#if people are actually using the passage from Numbers as an example of the singular they they need to stop | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

annisir-kaugan · 4 years

Text

Report: Origins and Operation of Triglavian Society Annisir Kaugan - Third Eye Analytics.

The first interesting thing about the Triglavians is their language. It is not an exact language, meaning many of the terms they use have no one definition. They use cultural idioms in a contextual way, phrases can have different, but related, meanings depending on the context of the sentence. The 'Flow of Vyraj', which is used a lot, refers to the passage of time, but this can be in terms of a project plan, the course of events or even, as fate wills it. 'Poshlost' generally means bad or unsavoury and its opposite, 'Sobernost' means good, or good for the majority. Understanding this is key to understanding the Triglavians and people seem to miss this because its not a normal usage of language. It is worth spending time with their language, either the data streams, or other example that are scattered around, simply to gain an appreciation of their culture.

The other area that people get confused with is the organisation of Triglavian society, when in reality, although complex in some ways it is actually very simple. There are three main Clades, Perun, Veles and Svarog, each has a number of sub-clades and so far only a few of these are known. For the most part these are made up of Narodnya and all the pilots of vessels encountered are Narodnya. Again its a general term, they call capsuleers 'Augmented Foreign Narodnya' and Sansha 'Hivelinked Foreign Narodnya' for example. Each Clade appears to have a number of Koschoi and Navka associated with them, from various models there is a simple reason for this and it will become clear.

The term 'Struggle' is used a lot, while there have been various theories it is actually, again, very simple. Triglavian society is an extreme meritocracy, rank within society is entirely based on 'Proving', whether in technical arguments or combat they always compete and trial everything. An individual Narodnya begins life with a base level of rank in society, throughout their life every qualification, contest, successful project or failure adjusts this ranking. The Triglavians speak of 'Glorification' and 'Mortification', which were confusing at first. 'Extirpation' refers to destruction or death. 'Glorification' simply means an upward adjustment in ranking, and 'Mortification' a downward one. This is the 'Struggle' of which they speak. In one case an entire sub-clade was given Mortification because their ship design did not come up to specification and fell short in proving.

It suggests there are upper and lower limits to rankings too. The point is that those reaching the ultimate rank become Koschoi, and those dying in the attempt or reaching the lowest rank become Navka. Which is why the Koschoi and Navka make up the Convocation of Triglav Outside the Struggle; they are not in it, they have either won or lost. Explaining the Koschoi and Navka is complicated to say the least and will be followed up later. Every clade and sub-clade have their own, because they belonged to them before becoming as they are, but the Koschoi and Navka can also act independently of the clades; both have been shown to be operating as 'Detached' from time to time. This too has implications that will be revealed in due course.

In order to explain this it is necessary to go right back to the very beginning of New Eden, to the first settlers in the cluster. At first is appears not much is known about these times, but a lot can be inferred. Analysis of human DNA has shown that all the inhabitants of New Eden belonged to the same species which originated on a single planet some two hundred thousand years ago. Many of the animals and plants we see are not native to New Eden, but were imported around the same time as human settlement took place. Countless archaeological studies have found no trace of any predecessors which would show that they evolved on planets in the cluster. Astronomers have been studying space around New Eden for centuries, in particular the Eve Gate, Which was a natural wormhole that formed fifteen thousand years ago and was open for around 75 years before collapsing into a singularity. This data complies with the findings of archaeologists on all the settled worlds.

There were three main clusters of activity; the Amarrian and Minmatar home systems and the system shared by the Caldari and Gallente. Outside of these there were a handful of smaller colonies and these groups were almost pilot studies. Pioneers to test the soil, lay down the infrastructure for terraforming and habitation as well as surveying the planet. They were not really prepared to operate without support, unlike the Jove, who fared much better after the gate's collapse. The two groups that really stand out are the Talocan and the Yan Jung, for different reasons.

"The Yan Jung nation immigrated into our world through the EVE Gate aeons ago. From where, we do not know, though the fragments of texts we've managed to translate talk about a mysterious middle kingdom. They settled here in Deltole, though we suspect they also colonized other systems, even in far off places. But what we've uncovered so far is here in the Deltole system, especially on Deltole V and VI, which seem to have been much more inhabitable back then."

– Sebast Mathon, Professor of Archaeology, University of Caille

The Yan Jung are an oddity. The majority of the early settlers were unprepared, they were not, they left few traces but the Hidden Path site in Deltole is odd. An Ancient Gargoyle Statue guards the site, although defunct now and a beacon lights up the system. Their artefacts are found throughout space, notably, from a Triglavian point of view, texts on Semiotic Theory, Singularities and Trigonometric Laws. Although they apparently were only around for a millennia or so they seem to have been masters of ancient technologies that New Eden science still cannot match. Rather than being simple settlers they could have been fugitives escaping to the newly discovered space, but there is another option.

The second oddball group are the Talocan. Unusually they did not settle anywhere, but rather roamed as nomads or lived in space, another connection to the Triglavian way of life perhaps. They seem to have left only one site in New Eden, the Devils Dig in Otitoh, now heavily over run with Rogue Drones to the extent all archaeological research has had to stop. This may be deliberate. One interesting feature of the site is the Sun Reader, a black monolith, similar to others found elsewhere in New Eden, which may also be Talocan artefacts. These seem to contain solar data, of some form, which points to them being some kind of observational device. Its is possible they formed some kind of distributed network in the manner used by astronomers today, several devices creating a much larger device when working in unison. Even more intriguing is the possibility that the network is still operable and the Triglavians accessed it to determine which systems to target.

There are numerous ancient relics scattered throughout the cluster, black monoliths, ancient stargates and even odd rift like features. The Amarrians expanded into space by reverse engineering an old stargate, and the technological principles are still not fully understood. In the same way the original Minmatar expansion was via an ancient acceleration gate. If the black monoliths are Talocan in origin, then did they also build the other structures in space?

The Jove were better prepared, setting in the Utopia system in the Heaven constellation. Since the Jove moved out there have been numerous archaeological surveys of the area. Ice core and soil samples show that they spent a long time adjusting the climate and seeding the ground before establishing colonies. It seems likely that they used automated systems and kept the vast majority of their personnel in cryostasis until the planetary installations had sufficient resources. This may have been as long as a millennia in some cases. Further studies have shown that the first Jovian expansion did not really develop until the third millennium, which has implications to be discussed further on.

Nothing is known of what lies beyond the Eve Gate, although it is certain that New Eden was colonised by the inhabitants of that space. Exhaustive DNA studies have shown that everyone in the cluster originally came from a single species originating on the same planet. Minor mutations concomitant with space travel and living in space show they had been in space for some millennia prior to the Eve Gate. We can infer a lot from the behaviour of groups within New Eden, everyone is essentially running on the same underlying code. It would have been a place of Empires, Corporations and factions in a similar form to those established in New Eden. It seems to be a natural development in human society. Colonising a new space is a difficult task, but with great possibilities; the first steps have been taken already in the Anoikis systems and they are relatively easy to access. New Eden was virgin territory. The original crews had to scout and survey and be followed by teams to build the star gates. That meant mining and refining resources, and all done in space, massive industrial ships must have been used, on a scale we only really see with the World Arks, Anchorages, and perhaps the rumoured City ship being built by Thukker.

They would have needed the technology to move across vast distances without cynos, some advanced form of jump drive or wormhole generating system maybe. Sansha, Drifters, Triglavians, the Jove themselves and maybe even Rogue Drones now, have shown something like the abilities required. Whether they developed it themselves, or found the necessary information in some ancient cache is not known. While the Empires of New Eden build star gates and know how to set them up it is still a massively complicated process, the original Amarrian gate required sending ships out using cryosleep chambers. The incoming crews from beyond the gate managed to push lines of stargates deep into the cluster in just a few decades. This raises some interesting questions and possibilities.

The other side of the gate could have been contested, but there are actually quite a mix of different groups in the original settlers, so that may well not be the case. The engineering group should therefore be a representative mix as well, from those factions with an interest. They are not another race, or nation, but almost certainly something like a corporation or other entity, composed of members of the existing nations. It is not known how the gate failed, certainly echoes of the collapse are still heading out into space but it does not seem normal. The gate appeared to be a wormhole of huge size, which is interesting. Gates are formed by the conjunction of points of gravitational resonance, in simple terms. New Eden has a propensity for forming wormholes now but did not at one time. When two systems get close enough on the right path, that can trigger the formation of a hole. For something this size it would mean another cluster or a galaxy moving into the right position relative to New Eden for it to form. Normally that kind of movement is slow, in terms of galactic time, which means the lifespan of the hole can be very long. The mass limit too, given its size but there is a possible way around it. Mass Entanglers are used to increase the mass of a ship for the purpose of rolling holes, better than the old Higgs device. An array of Entanglers, much as we see with the Triglavian Solar Harvester could be used to pull the hole apart, compensating for mass entering it. There might need to be an array on both sides, but there is no way of knowing, this kind of engineering is beyond the capacities of most groups in New Eden.

The question is did one of the groups in the original settlement phase sabotage the gate? Preventing a massive influx of settlers coming to plunder the resources, and maybe giving their allies a better chance of success? It is a distinct possibility, some of the ancient stargates are badly damaged, but others are not, they have been deactivated and rendered useless, which implies deliberate sabotage. If somebody rigged the mass entanglers to reverse polarity then that could collapse the hole, but the array on the other side would work against it, resulting in the singularity that exists now. The same for the stargates, it is as though a deliberate attempt was made to stop the early colonies being able to support each other or receive any assistance. That is curious in itself, as is the behaviour of the Talocan and Yan Jung. Perhaps they decided humanity needed a second chance, to work out a better way to live rather than simply plundering the resources of this new space.

Archaeologists often use the term cultures and it frequently gets misinterpreted by people from outside the profession. All the inhabitants of New Eden belong to the same culture, there are racial differences but in fundamental terms everyone speaks the same language and follows the same basic ways of doing things. Prior to meeting the Amarrians and Udorians were distinct cultures, but they lost their individuality not long after. In a similar way the Talocan, Yan Jung and even the Jovian, from Sleeper artefacts, are obviously from the same basic culture. The labels given them come from the Jove, but they may not be entirely accurate or show the true picture. Given the hypothetical existence of an engineering team that facilitated the early migrations it makes good sense that the Talocan and Yan Jung were a part of this. The Talocan appears to be based in space, the engineers, scouts and surveyors, while the Yan Jung fit into the role of scientists and theoreticians. The planetary settlements of the Yan Jung being research bases, and perhaps food producing areas or for the production of other planetary materials. They both disappeared from New Eden, possibly around the same time, maybe fourteen thousand years ago. The Talocan reappear, in Anoikis, occasional wrecked ships and quarantine zones around ruined Talocan structures, something certainly went on and to discover what requires a reworking of the established position. It is impossible to say if Yan Jung went with them, or were somehow taken over or absorbed. This appears to coincide with the Jove becoming more active which indicates the Talocan group wanting to avoid them in order to let the new colonies flourish uncontaminated

Anoikis is a cluster of systems, possibly located in a region of dark matter or energy, or a region of intensely folded space, it has some extremely unusual characteristics. Assuming that the Talocan used the network of black monoliths as a wide area observatory, then this should have piqued their interest. How they travelled there is unknown, but they must have, and spent some considerable time there preparing their plans. Presumably using the same kind of technology that was used to set up the original gate network but it may have taken longer due to distances involved. They seem to have had a much more intimate understanding of the way space operates than anyone in New Eden possesses today. The New Eden cluster consists of 5431 systems, 230 of which are in Jovian space and inaccessible and there are 2603 known systems in the Anoikis cluster; the true extent of Abyssal space is unknown at present.

Many people see the system of wormhole connections between New Eden and Anoikis as randomly occurring, this is simply untrue. Anoikis has a definite structure and while the formation of connections may seem random it does, in fact, operate according to a comprehensive set of rules. There are 30 Regions and 310 Constellations, these directly affect the class of system and also the connections that will open up between them, and also New Eden. This might be due to the way the data is represented, rather than an actual physical map, no such map exists so it is a convenient way of looking at things. All of the Region 30 systems are class 6, for example and that pattern follows for all the other regions. This suggests that there is something highly unusual about both the underlying structure of space and the matter-energy balance of the cluster. Most unusual indeed.

The Talocan must have spent some considerable time there. Exploring and mapping the area offered challenges not found in New Eden and chances are that meant modifying their technology. From events in New Eden much later on it is suspected that some of the precursor technology was based on Isogen-5, an allotropic form of Isogen, connected in some way to the formation of blue stars. It is highly volatile, as evidenced by these later events, Isogen-10, used by the Triglavians is a much more stable form. It does not, as far as anyone knows, appear in Anoikis, meaning that the Talocan may well have had to find alternative materials. ~

Oddly the materials and blueprints for making tech III ships all come from Anoikis , so are a sign of Talocan adapting to the new environment. Which means that the Talocan wrecked ships spotted in Anoikis and New Eden are more than likely not their original ship forms, but developed later on. This is an interesting pointer. For one thing it does point to an extended time in the Anoikis cluster. They also must have taken the construction and mining vessels. There are a large number of ruined Talocan sites around, some of which are co-sited with Sleeper sites, probably the origin of the Jovian-Triglavian satellite polity mentioned in one of the data streams.

The Talocan built a complex network of structures known as Epicenters, which are vitally important. Each contains Talocan static gates and violent wormholes, impassable by any means available. There are similar wormholes in the Drifter systems, but more on those later. Thera formed the heart of this network, and still functions in that respect, although possibly in a different way. It is a unique system and may have been artificially engineered, in itself a prodigious feat of stellar engineering and beyond the capabilities of anyone today. There are twenty-five small ship systems, known as Class 13, these only form small connections that will only pass frigates, or some specially engineered ships. In addition a further seventy-five systems also contain Epicenters.

The operation of this network is unknown, although there are a number of possibilities. This gave the Talocan one hundred and one systems to explore and operate in. It could have been fixed, Thera acting as a hub and the Epicentre static gates and what are now violent wormholes connecting to other systems in the net. The Drifter systems also contain strange wormholes that do not seem navigable but may once have connected. Alternatively it may have been programmable, the Epicentres acting as controls for the system, rather like a modern mass transportation system. In either case they had access to systems within the network but presumably also those outside it. Overall a fixed system makes most sense in light of later events.

This must have taken a considerable amount of time, which presupposes that the Talocan used some form of Kitezh class ship, as discussed by the Triglavians and also the Jove appear to have some knowledge of them as well. It is unknown as to how many of them there were, or what the ratio of male and female was. Likewise did they use sexual reproduction or some system to generate viable embryos as the Jove did? It is a task of mammoth proportions, feeding so many without access to planetary resources, not to mention completely adapting to a whole new technology. They did it, while dating technologies for planetary archaeological sites are commonplace and a number of methodologies may be employed, those for spatial artefacts are much more complex and prone to error. Especially in the complex topology of Anoikis space. The only realistic figures quoted suggest some of the installations may be as old as twelve thousand years. This seems reasonable; the first Jovian expansion began around this time and the Talocan should have completed most of the work by then.

It is now a piece of history, but the Seyllin event was linked to Isogen-5 caches and caused the first wormholes to begin appearing in New Eden as well as shattering a number of planets. The later Caroline’s Star event, since found to be W477-P, revealed the presence of Thera and the shattered systems. Again, this points to the Talocan network and the main Anoikis cluster being two distinct entities. The Talocan must therefore have returned to New Eden prior to the Jovian expansion to complete their work unnoticed. It is also worth bearing in mind that a society can change beyond belief in three thousand years and that this happened twelve thousand years ago.

Somehow the Talocan used a device, or array of devices at W477-P in order to create some form of sub-spatial affinity between New Eden and Anoikis. How this was done is hard to even imagine as it necessitates altering the topology of space in both clusters. Interestingly this manipulation may have had other side effects as well, the abundance of deadspace zones, and even the Dead Storms of Detorid, which may point to the Abyss and even the Abyss itself may have been formed by this work. The Seyllin event probably opened up the existing weaknesses permitting the formation of wormholes and made this easier to achieve naturally. The event at W477-P travelled through the Epicenter network rendering the wormholes and static gates dysfunctional and unlocking the now shattered systems.

This made the formation of wormholes a lot easier and allowed the explorers much more access to Anoikis. Thera can support a dozen or more connections and maybe as many as twenty-five, this is a lot higher than most systems where the upper limit may be five or six. Most systems have one or two static connections, these can despawn and respawn very quickly so appear to be always present. There are any number of wandering connections as well, but all connections follow the underlying rules. Systems in the New Eden cluster itself do not have static connections, their limit seems to be around the usual five to six, Systems in Jovian space do not connect to normal Anoikis systems, although there may be others that are still hidden. The J005299 system is occupied by Sansha’s Nation and is unique in this respect, although it really suggests Sansha have other hidden systems in which they stage their fleets. The Jovians used a time-based system to name the Anoikis systems, the majority of the systems, excluding the unique, the shattered systems and four others, fall into the format of J-hours, minutes and seconds, two digits for each. The list is possibly not complete.

Connections form according to the systems, their statics and then any available wandering connections, These may follow some kind of hidden paths within the structure of space, it is impossible to say at present. Connections generally disappear within twenty-four hours, although the new Pochven holes have a shorter lifespan. Different connections have different mass limits, affecting the size and number of ships that can pass through without triggering a collapse. The inhabitants of Anoikis systems use this to their advantage, triggering an early collapse, or leaving the hole at a critical point thus trapping intruders. These cycles create endless patterns in the map of Anoikis, Class 4 systems can form long chains leading across the Anoikis cluster and Class 2 systems can form smaller ones or bridges between Anoikis and New Eden. The map is therefore a complex map of both scientific phenomena and human activity, the mathematics of which is extremely complicated.

It is not possible to predict where a given system will connect to, the type maybe but not an exact location. Organisations like Signal Cartel rely on huge numbers of scouts and specialised mapping tools to create a window into the map. In that respect it corresponds with the mathematics governing the formation of freckles on skin or the pattern on a variegated leaf, the patterns are unpredictable but expected.

