Pointless Announcements

I ate two fortune cookies, both fortunes were lame.

"Inch by inch life's a cinch, yard by yard life is hard."

And

"It's is very possible that you will achieve greatness in your lifetime."

Yes, it said it's is.

Although I can sort of see where she was coming from as I am half tempted to go fetch the skull and scrub it off, save it for Halloween...

Some quack is trying to tell me I have Zymhophixophobia. It's a made up fear of being afraid of made up conditions. I told him he made that up and he's a pretend doctor. It's so frightening the limits they'll push to make a buck. What a truly scary thing.

Yay Hattie! Thank you. I'm sorry I didn't catch you last time. Glad to be back.

I need legal court advice, Check the buzzkill thread and tell me what you can? I Miss you guys really bad.

yeah, I totally would.

Yeah, we talked about it and she said the reason she brought them home was because she really likes cats and thought it was cool. So we talked about not touching gross stuff just because it is cool.

(Not sure if it was actually even a cat, could have been a raccoon or skunk [we have skunks in our neighborhood] or opossum or something)

She said some other little kid already took the skull.

Also, the park is directly across from our house, when I talk about her and the other kids/neighborhood kids being over there it is basically an extension of our front yard. She isn't allowed over by herself, either. There has to be bunches of kids we know over there or be with her brothers and their friends.

Isabel would be yelling, "Dad! Dad! Do we have any carrion beetles?

These bones were clean as could be, minus dust and dirt stuff.

The volume of Mordecai/Rigby slash-art in the world is genuinely appalling.

My mom is going to have the opportunity to meet our attorney general this week.

Her boyfriend/friend/person/guy is filming her for this thing.

Also, not sure how I feel about this boyfriend being back in the picture. guy from when I was a kid.

But he is into birds, and i want to get some birds, so there is that, at least.

I'm in a group for my presentation I have to do tomorrow and they are all way way cleverer than me and they've basically done the entire things and I've done almost nothing =(
I feel so bad so I have put together a little gift for each of them, just some pencils and highlighters that look like nail polishes and some sweets. I just feel so guilty! And also, to be honest, I hope they don't tell on me for doing almost nothing and sitting there with a blank expression on my face for group meetings. It's about a Shelley poem. I don't even know what I'm saying tomorrow yet. I suuuuuuck you guys!

Do each of you have the presentation? You can look through it and propose to do certain parts.

Group meetings can be tough.

Yeah we practised it today, I've got my bit. I think they all liked their dumb gifts. I ate Skittles.

Skittles are pure immediate gratification.

I got my transport money from college today after standing in line for 2 hours, then went and bought our classmate's gift (a metallic agenda with 'The Wave', that famous Japanese painting, and a lovely spring scarf), had Chinese for lunch and the beef was amazing, and then bought myself a sweet little dress that makes me feel like a fondant, a t-shirt, the fastest novel in the world and a bag of Earl Grey with jasmine flowers, which I'm going to try right after this post.

What a nice sounding day, after the waiting in line part was over.

I want to go walk around by myself and have lunch and book shop and stuff.

I only read 30 pages so far. It's about the day before Christmas, I think, and how several stories come together. It takes place in Bucharest, and I think one of the characters is Santa's wife, Angelina Christmas, who is also a taxi driver. I'll tell you more once I finish it.

The thing with it is that 53 writers sat down and wrote this collective novel in what was the shortest time ever in the world. There's a Guinness record for that. I was supposed to go to the launch party, actually, but I met Alex that evening earlier than it was planned, and hey, sex tops almost any book, when it's guaranteed to be amazing and it only occurs 4 times a year.

^5 on the Alex do-it time.

Tell us how the book turns out.

So I took the "initiative" as my roommate likes to say (showing off his nice English vocab), of dealing with the lightbulb situation, and he was grateful. He then brought up the situation with the garbage, so I kindly mentioned that I had all my garbage in my room, and he was like "Oh! So all this is just us two? Nevermind then, I won't ask you to clean our mess."

That was nice. Then we had a nice conversation. This turned my day around, which had been kind of crap to this point.

