From: Tom Sweetnam (savamutt@trailnet.com)
Date: Sat May 13 2000 - 22:48:13 PDT
> Which lives did the Buddhist monk save in his act of self-immolation?
> How many behavioral algorithms did he fail to express by removing him
> from future iterations of the game?
You're not suckin' me into that one. I may be from California, but I've been
through the 12 steps of Metaphysics Anonymous, and I haven't touched a drop
in...days.
> Moreover, that Rocky guy would been most likely thoroughly shrapnelled
> TNT-flavoured dead meat whether he belly-dropped upon that grenade, or
> not.
Very insightful Grasshopper.
(Luckily, I haven never been in such a situation, so I can't
> comment). The outcome matrix for that particular iteration of the game
> looks quite clear. (You have heard about Iterated Prisonner's Dilemma,
> haven't you?).
Get serious. I don't know a meme from a hat shop cat. I'm simply a
world-class bullshit artist wasting a little time in this forum of Titanic
egotists all bent on self-importance. You guys need somebody like me in here
every now and then.
My only scientific aspiration is to get my &**%$@#%% CCD camera working
again. Of course it's homemade, so I don't have an engineer at some high
falutin company I can call whose mother I can insult. So is my telescope,
homemade I mean. I'm rather proud of it. Of course I'm not one of these
guys who picks up a few broken Coke bottles on the side of the road and $5
worth of junk at the scrapyard and builds a masterpiece that has the optics
shop boys at Mauna Kea buckling at the knees and blubbering like 3 year-olds
for a week.
I'm a low-rent papparazzi you see. I shoot photos of the stars. S & O
mostly. The skies used to be magnificent here in Alamogordo/Cloudcroft. The
skys look like Dresden after the raid tonight though. The forest fires are
getting close. The water drop planes load up down at Holloman AFB, just 6
miles from where I have my RV parked, and they've been coming and going at
10 minute intervals nonstop for 4 days. I'm moving on the VLA soon -very
soon. As to your pronouncement that "the act of living is sufficiently fun
all by itself", well....that's one of the wisest bits of pixel shine I've
seen around here in awhile.
again because I decided to hang around Alamogordo until the smoke clears so
I can get over to the VLA> bout as neophyte as nephyte can get, and my one
and only scientific asperation is to get my so I can just dragged myself
into this discussion group because
>
> > As one might expect, owing to the sentimental fools who write such
things,
> > there is nary a reference to memes in his Congressional Medal of Honor
> > citation. I'm pretty sure the others who were within eternity's
doorstep of
> > that grenade saw something quite different than a misguided meme
complex
> > destroying its host as well, but they were young grunts after all, and
not
> > the most sophisticated souls on the planet...at least not at that point
in
> > their lives. So I'll go ahead and stick my neck way out here, and
hazard a
> > guess that what they saw in the A Shau Valley that day, was the same
thing
> > that I saw on that street in Hue -an example of "evolution in action",
an
> > example of transcendense. After all Eugene, what pot of gold is there
at
> > the end of this rainbow we call evolution, besides transcendence?
>
> I dunno, I think the act of living is sufficiently fun all by itself,
> so it doesn't require any further legitimation (some people will
> disagree, as for instance late Sasha Chislenko (peace to his ashes)).
>
> As to transcendence (which will be hopefully guided by the Hedonistic
> Imperative), it is the same as with any event horizonts: none of the
> observers passing it notice anything out of the ordinary. If we stick
> around long enough, we'll should be able to find this out in the first
> person. If not, well, c'est la mort.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat May 13 2000 - 22:54:13 PDT