The so-called Drifter systems are also unique. They contain a number of ancient structures, black monoliths and violent wormholes. The Caged Wormhole in particular is interesting in that it seems to link to Thera. Another site is a wrecked Sleeper Enclave, and there are ship graveyards containing unknown vessels. These appear to be experimental areas, strange rifts and mysterious probes, the black monoliths are also in evidence. The Sisters of Eve have been researching these systems for years, although have yet to report on them, standing flotillas of vessels stand guard in each system. A focal point for the system is the Hive, a complex of acceleration gates guarding entry to the Nexus. This is staggering, a massive double rift with a broken structure at the centre. Originally the structure resembled a sea urchin but quickly fell apart and is now an S-shaped disarray of huge beams, lightning sparks through the components on an intermittent basis. Nearby is an alignment device, but frequent attempts have failed to move the beams in any way. It is as though it was once trapped or sabotaged to make operation of the Nexus impossible. Drifters guard the way and have a Hive structure on site, hence the name, but the systems themselves are obviously the work of Talocan, or their descendants.

Anoikis is a grey area, it hides its secrets well and in many ways offers more questions than answers. The Talocan were active there from maybe twelve thousand years ago, the first Jovian expansion lasted for nine thousand years before collapsing in what appears to be civil war. From the archaeological record it is possible to see that they leapt ahead, making great strides in science and technology, their installations were re-engineered at a furious pace. It seems likely that some Jovian group made contact with the Talocan during this period, laying the foundations for the Sleepers. Analysis of at least one Drifter corpse was completed by a team consisting of Dr. Mizhir Starsurge, Dr. Anslo Tetua, Kybernetes Moros and Kalo Askold. The corpse had been much modified, beyond the original Jovian improvements, the Jovian corpses are similar and formed the basis of Warclone technology. Capsuleer infomorphic technology relies on a destructive brain scan at the point of death, the information is transmitted as a burst and used to reconstruct the brain state in a new clone, thus preserving memories and experiences. The Jovians, and now, Warclones, use an incremental system, much more sophisticated but requiring much higher bandwidth. The intricacy of some of the implants is such that the technology is unfathomable, but it probably has applications in interfacing with a virtual reality system.

Virtual Reality Environments (VRE) have been a desirable theoretical possibility since the use of computing technology really got going. There have been a large number of thought experiments, a lot of research, and they have formed the basis for numerous stories and a number of popular holoreels. The principles are well known and a lot of research has gone into virtual reality and its many applications in science, industry and entertainment. While great strides have been made the ultimate goal of a fully immersive world has never actually been realised and remains tantalisingly out of reach. The difficulty lies in the interface to the human brain, due to its complexity, and the Jovian implants appear to do just that.

The brain contains around 86 billion neurons, with interconnected synapses numbering maybe 60 trillion or more. The numbers are that large and frightening. A neuron is relatively simple to simulate, it's a switch, although there are countless different types and it has weighting with experience. The firing of a neuron triggers hundreds, even thousands, of synapses and these react in different ways because of the nature of the triggers released. Synapses also react to the firing of other synapses in their local area, which makes the processes much more complicated to simulate. Even the most highly sophisticated technology available in New Eden would require an installation the size of a large city and would not operate at anything like the speed of a human brain.

The Sleeper installations in Anoikis are densely packed with processing units and use advanced materials and methodologies not really understood by New Eden science. Even they do not appear to simulate the brain, but there is a way round it.

Old time philosophers talked of mind, body and spirit, to a great extent this is true. The brain is split into two sections, often referred to as the bicameral mind, on side being the emotional centre, the other dealing with logic and problem solving, but both interconnected and also interdependent with the body as well. It processes around 3 terabytes of information a day, a lot from the environment but a significant amount is derived from within the body as well; even the kidneys have nerves. The chemical balances of the body can affect the brain and vice versa. It seems as though the Jovian design uses the mind as a processor in conjunction with the high bandwidth infomorphic interface. This group mind acts as a kind of computational cloud which interacts with the processing structures to produce a kind of consensual reality, filling in the blanks as necessary.

The body is largely switched off, or the external stimuli are ignored and replaced by those of the VRE. This has to happen, without the bodily awareness in the circuit it can destabilise the mind. At its height there were countless installations throughout Anoikis, linked through the Talocan Epicenter network. Presumably the Jovians had been working towards this for thousands of years, and who is to say the Talocan were not doing as well. The supposed disappearance of the Yan Jung could be due to them taking their research into a VRE as well. It was a substantial computational structure. There must have been external operators and many working within it on various research projects. The early efforts of the Jovians would go a long way towards explaining the exponential gains in sophistication made during the first Jovian expansion. It is not known when the Jovians encountered the Talocan, perhaps only a few did, and maybe during the course of the first expansion, or shortly after it’s collapse.

Then things might have taken a different course, likely in light of subsequent events. In order to construct an ideal society, or at least experiment to find a better way, which appears to be a constant motivation for the Talocan at least, they would have to go a different route. The Jove created embryos, from bloodline genomes, rather than sexual reproduction. If they connected an infant to the VRE, and raised it inside it, using external operators, or even some form of artificial intelligence actors then the possibilities are extra-ordinary. They could link the infant’s mind to adaptive neuromorphic arrays, which would then grow as the child did, This then gives a reproducible processing array capable of hosting a human mind or forming the basis of an artificial sapience.

Artificial intelligence is used in many applications, and is frequently misunderstood. Any program that makes a seemingly intelligent decision is deemed AI. Although the leap to something which is artificially sentient is a big step. The Rogue Drones are for the most part simple intelligences performing according to a sophisticated script of some form. Very few are actually sentient, and even those may be part of a much larger single mind. The Triglavians use the term ‘distributed artificial entities’ in speaking about them and are very cautious.

It does make sense that the Jovians used some form of AI actor within their VRE, to guide events perhaps and steer things in the right direction. From analysis of what appears to have happened, this was their downfall. If they used an array capable of sentience for their actors, then it is possible that one or more actually achieved it, and in realising their nature, also perceived the nature of the VRE. The purity of the society within the VRE relies on the inhabitants being unaware that it is a construction. Something went badly wrong. The Talocan were forced to rescue infomorphs from the VRE, there are numerous quarantine stations around Anoikis to confirm this. Quarantine because they had to make sure that the rescued infomorphs were human and not some artificial infomorph. Very much letting the genie out of the bottle.

This took place not long before the total collapse of the second Jovian expansion and the Talocan of this time might well have been calling themselves Triglavians, or were heading that way. The Jovian Sleeper installations were equipped with guardians, the Patrollers and other ships still seen today, the actors from the VRE would have had little trouble taking these over and using them against the Talocan and surviving Jovians. It would seem that they fought a defensive battle heading for the Drifter systems, then using the giant rifts to take their Kitezh, presumably into the Abyss. This was not a controlled migration, it was a rushed evacuation, who knows what they left behind, or how many were lost.

The sentients from the VRE, and the other AI were able to take over the corpses of the Jovians, it is unlikely than any actually survived, although the question still exists; did the AI achieve sentience by accident, or did someone deliberately engineer it? As with the initial settlements, they were left alone to develop naturally, to give humanity a second chance. Were there agents among the Talocan that still wanted that to happen? Whichever the case it would seem that the sentients used the knowledge within the VRE, possibly to create the feared Drifter vessels, or perhaps simply using the guardian vessels left behind, to attack the rest of the second Jovian expansion colonies in New Eden. Revenge on, maybe as they saw it, their jailers. Certainly the second Jove Empire sites were attacked from outside their sector, fighting inward to the centre. It is possible they also infiltrated the genome databases and left behind a gift, the Jovian disease, a fatal flaw in their physiology. It may never be known, the evidence points to all the Jove being dead, only leaving their remnants behind.

These then are the Sleepers, a group of autonomous defensive systems and possibly some actual artificial sentients, maybe even one or more rogue agents among them. They seem to have built more structures, looking for a way to follow their jailers, or discover their technologies. Seemingly they did in the end, the scraps of trinary data recovered from damage fleets of Drifters in New Eden revealed the first glimpses of the Abyss. It is known they were fighting in areas of the Abyss capsuleers were not able to access and the Sansha had managed to invade their as well. The Triglavians referred to them as the Ancient Enemy, but not quite as they had known them. They also linked them to the second Jove Empire quite clearly, but these were Drifters, not the Sleeper vessels they had fought originally.

The Sleepers and Drifters are therefore two facets of the same group, some of the Sleeper installations being built after the surviving Talocan and Sleeper infomorphs escaped. The Talocan installations were left in ruins, the result of the Drifters' frustration at the escape. Sites like the Mirror may be Sleeper attempts to decode the Talocan technology in order to follow them, the actual truth may never be known.

The story from that point has been well recorded elsewhere. The Talocan prospered in the Abyss, modifying their technology, and adapting, as they had done previously. Its unknown how their society evolved, although these were the descendants of people who had gone through doubtless many changes in the last fifteen thousand years. For now their invasion seems to be at an end; they are consolidating Pochven and creating Bujan, or moving Bujan to Pochven, This is indeed perhaps one of their enduring mysteries, but given their history, simple to decode.

The Narodnya live lives of Struggle, seeking to improve themselves or die trying, their pilots fight ferociously without mercy for the most part. Each success improves their ranking, as seen in the Abyssal Proving Ground contests. Presumably failures send them down the ranks and Glorification can therefore be seen as a promotion, Mortification as a demotion. For the ultimate survivors the reward appears to be the rank of Koschoi, these live in the Domain of Bujan. It is obviously a VRE of some form, a fabled pleasure garden, similar to those depicted in ancient religious texts. There they reap the rewards they have earned, outside the struggle at last. The Navka receive somewhat different treatment. Their infomorph is edited, the emotional facet of their personality removed, and what is left is hosted on some kind of processing array. They act as librarians, guarding the memories of the Triglavians, and with the addition of a personality and a script, as actors to serve the Koschoi. Both may leave the Domain of Bujan from time to time as requested, but under the names Detached and Unshackled, to undertake missions of import.

The Domain itself is probably based on the Anchorages, linked together through their conduit network. Koschoi and Navka are both able to interface with individual Narodnya it would seem, acting as information stores and advisors. Indeed the Koschoi and Navka, being beyond the Struggle are those that form the Convocation of Triglav Outside the Struggle. From the Triglavians themselves it is known that those left behind in the Abyss are the Poshlost, the unworthy, maybe they can in time redeem themselves, but for now the bulk of the Triglav care nothing for them. It is telling that now the Sansha, Angel Cartel and even DED operatives are fighting over what remains in the Abyss. There will be more developments to come.

The Triglavians have wrought great changes to the fundamental nature of space, on a scale not seen since the establishment of the affinity between New Eden and Anoikis. This in itself was almost certainly responsible for the phenomena known as the Dead Storms of Detorid, elusive, but appearing when the alignments of Anoikis connections are in a certain conjunction. It could also have been responsible for the formation of the Abyss, lost systems trapped between the folds of space. Since the Triglavians moved the Anchorages into New Eden it has become even more unstable, Metaliminal storms sweeping the fringes of the New Eden cluster, and strange clouds moving through the Abyss. So far Anoikis has been unaffected, but for how long?

One of the communications from the Triglavians showed Sansha fleets fighting in what appears to be an unknown part of the Abyss. Certainly a part nobody has been able to access, but it might be possible given the Triglavian migration. The ship building facilities were only found in the deepest pockets, and no sign of the anchorages ever found. There could be tracts of systems never seen by capsuleers, the remnants of Triglavian civilisation, archaeological sites giving clues to their origin, as well as any facilities they may have left behind. Triglavians still live in the Abyss, Poshlost, but with the capacity to achieve some form of redemption and, although Narodnya, they remain connected to the Koschoi and Navka. These must live somewhere, even have Kitezh to use as a base and some means of harvesting food and other supplies. Maybe one day these wonders will be accessible, a new frontier of exploration.

There are fifty Abyssal pockets, linked by the conduit network, that is still Triglavian controlled, possibly a number of Proving Grounds as well. The Talocan directly controlled 101 systems out of the 2499 known Anoikis systems and Pochven is comprised of only 27 New Eden systems so far. When these are consolidated the Triglavians might desire to expand. They are building up, repurposing existing stations, constructing military installations and there may well be covert research facilities being constructed. The limitations of the conduit network restrict both capsuleers and those Narodnya who are still to prove themselves, not forgetting that even now the clades still prove against each other, it the way of the Triglav. New wormholes appear in systems, mostly local to Pochven, but other areas as well and in Anoikis, and the Triglavians still come out to prove themselves against the forces of New Eden.

A further complication could be Edencom; Provost Marshal Kasiha Valkanir has amassed a great deal of power and there are rumours of political turmoil between Edencom and the Empires. They have established 53 Fortress systems, between Edencom and the Triglavians there are a further 112 systems that have been ravaged by combat. Those systems obviously still hold some interest for the Triglavians and Edencom are not likely to let them go, nor do they seem content to let the Triglavians hold Pochven. While the systems are sealed off for now there are ongoing planetary resistance operations underway from all appearances. From the history of New Eden it would not be the first time a military command has gone rogue. This conflict has already seen a number of mercenary groups emerge, even Sansha have had some kind of schism and there are questions about the Upwell Consortium outstanding.

Both Edencom and Upwell have been found to have covert research facilities out in the fringes of the cluster, how many of these remain is unknown, but the two organisations seem to be linked in some unknown way. What further developments will take place is hard to imagine but there are undercurrents even now. It is a possibility that the Empires will write off their losses and seek peace with the Triglavians which could lead to them opening the border systems of Pochven, only time will tell.

#Eve Online Tweetfleet CCP Games

1 note · View note

ruminativerabbi · 4 years

Text

COVID-Diary, Week Nine

One of the laws that governs our Pesach-seder retelling of the story of leaving Egypt is that it has to start with g’nut and end with shevach, that it has to move forward from the dark, upsetting part of the story to the one bathed in light, to the redemptive story of a nation made safe and free. I’d like to apply that thought to this entry in my COVID-diary of weekly letters on the epidemic and its effect on us all.

Starting with g’nut is the easy part. As we make our way deeper into the forest and the tightly-intertwined boughs overhead let in less and less sunlight, we are all beginning to lose our nerve. We are, after all, too far along on this journey for any of us to turn back. But neither does any of us know just how huge the forest we are negotiating actually is…or how long it will take us to reach the sun-drenched meadow we are all imagining simply must exist on the other side of the woods. (Nor, of course, does any of us know if that meadow exists other than in our eager fantasy to imagine ourselves being somewhere other than where we actually are.) Still, we reassure ourselves, all forests have outer edges and so must also this one through which we are hiking. And if that really is the case, then all we really have to do is to persevere, to keep walking without getting lost or losing our nerve, and to remain steadfast and determined even when our calf muscles start seriously to hurt, as we become more and more weary, and as we all succumb—at least now and then—to frustration born of the fact that we cannot simply turn back the clock and decide not to undertake this interminable journey through this damned forest, through this woods which feels as though it is growing colder and darker by the moment.

And then, just as we begin to think we actually can hear Dolly Parton singing our national anthem of aloneness-in-the-forest (“If I had wings, I would fly away / From all my troubles, all my things / And I would fly to a place of comfort. / Heaven knows I need a change. / If I had wings, Lord give me wings”)—just as we collectively all become batty enough to imagine the divine Miss Dolly actually is singing to us personally from some unseen perch in the sky to encourage us as we march forward through the gloom, that is precisely when the siren call of magic thinking beckons and we risk wandering off in precisely the wrong direction just at the precise point in our journey that we need to hunker down, to keep steady the tiller, to move forward with resolute intensity, and not to forget that this is specifically not one of those journeys that serves as its own destination but a real one that—if we continue to move forward—will actually bring us to a real destination and, at that, the one we began the journey in the first place to attain. The will to wrap the story up with shevach is intense: we all want this story to end well. But we are not here free people enjoying a seder, but the actual people wandering in the desert without any clear sense of where we are going…or when we’ll finally get there. That is the specific task tradition lays at our feet at this point in the COVID-era: to resist wrapping things up neatly with a rousing chorus of Chad Gadya and then to clean up the kitchen and go to bed for a well-earned night’s sleep.

I just finished reading a remarkable book, Madeline Miller’s Circe. I recommend it very highly as a well written, intelligent, and extremely engaging novel—and publicly thank my younger son Emil for steering me in its direction—but I mention it not just to suggest it to you as something I think you will all enjoy, but to highlight one of its most powerful passages. Odysseus is somewhere on his interminable voyage home to Ithaca. He and his crew have successfully dealt with cannibals, pirates, and monsters of various sorts. And then the man lands on Aeaea, island refuge of the sorceress Circe, and things really get hairy. Irritated by her intruders’ arrival, she turns half of Odysseus’s crew into swine. But then she falls for their brave captain and ends up not only releasing the crew from her spell so they can continue their journey, but also offering them all sorts of important tips about how successfully to negotiate the rest of their journey.

And there’s a lot to negotiate. There’s the six-headed monster Scylla (depicted almost sympathetically in Miller’s book) and the ever-churning, ship-destroying whirlpool called Charybdis. But there are also the Sirens. Their number keeps shifting throughout the sources. Their unpronounceable names (Theixiepeia, Aglaopheme, Parthenope, etc.), ditto. Their appearance—always some combination of womanly features and avian ones, including feathers and wings—are also in flux from ancient source to ancient source. But what all the sources, Homer included, agree upon is the Sirens’ singular ability to lure sailors to their deaths by singing to them so sweetly that they, the sailors, are driven to ignore their normal safety standards and instead to sail directly to the Sirens’ island, which invariably leads to their ships foundering and sinking on its rocky shoals.

Left unexplored in the sources is how exactly this works, but Homer himself offers the most cogent explanation: the Sirens’ song was not just music but also magic, and was thus able to inspire those who heard it simply to ignore the dangerous shoals towards which they were recklessly sailing—not not to see them at all but rather to see them and to understand the danger they constituted, but at the same time to be so mesmerized by the beauty of the Sirens’ siren song so as not to care.

