment that night I turned her down. I told her to get to know and trust me first. I figured, even if this went nowhere, maybe I'd set a precedent. So we shared a bed that night *drum roll* sleeping. Or hugging, if you must know. I think that set things off on the right priority.

  • Learn stuff + share it

    The Rome thing makes bags of sense now. The Viking thing less so, because the Scandinavian conversion was almost certainly responsible for ending their bloodthirsty traditions. I've come up with three explanations, potentially:

    1) "Peaceful' Christianity was a short anomoly in history, caused by resentment. "We're being conquered by these Viking scum! They're inferior because they raped our women! Why haven't we done that to them? It must be because we're Christian! It can't be because we're militarily less powerful and would in fact have done the same thing if we were like that... not at all. No, must be Christianity. Now let's put that into our literature and make it a central myth of our crusading, militaristic Christian culture." And once that became popular, it became momentarily true in a self-prophesising kind of way, until the Vikings and Eurpoean pagans went away and then the Christians remembered how fun butchering was, and everything was back to normal.

    2) For a short time, Christianity became relatively peaceful compared to its context. Yes, Christianity can be militaristic, as was Rome. But I'm hesitant to call Roman culture a warrior culture in the same sense as Viking culture was. In my understanding, Roman violence was a means to an ends - expansion and cultural superiority were the ends, and they were more than happy to achieve that violently. But in Viking culture, the violence is the point. The means and the ends - there is no cultural superiority, the belief that they need to enlighten the world with their influence. The violence alone is glorious enough. And considering as well that Rome had gone, leaving weak kingdoms behind yearning for the old, Roman Christian protection, Christianity must have seemed positively benign by contrast.

    3) Christianity was never peaceful, but it was a lie the Scandinavians bought for a while, so it was the perception of Christianity as a peaceful movement that pacified them.

    More research might narrow this down, if I find time.
    Also, how would this work? :

    Quote

    We could always make a separate thread for this.

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    I think a mod could do that and move all the info in this thread over. There's already quite a bit here and it would be a shame to split it unnecessarily.

  • Learn stuff + share it

    Quote from 'zilla

    Basically, when you are "struck" by a quantum wave, it is as if a cloud sails above your head, and each spot under that cloud has a certain chance to be hit by a raindrop. There will only be one raindrop, though, and it will drop at random, with a higher chance of falling where the cloud is denser. And, once the drop has hit the ground, the cloud is gone.

    This is starting to actually make some sense to me now. Its like a statistical probability cloud, with every value in the range being 'hit' with such frequency the effect of a field/wave is created. I'll go with that to get my foot in the door.

    Quote

    In my perspective, I didn't move very far at all. How does that make sense? Because the entire universe in front of me is compressed, and distances are much shorter in that direction. Even you were practically flat until I ran past you. Then you got really long.

    I was thinking the brain must compensate for the effect of flattening/lengthening in order to preserve a sense of spacial awareness whilst moving. I was just gawking at how awesome that was, then the obvious fact struck me that at human speeds the effect would be so small as to make no difference. Such a shame.

    Quote

    We could always make a separate thread for this.

    Good idea. I think a mod could do that and move all the info in this thread over. There's already quite a bit here and it would be a shame to split it unnecessarily.

    Speaking of which, calling @LinkSkywalker back to the floor. I was confusing myself over the effects of early Christianity, then I remembered there was a resident Rome buff over at Zelda Cavern.

    So, my question is this: Why didn't Christianity disarm Roman militism? Early Christianity had a generally pacifying influence, and (according to some documentary) it was the peaceful resignation of Christian martyrs in the arena that impressed many Romans. I get that Constantine's conversion may have been a political, reactionary move to stop the growing support for Christianity from overtaking his authority. But consider the Viking kings who converted to Christianity for political reasons, but nonetheless it led to the conversion of the populace and the pacifying of their traditions. The same for the native Irish tribes upon their conversion.

    So, why not with Rome?

  • Learn stuff + share it

    That's pretty cool. It reminds me of what I read in A Brief History Of Time, which I devoured even if I knew it was probably a little dated. I always have a triple ton of questions whenever I encounter this stuff. That's what excites me so much about it. Particle/wave duality, for example, always eludes me. I mean, I've read about it, and I get the basic premise and its power to explain observations. But my brain just isn't equipped to truly grasp the concept. And it ties in to the forces, because in Brief History, gravity stars as a particle (a graviton), and objects are only afftected by gravity when struck by gravitons. But, at the same time, it's a wave and so is present everywhere within its particular field. But you can't be 'struck' by something that is everywhere at once (or everywhere within a range). Similarly put, something that has a locational range rather than a fixed location could not have speed, because speed is defined as a change of location (movement). If a wave/particle occupies a range of positions at the same time, then it already occupies the position it is moving towards, rendering the idea of motion meaningless.

    And another thing! If an object travels at very high speeds, less time passes for that object than for a stationary observer. But speed is measured as distance over time. So, if you travelled across my vision at the speed of light, every second you experience should be an infinite length of time for me. So, if it's taking you an infinite amount of time to do anything (from my perspective), then you aren't travelling very fast at all.