Uhhh... I think someone knocked me out last night. I was at a bar, feeling a little buzzed from 4 drinks, was a little out of breath from karaoke (second time I've ever been, and I dominated, btw), and pretty exhausted from a serious lack of sleep. But anyway, I had just relieved myself in the bathroom, and I was washing my hands when all of the sudden I wake up from the floor, nobody really having noticed me halfway through the bathroom door (I could see the whole bar pretty clearly, and only the bartender was rushing over, being the only one who'd noticed). I was very confused about where I was for the first few seconds until it all started coming back to me. The bartender asked me some questions to make sure I didn't have a concussion. I responded well enough that he didn't think I had a concussion, but I immediately noticed my jaw hurt like hell.

There are two explanations for this sudden, unexpected sleep.

1. The combinations of bodily strains, blood pressure and all, caused some seriously weird reaction, causing me to pass out, hit the sink with my jaw on the way down, and wake up a few seconds later.

2. Someone was in there that seriously hated my singing or the French (cuz it was a French song), and decided to punch me straight in my jaw, hitting "the button," so I was knocked out without a concussion.

Likely you fainted. Based on what you're desxribing.

Alcohol drops blood pressure like a mofo.

There's something I think about every once in awhile that makes me chuckle, because I've watched my dad do this same exact thing with a picnic table in our back yard, to a certain extent. I wish I had kept the boards and rebuilt the old table.

Heraclitus’s “river fragments” raise puzzles about identity and persistence: under what conditions does an object persist through time as one and the same object? If the world contains things which endure, and retain their identity in spite of undergoing alteration, then somehow those things must persist through changes. Heraclitus wonders whether one can step into the same river twice precisely because it continually undergoes changes. In particular, it changes compositionally. At any given time, it is made up of different component parts from the ones it was previously made up of. So, according to one interpretation, Heraclitus concludes that we do not have (numerically) the same river persisting from one moment to the next.

Plato is probably the source of this “paradoxical” interpretation of Herclitus. According to Plato, Heraclitus maintains that nothing retains its identity for any time at all:

“Heraclitus, you know, says that everything moves on and that nothing is at rest; and, comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says that you could not step into the same river twice” (Cratylus 402A).
But what Heraclitus actually said was more likely to have been this:

“On those who enter the same rivers, ever different waters flow.” (fr. 12)
On Plato’s interpretation, it’s not the same river, since the waters are different. On a less paradoxical interpretation, it is the same river, in spite of the fact that the waters are different. On both interpretations of Heraclitus, he holds the Flux Doctrine: Everything is constantly altering; no object retains all of its component parts from one moment to the next. The issue is: what does Flux entail about identity and persistence? Plato’s interpretation requires that Heraclitus held what might be called the Mereological Theory of Identity (MTI), i.e., the view that the identity of an object depends on the identity of its component parts. This view can be formulated more precisely as follows:

For any compound objects, x and y, x = y only if every part of x is a part of y, and every part of y is a part of x.
I.e., an object continues to exist (from time t1 to time t2) only if it is composed of all the same components at t2 as it was composed of at t1. Sameness of parts is a necessary condition of identity.
It now seems that if we want to allow that an object can persist through time in spite of a change in some of its components, we must deny MTI. An object x, existing at time t1, can be numerically identical to an object y, existing at time t2, even though x and y are not composed of exactly the same parts.

But once you deny MTI, where do you draw the line? Denying MTI leaves us vulnerable to puzzle cases, the mother of all of which is the following.

The Ship of Theseus

This is a puzzle that has been around since antiquity, probably later than Heraclitus, but not much later. It first surfaces in print in Plutarch (Vita Thesei, 22-23):
“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”
Plutarch tells us that the ship was exhibited during the time [i.e., lifetime] of Demetrius Phalereus, which means ca. 350-280 BCE. (Demetrius was a well-known Athenian and a member of the Peripatetic school, i.e., a student of Aristotle. He wrote some 45 books, and was also a politician).

The original puzzle is this: over the years, the Athenians replaced each plank in the original ship of Theseus as it decayed, thereby keeping it in good repair. Eventually, there was not a single plank left of the original ship. So, did the Athenians still have one and the same ship that used to belong to Theseus?