I’m not sure if high school students these days read Homer, let alone if they are taught how to take its lessons to heart. But the notion of magical thinking—the specific phenomenon exemplified by the Sirens’ story in which people who can see the world clearly are nonetheless so seduced by desire that they simply ignore what exists plainly and unambiguously before their eyes—that absolutely exists in our world.

We all sail occasionally towards the Sirens’ mythic isle, but we can’t afford to fall prey to magical thinking at this juncture of the COVID-crisis. The urge to wrap things up with shevach, with the good news that this is all almost behind us, certainly beckons, though! The numbers are improving. For the first time in a long while, the number of COVID-19 patients hospitalized in our state dropped to under 10,000….and that was on the same day that the number of people with COVID-19 newly admitted to the hospital dropped to under 800. That sounds so encouraging and so heartening! Yes, 280 New Yorkers died yesterday of COVID-19, bringing the state-wide total of losses in the last two months to over 19,000. But why focus on the negative? There are, after all, more than nineteen million New Yorkers. And not even 20,000 have died. What’s not to feel positive about? And then add to the mix the ever-improving weather and the intense cabin fever many of us are experiencing. And, voilà: the framework for precisely the kind of magical thinking that will get us all killed.

The people in Williamsburg who gathered in illegal and dangerous numbers last week to attend the funeral of Rabbi Chaim Mertz are an excellent example. You are already feeling that it’s enough already with the g’nut, that the time has come to wrap the story up with long overdue shevach…and then someone has the nerve to say that it would actually be a mitzvah not to attend the funeral of a beloved, highly respected teacher and rabbi. So you simply develop the fantasy—despite the fact that hundreds of hasidic Jews like yourself have died of COVID-19 in these last week—you will yourself to imagine that the greater good of showing respect to a deceased rabbi on his final journey will somehow make you safe from infection even if you fail socially to distance yourself from the other attendees. You know that makes no sense. You understand perfectly well that the virus has no moral bearing, that it doesn’t decide who does or doesn’t deserve to become infected. You know that, but it doesn’t suit you for it to be so. So you just unknow it…for as long as it takes to do what you have no convinced yourself is the right thing. And you do this even though some other part of you knows perfectly well that the “right thing” in this context is precisely the wrong thing. And so you go to the funeral and profess amazement when the world condemns you and your fellow mourners as reckless and irresponsible purveyors of infection rather than as sober and respectful mourners.

Yes, Mayor de Blasio’s comments were out of line and hurtful. Tarring the entire Jewish community because of the thoughtlessness of a few hundred magical thinkers was not only impolite and impolitic, but also prejudicial in a way that the mayor of New York City really cannot afford to be. I suppose the mayor regrets his intemperate words now that they’ve been so universally condemned, but the lesson we all need to learn from this whole incident is not about looking both ways before you step into the tweet: the lesson for us to learn is how potent magical thinking can be when you really, really want reality to conform to your own wishes and desires.

As the days grow warmer, as the siren call of the beach grows stronger, as the rules of the lock-down feel more and more onerous, and as the numbers seem to be registering improvement on a day-to-day basis, it is going to become more and more challenging to follow the rules, to have masks in place whenever we venture out into public places, to wear gloves when touching surfaces we ourselves haven’t first disinfected. I hate my mask! (I particularly hate the way it fogs up my glasses, but I also hate the whole concept.) And I don’t like wearing latex gloves either! I’m sick of the restrictions the universe has placed upon us too, and I’m somewhere between unhappy and enraged about having had to cancel our plans to travel to Israel this summer. In many ways, I am not a happy camper. But I am going to do my best not to succumb to the kind of magical thinking that beckons at almost every juncture in the course of the day. Instead, I’m going to do what it takes to remain safe and sound. And so must you all of you! This story will surely end up with shevach. But there’s a lot of the forest we have first to negotiate before we find ourselves safe and sound on the other side.

#COVID-19 #Odysseus #Madeline Miller #Magical Thinking #Circe #Sirens

1 note · View note

programmingisterrible · 6 years

Text

Repeat yourself, do more than one thing, and rewrite everything

If you ask a programmer for advice—a terrible idea—they might tell you something like the following: Don’t repeat yourself. Programs should do one thing and one thing well. Never rewrite your code from scratch, ever!.

Following “Don’t Repeat Yourself” might lead you to a function with four boolean flags, and a matrix of behaviours to carefully navigate when changing the code. Splitting things up into simple units can lead to awkward composition and struggling to coordinate cross cutting changes. Avoiding rewrites means they’re often left so late that they have no chance of succeeding.

The advice isn’t inherently bad—although there is good intent, following it to the letter can create more problems than it promises to solve.

Sometimes the best way to follow an adage is to do the exact opposite: embrace feature switches and constantly rewrite your code, pull things together to make coordination between them easier to manage, and repeat yourself to avoid implementing everything in one function..

This advice is much harder to follow, unfortunately.

Repeat yourself to find abstractions.

“Don’t Repeat Yourself” is almost a truism—if anything, the point of programming is to avoid work.

No-one enjoys writing boilerplate. The more straightforward it is to write, the duller it is to summon into a text editor. People are already tired of writing eight exact copies of the same code before even having to do so. You don’t need to convince programmers not to repeat themselves, but you do need to teach them how and when to avoid it.

“Don’t Repeat Yourself” often gets interpreted as “Don’t Copy Paste” or to avoid repeating code within the codebase, but the best form of avoiding repetition is in avoiding reimplementing what exists elsewhere—and thankfully most of us already do!

Almost every web application leans heavily on an operating system, a database, and a variety of other lumps of code to get the job done. A modern website reuses millions of lines of code without even trying. Unfortunately, programmers love to avoid repetition, and “Don’t Repeat Yourself” turns into “Always Use an Abstraction”.

By an abstraction, I mean two interlinked things: a idea we can think and reason about, and the way in which we model it inside our programming languages. Abstractions are way of repeating yourself, so that you can change multiple parts of your program in one place. Abstractions allow you to manage cross-cutting changes across your system, or sharing behaviors within it.

The problem with always using an abstraction is that you’re preemptively guessing which parts of the codebase need to change together. “Don’t Repeat Yourself” will lead to a rigid, tightly coupled mess of code. Repeating yourself is the best way to discover which abstractions, if any, you actually need.

As Sandi Metz put it, “duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction”.

You can’t really write a re-usable abstraction up front. Most successful libraries or frameworks are extracted from a larger working system, rather than being created from scratch. If you haven’t built something useful with your library yet, it is unlikely anyone else will. Code reuse isn’t a good excuse to avoid duplicating code, and writing reusable code inside your project is often a form of preemptive optimization.

When it comes to repeating yourself inside your own project, the point isn’t to be able to reuse code, but rather to make coordinated changes. Use abstractions when you’re sure about coupling things together, rather than for opportunistic or accidental code reuse—it’s ok to repeat yourself to find out when.

Repeat yourself, but don’t repeat other people’s hard work. Repeat yourself: duplicate to find the right abstraction first, then deduplicate to implement it.

With “Don’t Repeat Yourself”, some insist that it isn’t about avoiding duplication of code, but about avoiding duplication of functionality or duplication of responsibility. This is more popularly known as the “Single Responsibility Principle”, and it’s just as easily mishandled.

Gather responsibilities to simplify interactions between them

When it comes to breaking a larger service into smaller pieces, one idea is that each piece should only do one thing within the system—do one thing, and do it well—and the hope is that by following this rule, changes and maintenance become easier.

It works out well in the small: reusing variables for different purposes is an ever-present source of bugs. It’s less successful elsewhere: although one class might do two things in a rather nasty way, disentangling it isn’t of much benefit when you end up with two nasty classes with a far more complex mess of wiring between them.

The only real difference between pushing something together and pulling something apart is that some changes become easier to perform than others.

The choice between a monolith and microservices is another example of this—the choice between developing and deploying a single service, or composing things out of smaller, independently developed services.

The big difference between them is that cross-cutting change is easier in one, and local changes are easier in the other. Which one works best for a team often depends more on environmental factors than on the specific changes being made.

Although a monolith can be painful when new features need to be added and microservices can be painful when co-ordination is required, a monolith can run smoothly with feature flags and short lived branches and microservices work well when deployment is easy and heavily automated.

Even a monolith can be decomposed internally into microservices, albeit in a single repository and deployed as a whole. Everything can be broken into smaller parts—the trick is knowing when it’s an advantage to do so.

Modularity is more than reducing things to their smallest parts.

Invoking the ‘single responsibility principle’, programmers have been known to brutally decompose software into a terrifyingly large number of small interlocking pieces—a craft rarely seen outside of obscenely expensive watches, or bash.

The traditional UNIX command line is a showcase of small components that do exactly one function, and it can be a challenge to discover which one you need and in which way to hold it to get the job done. Piping things into awk '{print $2}' is almost a rite of passage.

Another example of the single responsibility principle is git. Although you can use git checkout to do six different things to the repository, they all use similar operations internally. Despite having singular functionality, components can be used in very different ways.

A layer of small components with no shared features creates a need for a layer above where these features overlap, and if absent, the user will create one, with bash aliases, scripts, or even spreadsheets to copy-paste from.

Even adding this layer might not help you: git already has a notion of user-facing and automation-facing commands, and the UI is still a mess. It’s always easier to add a new flag to an existing command than to it is to duplicate it and maintain it in parallel.

Similarly, functions gain boolean flags and classes gain new methods as the needs of the codebase change. In trying to avoid duplication and keep code together, we end up entangling things.

Although components can be created with a single responsibility, over time their responsibilities will change and interact in new and unexpected ways. What a module is currently responsible for within a system does not necessarily correlate to how it will grow.

Modularity is about limiting the options for growth

A given module often gets changed because it is the easiest module to change, rather than the best place for the change to be made. In the end, what defines a module is what pieces of the system it will never responsible for, rather what it is currently responsible for.

When a unit has no rules about what code cannot be included, it will eventually contain larger and larger amounts of the system. This is eternally true of every module named ‘util’, and why almost everything in a Model-View-Controller system ends up in the controller.

In theory, Model-View-Controller is about three interlocking units of code. One for the database, another for the UI, and one for the glue between them. In practice, Model-View-Controller resembles a monolith with two distinct subsystems—one for the database code, another for the UI, both nestled inside the controller.

The purpose of MVC isn’t to just keep all the database code in one place, but also to keep it away from frontend code. The data we have and how we want to view it will change over time independent of the frontend code.

Although code reuse is good and smaller components are good, they should be the result of other desired changes. Both are tradeoffs, introducing coupling through a lack of redundancy, or complexity in how things are composed. Decomposing things into smaller parts or unifying them is neither universally good nor bad for the codebase, and largely depends on what changes come afterwards.

In the same way abstraction isn’t about code reuse, but coupling things for change, modularity isn’t about grouping similar things together by function, but working out how to keep things apart and limiting co-ordination across the codebase.

This means recognizing which bits are slightly more entangled than others, knowing which pieces need to talk to each other, which need to share resources, what shares responsibilities, and most importantly, what external constraints are in place and which way they are moving.

In the end, it’s about optimizing for those changes—and this is rarely achieved by aiming for reusable code, as sometimes handling changes means rewriting everything.

Rewrite Everything

Usually, a rewrite is only a practical option when it’s the only option left. Technical debt, or code the seniors wrote that we can’t be rude about, accrues until all change becomes hazardous. It is only when the system is at breaking point that a rewrite is even considered an option.

Sometimes the reasons can be less dramatic: an API is being switched off, a startup has taken a beautiful journey, or there’s a new fashion in town and orders from the top to chase it. Rewrites can happen to appease a programmer too—rewarding good teamwork with a solo project.

The reason rewrites are so risky in practice is that replacing one working system with another is rarely an overnight change. We rarely understand what the previous system did—many of its properties are accidental in nature. Documentation is scarce, tests are ornamental, and interfaces are organic in nature, stubbornly locking behaviors in place.

If migrating to the replacement depends on switching over everything at once, make sure you’ve booked a holiday during the transition, well in advance.

Successful rewrites plan for migration to and from the old system, plan to ease in the existing load, and plan to handle things being in one or both places at once. Both systems are continuously maintained until one of them can be decommissioned. A slow, careful migration is the only option that reliably works on larger systems.

To succeed, you have to start with the hard problems first—often performance related—but it can involve dealing with the most difficult customer, or biggest customer or user of the system too. Rewrites must be driven by triage, reducing the problem in scope into something that can be effectively improved while being guided by the larger problems at hand.

If a replacement isn’t doing something useful after three months, odds are it will never do anything useful.

The longer it takes to run a replacement system in production, the longer it takes to find bugs. Unfortunately, migrations get pushed back in the name of feature development. A new project has the most room for feature bloat—this is known as the second-system effect.

The second system effect is the name of the canonical doomed rewrite, one where numerous features are planned, not enough are implemented, and what has been written rarely works reliably. It’s a similar to writing a game engine without a game to implement to guide decisions, or a framework without a product inside. The resulting code is an unconstrained mess that is barely fit for its purpose.

The reason we say “Never Rewrite Code” is that we leave rewrites too late, demand too much, and expect them to work immediately. It’s more important to never rewrite in a hurry than to never rewrite at all.

null is true, everything is permitted

The problem with following advice to the letter is that it rarely works in practice. The problem with following it at all costs is that eventually we cannot afford to do so.

It isn’t “Don’t Repeat Yourself”, but “Some redundancy is healthy, some isn’t”, and using abstractions when you’re sure you want to couple things together.

It isn’t “Each thing has a unique component”, or other variants of the single responsibility principle, but “Decoupling parts into smaller pieces is often worth it if the interfaces are simple between them, and try to keep the fast changing and tricky to implement bits away from each other”.

It’s never “Don’t Rewrite!”, but “Don’t abandon what works”. Build a plan for migration, maintain in parallel, then decommission, eventually. In high-growth situations you can probably put off decommissioning, and possibly even migrations.

When you hear a piece of advice, you need to understand the structure and environment in place that made it true, because they can just as often make it false. Things like “Don’t Repeat Yourself” are about making a tradeoff, usually one that’s good in the small or for beginners to copy at first, but hazardous to invoke without question on larger systems.

In a larger system, it’s much harder to understand the consequences of our design choices—in many cases the consequences are only discovered far, far too late in the process and it is only by throwing more engineers into the pit that there is any hope of completion.

In the end, we call our good decisions ‘clean code’ and our bad decisions ‘technical debt’, despite following the same rules and practices to get there.

52 notes · View notes

geopolicraticus · 6 years

Text

Sufficient unto the day is the rigor thereof.

Recently I looked up a passage in Husserl that I have seen quoted many times, but of which I could not remember the source. The quote (which I had quoted on Twitter) is, “But what if truth is an idea, lying at infinity?” and it turns out that this comes from Formal and Transcendental Logic, section 105. Here is a longer quotation to give some context:

“There is, as we know, an extraordinarily wide-spread interpretation that eschews all phenomenological investigation of the intentionality of an evident judging and construes evidence conformably to a naively presupposed truth-in-itself. According to this interpretation, there "must" be an evidence that is an absolute grasping of truth (the naive argumentation is often explicit), since otherwise we could neither have nor strive for truth and science. This absolute evidence is then taken to be an — indeed very wonderful — psychic characteristic of many processes of judgment, one that absolutely guarantees that the judicative believing is not mere believing, but rather a believing that makes the truth itself actually given. But what if truth is an idea, lying at infinity? What if it can be shown, in evidence, that, with respect to world-Objectivity in its entirety, this is no accidental matter of fact, resulting from our unfortunately limited human cognitive powers, but an eidetic law ? What if each and every truth about reality, whether it be the everyday truth of practical life or the truth of even the most highly developed sciences conceivable, remains involved in relativities by virtue of its essence, and referable to "regulative ideas" as its norms? What if, even when we get down to the primitive phenomenological bases, problems of relative and absolute truth are still with us, and, as problems of the highest dignity, problems of ideas and of the evidence of ideas ? What if the relativity of truth and of evidence of truth, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the infinitely distant, ideal, absolute, truth beyond all relativity — what if each of these has its legitimacy and each demands the other? The trader in the market has his market-truth. In the relationship in which it stands, is his truth not a good one, and the best that a trader can use? Is it a pseudo-truth, merely because the scientist, involved in a different relativity and judging with other aims and ideas, looks for other truths — with which a great many more things can be done, but not the one thing that has to be done in a market? It is high time that people got over being dazzled, particularly in philosophy and logic, by the ideal and regulative ideas and methods of the ‘exact’ sciences — as though the In-itself of such sciences were actually an absolute norm for objective being and for truth.”

That’s a long paragraph, and it isn’t even the whole of the paragraph, though I think it does make the point without sacrificing too much context. Husserl wrote a lot of long paragraphs. Obviously, there is a lot to unpack here. Where to begin?

I’ll start with the idea embodied in the short quote, “But what if truth is an idea, lying at infinity?” Husserl is at pains to point out that what he is suggesting is not that human finitude and fallibility are responsible for truth to recede from us as we approach, like the horizon. Husserl is suggesting that the ever-receding goal of truth is built into the structure of truth itself. This is not about us being human, all-too-human; this is about the truth being infinite, all-too-infinite.

When we think of Nietzsche scolding us for our human, all-too-human foibles we chiefly think of human limitation. This was to be a major theme of the existentialists, and those who followed the existentialists, who sometimes invoked the “radical finitude” of humanity and of the individual. Radical finitude, I assume, is that finitude at the root of our being. It is not a contingent finitude, except in so far as human being is intrinsically finite. This finitude at the root of human being entails that our grasp of truth will be limited by our finitistic cognition. An infinitistic truth will thus be known, if it is know at all, through a finitistic lens.

What I think Husserl is saying here is that even if all of this true, and human limitations entail seeing an infinite truth through a finite lens even then, again, the infinitistic truth that we perceive is a moving target that is itself unfolding and developing so that even a mind not subject to human cognitive limitations would not perceive this truth all at once, in fell fell swoop, and possess it absolutely. The truth, like the mind that grasps the truth has a horizon structure that means it recedes as we approach.