    Unless you invert the problem, and then it's fixed. If you are travelling at the speed of light, and time is not passing for you, then you must be (from your perspective) taking zero time to reach your destination. From your perspective, you are travelling with infinite speed, and so you occupy every position on your journey at once. It is only from the observational perspective of a slower/stationary observer that you appear to change from one position to another. This is Star Trek fixed. Do you remember the old problem: "Even if you could travel at the speed of light, it would take you millions of years to reach the nearest planet! You would never survive the trip!" Well, perhaps if you were travelling at the speed of light, then it would take you no time at all. It is only the universe that would age around you as you 'blink' to a different section of spacetime.

    But then, that's why we rely on mathematics rather than puny human reasoning to work these things out. Excuse my rambling :)
    The First Alphabet

    I would like to dispel a little myth: The first alphabetic system was Greek. Well, actually no. At least not completely.
    The development of writing is a vast field of study, often misty, and often feeling like a vast newspaper puzzle. Greek is the first true alphabet in that it conforms to a stricter set of requirements to be considered an alphabet by professional linguists. But the popular view that writing prior to this was exclusively logographic, ideographic or pictographic is a myth.

    Consider the older heiroglyphic (and relatives hieratic and demotic). It contains both phonemic and ideographic elements. The ideographic elements aid with meaning, but are largely used as punctuation to mark the end of words. You cannot construct a meaningful sentence in Egyptian using only ideograms. The bulk of the writing is in fact phonemic. But wait! Those familiar with the language would point out that there are only two vowels represented in heiroglyphs. Like Arabic, its repetoire is comprised almost exclusively of consonants. This makes it an abjad alphabet rather than a true alphabet.

    But our voyage into linguistic history doesn't stop there. Predating heiroglyphic by some margin is cuneiform. Cuneiform, like heiroglyphs, does contain ideographic and logographic elements. But it also contains phonemic elements, crucially both vowels and consonants. Cuneiform, arguably the oldest true writing system in evidence, is perfectly capable of expressing the full range of phonemes. It would seem that representation of vowels was not a Greek innovation - rather, the omission of vowels was a temporary anomoly, possibly a form of abbreviation that stuck for a while. And, whilst we're talking about Greek, the symbols of the Greek alphabet also stand for discreet words with meanings ('A', for example, stands for the discreet word 'Alpha'). So Greek is not responsible for separating phonetic from logographic. A writing system comprised exclusively of phonemes, it is not.

    An interesting aside - the Sumerian language (cuneiform) counted in units of 1, 10 and 60, a system that has been preserved in our measurement of seconds and minutes.

  • Your top 5 favorite songs

    Suuuch a hard question. My five favourite atm (which changes very often):

    Maia Dietrich - Thunder
    Leo Stannard - In My Blood
    Amaranthe - Digital World
    The Tom Gee Band - Superman
    Souvenir Season - Your Love Is My Cocaine

    There's other oldies that maybe I hold more highly, but I've overplayed them enough to drive them off my top 5.

  • What's the best present you have ever received?

    Getting a cam-corder was the coolest thing ever when I was nine, and me and my bro had months of fun making stupid action sequences. But actually, the best present far and away (exluding all the things the OP didn't intend) has to be the music keyboard I got for my 18th. I've been hooked on keyboard ever since, and it's brought me unending hours of joy through all sorts of times.

    On a lesser note (ha!), one christmas when I was about ten my dad got me a bunch of n64 games. He didn't know anything about games and selected them at random. I'd never heard of any of them and therefore assumed crapness. But that bundle included Twisted Edge and Wipeout64, which turned out to be damn fun.

  • Google+ is the best social network

    And we'd all be in constant fear of starvation, plague and crime.

    I still can't get past the unintuitiveness of Google+. I really WANT it to be great, because I love Google.
    For example, I tried to start a conversation on G+ with my friend, after a recent upgrade. The old "hangouts" feature wasn't visible from my entry page, and when I went to his profile no 'message' or 'chat' was visible either. Granted, I could be blind, but I assume that if I couldn't find it, there will be a reasonable number of other people who can't. Such a basic use should be very obvious and in your face. So we went back to FB, because being able to actually talk to people takes the entire right half of the screen. Can't miss that.

  • Dad Situation

    Sorry it's (he's) turned out this way. At least now you have that confirmation and you can be confident that you've done all you can. Obviously you need to deal with it in your own way. In the long term, Cressel's probably right that ill feeling is something you want to cleanse yourself of eventually, but that can wait. If it helps you to be angry or resentful to get you through the initial stages, I don't see a problem with that. Heck, you have every right to feel that way.[/stating the obvious]

  • Video game dreams

    Cool dreams. I love it when that happens - haven't had one though for a looong time. I used to have dreams where OoT or MM would merge with situations at school and stuff, Like I'd find a 64-bit chest under the tree in the school playing fields, it'd have a hookshot in it and I could use it to escape the upcoming lesson :)

    These days the closest I get is half-dreaming. When you're lying in bed thinking far too much about the hours of Super Metroid you've been playing and you start drifing off, and the rules of the game being imagined in your head break down, Samus starts breaking through ceilings and flying off into space, where Captain Kirk leads you into long-lost memories of OS Star Trek...

  • Flaws

    I did find the dark world a little tedious after a while. The soundtrack is tres cool, I'll give it that, but the drab colour scheme was only good in short doses. I get that it HAS to have a drab colour scheme, because hey, it's the dark world. So I don't know what the solution to that would be. Maybe a few sections with the traditional 'evil colours' of dark purple and red? A few more NPCs might indeed have hepled, and independant puzzles. I'd also have liked to see them make a little more out of Kakariko village in the dark world, maybe some basements or smething lurking in the ruins.

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