I always thought Donald and Daisy looked alike…

24. I’ve been doing a lot of research into incest recently, because it’s strange to me how ingrained our aversion to incest is, and how we always attempt to justify it by saying it’s just ‘icky’ or wrong. I’m also interested in the ‘moral’ and evolutionary psychology behind cannibalism, contamination, and religion. See Haidt, et al.

I’m going to take a page out of RaJ’s book and ask you all about this. Click the image to make it bigger, read it, then think about it for a bit:

How exactly can you tell if something is incest? Does the porn show you their birth certificates, or are you just supposed to take their word for it? And what is animated incest? Am I really supposed to infer that the two cartoon characters are related?

… curious…

Last Year: Philosophers eat their young, Shh!! He'll hear us!
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Garfield Minus Garfield

10. When I was ten, I thought about Superman and the movie Contact and wondered whether it was selfish for humans to assume that we were created in God’s image. It was a slippery slope from there.

This just hilarious.

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I’m incredible, arrogant, and deluded, but not for the reasons you argue

Dear Anonymous,

Wow, I haven’t had an anonymous comment in a while. I’d actually grown to miss them! And I’m not even being facetious. I like anonymous comments. I even argued for them here.

Anyway, here’s the comment. I’ve split it up to respond to each part.

Forgive my sounding like a jerk, please, but you can’t be serious.
If you claim to know the answers to all of these questions, you are incredibly arrogant and deluded.

You don’t sound like a jerk and I’m not really serious. The post was mostly tongue-in-cheek. I was trying to come up with a list of 100 things and ended up locking myself into that style. I realized my list should have included much more history, but then I realized how little valuable history I knew.

More than anything, the post was an attempt to show that— no matter who we are— our education could always be improved. I was trying to list human realizations, accomplishments, and discoveries that people should be aware of as part of our cumulative heritage. Does that seem fair enough?

“What is a black hole?” Really? You know? Publish!

A black hole is an area of condensed mass so great that even light cannot escape. Extra credit would go to anyone who used the terms ‘Hawking radiation,’ ‘quantum mechanics,’ ‘general relativity,’ ‘quantum gravity,’ ‘event horizon,’ or ’spaghettification.’ Double-extra credit for the last one. My post didn’t ask for precise knowledge, only working knowledge, which I have just provided.

“What do Muslims/Christians/Hindus/etc believe?” You think that they all believe the same thing?

They should if they’re being logically consistent with their beliefs. But even though most people cherry-pick their faith, there are core tenets of certain faiths that all members have in common. For instance, I cannot call myself a Muslim while simultaneously believing Mohammed was a wanker who conned everyone. I can have Muslim-like beliefs, but Islam-proper is removed from my grasp. I have no problem with people believing different things than other members of their faith, I just want people to have a general outline of what these faiths imply because I think it’s important to know your world.

“What is gravity?” What is a force? Please tell us.

Gravity is the force mass exerts on other mass in the form of pull. The net result is always that the smaller object gets pulled into the larger object. Force is mass times acceleration unless you’re being ‘deep,’ in which case I have no idea what you’re aiming at.

“Explain quantum theory” Wow. This just shows your ignorace. (sic)

If you didn’t get the joke, how could you single out the punchline? I know nobody can explain quantum theory just like I know nobody (myself included) has full knowledge of all the things on that list. That’s why it’s on there: to call attention to itself and the absurdity of the list. Sorry if that went over your head, perhaps I should have been less subtle.

I’m sure you get the idea. Give me a break.
And you clearly need to do some reading on metaphysics–you don’t know what “is” means. Get rid of this list and start back there–look up “ontology”.

That’s rich. You realize I’m a philosopher, right? “Is” is a form of “to be.” Aristotle specified two forms of “is” into qualitative identity and numerical identity. To say that something is something else is to imply that it has properties similar to the other thing (qualitative) or that it is necessary and sufficient to form that thing (numerical). I think you imagine me to be using the second form, when in reality I’m using a more colloquial speech to better suite my readers. I could use a more precise formal language, but that seems counter-productive.