Significantly, the idea of the horizon is an important theme in phenomenology. There is an excellent paper that is a phenomenological treatment of the problem, “The Horizon” by Cornelius Van Peursen, included in Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, edited by Frederick Elliston an Peter McCormick. And, if you’re lucky enough to find a copy (as I was, many years ago), there is the book Phenomenology and Reality, also by Cornelius Van Peursen, which includes a section on the horizon.

If the horizon structure of the world is not only in us but also in the world—if it is not only an anthropic (and anthropogenic) horizon but also a metaphysical horizon—then this is not only a phenomenological insight, but also a metaphysical insight, and it entails a definitive rejection of the Parmenidean worldview and its permutations down through the millennia. And we should be in no way surprised by this, as this is exactly what we should expect in a universe that is changing, developing, and evolving. A dynamic universe does not and cannot give itself all at once, and in such a universe the truth is an idea lying at infinity, that would only be fully known after an infinite period of time had elapsed (and maybe not even then, but that is an argument for another time). This is like asking the question about what philosophers call the Thomson lamp: if the switch is turned from on to off an infinite number of times, after this infinite task has been completed, is the lamp on or off?

Let me try to give one “concrete” example of the point I am making, though you might not think my example is all that “concrete.” I should mention that I was struck by re-reading the passage from Husserl quoted above, because I hadn’t remembered that I had taken “regulative ideas” from Husserl. I’ve been using the term occasionally in my writing, usually to indicate ideas that are unfalsifiable but nevertheless meaningful, and which play a prominent role in shaping our conceptions of things.

Elsewhere in Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl used the phrase, “regulative idea in the Kantian sense” (quoted below), and Husserl occasionally referred to, “an idea in the Kantian sense.” What did he mean by this? What is an idea in the Kantian sense? Here is how Kant explained what he meant by an “idea”:

“A perception which relates solely to the subject as a modification of its state, is a sensation (sensatio), an objective perception is a cognition (cognitio). A cognition is either an intuition or a conception (intuitus vel conceptus). The former has an immediate relation to the object and is singular and individual; the latter has but a mediate relation, by means of a characteristic mark which may be common to several things. A conception is either empirical or pure. A pure conception, in so far as it has its origin in the understanding alone, and is not the conception of a pure sensuous image, is called notion. A conception formed from notions, which transcends the possibility of experience, is an idea, or a conception of reason.” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason)

…and...

“By idea I understand the necessary concept of reason, to which the senses can supply no corresponding object.” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason)

And here is Husserl’s gloss on Kant:

“To speak of a ‘limit’ rather than an idea of clarity would not always be appropriate, though limit is the word that first comes to mind. Not always should one think of something like a limes. Perfect evidence of external experience, for example, is a regulative idea in the Kantian sense.” (Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, translated by Dorion Cairns, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969, p. 62)

By excluding the possibility of correspondence with any object of sensory intuition, an idea in the Kantian sense (as Husserl frequently calls it), is entirely isolated from all the customary ways in which we assimilate ideas to experience, including defining truth as correspondence to fact. This doesn’t make ideas in the Kantian sense false, rather, it means that the entire correspondence theory is irrelevant when it comes to ideas in the Kantian sense, because, by definition, they have no correspondence to fact.

The regulative ideas I have identified—the cosmological principle, the principle of mediocrity, the Copernican principle, the principle of parsimony, and so on—regulate our most general and abstraction conceptions of the world, and are therefore not identical to the world nor to any part of the world. No evidence of the world, a fortiori no perception of the world, can confirm or disconfirm a regulative idea by definition. We have already stipulated that regulative ideas in the Kantian sense have no corresponding object.

The convergence of evidence upon a regulative idea that is always nevertheless underdetermined by evidence is an illustration of truth as an idea lying at infinity. And here we see that, in so far as we are concerned with regulative ideas, they are ideas in the Kantian sense. How we go about establishing some relationship between the world and our regulative conceptions of the world is the whole art of thing. One would like to say that one ought to choose the simplest relationship, but this, too, would be to invoke a regulative idea—the principle of parsimony—and therefore to imply an infinite regress.

A rigorous conception of the truth can only be as rigorous as is possible given that human beings are what they are (limited, finite, fallible) and given that the world is what it is (an infinitistic manifold that reveals itself within a horizon that recedes as we approach it), and we approach it by way of attempting to understand it and to assimilate the world to human knowledge. As both mind and world are ideas lying at infinity we can assert that, sufficient unto the day is the rigor thereof.

To measure rigor against an ideal standard that will never be in human possession is to make it an impossible dream. Rigor, then, is the rigor that is possible today, with human beings being what they are today, and the world being what it is today. And we can also say, adapting a phrase from George Bernanos...

rigor is everywhere.

A scene from “The Diary of a Country Priest” based on the novel by George Bernanos; the film was made by Robert Bresson. On his deathbed the consumptive protagonist asserts, “Grace is everywhere.”

#Edmund Husserl #phenomenology #truth #rigor

1 note · View note

matkasatta · 3 years

Text

Required INFORMATION REGARDING SATTA Matka DPBOSS

The site presents the absolute best Matka Dpboss matches for everyone, it furnishes you to play with and supplies you an ideal stage to play with. What's more, the Satta Dpboss site gives you the speediest satta result, ideal envisioning clues, and deceives. We supply totally free open and close results with the expectation of complimentary that incorporate week after week Jodi and panna with an uncommon zone.

The Way to Perform Technically?

At that point, you're in the ideal area. In this game, there are a few lottery homes possessed by singular passageways that lead to explicit timings. Some of the celebrated lottery homes are remembered for this game. A Few of the bazaars, for example, Madhuri, Syndicate Night, Dhanlaxmi Night Satta, and Rajdhani Night Bazar declare results during that time and all through the evening time. Every commercial center and lottery home deliveries the outcome inside an open and shut configuration.

The Way to Perform Matka Dpboss Online? This gameplay is arising on the web business market. We're the most dependable online Satta Dpboss website which gives you tips and procedures to play forcefully.

Inside this number framework, it is feasible to figure number games. You may even utilize and endeavor a top-notch stunt that was secret until the present time. These sorts of games will likewise be founded on your own fortune at some point your fortune is with you and your fortune not with you actually. Be that as it may, your persistent effort could modify your fortune simply to surmise the sum total.

The Best Way to Combine The Satta Throughout The Online?

It's very direct to join the wagering on the web through Satta Dpboss destinations. There's no rigid standard to consolidate the internet. Essentially join and top of the marking structure for getting passage to our site. Every one of the famous gambling club sites has an online presence. This can give you a feeling of joy along with phenomenal entertainment and empower you to decide how quick moves take place and what decision you have. Whatever the circumstance, totally free web gaming is valuable for procuring Satta Dpboss.

It's feasible to make your experience of involvement paramount with it by getting a charge out of the Matka Dpboss sport since it enhances your fervor. These are experience-based games that are made for the most extreme benefit of their clients. Playing these Kalyan star line games will be a brilliant experience for you.

The Way to Begin Playing with Dpboss?

Subsequent to getting passage to the Satta Dpboss sites you need to adhere to the guidelines and rules. You may have to manage a few obstacles so be set up to back on your web gaming. There are boundless opportunities for your new players. You need to pick the style of installment.

The Way to Confront Money Limitations :

The gaming Satta Dpboss sites depend on cash and money. Virtually every one of the clients needs to deal with some money limitations by means of destinations. You need to know about the standard that exactly how much sum you are in a situation to store a day. Keep prepared and make a financial plan concerning the money which you might want to store each day.

Whatever the circumstance, you can amplify in your web installments which are confined to. Fundamentally is just winning. The second is by rationing more cash on moving toward days. On occasion, you may even get the site to work with some of those limitations. At any rate, this truly is for significantly experienced gamers.

Truth About Satta dpboss

The going may appear to be befuddling to you. Maybe you never experience this proposal in your life or you're too gullible to even think about reasoning that it might truly be something genuine. Most of us continually pick to assume our part in changing the world, giving a lot of investment to the lottery but since the restricted capital is accessible the chance cost shows up high to most of us.

Notwithstanding, Satta Matka Dpboss is only one astonishing snare you don't wish to kill from. Means your extraordinary deed won't simply do great to the people your lottery will be utilized for yet it might get back to you at a bigger return way like a vehicle.

Which Exactly are Online Raffle Tickets?

It is no advanced science, in any case, an incredible container believed that makes a triumphant circumstance for both the gatherings getting your sum just as the individual giving that entirety for a lottery. By making a pool pass to the gift you make sets you in a spot to test your fortune in the attractions related to this lottery gift. Online pool tickets would be your passage to get things you truly have been dreaming about for seemingly forever however couldn't get your hands on them yet.

Lottery Integrated Raffles

Such applications work in a style at which the members pay a base add-up to get an explanation of whatever it has been utilized for. At the point when those minuscule totals gathered by each member end up being a sufficient amount that this guides the trigger in a greatly improved manner on the double in light of the great number of assets made.

While then again that the members in Matka Dpboss feel revenue and relationship by attempting their fortune consequently to by winning the prizes draws which may vary from cash prize to a visit to your objective. Furthermore, it includes offers like the chance to win an auto that has been set up by an alternate proprietor with this expanded justification lottery.

Online lottery tickets in Satta Dpboss and Madhuri Satta are acquiring footing across the planet as of late as a result of their extraordinary results and the reasons they're being utilized for. There are many strategies by which these applications are working in different organizations and viewpoints in order to achieve the long set targets.

#satta matka dpboss #satta matka #dpboss

0 notes

jnometeora · 4 years

Text

Synapses

Think about it.

Elizabeth.

As we have seen in my reading of the discourses of the “new media camp,” it is true that the post media conditions proposed by those discourses might run the risk of declaring both the abolition of medium specificity per se (and of the concept of the medium in general) and the computer’s triumphant absorption of all the technical and aesthetic possibilities of previous media in its transcoding and algorithmic operations.[0]

Critical Thinking

Looking to a beautiful landscape or receiving pressure waves from vibrating objects, generate different frequencies, sounds, words and appreciate beautiful songs. Colors, tones, smells, tastes are mental creations constructed by the brain out of sensory experience.

They do not exist as such outside the brain, and they are all different for each one of us.

Thus everyone carries with him his singular cultural chip, variable with the time of his trainings, as different from his neighbor’s as the design of his fingerprint or the count of his DNA, natural chips, and travels over a multicolored cartography (…) [1]

Assuming that, we may accept that anything one wants to describe—say, content (sensory experience), space (coordinates), time (intervals), or instructions (programming, algorithms)—can be expressed in the irreducibly countable alphabet of that one binary difference, 0 or 1. [2] Since neuron can be seen as mainly digital because it either fires or it doesn’t; but the question is actually more complicated because that activity is influenced by many factors in the brain which aren’t on/off signals.This leads to a conclusion (…) that the brain works in a way fundamentally different from computers analog and digital – it’s statistical. Nothing like the precision of mechanical computers in storage or computation is available given the brain’s hardware, yet it achieves a high degree of reliability.[3]

The number of connections for each neuron depends on its type [4] and the type of each neuron is determined at random [5] which leads to a statistical elaboration of the sensory experience.

Prospective Emergent digital and physical making technologies and applications emphasize a parallel between an individual’s active perception/sensory systems and human experience as knowledge.[6]

New powerful communication system

Symbiotic Interactivity in Multi-sensory Environments (…) a silent revolution is going on as an effect of emerging mobile and wireless technologies. In the near future we will not just see technology–driven trends towards the unwired techno–nomad, we will simultaneously experience a fundamental change in the way we merge together with advanced, non–local communication systems.Combined with increased sensory resolution and focus on individual experience, we will symbiotically fuse with a world that, in effect, has become our fleeting interface. [7]

Since we do not simply experience a succession of here and nows but we use our to align and update predictions [8] there is the possibility to create some background prototype, a sort of neuronal playground in which synapses may “play” as in the Senselessness installation, in which visitors can experience the so–called Floatation Tank (a.k.a. Isolation Chamber).The tank enables the participant, probably for the first time in his or her life, to experience ‘sensory deprivation’.Similar to the virtual CAVE at the University of Illinois, it is an example of a 21st century ‘cave’, in the sense that it decisively separates the participant from his/her normal environment. Other examples (…) such installations as Dali Llama (participant occupies a cage next to a caged live llama animal); Balls (playing ping–pong in an environment saturated by balls, real and electronic); Gravitation Dissolving (experience an approximation of weightlessness, via a Virtual Reality hang–glider simulator); Bullet–Proof Body Condoms (participants try on huge plastic body bags, in a simulated effort to protect themselves from chemical and biological terror); The Wizard of Schmooze (a ‘disembodied’, invisible ‘wizard’ interacts with participants); or Art Should Touch You (visitors break the taboo of not only touching the artwork but even of being themselves touched by it).[9]

Architectonic thoughts

Armed with this analysis, it would be possible to look at other texts [10] in order to study and create a multi-sensory environment which combine a fun house with an environment of sensory stimuli, optical illusions, and popular culture imagery.[11]

What characterizes the new system of communication, based in the digitized, networked integration of multiple communication modes [12] where everything is artificially rendered and the unknown variable is the character entering the chambers following an aleatory path.

All the possible path should be previously rendered and the spaces disposition holds this difficulty: [13] all the chamber should be well disposed so that the visitor may not realize that all flowcharts were previously studied; in that way the visitor will feel more comfortable as having everything under control and choosing a random succession of spaces and contents.

From now on the visitor will be the synapse of this macro scale neuronal playground. Entering in this system, is entering a recursive function where his sensory experiences are molded.

In order to reach a successful experiment (…) results are running amok [14] and every experience should be barely reproducible in a digital way, but strongly dependent on the character background.

The building should be majestic as a palace of a prince [16] in order to stimulate sensory experience already at first glance. Since the palace of a prince must accommodate a large number of people, it should have rooms notable for their number and size. [16] In those rooms multiple paths are organized, inside Compartition (…) which sub divides the whole Platform of the Palace into smaller Platforms, so that the whole Edifice thus formed and constituted of these its Members, seems to be full of lesser Edifices: By Walling we shall understand all that Structure, which is carried up from the Ground to the Top to support the Weight of the Roof, and such also as is raised on the Inside of the Building, to separate the Rooms; Covering we shall call not only that Part, which is laid over the Top of the Edifice to receive the Rain, but any Part too which is extended in length and breadth over the Heads of those within; which includes all Ceilings, hals arched Roofs, Vaults, and the like. Apertures are all those Outlets, which are in any Part of the Building, for the Convenience of Egress and Regress, or the Passage [17] of the visitors. Paths should be organized in a univocal way.

[0] Kim, Between Film Video and the Digital Hybrid Movin [1]Serres_The Incandescent, [2] Peters_Digital Keywords, [3] Siemens_A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, [4] Bureaud_MetaLife Biotechnologies Synthetic Biology ALi, [5] Bureaud_MetaLife Biotechnologies Synthetic Biology ALi, [6] Schneiderman_Textile Technology and Design From Interior Space, [7] Ascott_Engineering Nature, [8] Wollner_Body Sound and Space in Music and Beyond Multimo, [9] Ascott_Engineering Nature, [10] Serres_History of Scientific Thought, [11] Ockmann_Architecture Culture 1943 1968, [12] Castells_The Rise of the Network Society, [13] Williams_Daniele Barbaros Vitruvius of 1567, [14] Schumacher_The Autopoiesis of Architecture Vol 1 [15] Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture 1999 [16] Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books 1988 [17] Alberti, 10 books of architecture 1755

#jnometeora #text

0 notes

theknightonabike · 7 years

Text

Is this Knight thing just a game?

I attended the SCA’s Midrealm Crown tourney yesterday.

I really enjoyed myself. Partly because I got to re-connect with a number of lifelong friends. Also, I had the privilege to attend My Beloved Rocky and Jane as they participated in the last Crown Tournament he intends to compete in.

To our knowledge. Rocky is the oldest individual to compete in a Crown Tourney in the history of the “known world” At 75 years old, he forwarded his banner and the name of his Lady as a legitimate fighter in, basically, the one stick fighting tournament that actually has some modicum of consequence..

In general, every tournament has some consequence... After all, the practitioner gambles renown.... In Rocky’s case, he was engaged in one of the greatest gambles a Man of Coat Armor CAN make... Is he, at that age, capable of bearing harness on the field as a legitimate threat, or is he too feeble. Will his efforts be denigrated by patronization from his peers. He won that gamble, and succeeded in gaining much worshipful honor. I love him for that, and will honor him all the days of my life, as is my responsibility as a Member of the Chivalric community.

Crown tourney has “real world” consequence. The winner of that tournament more or less becomes the “president” of the world’s largest costume party/Medieval theme park/Chivalric sandbox. They become the focal point... the archetype.. for other’s journeys. (Regardless of if they ultimately succeed or fail)

In any case, The tournament is the highlight of the six months/ stick fighting tournament play cycle in the SCA.

Later that night, Rocky was recognized by My King and the assembled Knights for His life long constancy in the pursuit of knightly endeavors and pursuit. This was a right and proper thing to have happened.

I told Rocky that one of my goals was to some day beat his record... to compete in Crown Tourney at the age of 76. He is my Chivalric father, my elder. It is my responsibility to honor the love and investment he has given me by trying my hardest to surpass him, as, ultimately, I hope my own students surpass me.

If you boil it down, Knightly enterprise and living the Way of the Knight has nothing to do with costume parties, or Larping, or tournaments.. It is an inward path to Mastery.

The SCA and other organizations, including the global steel fighting community, are ultimately constructs and crucibles to learn, test, and examine one’s self through Deeds. That is a defining function of the Hero’s journey.

One of the highlights of my day was that I got to connect with a kindred spirit in the form of a Man who, in the context of our game, calls himself Rin Ravenfoe. He is a Master of Arms in our Society.

