On the 28th I celebrated my continuing mantle cell lymphoma remission with a bottle of sweet Belgian Malheur.
15 min in the freezer and ready to pour
poured just right for medium foam
not simple inebriation, also considerable fatigue
another month before the next one … only 29 days in this case
Hopefully it will not mess with my updates again.
Four years gone and still cancer-free and alive!
http://lodown.net/wikipedia/pmwiki.php?n=Category.IFI201201
Especially:
Casuistry, or judging dynamic specifics taken to its logical conclusion will show that agency and personal responsibility for the dynamics of the universe now known as the self, is egregiously fallacious.
- Voltaire’s bigoted campaign against Jesuit casuistry and
- the backlash of Law against Psychology on insanity defense at the end of the 20th century.
This is very relevant to the current seriously erroneous conceptualization of free speech.
Today new shelves will emerge in the garage. It will consist of two-by-ten yellow pine: four eight feet uprights and seven fourteen feet shelves cross-lap jointed and the whole structure screwed to the wall.
Part of the reasoning is to better accommodate 6/2 wiring run along the wall in 3/4 galvanized electrical conduit, and a 230v plug for a Lincoln AC-225 arc welder, … scrap the conduit part: Now the 6/2 romex wire will be run up inside the wall from the plug, through the ceiling and down inside the wall to the electrical box.
Meta and I are just back from the last day of my bi-annual check-up at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. This coming Thursday we will see oncologist Jorge Romaguera for the verdict.
I have permanently quit facebook, but of course I could not delete the information it has in its databases. I will focus more on public commentary at my blog, http://lodown.net/
There is too much frivolous insincerity and joking when I discuss the serious issues of The Human Singularity Project (HSP) on facebook. It is a waste of time, so I intend to seriously limit my posts on facebook from now on. Really, this time.
I wonder what is going on with Susan Blackmore, since she had this brain fart of a conclusion 16 Sept 2010, after a conference on memes. The change of mind had to do with the shocking information, according to her, that the religious have more children and are more compassionate than their non-religious counterparts—thus reversing what she had believed—that religion is a meme by definition detrimental to its host, like a virus.
Here Susan takes a local, short-term view. She does not take into account that the local order of the cosmos is in play with memes-as-virus, not individual human lives. The relevant data concerns the destruction of the biosphere, which includes the human animal. The normalized responsible levels of production-and-consumption are not harmless, and god-believers are as feverishly engaged in it as junkies looking for the next best trip.
I agree with Susan’s desperate comment to her daughter when she had anorexia that she was welcome at Susan’s new house, but that her anorexia was not welcome. Our addictions are not us. In fact, anorexia is but one of many pathological symptoms of our addiction to the meme known in HSP as the phony self.*
Both civilization’s pictures of consciousness** as a stream and a theater are fiction. Our belief in it goes along with the cultural mythologies of god agency and self-agency. Civilization’s greatest error is biographical. Its main errors are that the self is (1) conscious (2) willful and (3) has agency.
* Descent of Addiction to the Self at http://lodown.net/
** There is No Stream of Consciousness
I left this comment on a review by Glenn Coney on the book Living Without Free Will by Derk Peerboom.
Click on this link to see in context of the review: My Comment at Amazon
Glenn Coney’s review is unworthy of the name. Its single star skews the rating, so I would advise it removed were it not … that its vindictiveness ultimately stands in vindication of the book. Coney not only criticizes Derk Pereboom’s views, he maligns his person as stupid, seduced, ideological and by that explicit implication, as dangerous as his views. I have actually read this book, which probably cannot be said of the deterministic action we would traditionally ascribe to Coney. It is in parts a tedious academic (and fair) analysis of the many different variations on the positions on free will vs. determinism, and there are some wonderful ideas on how it could be when civilization is finally rid of what I see as a blame-sick, guilt-mongering culture due to its historical rootedness in the massively pathological fiction of free will.
All concepts, including the concept here described as “emergent properties of complex systems” are exceedingly superficial as generalizations of the internal dynamic fractal continuum that is the universe. The concept “life” is itself a vague metaphor for indefinable quantum variations in space. Sure, emergent “properties” cannot be reduced to their component parts—that is why we imagine them to be the thing—it is all our minds are capable of. The fact is that the sensation of will itself is illusory, never mind the fiction that it is free.
Testing slickr-flickr with hummingbirds did not work … the plug-in might have been the culprit irretrievably deleting the database of that wordpress installation. So now I have it linked directly to the Hummingbirds Spring 2011 set on flickr. Click above or on the photo on the right.
Note that I am using a Nikon D70 * with old manual focus and auto focus lenses.
* Unfortunately this D70 has slight banding, only visible if you look for it perfectionistically. I might buy a D90 or even a D300, but only when there is a very good deal on Craigslist.
Click on the photo below to see all photos taken on May 15, 2011.
 
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2002 Acura RSX
 
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2004 Toyota Tacoma
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