Ontology is the study of being. I always remember by thinking of the exact opposite as “Offtology,” ha ha. I’m not sure why you mentioned ontology at all. It’s tangential at best, irrelevant at worst. If you’ll tell me, I’d gladly respond.

I imagine you’re an undergrad at York University interested in philosophy of science and checking your favourites tab from your work in an office or something. I don’t think you really want to get into a flame war. You probably just took the previous post too literal and too arrogant, then mistook my personality from that post and commented in an attempt to show me the ‘light.’

How far off am I?

—Pixelation Qyw Styx

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Open Letter to Environment Haters

I like the environment. It’s been good to me. It warms the cockles of my heart. So when it asked me to write a post in my own style for Blog Action Day, I was more than happy to oblige.

Insofar as it is convenient for me to do so, I always do what I can to help the environment.  I drive a hybrid car and will eventually switch to electric.  I reuse and reduce.  I avoid using electricity in daylight (the nature of electricity requires power companies to produce as much as the maximum electricity used of the previous year).  And I don’t eat meat (factory farming uses more water than we use for human consumption, more land than you can think of, and produces more greenhouse gases than cars).  It’s part of my ‘do no harm’ moral theory.

And yet, intellectually, I have no real reason to do so.  I hedge my bets, but I don’t suppose we’ll do any better in the large scale than so many other populations have failed at in the small scale before (Ref. J. Diamond’s “Collapse”).

I fear our race should have played out the Prisoner’s Dilemma 10,000 more generations before the advent of technology. My fear is that only in that way could a true morality and conservationist respect for nature develop. As it is, we’re in a rather precarious point in our history in which the combination of individual demand is having a detrimental effect on our environment. We’re a bunny population that has outgrown its food supply, a too virulent virus where the best strategy for each individual finally comes directly at odds with the necessary group strategy of survival.

And I’m pessimistic. I think that our individualistic societies are too short-sighted to realize they are damning the world or too selfish to restrain their own uses and abuses.  We’ll be choked to death by the free rider problem.  Oops.

If you disagree, that’s cool. It’s intellectual masturbation anyway. Neither of us will know how it turns out so it’s foolish to feel certainty, anger, or superiority anyway. At least the course of action that my point of view requires is a sustainable one. Individual ignorance is not. However, I don’t have to worry about the future. My genes shall only be represented insofar as my siblings are related to me. I’m just not going to be a jerk and mess it up for those whose genes will go on.

But good luck with that.  Seriously,

— Pixel Q. Styx

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Ode to Bluehost

Like an abused wife defending her husband, I defended Yahoo! for over a year before their lack of support for a higher level of MySQL (geek stuff) made upgrading my blog impossible.

So I switched to Wordpress’ recommended host: Bluehost.

As most moves go, it was fairly intrusive and caused a lot of head-aches. Not the least of which was figuring out how to move my database from Yahoo! I annoyed the Yahoo, online forums and Bluehost tech support for almost a week until I figured it out (I had to switch back to Yahoo, download everything, then switch to Bluehost before my contract with Yahoo extended another month).

I was happy with my decision then. Bluehost was 40 percent cheaper, had a program that automatically updates my blog and has auto re-directs that Yahoo could only dream of. This isn’t even to mention their e-mails, ftps and database permissions which are almost 100 times the amount of Yahoo’s (literally).

But Bluehost wouldn’t deserve an ode if not for their tech support. Yahoo has constant quality assurance tests that send you an e-mail every time you call their tech support to see what they can improve (everything). Bluehost just does it right the first time. The tech support at Bluehost knows what it’s talking about.

It’s surprising how rare that is now.

As anyone who checked this blog from 2 to 3:30 a.m. GMT (I’m lying, I have no idea what time GMT even is, but then, neither do you) will know, my site was down today. I accidentally deleted a table in my database that turned out to be necessary for the subsistence of the Internet… who knew?

So I called Bluehost and, in less than one minute, I hung up. Some five minutes later, they reverted my blog to its previous state as if nothing had ever happened.

(Sorry this ode doesn’t rhyme. It’s more of an ass-kissing review for the people that saved my butt than lyric poetry.)

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