We had actually started a conversation about the Hero’s journey literally three years ago in a stylized living history encampment at Pennsic.

We almost immediately fell back into the same conversation, only this time, we had a little more time to develop our thoughts and understand the type of men we were. I think that our meeting was exactly at the right time in the right place to spur us both further upon our paths; especially for me. Some of the things that we talked about have shed some light on certain struggles I have been trying to come to grip with for several years.... Since one afternoon in Spain when the 29 lost the banners of our ancestors... but that story is for another day..

Later that evening, I got to participate in a ceremony that marked a signpost in another Man’s journey. He was placed on Vigil for Knighthood himself.

This man’s path has been winding, long, unique, and also full of trials. But that is a singular function of this type of pursuit. Perhaps someday I will write more on this...

Then, I had a brief conversation with my dear friend Doug, who’s pursuit of mastery has also been twisting and turning... We started in the sca roughly at the same time.

I have a great feeling of kinship with this man and his beloved family is a jewel of beauty that I have enjoyed and, in many ways, envied over the years. But the trials on his journey have been different than mine.

He is rejoining the path of Chivalric pursuits, and we are, as is so often the case on these journeys, picking up where we left off when our paths diverged some 6 or so years ago.

Our conversation was cut short due to the nature of the day, and we continued it via texts this morning. In those texts, there were a number of themes that are interesting and need further developed.

We were discussing the fact that the Knighthood of our Ancestors are, of course, different than the path that modern practitioners must walk. This concept touches on the evolution of relevance that happens to all warrior paths through history. Again, some day I may try to write more on this topic as well..

There is a continuity of themes, however. The need and the archetypes themselves are universal. For instance, I think for practitioners such as myself, there are two Knightly realities. If a practitioner does not foster excellence in both of these realities, then he or she is, at the least, not reaping the benefits of this path, and at most, utterly failing.

They are both Part of the whole... the yin and yang, the inside and outside path...

I have been blessed with being acknowledged a member of two modern Knightly Orders. But really, is there value in this? My fellows and I have sacrificed much... suffered and exulted in much.. but when it comes down to it, is it REALLY a game that we play? An elaborate lifelong exercise in self delusion and mental masturbation?

For instance, my co-workers don’t know what I have done, what I have faced... They don’t know of the times I almost shit myself in fear, got my dick knocked in the dirt by stronger men, or exhibited exquisite hubris... They don’t know that, for some reason, people around the world know my name. That The name my father gave me is in the congressional record. They don’t know that I have been stopped in crowds to give autographs, or been held in high regard by people of greater worth than myself, or villainized by others..

And is that high regard or distain just part of a game? Does the blood and the money and the life shed by me and those like me merely to serve as a prop for other people’s fantasies? For my own fantasies?

One of the major responsibilities of being a Knight of the SCA, for instance, is to judge the efforts of fellow practitioners; to serve as a guardian of the Fount of Honor, and to ascertain when a fellow practitioner is ready for the public rituals, accolades, and responsibilities of formal Knighthood.

But how is that judged? What is the purpose of the entire thing?

As I said, there are two Knightly paths... An internal and an external... Both have different ramifications and worth.

I have said before that the Chivalric life is not for everyone. In fact, it is a narrow filter.. only those who are broken in certain ways really actually need it...

For those broken men and women who do, the personal payoff is almost entirely internal in nature. As such, it doesn’t really matter if the external construct it plays out upon is a dojo, or a tiltyard, or a stick fighting tournament in the SCA... To tread the Hero’s journey means that rites of passages.... tests... risks with true internal and external consequence, are NECESSARY...

The external “chivalric sandbox” may look utterly ridiculous from the outside... completely and wholly contrived...

But think about something...... ALL rites of passage are, by necessity, artificial constructs.. Ordeals to pass from one stage of life to another... They must be painful, they must be exultant, and they must, in some ways be artificial.

The tribal leader that puts a test before a warrior constructs challenges in an artificial way. The risks are generally controlled, the goal amorphous... but they are constructed in such a way by this elder, by this Knight, to test the mettle of the internal person in an external way.

This, amount other reasons, is why a Knight must always make a Knight... Why an elder must be the one to externally and publicly acknowledge success.... or failure.

For make no mistake, it is not a true rite of passage, not a true test, if there is not the distinct possibility of failure.

Failure is always a part of the Hero’s journey...

I think that is the purpose of these external “games”. They serve as the physical mountain that must be climbed.. the physical stone that must be stacked... the fearful path that must be tread, the enemy that must be conquered.

A Knight always makes a Knight because he or she is the only one who knows the path of the soul that must be tread. If an external accolade is given with no ordeal, then it has little transformative internal consequence, and it truly IS just a game.

These rites of passages, these ordeals of the body and soul, produce different results ultimately, because, well, no two people are entirely alike...

I am a different “flavor” of knight than others... is one of greater worth than another? No.... AS LONG AS we both tread the same archetype,the same hero’s journey of our own souls.

Ultimately, every “type” of knight, as people such as Sir Vitus have pointed out in the past, serve different purposes, different archetypes in and of themselves.

The external purpose of a Knight is to act as archetypes and examples for other practitioners.

This is why, as I believe, the literary Arthurian Knights really boil down to archetypes of different expressions of this reality.

In the SCA, there are Knights that hold entirely different views than I.. Some represent the Knight that is barely constrained, Some represent the romantic idealist, some the Courteous exemplar, some the hardened warrior. Some play the Noble Savage. Some are shaped to play the ideal of the refined Master.

Ultimately though, externally, it is their JOB to be those archetypes for other practitioners... for other seekers.

Some must play the roll of the False Knight as well. Their role in other’s journeys is to be the Brother who betrays, the Knight who taints, The Breaker of oaths... The exhaled Knight who sins against Chivalry..

I have said many times that “we are the instruments of other men’s tests”. And the reverse is true... sometimes others are my test. Sometimes the role of a Knight is to be the exemplar of the hated.

The role of some Knights is to test the practitioner to the point of failure, or the focus of hate, or the stumbling block to the abyss.

I am just now learning the words to understand this truth in my own path... it is the hardest lesson so far. I personally don’t know if I will pass this ordeal in my path or not.. and what is even more sobering is the realization that I myself may play that exact same role in someone else’s path... That thought fills me with dread.

But that is the nature of things: The construct of the test, both in the artificial parameter of the ordeal, and in the internal Chivalric path... The internal reality.

9 notes · View notes

quranreadalong · 7 years

Text

Notes before we get started

Here’s some stuff you need to know before we actually get into the Quran itself.

ORDER OF THE QURAN

The Quran isn’t in chronological order. Instead, the longest suwar (chapters, singular=surah) are generally in the first half, and the shorter ones are in the second half. No one knows the exact chronological order, as in which of Mohammed’s “revelations” came first, but the suwar are generally divided into Mecca and Medina suwar.

The Mecca suwar were from Mohammed’s earlier years as a “prophet” (610-622 AD), while the Medina suwar were from many years later, after he had gathered followers and established a Muslim base of power in the city of Yathrib, which he called Medina (622 AD+). Some suwar are a combination of “revelations” from both eras! In a small number of cases, it’s hard to tell where/when the majority of a surah came from, but I’ll point those out along the way. As a general rule, the Medinan suwar contain lists of rules and descriptions of events in Mohammed’s own life, whereas the Meccan ones are mostly just Mohammed yelling at people and telling them to stop being polytheists; most are devoid of rule-and-regulation stuff.

The reason why I tend to use the word surah rather than just “chapter” is because of this--suwar that directly follow one another aren’t necessarily from the same time period or concern the same topic. Each one is pretty self-contained. A surah in the second half of the Quran is usually earlier than one in the first half of the Quran.

The Quran is fairly intolerant and extremely repetitive. I’m serious: it is not laid out like a mythological history book like the Torah is, so if that’s what you’re expecting, then... don’t... expect that! It’s just a long collection of Mohammed’s rants. If you have never read it before, and the only thing you know about it is that Muslims believe it is the most beautiful book of all time, please temper your expectations now.

Mohammed’s early “revelations” (ayat, singular ayah) are noticeably more poetic than the later ones from Medina, which are often tedious lists of rules, Biblical stories, and chastisements of The Disbelievers, which get worse and worse. We’ll see that right away in the second surah. Don’t worry, though, it’s not all tedious crap. There’s plenty of interesting stuff to discuss within the Quran’s pages.

Finally, because there are so many suwar and they come from different points in Mohammed’s lifetime, some parts of the Quran seem to contradict one another. But never fear: the Quran contains a handy-dandy provision in which seeming contradictions are resolved by Allah abrogating older ayat/verses with new and “better” ones: the later verse replaces the earlier one. As we go along, we will keep that in mind.

Wikipedia lists two suggested chronological organizations of the Quran, though as you can see, there’s some variation. I’m going to be reading the Quran in its standard order, but I’ll note whether it is an early, middle, late Mecca or Medina surah at each one’s introduction.

THE AHADITH

While Islam requires one to believe that every word of the Quran is true, there is another element to the religion called the ahadith (“traditions”, singular hadith) which are basically collected sayings about Mohammed and his followers. Essentially, if a subject is not directly addressed in the Quran, Muslims turn to the ahadith collections to figure out what is or is not permissible. Allah forgot to mention a lot of stuff in The Perfect Book, apparently. So occasionally I’ll need to link to some ahadith.

The problem, of course, is that many of the ahadith passages are full of shit and blatantly made up. Early Muslim scholars dedicated their entire lives to figuring out which ahadith were reputable, and when I quote a relevant hadith, it will almost always be from one of the two most reputable collections, called Sahih Muslim and Bukhari. Maybe we’ll read some of the collections later, at least the sahih or “strong”/highly reputable ones. My Big Fat Ahadith Read-Along would be…. an experience.

TAFSIR & SIRA & HISTORY

Some things in the Quran are incomprehensible without consulting outside sources that explain what a particular verse is about and what the historical context of the verse is. There is a genre of Islamic literature called a tafsir that collects ahadith relevant to a certain verse, and sometimes I will link to one of several highly-regarded tafsir collections when a part of the Quran requires it.

Every now and then I’ll also bring in excerpts from a sira (a “biography”/hagiography of Mohammed and his followers; the one I'll quote from is by Ibn Ishaq and was written in the 8th century) or a history book (usually al-Tabari’s) for the same reason. It is impossible to read the Quran without referencing these things at some points, because people, places, and events are mentioned but never explained. Understanding the changing situation and power dynamics between Mohammed and his various enemies is also crucial for understanding why the Quran gets progressively more violent and intolerant chronologically.

The tafsir collections, as well as the history and sira books that I link to, occasionally give more than one explanation for a certain verse/incident. When there is historical disagreement about a situation or reason to doubt any of the sources I listed above, I will be sure to mention that.

CHRISTIAN AND JEWISH SOURCES

Much of the Quran involves rehashed stories from Judaism and Christianity--but often the details are strange and don’t come from the Bible/Torah. This is because Mohammed enjoyed collecting and then copying stories he heard from the sects around him, and not all of those stories had any basis at all in the Bible. Some parts of the Quran are clearly pulled from the Talmudic writings of rabbis, while others are clearly pulled from Christian apocryphal texts. I will link to the sources of those non-Biblical stories when they come up.

TRANSLATIONS

corpus.quran.com is my go-to translation site. It lists seven highly-regarded English translations, all side-by-side. I’ll be using the Pickthall translation. In the event that Pickthall’s translation is noticeably different from the others, I’ll make a note of it and explain the controversy over the word in question. (There are some people who will tell you that you cannot read the Quran in any language other than Arabic or else you won’t understand it. These people are full of shit and you can feel free to ignore them. Hundreds of millions of the world’s Muslims cannot understand Arabic. Any debates over the meaning of a certain word also apply to the original untranslated Arabic word. All the translations on that site are regarded as very well-done and scholarly.)

THE HISTORICAL QURAN

Regarding the historical validity of the Quran itself, the content has remained mostly unchanged since the 7th century. There is a debate about how much of was altered between the time of Mohammed and the last years of the 600s AD, but it is generally agreed that the majority of it has remained the same.

There is, however, evidence that during Mohammed’s lifetime, the Quran was a changing document, and some verses were removed from it on Mohammed’s orders, both in the early and late periods of his prophetic career. Some were once believed to be part of the Quran but were later deemed non-revelatory. This is a form of naskh, or abrogation, a concept that is addressed within the Quran itself. The other form of naskh involves a later verse superseding an earlier one, but both remaining in the Quran. We’ll get to all that.

It is less clear whether anything major was added to the Quran after Mohammed’s time. The first written Quran was compiled only after Mohammed’s death, and it wasn’t fully edited and standardized until the time of the third caliph. The written Quran itself also changed over time, as the Arabic script of early Islam was not the Arabic script we use today. For example, diacritics (little dots above or below Arabic letters: ت/t and ب/b) were not in use in the early days. Identical letters were used for different sounds, which was, as you might imagine, somewhat of a problem. So eventually they were added in to help people read the damn thing. In general it is believed that the addition of diacritics did not alter the meaning of the Quran in any huge way, as the Quran in its verbal forms (there were multiple different ones, though Mohammed said that was fine as long as the meaning remained the same) had already been memorized by several people, but it really isn't possible to know for sure.

We do not know who was the first to compile the Quran into one book, as there are conflicting ahadith on the matter. We do know that one of the first to compile a written Quran was a scribe named Zayd ibn Thabit, who put it together in the year after Mohammed's death by bringing multiple fragments of text together and supplementing it with the assistance of those who had memorized some verses. The caliph Uthman used Zayd's text a base for the “official Quran” and had variant texts burned (a fragment of one surviving older copy is here; it does have some added words, subtracted words, a missing verse, etc compared to the Uthmanic text). It’s generally believed that this is more or less identical to the Quran that we have now, but the earliest surviving near-complete copy that we have dates to the mid-eighth century at earliest. If any significant material was added to or removed from it in the preceding century+, we have no way of knowing it.

(I finally wrote a post on this whole process that u can read here if you want!!)

So we're just gonna ignore those problems, since neither we nor anyone else can answer the questions they bring up. For the purpose of this read-along I’ll be treating every word of the Quran as something Mohammed actually said. Now settle in and get ready to read the most beautiful book of all time.

Without further ado, I present: How To Burn Your Kafir: The Noble Quran

⇚ previous day | next day ⇛

#quranreadalong

1 note · View note

fuse2dx · 5 years

Text

January ‘20

I felt like trying this for a bit again.

Untitled Goose Game

Where Journey and its ilk blew up the idea of a short, single-visit game, Untitled Goose Game feels closer to the next evolution of this ultra-focused style of design. It’s a perfect elevator pitch of a game - surmised exactingly in its abstract, and not even needing to commit to a ‘proper’ title… and yet more immediate and relatable than countless other games. Your aims are clear and simple, and a compact suite of commands elicits a range of responses from its environments and characters to help you achieve them. How one begets the other is just logical enough to work for its two hour duration, but does suggest it’s unlikely to have had scope to go much beyond this without repetitive tedium, or becoming bewilderingly obtuse. That’s not to say that it’s challenges are totally intuitive, or even that it’s free of moments where janky controls entangle you - but again, you’ll easily endure through it given how briefly you’re expected to stay. The primal appeal of being a horrible goose is easy to be ensnared by, and is neither overdone nor worn thin, once again thanks to the length of it. Its elegance and charm complements the simplicity of it all wonderfully, and though not revolutionary, or pushing any particular aspect of the medium to new highs, the quirk, laughs and originality of it is the type of bottled lightning that is unlikely to be replicated any time soon. Honk.

Wattam

It’s a game by Keita Takahashi. You can assume plenty; warmth, charm, whimsy, colour, humour - and you’d be right. Divorced of a big studio and the legion of other talent that comes with it, his solo work continues to be mechanically light and missing a few layers of polish, yet is simultaneously far more experimental and groundbreakingly humane than most anything you could care to mention. Trying to explain in regular video game terms what you do is somewhat redundant, but to at least give it a shot; you play a large green square - The Mayor - who’s initially alone, but slowly coerces its population back, repopulating the world through various interactions within it.

I’ll be straight with you: I’ve had to rewrite this passage, as some of the first sessions I spent with this drove me up the wall and lead to a less-than-favourable commentary. Fully aware that talking predominantly about how it plays was “doing it wrong”, I nevertheless took to highlight how I found the camera frustrating, the characters’ erratic and independent movement to be testing, and the rapid-fire sampling of children’s cries laid over the jazzy background music to be cacophonous and anxiety-provoking rather than joyous. That I persevered and made it through the rest of the game is not to say I don’t still harbour some negativity towards it, but the last portion of the game did do a far better job of bringing me around to its charms than those earlier moments where I felt a bit too much like I was wrestling with it. I knew I wanted to see it all and to love it; the idea of being on the outside of something so light being quite so glum, but it didn’t come quite as easily as I was expecting. Don’t be too put off, but perhaps don’t also expect it to be completely painless either.

Neo Cab

Neo Cab’s setting shines a miserably relatable light on a dystopian city and the people living within it. There’s an increasingly downtrodden population of gig economy workers, a police state whose corporate favouritism is not remotely subtle, and a growing number of people whose sentiment against this climate is rallying them together, and turning to action. There is not a lot of digging required to expose the game’s politics, or to join the dots to whom it really wishes were held to justice.

Normally when talking about visual novels, or even just narratively-focused ones, I tend to find myself on the back foot, expecting folks to turn off, and having to find ways to walk it back to more traditional game tropes. Here, I was actually quite pleased with how well Neo Cab defies any lack of interaction - to the point where I’d actually be pretty comfortable recommending this to near anyone. A big component of this is set up early on; a wearable device is forced upon your character that visibly broadcasts her current mood for all to see. As well as mood limiting what you’re willing to say (crucially though, not stopping you from contemplating these options), it’s also un-conveniently right there on her wrist for folks to see when they’ve hit a nerve. As a cab driver by trade, branching dialogue options you need to assess are incredibly frequent - and give your cues are often assuming, intrusive, or just plain rude - your management of them becomes all the more immediate and crucial. Ride quality influences your rating as a driver as well as your income, which in turn impacts which rides you can take, who you can meet, and who you can rely on in future. Sometimes your choices are simple, whereas other passengers may be more obtuse, or inadvertently land you in a quandary more moral in nature. It’s not a long game, and while I naturally don’t want to say too much, it does a good job of keeping the focus grounded on its key characters, who really make it all tick over nicely. I thought Neo Cab was pretty great - it’s got a simple but stylish look to it, and gives you just enough to think about.