But we can liven it up a bit by considering two different, somewhat modernized, versions. On both versions, the replacing of the planks takes place while the ship is at sea. We are to imagine that Theseus sails away, and then systematically replaces each plank on board with a new one. (He carries a complete supply of new parts on board as his cargo.) Now we can consider these two versions of the story:

Simple version: Theseus completely rebuilds his ship, replaces all the parts, throws the old ones overboard. Does he arrive on the same ship as the one he left on? Of course it has changed. But is it it?
Let A = the ship Theseus started his voyage on.
Let B = the ship Theseus finished his voyage on.
Our question then is: Does A = B? If not, why not? Suppose he had left one original part in. Is that enough to make A identical to B? If not, suppose he had left two, etc. Where do you draw the line?

Complex version: Like the simple version, but with one addition -- following Theseus in another boat is the Scavenger, who picks up the pieces Theseus throws overboard, and uses them to rebuild his boat. The Scavenger arrives in port in a ship composed of precisely the parts that composed the ship Theseus started out in. He docks his ship right next to one that Theseus docked.
Now we have:

C = the ship the Scavenger finished his voyage on.
Our problem is to sort out the identity (and non-identity) relations among A, B, and C. The only “obvious” fact is that B ¹ C (after all, they are berthed side by side in the harbor, so they can hardly be one and the same ship!). Beyond that, there are two alternatives:
MTI tells us that A = C. The ship on which Theseus started his voyage, namely A, is identical to the ship on which the Scavenger finished his voyage, namely C. So we have two ships: one (A) that was sailed out by Theseus and (C) sailed in by the Scavenger, and another one ( that was created (out of new parts) during the voyage and was sailed into port by Theseus.
The alternative is to abandon MTI and hold that A = B. On this account, we still have two ships, but their identity and non-identity relations are different: one ship (A) was sailed out by Theseus and ( sailed in by Theseus, and another one (C) was created (out of used parts) during the voyage and was sailed into port by the Scavenger.
Unfortunately, both alternatives lead to unintuitive consequences.

The problem with alternative (i) is that it requires Theseus to have changed ships during the voyage. For he ends up on B, which is clearly not identical to C. But Theseus never once got off his ship during its entire voyage: Theseus got on board a ship (A), sailed a voyage during which he never got off the ship, and arrived at his destination in a ship (. He was on just one ship during the whole process, but alternative (i) seems to require that he was on (at least!) two different ships.
The problem with alternative (ii) is that in holding that A = B and admitting (as it must) that B ¹ C , it must also hold that A ¹ C . Yet every part of A is a part of C, and every part of C is a part of A! So A and C are two different ships even though their parts are the same; and what of A and B? They have no parts in common, and yet A and B are the same ship.
These results seem as paradoxical as the view that there are no persisting objects.

Conclusion: MTI seems too strong. It denies identity to objects that we think of as persisting through time. But that leaves us with some problems:

What do we replace it with? Spatio-temporal continuity (the intuition behind our alternative (ii), above) is the most promising (and common) suggestion. A persisting object must trace a continuous path through space-time. And tracing a continuous path is compatible with a change of parts, so long as the change is gradual and the form or shape of the object is preserved through the changes of its component materials. So it appears that we can replace MTI with the theory of spatio-temporal continuity (STC).
But STC is also problematic. For it is easy to imagine cases in which our intuitions tell us that we have numerical identity without spatio-temporal continuity. Consider that an object can be disassembled and then reassembled. (Think of a bicycle that is taken apart. The parts are then placed in a number of separate boxes, which are then shipped, separately, across country. The boxes are then unpacked and the bicycle is reassembled.) How do we account for its identity? STC breaks down in this case, for there is no continuously existing bicycle-shaped object tracing a smooth path through space-time. But MTI gives us the right result: the reassembled bicycle is made of exactly the same parts as the one that was taken apart, and so is numerically the same bicycle.
In fact, there is a way of describing the case of Theseus’s ship that seems to demand MTI rather than STC. Suppose the ship (A) is in a museum, and a clever ring of thieves is trying to steal the ship by removing its pieces one at a time and then reassembling them. Each day, the thieves remove another piece, and replace it with a look-alike. When they have removed all the original pieces, we are left with this situation. There is a ship, B, that is in the museum (made of all new materials), and there is a ship, C, in the possession of the thieves (the original pieces of A now reassembled). Which ship is A (Theseus’s original ship)? Surely not B—it’s just a copy of A, left behind in the museum by the crooks to cover up their crime. It is C that will interest the antique dealer who is interested in buying A, the original ship.