Demon’s Tilt

Pinball tables may not have changed much in the layman’s eyes over the years, but video game versions certainly have. In paying quite unsubtle homage to Naxat’s series of tables that blessed a number of 16-bit systems, the passage of near three decades has given Demon’s Tilt plenty of space to grow into. Larger, higher resolution screens gives us bigger play spaces and more detailed imagery, while increased technical grunt lends itself to a seemingly limitless crescendo of frenetic, often incomprehensible action. I mean, why not throw a little bullet hell into the mix? Goodness grief.

Given my particular fondness for Devil’s Crash, which to Demon’s Tilt is the clearest, most singular inspiration, I was naturally drawn to this. I’d played a little before in early access, but a more complete Switch version was appealing enough to revisit it. I was already safe in the knowledge that it’d managed to build upon and flatter my favourite pinball game without reducing itself to an imitation, but the option of portable play (with a FlipGrip, even) was particularly exciting. As it happens, trying to condense so much to a small screen wasn’t quite such the modern convenience I’d hoped - it’s a neat showcase, but quite impractical to actually play with. Not thrusting yourself within an inch of the screen and having to squint may give a smidgen more a fighting chance, but a bigger display also allows you to appreciate the slick blend of neon effects spewing themselves over the striking gothic imagery. The music contributes yet more welcome intensity to things, and though I’ve begrudged a few near misses and unfortunate bounces, in calm retrospect it’s clear the this is far more a reflection of my skill rather than any lack in ball physics. For those who are practised in ways I am not, the table itself has plenty of opportunity to flex your muscle, but even though my games aren’t the feats of endurance I’d wish for, I’m still coming away each time clamouring to go straight back in.

198X

I missed this game’s crowdfunding attempts, but after seeing its trailer - a moody and romanticised nod to all things 80s arcade culture - it was very clear this was making a direct appeal to my sensibilities. It’s a coming of age story about a bored suburban teen, whose discovery of the local arcade ‘changes everything’. Now, I love arcades far more than most, but even I found the story to be over-egged. The Kid’s monologuing through the game’s cut-scenes jumps at such breakneck speed that it genuinely made me feel uncomfortable about their state of mind. Pre-arcade, all is miserly and monotone, whereas the escapism they indulge in after this discovery is worryingly unhinged. The pixel art propping them up may be quite tasty, but I think most people will find the story being pushed to be a touch cringeworthy.

The game that’s book-ended by these scenes are actually a series of mini-games, each clearly inspired by a particular 80s title. In short clips and stills, you could be fooled into thinking these are not just dutifully upgraded, but maybe even improved homages to the given classics. Visually, yes, there is some argument to be made here as there is some terrific pixel artistry being conducted here, but as there’s only about 15 minutes of each to play, it’s no surprise that some corners have had to be cut. Generally speaking, the balance of each isn’t quite so nuanced, and unsurprisingly this leans towards them being easier than you’d expect, but there’s specific shortcomings in each too. For example: definitely-not-Final Fight has some shocking collision detection, and of particular disappointment for myself, definitely-not-Outrun has but one gear, and hardly any impression of speed. While not fatal flaws, my point is simply that you’d not choose to play these over the original games they intend to pay their respects to. A second part being teased at the shortly-reached end is likely a downer for those expecting value, but I think it’s two-hour runtime is probably just about right considering it’s best viewed as a novelty.

#untitled goose game #wattam #neo cab #demon's tilt #198x

0 notes

sciencespies · 5 years

Text

'She' goes missing from presidential language

https://sciencespies.com/humans/she-goes-missing-from-presidential-language/

'She' goes missing from presidential language

A new study reveals that although a significant percentage of Americans believed Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential election, people rarely used the pronoun “she” when referring to the next president. Credit: MIT News

Throughout most of 2016, a significant percentage of the American public believed that the winner of the November 2016 presidential election would be a woman—Hillary Clinton.

Strikingly, a new study from cognitive scientists and linguists at MIT, the University of Potsdam, and the University of California at San Diego shows that despite those beliefs, people rarely used the pronoun “she” when referring to the next U.S. president before the election. Furthermore, when reading about the future president, encountering the pronoun “she” caused a significant stumble in their reading.

“There seemed to be a real bias against referring to the next president as ‘she.’ This was true even for people who most strongly expected and probably wanted the next president to be a female,” says Roger Levy, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and the senior author of the new study. “There’s a systematic underuse of ‘she’ pronouns for these kinds of contexts. It was quite eye-opening.”

As part of their study, Levy and his colleagues also conducted similar experiments in the lead-up to the 2017 general election in the United Kingdom, which determined the next prime minister. In that case, people were more likely to use the pronoun “she” than “he” when referring to the next prime minister.

Levy suggests that sociopolitical context may account for at least some of the differences seen between the U.S. and the U.K.: At the time, Theresa May was prime minister and very strongly expected to win, plus many Britons likely remember the long tenure of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

“The situation was very different there because there was an incumbent who was a woman, and there is a history of referring to the prime minister as ‘she’ and thinking about the prime minster as potentially a woman,” he says.

The lead author of the study is Titus von der Malsburg, a research affiliate at MIT and a researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Till Poppels, a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego, is also an author of the paper, which appears in the journal Psychological Science.

Implicit linguistic biases

Levy and his colleagues began their study in early 2016, planning to investigate how people’s expectations about world events, specifically, the prospect of a woman being elected president, would influence their use of language. They hypothesized that the strong possibility of a female president might override the implicit bias people have toward referring to the president as “he.”

“We wanted to use the 2016 electoral campaign as a natural experiment, to look at what kind of language people would produce or expect to hear as their expectations about who was likely to win the race changed,” Levy says.

Before beginning the study, he expected that people’s use of the pronoun “she” would go up or down based on their beliefs about who would win the election. He planned to explore how long would it take for changes in pronoun use to appear, and how much of a boost “she” usage would experience if a majority of people expected the next president to be a woman.

However, such a boost never materialized, even though Clinton was expected to win the election.

The researchers performed their experiment 12 times between June 2016 and January 2017, with a total of nearly 25,000 participants from the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. The study included three tasks, and each participant was asked to perform one of them. The first task was to predict the likelihood of three candidates winning the election—Clinton, Donald Trump, or Bernie Sanders. From those numbers, the researchers could estimate the percentage of people who believed the next president would be a woman. This number was higher than 50 percent during most of the period leading up to the election, and reached just over 60 percent right before the election.

The next two tasks were based on common linguistics research methods—one to test people’s patterns of language production, and the other to test how the words they encounter affect their reading comprehension.

To test language production, the researchers asked participants to complete a paragraph such as “The next U.S. president will be sworn into office in January 2017. After moving into the Oval Office, one of the first things that ….”

In this task, about 40 percent of the participants ended up using a pronoun in their text. Early in the study period, more than 25 percent of those participants used “he,” fewer than 10 percent used “she,” and around 50 percent used “they.” As the election got closer, and Clinton’s victory seemed more likely, the percentage of “she” usage never went up, but usage of “they” climbed to about 60 percent. While these results indicate that the singular “they” has reached widespread acceptance as a de facto standard in contemporary English, they also suggest a strong persistent bias against using “she” in a context where the gender of the individual referred to is not yet known.

“After Clinton won the primary, by late summer, most people thought that she would win. Certainly Democrats, and especially female Democrats, thought that Clinton would win. But even in these groups, people were very reluctant to use ‘she’ to refer to the next president. It was never the case that ‘she’ was preferred over ‘he,'” Levy says.

For the third task, participants were asked to read a short passage about the next president. As the participants read the text on a screen, they had to press a button to reveal each word of the sentence. This setup allows the researchers to measure how quickly participants are reading. Surprise or difficulty in comprehension leads to longer reading times.

In this case, the researchers found that when participants encountered the pronoun “she” in a sentence referring to the next president, it cost them about a third of a second in reading time—a seemingly short amount of time that is nevertheless known from sentence processing research to indicate a substantial disruption relative to ordinary reading—compared to sentences that used “he.” This did not change over the course of the study.

“For months, we were in a situation where large segments of the population strongly expected that a woman would win, yet those segments of the population actually didn’t use the word ‘she’ to refer to the next president, and were surprised to encounter ‘she’ references to the next president,” Levy says.

Strong stereotypes

The findings suggest that gender biases regarding the presidency are so deeply ingrained that they are extremely difficult to overcome even when people strongly believe that the next president will be a woman, Levy says.

“It was surprising that the stereotype that the U.S. president is always a man would so strongly influence language, even in this case, which offered the best possible circumstances for particularized knowledge about an upcoming event to override the stereotypes,” he says. “Perhaps it’s an association of different pronouns with positions of prestige and power, or it’s simply an overall reluctance to refer to people in a way that indicates they’re female if you’re not sure.”

The U.K. component of the study was conducted in June 2017 (before the election) and July 2017 (after the election but before Theresa May had successfully formed a government). Before the election, the researchers found that “she” was used about 25 percent of the time, while “he” was used less than 5 percent of the time. However, reading times for sentences referring to the prime minister as “she” were no faster than than those for “he,” suggesting that there was still some bias against “she” in comprehension relative to usage preferences, even in a country that already has a woman prime minister.

The type of gender bias seen in this study appears to extend beyond previously seen stereotypes that are based on demographic patterns, Levy says. For example, people usually refer to nurses as “she,” even if they don’t know the nurse’s gender, and more than 80 percent of nurses in the U.S. are female. In an ongoing study, von der Malsburg, Poppels, Levy, and recent MIT graduate Veronica Boyce have found that even for professions that have fairly equal representation of men and women, such as baker, “she” pronouns are underused.

“If you ask people how likely a baker is to be male or female, it’s about 50/50. But if you ask people to complete text passages that are about bakers, people are twice as likely to use he as she,” Levy says. “Embedded within the way that we use pronouns to talk about individuals whose identities we don’t know yet, or whose identities may not be definitive, there seems to be this systematic underconveyance of expectations for female gender.”

Explore further

‘Going negative’: how Trump has changed the Twitter narrative

More information: Titus von der Malsburg et al, Implicit Gender Bias in Linguistic Descriptions for Expected Events: The Cases of the 2016 United States and 2017 United Kingdom Elections, Psychological Science (2020). DOI: 10.1177/0956797619890619

Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Citation: ‘She’ goes missing from presidential language (2020, January 8) retrieved 8 January 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2020-01-presidential-language.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

#Humans

0 notes

aclayjar · 5 years

Link

The Existence of God Does God exist? I believe that he does. But I cannot conclusively prove that to you. I believe that he exists for two primary reasons. The first is based primarily on my own experience, and secondarily on the experience of others. That there is a God, a God who is interested in me, and who is working in my life, is the best explanation I have for who I am and for what I have experienced. And I am not just an isolated example. I have personally known others, and read about countless others, whose experiences have been similar to my own. I cannot prove to you that God exists, but I believe he has proven his existence to me. The second primary reason I believe in the existence of God is that it makes more rational sense to me than the alternative. I simply cannot wrap my head around the thought that this universe, including the planet we live on, life itself, and the ability to think rationally are simply the product of blind chance. I know there are some really smart people who seem to have no problem with accepting that; but I just cannot. I must also confess that my upbringing in a Christian family has had an impact on me. Some would say that I was brainwashed, but I am grateful for that push in the right direction. I may have believed at one time because of my parents, but that time is long past. Proofs for the Existence of God If I cannot prove to you that God exists, why would I include a section on proofs for his existence? While I do not believe that a conclusive proof is possible, there have been many attempts over the years to provide logical proofs for God’s existence. These 'proofs' will not convince everyone of God's existence. But they can remove stumbling blocks that stand in the way of belief. Many are convinced that belief in God is irrational. These proofs can demonstrate the rationality of belief. These proofs include: Cosmological There are a variety of cosmological arguments for the existence of God. Each of these is centered on causation or change. Among the most familiar of these is the Kalām argument. This proof takes the form of: Whatever begins to exist has a causeThe universe began to existTherefore, the universe had a cause If the initial two premises are correct, then the conclusion is also correct. This seems like a good proof. But you will not have to use it very many times before you find those who will disagree with one or both of the initial premises. To me, their reasons for disputing the premises seem far-fetched or flimsy. But to those who do not want to believe, any excuse will work. For more on this see "The Kalām Cosmological Argument" and "Followup on the Kalām Cosmological Argument". Teleological The teleological argument is also known as the argument from design. Essentially the argument is that the universe, and life, is too finely tuned to have been an accident; there must have been a designer. Today, the intelligent design movement is championing the teleological argument. Like all of the arguments listed here, there are those who dispute that the appearance of design requires a designer. If could, for instance, simply be that there are an infinite number of universes. And this one just won the cosmic jackpot and was able to support life. Ontological Of all of the logical proofs presented here, this is to me the most confusing. A variation of this argument goes something like this. God is by definition the greatest being that you can conceive of.But what is greater, that which is only conceived, or that which is actualized?That which is actualized is greater, so a god that actually exists is greater than a god who is only conceptualized.Therefore God is actual. Confusing; yes. But it does have its proponents. Miracles A miracle is defined as an event that is caused by a supernatural entity. So if miracles occur, then there must be a supernatural entity, God, behind them. So if miracles can be demonstrated to occur, or have occurred in the past, then there must be a God. The biggest miracle ever to occur is the creation of the universe, so God does exist. Morality Seemingly hardwired into humanity is a sense of right and wrong, and of fairness. There is also a willingness to self-sacrifice, a willingness which seems contrary to a purely naturalistic understanding of life. What is the source of this morality? Is it a trait that evolution has left us with? Is it culturally derived? Or is it a divine moral lawgiver? There are problems with the first two, so it must be the third. For more on this argument see "The Moral Argument: Objective Goodness Requires God". Religion Throughout time and place wherever modern man has been found there is some trace of religion. An acknowledgement of something greater than ourselves. That is quite the coincidence, unless the creator has built into us a desire to know him. General Revelation What can I know about God apart from the Bible? This is generally what is considered to be general revelation, what is revealed about God through some source other than the Bible or other God inspired writings. General revelation can include: Nature: The creation itself bears witness to its creator (Ps. 19:1-6; Rom. 1:18-23).History: Sometimes in historical, or even current, events we can dimly see the hand of God at work.Conscience: Why do we have a conscience? Romans 2:14-15 identifies the conscience as God’s law written on our hearts. General revelation is available to everyone who lives, or has lived. But for the most part humanity ignores the witness of general revelation. Living their lives as if there were no God. General revelation does not tell us anything very specific about the creator. And it is best understood in light of his more directed revelation of himself in the Bible. The Nature of God from General Revelation So just what can a person know about God based on general revelation? There are a number of attributes of God that can be derived just from what we can see in the creation, and others that are likely. Powerful In my way of thinking, power is required to produce something. And the bigger and grander the product, the more power is required to produce it. As humans we think of ourselves as pretty powerful. Yet producing something the size of the moon is well beyond our ability to execute. I cannot imagine the amount of power that would be required to produce a universe. Even a universe that unrolls from a singularity would require an amazing amount of power to start it, and keep it unrolling. I have no idea about what lies beyond the universe we inhabit. Nor what limits there might be on a universe creator in that realm. But within the context of the creation, I think it is safe to identify the creator as all-powerful, omnipotent; without equal in power and ability; able to do whatever he chooses. Intelligent The more complex and elegant the design, the more intelligence is required to produce it. And can you think of anything that is more complex or elegant than the universe, apart from its creator? Is there anything about the creation that its creator would not know? Transcendent A creator would be distinct from his creation, independent of it and not limited by it. Space and time are two limitations that we are very familiar with. Everything in this universe is limited to being in a single location at any one moment in time. And everything that I am aware of experiences the passage of time in a forward only manner. Not being bound by space means that the creator can be multiple places at any one instance of time. Or even in every place within the universe. This means that the creator could be omnipresent, everywhere at once. Even more interesting is that the creator would not be bound by time. This means that he could move both forward and backward in time; be in multiple time periods simultaneously; or even be concurrently present at all points of time. That is admittedly hard to visualize. But if, as scientists claim, time is just another dimension, then it is really little different than being in multiple places at one time. If the creator is intelligent enough to create our universe, and is able to be everywhere within it, both in space and in time, then he could know everything that has happened, is happening, or will happen. He would be omniscient. Miracles A miracle is generally defined as something that has a supernatural origin, an act of a deity. Much of the argument against miracles assumes that there is no creator. There are those who will argue that even an omnipotent and omniscient creator would be unable to produce a miracle. But that does not really make sense, since creation itself is an act of the creator, a miracle. I can find no rational argument for supposing that a creator would be unable to interact with his creation, i.e. perform miracles. He may choose not to perform miracles, but that is different than claiming he would be unable to. I was a software developer for many years, the creator of little software worlds. Most users of those applications were limited by the user interface in what they could do. But I was able to tweak the underlying data in ways that they could not. This allowed me to accomplish things that the average user could not. That is really no different than the creator manipulating the underlying laws and constants that drive our universe to accomplish something that I would be unable to. Miracles are impossible if there is no creator. But if there is a creator, then miracles should not be a surprise, even miracles that we do not recognize as such; rather they should be expected. For more on miracles see "Miracles: Impossible, or to be Expected?" Purposeful While it is by no means certain to me, it does seem likely that a creator would have a purpose in his creation. In other words, he had a reason for producing a life friendly universe. And if he had a purpose in creation, and especially if that purpose included intelligent life, it would seem reasonable to assume that he would be active in his creation, at least enough to make sure his purpose was fulfilled. It would also seem likely that he might want any intelligent life that developed to have some concept of him and his purpose. For more on God's purpose see "God's Purpose in Creation". Other Posts in this Series Post History Original Post: December 11, 2017Updated: October 20, 2019

#bgbg2

0 notes

news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog · 6 years

Text

Gayborhoods aren't dead. In fact, there are more of them than you think.

Open up a travel guide and you're likely to see multiple passages about where to find the local "gayborhood," a neighborhood disproportionately populated by LGBTQ people. In San Francisco, there's the Castro. In Chicago, you have Boystown. And in Mexico City, there's Zona Rosa.

Walk through any of these neighborhoods, and you'll discover blocks of rainbow flags and queer clubs pulsing with extremely corny but good '90s house music. Yet for over a decade, critics have been lamenting the alleged "death" and "demise" of these gayborhoods, accusing them of being "passé" or surrendering to gentrification.

"There goes the gayborhood," The New York Times proclaimed in one 2017 headline.

But Amin Ghaziani, assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, isn't exactly grieving. In his recently published piece, "Cultural Archipelagos: New Directions in the Study of Sexuality and Space," Ghaziani analyzes new research to make a bold hypothesis: The gayborhood hasn't died, and it isn't being diluted out of existence. Instead, gayborhoods are multiplying and diversifying.

Gayborhoods, Ghaziani argues, aren't singular sites but have instead become cultural archipelagos: a series of queer islands, connected by sexuality and gender. And cities will often have more than one of them.

What's a gayborhood, anyway?

The Castro district, historically the center of the queer community in San Francisco, is now one of multiple gayborhoods.

Image: smith collection/gabo/Getty Images

If you're queer and live in an urban area, chances are decent that you've at least travelled to a "gayborhood" — maybe to stand among a crowd of sweaty bears in thongs during a pride parade or to puke your guts out outside the local queer karaoke bar.

Ghaziani defines as gayborhood as having four defining features: It's a geographical center of LGBTQ people (including queer tourists), it has a high density of LGBTQ residents, it's a commercial center of businesses catering to the queer and trans community, and it's a cultural concentration of power. It's the neighborhood where you'll see pride parades begin, dyke marches take off, and street parties go into the night.

Want to buy an anal plug from a queer-affirming sex shop? Go to the gayborhood. Need advice from a trans-friendly psychic? The gayborhood awaits. Looking for support as you get prepare to come out to your family? Attend a group therapy session held at your local LGBT center in ... the gayborhood, of course.

"The gayborhood is home to large amounts of organizations, businesses, and nonprofits that cater to the LGBTQ individuals," Ghaziani told Mashable in a phone interview. "Not everyone who lives in a gayborhood self-identifies as LGBTQ, though a statistically sizable portion does."

Gayborhoods formed as gay culture itself emerged in the postwar period and began to flourish: think New York City's West Village in the Stonewall era or San Francisco's Castro District in the 1950s. These were radical communities, home to intergenerational bath houses, butch femme bars, and sites of protest.

In the early 2000s, critics began to lament the supposed loss of these neighborhoods, citing "late-stage gentrification, the global circulation of capital, changes in the flow of migration, liberalizing attitudes toward homosexuality, social acceptance and assimilation, and the normalization of geo-coded mobile apps (which have altered how places facilitate social and sexual connections)," Ghaziani writes.

The critics weren't entirely wrong. Many traditional gayborhoods have indeed gentrified, and queer people have dispersed to other neighborhoods. But even as they've changed, gayborhoods have yet to disappear. Actually, they continue to bloom — you just won't see them if you're looking in the same singular places. That's partly because it's a "misconception" that "cities have only one gayborhood," Ghaziani told Mashable.

Historically, some cities have had more than one gayborhood, but not all of them have made it to the map. And even as queer people disperse from recognized gayborhoods, they cluster and form new gayborhoods in areas not traditionally mapped as queer.

The country has emerging queer neighborhoods that act "as cultural archipelagoes. The imagery of an archipelago suggests a chain or a cluster of islands. That's a more apt way of thinking about sexuality in a city," Ghaziani says. "LGBTQ Americans are diverse people. Why wouldn't they express that diversity in the places they call home?"

There are more gayborhoods than you'll ever find in a travel guide.

The Gayborpelago

Northampton, Massachusetts, may not be known as a traditional gayborhood, but it's home to a number of women in same-sex relationships.

Image: flickr Editorial/Getty Images

Ghaziani cites multiple pieces of research to back his claim that gayborhoods function more like archipelagoes than they do singular sites within a city.

First, he uses US Census data to examine the geographic distribution of lesbians, noting that census data only captures information from same-sex couples, not individuals.

What the data reveals is clear: Lesbian couples do exhibit geographical clustering behavior. They just appear to be less visible because they often exist outside traditional gayborhoods in less urban areas. Same-sex lesbian couples reside in both traditional gayborhoods like Provincetown — where they make up 5.1 percent of all households — as well as outside of them, in areas not traditionally recognized as gayborhoods.

While gay men make up 14.2 percent of all households in the Castro, the well-known San Francisco gayborhood, for example, lesbian couples make up 3.3 percent of all residents in Northampton, Massachusetts. Yet in the popular imagination, San Francisco, not Northampton, is the epicenter of queer culture.

In Wellfleet, Massachusetts 2.2 percent of all households are same-sex households led by women, making it the 7th most concentrated lesbian area in the country. But Wellfleet is a town of 3,171 people — not exactly a standard gayborhood you could identify on a map.

Wellfleet, Massachusetts, isn't exactly a dense metropolis.

Image: UIG via Getty Images

Ghaziani attributes this unique clustering to multiple factors: Lesbians may feel more accepted in rural areas, where female masculinity isn't as tightly policed as male femininity; lesbians have less capital than gay men (women, including queer women, continue to make less than men) and therefore may not be able to afford urban neighborhoods; lesbians are statistically more likely to have children (and therefore different housing requirements).

"Only 12 percent of LGBTQ Americans aged 18 and above currently live in a gayborhood," Ghaziani says. "We're limiting our understanding if we focus on singular parts of the city."

Like lesbians, queer people of color often reside outside popularly known gayborhoods. Black same-sex couples, for example, are more likely to live in areas where other black people concentrate than where other specifically LGBTQ people live. Cases in point: Same-sex black couples are disproportionately concentrated in Baltimore City, Maryland (where they make up 4.15 percent per 1,000 households), and Lee County, South Carolina (where that number stands at 3.69 percent).

Lee County, South Carolina, isn't exactly a well-known gayborhood. Parts of that county nonetheless exhibit a key element of the gayborhood: residential concentration.

"Zip codes associated with traditional gayborhoods are largely white," Ghaziani writes. "The assumption of spatial singularity is epistemologically harmful because it ignores the 'spatial capital' and creative placemaking efforts of queer people of color. This includes youth of color, many of whom respond to the racial exclusions of the gayborhood by building separate communities."

By focusing solely on historically celebrated gayborhoods, sociologists run the risk of ignoring both old and new gayborhoods of color.

Meanwhile, trans people are often excluded from conversations about the gayborhood entirely. Disproportionately low-income, they often lack the capital needed to live in traditional gayborhoods. They report discrimination from both straight people and cis gays in gayborhoods. Even then, trans people can form their own cultural islands simply by sharing residential space together — an apartment, a building, wherever it may be.

The existence of other gayborhoods out there also provides a source of comfort. Ghaziani cites a recent study that found that "if you know your city has a gayborhood and you self-identify as trans, you're more likely to think your city is safer for trans people — even if you don't necessarily feel all that safe in the gayborhood."

When the gayborhoods of queer people of color, women, and trans folks are included, the gayborhood no longer looks passé. It looks vibrant. It's more diffuse than traditionally conceptualized.

Throw in digital queer neighborhoods, and the number of islands on the LGBTQ archipelago multiplies.

The Digital Queerborhood

It's a beautiful day in the digital queerborhood.

Image: leon neal/Getty Images

Critics have long blamed the rise of digital queer culture for the supposed demise of the gayborhood. Because many queer people have access to mobile technology and no longer need to find one another in bars, the argument goes, the need for gayborhoods diminishes.

The thesis isn't without merit: New York, once an oasis of lesbian bars, now only has three. Los Angeles has zero lesbian bars. San Francisco, also zero. Seriously.

But instead of looking at digital culture from a deficit-based perspective, consider reframing: Digital gayborhoods continue to thrive. Between Grindr and Scruff and Her, there are now dozens of location-based dating apps that bring people in neighboring zip codes together. Unlike historical gayborhoods, which tend to be white, digital gayborhoods are often more open to diversity, giving room for trans and POC queers to connect.

If users are connecting in a neighborhood without traditional gay establishments, they can nonetheless create a "gayborhood" online or create "pop-up" physical gayborhoods. Using Facebook's events planner, they can plan a trans-centered party at a local straight bar or hold a LGBTQ health fair at a nearby field, thereby temporarily transforming these spaces into "gayborhood" spaces.

Here's how Ghaziani describes it:

"You can queer any given space by logging on to see see any queers near you. It undermines the [traditional] gayborhood as the sole locus ... Many more areas of the city can now function as queer spaces [because of digital culture]."

These digital queer neighborhoods may lack the charms of more traditional physical ones. Pop-up parties planned on Facebook don't quite lend the same sense of stability as your local gay bar. And it probably feels different to connect to your lesbian neighbor on an app than it does to share a beer with them at a local queer restaurant (though participating in the former can lead to the latter).

These neighborhoods matter nonetheless. Their existence should be registered.

If there are so many gaybhorhoods, why doesn't it feel that way?

Let's say you agree with Ghaziani's central thesis that gayborhoods aren't dying, they simply exist in an archipelago. If you've grown up in or around a traditional gayborhood, you might still experience the transformation of some of these neighborhoods as loss.

The West Village, home to the infamous Stonewall Inn, is now also home to some of the city's wealthiest residents. The neighborhood remains queer, but queer parties also happen throughout the city's outer boroughs. The Village still serves as a point of culture, it's just no longer the only point.

That can feel like a death.

These centralized gayborhoods once provided "very powerful political functions," Ghaziani says. "Having a residential concentration of queer people in particular parts of the city means we can exert political influence. The election of Harvey Milk is one of the most visible ones. So when you see and hear reports that show [some] residential integration, [it can feel like] dissolution."

With dissolution comes a feeling of invisibility:

"Sexuality is unlike other major demographic characteristics," Ghaziani adds. "It's not visible on the body in the same way. So the visibility functions of queer spaces is still very important [for queer people to feel like they exist]."

Reframing is critical. By de-centering the idea of a singular gayborhood, and traveling to other gayborhoods within a city — maybe even spending some time in a digital ones — people can transform their feelings of loss into strength and multiply their cultural power.

The gayborhood isn't dead. It isn't even dying. It's just ready to thrive in a different way.

WATCH: Meet the 10-year-old drag kid shaping the future of drag youth

The DIYborhood

#_author:Heather Dockray #_uuid:bbe7534b-12b6-3075-9265-0bda05d54d53 #_category:yct:001000002 #_lmsid:a0Vd000000DTrEpEAL #_revsp:news.mashable

0 notes

laurabwrites · 7 years

Link

1. A Cat’s Eyes Can Tell You the Time

Early on in Nioh, you are talking to a dude in a cut scene, and he breaks out a full-sized cat from his g (which meows and blinks sleepily)i, looks at it, and says, “dawn is approaching.” The look of confusion on my face was so apparent the other person in the room with me started laughing out loud. I stopped playing right then, and had to look this up. Sure enough, telling time by looking into the eyes of a cat is not only a real thing, but one that has been around for hundreds of years. Cats have eyes that are way more sensitive in a human – processing something around six times the amount of available light – meaning that bright light is a pain in the keister. The pupil of a cat’s eye is elliptical, and is more variable than that as humans. The pupil is a tiny slit during the day, but widens to be completely round at night. Once you become accustomed to the various sizes, this can be used to accurately tell the time. As weird as it sounds, it’s totally true. I can’t get the image of a world where everyone has a pocket feline to help them be punctual out my head, personally.

2. One of the Popes Wrote Erotic Fiction

Not being a devout Catholic, I had no idea that Pope Pius II published one of the most famous works of erotica of all time, The Tale of Two Lovers. This thing was a huge best seller when it was published in 1467, even before Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini would become pope. It also happens to be one of the first examples of an epistolary novel, as the book is largely two characters – a married woman and a man-in-waiting to the Duke of Austria – writing dirty love letters to each other. The pope’s erotic writing wasn’t confined to this one work, however. He was an acclaimed poet, as well. Among his works are a number of erotic poems. As you might surmise, this sort of scandalous material stopped when he became pope. While this wasn’t really a scandal during the era, it’s easy to see how a religious figure might want to have something like this hushed up, another party might want to use it as blackmail, or how someone could desire such a thing a valuable historical artifact.

3. Animals Used to Be Tried in Court

This isn’t just an isolated incident or anything. There are multiple examples of animals appearing in courts from ancient Athens to 10th-century Iraq to being something that was commonly practiced in the 18th century in Europe. It isn’t something that is limited to animals with “human-like intelligence”, either. Courts have tried pests such as rodents, serpents, and weevils for damaging crops, going so far as to banish or excommunicate them. A bull that trampled someone might appear in court on murder charges. If found guilty, they would sometimes even be dressed as people before they were hung or otherwise executed. In the case of bestiality both parties would be tried. Some of these cases are amazing, too. Like the time an attorney argued that when a group of rats failed to show up in court, it was because the summons wasn’t issued widely enough. When they failed to show up a second time, the same defense attorney stated it was unreasonable due to the long, arduous journey that endangered their lives – because of the vigilance of the cats, you see. Personally, I can think of easily a dozen different scenarios where players are dragged into the court proceedings and have to work either for or against an animal defendant. Druids and rangers – your time to shine is at hand.

4. Eaters of the Dead

During the 16th and 17th century, wealthy Europeans would routinely eat the deceased – particularly prizing ancient Egyptian mummies – to help cure them of their ailments. Bones, blood, and fat were used in medicines to treat a variety of ills, ranging from headaches to epilepsy. Human body parts were in such high demand that it sparked a massive wave of grave robbing. Egyptian mummies and Irish burial sites were the most common targets, and thieves would even fence the bodies they stole piecemeal. Either the thieves themselves did the chopping up, or they had someone they could go to to easily butcher the dead to allow them to get more out of their fleshly treasures. After all, you could butcher an arm and get bone, fat, and blood, allowing you to hit three different clients rather than selling wholesale, so to speak. This is all even more strange when you consider this was taking place during a time period in which Native Americans were being condemned for cannibalistic practices and when Catholics were being chastised for believing in transubstantiation. If the widespread practice of ancient grave robbing for gruesome upper class desires doesn’t get your creative juices flowing, then the idea that society was debating what types of cannibalism was acceptable might.

5. Ant Domination

Unbeknownst to most people, there is a super colony of ants living below the surface. While researchers once determined that Europe had a colony of Argentine ants that spread over 6000 km, and that the US had one that stretched almost 1000 km, it turns out these are actually part of the same colony. In fact, add in Argentine ants that spread to Japan, as well. Instead of displaying the usual aggressive tendencies that are seen when two colonies meet, these ants are all extremely tolerant of each other and behave as if they are part of the same colony. That means that a single colony of ants spans most of the known world. The only thing in the world that rivals this singular population is humans. To add on to that, the ant colony wouldn’t even exist in this size if it weren’t for humans, who unwittingly transported them around the world. Intelligent giant insects are always good fodder for games, as are underground societies that lurk just beyond the view of the waking world. It could be even more terrifying if the real world met fantasy, and this vast colony of biting, stinging, flesh-consuming insects were unleashed upon the waking world by a malevolent intelligence. In a less nightmare-inducing scenario, the players could be forced to wade through a sea of ants and broker a deal with the various queens to be granted passage through their domain. Either way, have fun thinking every tingle you have on you for the rest of the day is an ant.

#world-building #history #weird but true #tabletop rpgs #world building #facts

4 notes · View notes

tape-hiss · 8 years

Text

Time, time, time

Hello! This post is about time in my fictional universe, and is appropriately a little bit late. Let’s just say I’m running on Aetherian time.

I did a lot of math for this one. Also, thought a lot about how we perceive time.

So real talk: I have avoided showing clocks and calendars thus far in Aetheri because I didn’t want to do the math to come up with a fictional time system that both worked and didn’t make story events IMMENSELY complicated to coordinate. What I came up with works, but you’ll have to suspend your disbelief a little, because it’s oddly convenient (by design) for a supposedly alien system of time.

There’s a larger question at hand here than just the mechanics of how spirits measure time--how does a species with a lifespan of around a thousand earth years measure time? How do they perceive its passage?

It’s probably obvious by now that spirits don’t seem to move at any slower of a pace than humans; they aren’t like ents, for example. The spirit-vs-human perception of time is actually a pretty lively albeit tiny field of study in Escalus. The way spirits treat time seems to mirror the way that humans do, just on a much longer time scale, which some people seem to think says something about the plasticity of the brain, about its structure, about how it compartmentalizes things.

There’s two rather different ways on the whole that spirits seem to perceive time, and it all seems to depend on what happens to them. Vlad and Numair are singular examples of each, in fact, and they’re even around the same age. Not a hell of a lot has happened to Numair in his 300+ years alive; he’s spent most of that time in Escalus, in the Palace, and so to him life seems to blur together--it doesn’t seem particularly long, just uniform. This is pretty normal for spirits. They live in a flat land under a wide sky. Time just smudges together, rather like a Sunday afternoon where you’ve done nothing all day and then suddenly it’s night.

On the other hand, Vlad’s had a lot happen to him; he’s seen and done a lot, and has been a lot of different people. Spirits like this seem to actually shed their past lives somewhat. It’s a little like you thinking of an event that happened to you a decade ago, and describing it as like another lifetime--but in spirits, this seems to be a fully-realized, psychological experience. It’s a dissociation from past events, good or bad, that spirits will often describe as like a death and rebirth. It doesn’t come in an instant--it almost always corresponds to major life changes--but what’s sort of weird about it is how total it is. Spirits will often refer to this sort of jokingly as their ‘past lives,’ but, only sort of jokingly.