We are still struggling with Heraclitus’s puzzle.

I really wish I was sober enough to deal with that.

The Zen Masters say that we can never step into the same river twice though.

Staying home one more day to get all better. Back to work tomorrow!

Feel better soon, Imke!

I love the way the B's always turn into sunglass smilies.

Zachariah is turning into quite the voracious little reader. He has completed three novels already this year, outside of school work, and is reading the Chamber of Secrets and The Halloween Tree right now. He started the Halloween tree last night at my suggestion after realising he forgot Chamber of Secrets at school. He is well into it already and begging me to tell him what happens because he can't seem to absorb to fast enough to satisfy.

I have to pay bills and do washing. Boo.

If a philosophy text book rambles on for about a 1,000 pages longer than it needs to... but it is universally ignored... can you still trick people into thinking you're smart by owning it?

I've just received the book I ordered for my classmate. It took them 8 days instead of 15 to 60, as it was out of stock. I'm very impressed with how they handled it.

The Halloweeen Tree is an interesting title that I've never heard of. I'm gonna go look it up.

Big gap between lectures. I still have an hour left and I'm bored of working. Sigh. Won't be home until about half six and I miss my cats.

If anyone is a Flaming Lips fan The Terror has leaked and it RULES. If you want the link I'll be more than happy to give it to you but I don't think I can post it here because The Rules.

We still have rules?

I thought the only rule anymore was Thou Shalt Not Spam.

I like the Flaming Lips.

a young man in my class had a few seizures this morning. i'm still nervous from the incident. he fell right beside me. the sound of his head when it hit the concrete... his mother. i put his coat on for him. he was getting chills. we gave him oj in case it was a sugar problem (this all before the emts arrived). this is the first time that he's had one he says.
21 yrs old
i haven't cried yet. maybe later.

Oh, poor guy. That sounds scary, you must be in shock.

I went out for drinks with my classmates, and the club was giving off a free glass of champagne to all the ladies, it was pretty cool. That and drinking an awesome blueberry cocktail.

Also. Does anybody here get the impression that I'm bossy? My classmate told me this today, after a series of compliments and a super hug for giving him The Film Club as a gift. I'm not bossy! He said that was the reason guys in our class don't look at me as a potential conquest or whatever.

And he's been with his girl for a little over 2 years. I guessed right, it was years and not some recent thing.

You? Bossy? Never!

Did I answer right?

Also, with two years in, he should have mentioned it at some point when the two of you were hanging out together. He was definitely fishing.

It's better to be bossy than the other thing anyway. Just boss the guys you like into bed.

What is the other thing?

My next door neighbour's decided to have an impromptu Thursday night party. I can't tell if she is shouting hysterically or laughing. She sounds like a werewolf.

The other guys in your class don't look at you as a potential 'whatever' because your classmate spent so much time acting as though he was interested in you and absorbing all of your time.

When did or do they have a chance to spend anytime with you or think they have a chance at all in between all the games of hangman, and all the flirty smiles and sitting next to you, and all the snagging you up as his partner for every project?

He has been after you but waiting for you to throw yourself at him, not mentioning his girl and putting out effort for your attentions, but you were looking to actually have something, not just be taken to bed, so his efforts didn't work out or work out quickly like he wanted. He has stolen all the time anyone else that liked you could have used to show you, only mentioned his woman when she was going to be around so he had to, and now is telling you it is your fault, you are too smart and opinionated (aka "bossy") rather than passive, so the other guys don't look at you.

I don't like him.

maybe he isn't this big of an asshole and I am making it all up and it isn't how it worked at all.

I am cranky for other reasons so here is my cynical analysis of him and the matter.

.

Pretty sure Pepper hit the nail on the head about that situation.

Shy? Why wouldn't he just say 'shy' though?

The phrase 'the other thing' reminded me of this painting though:
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/355.1998.a-c/

I love me some Brett Whiteley.

Just stating the obvious, which didn't all fall into place until this last revelation. But it is the obvious, now.

I'm more interested in how Irina feels about that all being the obvious, and whether any of the guys here agree that it is, than in being told I am smart.

I'm still cranky.