Obviously the prevailing view on this is that it’s merely a psychological coping mechanism, maybe even a physical one. Spirit brains are not significantly different-looking (it seems) than human brains, although they keep themselves up much better over the years. Maybe the secret of this is just that spirit brains are able to clean up much better.

Anyway, that’s the soft part of spirits and their perception of time--now for the hard mathy stuff.

So..............we don’t need to go through this whole damn thing, but my meta for this is that I needed to A) use Suuhl and Yil somewhere in making Aetherian timekeeping, and B) it needed to match up to Earth time, or at least not drift so far that I’d have to do bonkers calculations to figure out corresponding times in both universes.

You may remember Suuhl and Yil as being Aetheri’s two moons.

Suuhl is the blue one (so called because it’s a much further away, more ghostly object, and ‘suuhl’ is the Aetherian word for ghost) and Yil is the red one. Suuhl orbits Eoroe (which is the planet’s name--Aetheri is just the country) every 91 days, and Yil orbits every 30.33 days. Eoroe is slightly more massive than Earth but rotates at almost exactly the same speed--therefore, an Aetherian day is equal in length to an Earth day, although the way it’s measured is different.

(Ardh, which is where the Symphony Archipelago is, is essentially indistinguishable from Earth as a celestial object except for its topography. Just to make things less complicated.)

Time is measured in Aetheri by the following:

dheidt (1 dheid = 2 seconds)

rymmat (1 rymma = 90 dheidt = 3 minutes)

huurat (1 huura = 24 rymma = 1.2 hours)

leit (1 lei = 20 huurat = 1 earth day/24 hours)

vaact (1 vaac = 5 leit = 5 earth days) - this is an Aetherian ‘week’

yilruumt (1 yilruum = 30.33 leit or 30.33 days) - this is one ‘month’ or ‘moonth,’ namely, this is the orbital period of Yil--the ‘Yil-round’

suuhlruumt (1 suuhlruum = 91 leit or 91 days) - this is a ‘season’, which stretches from a soltice to an equinox or vice-versa; it’s also the orbital period of Suuhl or the ‘Suuhl-round’

ieirt (1 ieir = 365 leit or days = 4 suuhlruumt + 1 extra day) - this is a year, obviously, the time it takes Eoroe to go around its sun.

If you would like to see very roughly how Aetherian measures of time compare to the Gregorian calendar, I have made a goofy spreadsheet for you to check out, which you can see here.

Some of these measurements are a little odd, particularly the yilruum, which is essentially a month. Aetherians will use a yillruum only in non-specific instances, since it includes a third of a day--you’d use it to talk about a section of a season or suuhlruum. There are twelve yilruumt in a year, three per season, each named for a dominant constellation in the sky during their time. (Essentially this is the Aetherian zodiac, and yes, they do have astrology based on it.) The names of the yilruumt are included on the linked spreadsheet; they’re just named after things like animals, tools, and so on.

When you talk about a date in Aetherian, generally you describe it as being the nth day of the season in the nth year pre- or post-war. Hawk was born on April 4, 1986; Aetherians would describe this as the 13th day of Summer in year 6989 postwar. (There’s a caveat to this, I’ll get to it.) Dhuv, the Aetherian ‘month’ Hawk was born in, roughly corresponds to March 23-April 22, and wouldn’t be used to describe his birth except in an astrological context.

You’ll notice there’s a day 0 on the Aetherian calendar--this is their winter solstice and their new year. It’s considered a ‘nothing’ day, there to balance out the calendar, more or less.

But Adrien, you say. What about leap days?

Ho ho, I say, Fuck.

There’s no need for a leap day in the Aetherian calendar--it’s balanced out perfectly, there is no time lost. However, this does mean that there’s some drift between it and the Gregorian calendar, to the tune of about 59 seconds every day, until the next leap year comes round and puts it all back on track again. I’ll be straight with you: I’m not smart enough to figure out how to calculate for that. The consequences in-universe is that you just need to have an Earth clock and an Aetherian clock around at all times if you want to know what time it is in the other place; the consequences IRL is that I don’t actually know if Hawk’s birthdate matches up to the 13th day of Summer or the 14th, but I suppose it doesn’t matter that much.

That said, trying to figure out what time it is in the Archipelago vs Aetheri is a big pain in the ass. I made a rough scale, but again, it doesn’t account for time drift caused by leap days and of course time zones:

Aetheri uses what’s essentially military time; as above, 1 Aetherian hour (hurra) is 1.2 Earth hours, so there’s some drift over the course of the day between the two time scales. I suppose this will only matter in the actual comic when you consider that Ardh is about two hours behind Aetheri, so i.e. 0800 hours in Ardh is about 0900 hours in Aetheri, but say 1800 hours in Ardh is 1700 hours in Aetheri. Hoo.

On the upside, Aetherian clocks are generally pretty easy to read, although they’re often unmarked. Rather than having numbers on them, they usually work by filling bars or circles, and you generally just get a feel for what time it is. Sort of like reading an analog clock, but less exact.

They do usually include the year in the outermost ring, as based on a 100-year century. Beyond that, you’re on your own; you should probably know what millennium it is.

(The date above is something like 12:30:30PM on the 30th day of Winter, 2005.)

So that’s about it! This is one of those technical things I need to have sorted out for when we spend a bit of time in-comic telling stories in both Ardh and Aetheri at the same time. My only other conjecture is this: if spirits’ idea of a base unit of time is worth two of our own (two seconds that is) then I wonder if that would affect the way they perceive speed in music? If their idea of a ‘beat’ is twice as long as ours, does our ‘average’ tempo music sound very fast to a spirit?

Maybe! I don’t know. That’s a question for anyone with any kind of musical theory knowledge to answer.

Thanks for being patient with me y’all! It’s been rough times. And thanks for reading!

#webcomics #white noise #worldbuilding #writing #time

27 notes · View notes

ruthfeiertag · 4 years

Text

Re-Run from 2016 “To the Letter”

The following is a post I wrote back in early 2016 — a simpler, happier time — for the Month of Letters blog. While we have left Valentine's Day 2020 behind us already, I'm re-posting this piece, in part because it's amusing and, in part, because I am concerned about the U.S. Postal Service and want to remind us all how desperately important letters can be. I hope it makes you smile.

(Also, Happy May the Fourth)

*****************

14 February, 2016 St. Valentine’s Day

My dear Ms. Bradford,

Greetings and enthusiastic wishes for a Valentine’s Day alight with loads of loving letters! I write you today not only to send greetings, but also to thank you for giving me the singular honour of writing the Valentine’s Day post — and to tell you with immense regret that I can’t possibly write such a piece.

Allow me to explain. You asked that I focus on the love-letter sections of the book I have been reading, To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing by Simon Garfield.* If only you had asked me for a general review of the book! In that case, I could have extolled its wit and the wide range of historical examples it provides. I would have offered up moving passages, such as the one in the introductory chapter, “The Magic of Letters,” in which Mr. Garfield writes eloquently about what we are in danger of losing:

Letters have the power to grant us a larger life. They reveal motivation and deepen understanding. They are evidential. They change lives, and they rewire history. The world used to run upon their transmission — the lubricant of human interaction and the freefall [sic] of ideas, the silent conduit of the worthy and the incidental, the time we were coming for dinner, the account of our marvelous day, the weightiest joys and sorrows of love. It must have seemed impossible that their worth would ever be taken for granted or swept aside. A world without letters would surely be a world without oxygen (p. 19),

and provided instances of the author’s humour, such as when, in an aside to his discussion of Seneca’s instructional correspondence, he gently pokes fun at academics who study epistolary matters. In this note, Mr. Garfield informs us that

Seneca’s letters were longer than the norm, ranging from 149 to 4,134 words, with an average of 955, or some 10 papyrus sheets joined on a roll. Philological scholars with time on their hands have calculated that a sheet of papyrus of approximately 9 x 11 inches contained an average of 87 words, and that a letter rarely exceeded 200 words (note, p. 55),

an observation that betrays the author’s own interest in such minutiae. He also spares not the Fathers of the Church. He points out that during the millennium when “Literacy was not encouraged among the populace” (p. 81), letter-writing declined and “theological letters are all we have.” Mr. Garfield finds these letters uninspiring and cautions his readers that we “may prefer death to the lingering torture of reading them” (p. 82).

I shall say nothing at all about Mr. Garfield’s three chapters reviewing historical advice on “How to Write the Perfect Letter,” about the heated debates regarding whether letters should mimic informal conversations, about the importance of addressing recipients as befits their stations, about where to place one’s signature, nor about how leaving wide margins was a sign of wealth and status. Epistolary silence shall envelope the fascinating descriptions of the evolution of the modern postal system; not a word will there be from my pen about the incredible fact that postage used to be paid not by the sender of a letter but by the person to whom it was addressed, nor shall I mention anything about the invention of the postage stamp, despite Mr. Garfield’s engaging description of its conception.**

But love letters! You must see how this will never do. Love letters can leave us open to terrible embarrassment. Mr. Garfield acknowledges that

Love letters catch us at a time in our lives where our marrow is jelly; but we toughen up, our souls harden, and we reread them years later with a mixture of disbelief and cringing horror, and — worst of all — level judgement. The American journalist Mignon McLaughlin had it right in 1966: ‘If you must re-read old love letters,’ she wrote in The Second Neurotics Notebook, ‘better pick a room without mirrors.’ (p. 336)

Reading the love letters of others can be almost as cheek-reddening as reading our own. Shall we really subject our LetterMo companions to such blushing?

Moreover, we all know the power of a love letter. Think how we are charmed when Hamlet, that most articulate of Shakespeare’s creations, writes awkwardly to Ophelia:

'Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love. 'O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers; I have not art to reckon my groans; but that I love thee best, O most best, believe

Adieu.

'Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him, HAMLET.' (Hamlet, II. ii. 1212-20***)

And never let us forget that it is a letter, and not even an intentional love letter, but merely a letter of explanation, that finally wins Mr. Darcy the heart of Elizabeth Bennet. Do we wish to tempt our friends to deploy such power wantonly and without discretion? ****

But these are fictional examples, created strictly for our amusement or even for our edification. I really don't know whether we should intrude upon the privacy of people who actually lived — though Mr. Garfield patently feels no such compunction. He shamelessly lays out for us not only the ecstatic feelings of historical couples, he even brings up — and we’re both adults, so I’m just going to write the word straight out — SEX. I fancy you don’t believe me. Permit me, for veracity’s sake, to share some examples.

If you were to glance at page seventy-three, you would find Mr. Garfield’s account of

The letters between Marcus Aurelius and Fronto [which] track the rise and fall of a courtship from about ad 139, when Aurelius was in his late teens and his teacher in his late thirties, until about ad 148. The heart of their correspondence is ablaze with passion. ‘I am dying so for love of you,’ Aurelius writes, eliciting the response from his tutor, ‘You have made me dazed and thunderstruck by your burning love.’

All I will say is that, with all the conjugating the Romans had to learn, it’s a wonder there was time for such extra-curricular activity.

Mr. Garfield follows this Latin love affair with the tragic, even more explicit tale of Heloise and Abelard, those misfortunate, twelfth-century lovers. Theirs is another pupil-pedant passion, and Abelard writes that

‘With our lessons as our pretext we abandoned ourselves entirely to love.’ There followed ‘more kissing than teaching’ and hands that ‘strayed oftener to her bosom than the pages’ (p. 76).

The story culminates in pregnancy, a secret marriage, Abelard’s castration by Heloise’s relatives, and the retreat of both lovers into monastic life. Heloise’s love and desire for her husband remain unabated; during Mass, ‘“lewd visions of the pleasures we shared take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on my own prayers”’ (p. 78).

In a later chapter, Mr. Garfield treats us to a discussion of the romance of Napoleon and Josephine, and compares the market worth of their letters to the arguably more valuable missives of Admiral Lord Nelson. “In letters,” our author confides, “as everywhere else, sex sells: the Nelson [letter] went for Ł66,000, a fair sum but less than a quarter of a Bonaparte” (p. 192). Mr. Garfield puts before us the affaire de cœr of Emily Dickinson and her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. He quotes ‘a letter which echoed the steamy transactions of Abelard and Heloise …: “When [the pastor] said Our Heavenly Father,” I said “Oh Darling Sue”; when he read the 100th Psalm, I kept saying your precious letter all over to myself, and Susie, when they sang … I made up words and kept singing how I loved you”’ (p. 248). **** In another letter, Dickinson breathlessly confides to Gilbert that if they were together, “we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language” (p. 248).

To be sure, there are genuinely moving examples of great love to be found in the book. We are reminded that passionate romances need not be defined by tragedy. Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett fell in love through their letters, and their correspondence describes a “swift 20-month crescendo from endearing fandom to all-consuming craving” (p. 345). The two poets eloped and lived happily for the duration of their marriage. Browning was “the man who swept her [Barrett] away and liberated her passion” (p. 347) — and married her.

While the concerns of the famous hold a particular fascination for the masses — as Shakespeare writes, “What great ones do the less will prattle of”****** — the most touching and poignant letters are those of Chris Barker and Bessie Moore. Mr. Barker was a British signalman during the Second World War, Miss Moore an acquaintance from Mr. Barker’s time working in the Post Office. When they began to write, Ms. Moore was involved with someone named Nick, but three months into their correspondence Ms. Moore has shed Nick and is trying to persuade Mr. Barker that they are friends, and not mere acquaintances. She succeeds admirably, and soon Mr. Barker is assuring her of his interest in having “fun at a later date” while warning her “not to let me break your heart in 1946 or 47” (p. 145), and stoking her interest by wondering what she’s like “in the soft, warm, yielding, panting flesh” (p. 147). But before long Miss Moore’s unwavering admiration and epistolary dedication have complicated Mr. Barker’s desire and he is writing “I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU” (p. 202).

Miss Moore waits for her signalman throughout the war and his time as a POW. In the epilogue, we learn that they were married in October 1945 and had two sons. It is to the elder, Bernard, that we owe thanks for the preservation of their letters. The younger Mr. Barker says of his parents that “Their love for each other was so complete, always, that it was difficult for my brother and I in childhood and adolescence to relate to each of them as a single person” (p. 425). In the last letter of the war, Mr. Barker writes his by-now wife, “I can never be as good as you deserve, but I really will try very hard … We shall be collaborators, man and woman, husband and wife, lovers” (p. 426). The Barkers’ letters cannot be read without becoming involved in their growing affection and in the history Mr. Barker includes in his letters to the steadfast woman who would become his partner. The letters are tender and grateful and passionate, and we learn a great deal from them about Mr. Barker’s experiences as a signalman, about how to lay the foundation for a lasting, loving relationship, and about how thoroughly Victorian sexual mores had been trampled into the dust.

I cannot but think that you are as shocked as I am. You have not read the book and are innocent regarding its contents. I am sure, in my heart of hearts, that you didn’t understand what you were asking me to do. But I am equally sure, Ms. Bradford, that you agree these matters ought not be laid out before the Month of Letters community, that none of our letter-writers could ever have the slightest interest in reading about affairs of the heart (and of the body) of other people. Our reputation as an Internet society devoted to promoting the respectable art of epistolary composition would suffer dreadfully, and neither of us wants to be complicit in bring such a judgement to pass.

I do hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me for letting you down so. To make up for the lack of a post, I offer you a poem to run in its place instead, one more suitable for our impeccable epistolary society, to run in place of the piece I should have given you:

But For Lust Ruth Pitter

But for lust we could be friends, On each other’s necks could weep: In each other’s arms could sleep In the calm the cradle lends:

Lends awhile, and takes away. But for hunger, but for fear, Calm could be our day and year From the yellow to the grey:

From the gold to the grey hair, But for passion we could rest, But for passion we could feast On compassion everywhere.

Even in this night I know By the awful living dead, By this craving tear I shed, Somewhere, somewhere it is so.

I trust you understand my reasons for writing you this letter and do assure you that I remain

Your honoured and admiring epistolary confederate,

Ruth E. Feiertag

* Gotham Books, Penguin Group, 2014

** Those familiar with Terry Pritchett’s Going Postal will already have an inkling of the early history of stamps.

*** Open source Shakespeare, [http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/search/search-results.php], accessed 3 February 2016).

****Garfield irresponsibly provides no advice for the proper composition of a love letter. For that we must look to John Beguine of The Atlantic. His article, “A Modern Guide to the Love Letter,” reminds us to choose “100 percent cotton paper,” that may “suggest to your beloved those other cotton sheets you hope to share.” He also cautions us not to “succumb to the temptation to employ your own personal stationery imprinted with your name and address. Such handsome lettering makes identification appallingly easy for your lover’s attorney.” Beguine covers other topics such as Ink, Elegance (“Elegance prompts wit rather than comedy, sentiment rather than sentimentality” and “Long-winded elegance is oxymoronic. So length does matter, but in writing, less is more”), Salutation, Body (“even if you have a knack for them, no pornographic drawings”), Metaphors, Grammar, Complimentary Close, Signature (“If you can’t bring yourself to close without a signature, limit yourself to your first initial. And try to be illegible here. There’s no reason to make the job easier for a lawyer someday [sic]”), Delivery (“bribe whomever you must to have the letter placed directly upon the beloved’s pillow”), and Accepting an Answer. ([http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/02/a-modern-guide-to-the-love-letter/385370/])

***** One might also ponder Dickinson’s 1722 poem, “Her face was in a bed of hair”:

Her face was in a bed of hair, Like flowers in a plot — Her hand was whiter than the sperm That feeds the sacred light.

Her tongue more tender than the tune That totters in the leaves — Who hears may be incredulous, Who witnesses, believes.

****** Twelfth Night, I. I. 33. [http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/twn_1_2.html]

#Ruth Feiertag USPS SavetheUSPS #Letters #Simon Garfield #LetterWriting #USPS SavetheUSPS TotheLetter valentine's Day History

0 notes