cicero

Regardless of the size of the assets of these organizations, the parent's point is still valid that their success should not be measured in $s. So the Vatican has $10B in wealth, does that mean that they are successfully leading people to heaven? I say these numbers have little to do with what the Vatican exists for. If anyone in the Vatican thinks otherwise, I would say their priorities are off. (I speak about the Vatican rather than the LDS church because I know more about it, being Catholic myself.)

There are all kinds of intelligence. What is unique about human intelligence, which has been known since Aristotle, is our ability to recognize abstractions and make generalizations, which then leads to human language. Various plants and animals might react to red things, but we can abstract red as a color, thinking and talking about it as separate from the things that are red.

The success of phones and tablets appears to have made the desktop world afraid they were obsolete, so the trend since Snow Leopard and Windows 7 has been to make the desktop more like a phone or tablet. Windows 8 clearly went too far and provoked a revolt, so Microsoft improved things with Windows 10, but I think the Windows 7 UI is still better than Windows 10 in many ways.

Call-A.P.P.L.E. was an early magazine for the Apple II. I think it had lots of code listings, as was often the case with computer magazines back when it was common for computer owners to type in much of their software.

I missed this museum when I was in Cambridge. I may have to go back.

Since air traffic can be global, it makes sense to have global air traffic control conventions. However, not every technology has to be global. If a region wants to develop a technology that is optimized for their region, they trade global access for local optimization. There are cases where this may make sense.

We don't have to globalize everything. Yes, it's wonderful that we have the potential for people around the globe to work on and benefit from a particular project, but it is not necessary for every project to work that way.

There are very solid reasons for seeing marriage as a life-long commitment between a man and a woman for the purpose of providing a stable home for the children that they conceive that has nothing to do with hating gays. This is something humans have understood for thousands of years, but only in my lifetime we seem to have forgotten.

Cancel culture is becoming universal. Violations of political correctness can cause cancellation of TV shows, loss of jobs, and now banning from video game competitions. It is interesting that these days this is primarily a tool of the left end of the political spectrum even though in the past, book burnings, etc. were seen as a conservative tactic. However, cancel responses are becoming so common that I would not be surprised if conservatives start doing it too, if they haven't already.

At least our C02 emissions would be reduced.

Unopposed progress is why we are now having concerns about the environment.

I considered using Rust for a project, but I ended up going with C# because it appeared to have better support for Oracle database access and I could easily have a nice Windows desktop UI. C# seems more mature or fleshed out, but some of that may just be due to the "simplicity" of Go.

I think you missed the point of That Hideous Strength, which is not an allegory by the way. In an allegory, you must be able to say some person or thing in the story is equal to some thing in the real world. For example, Animal Farm by George Orwell is an allegory. In it, the farm is the Soviet Union and the pigs are the Communist Party. That Hideous Strength does have a scientific institution, NICE, but it does not stand for any particular institution, or scientific institutions in general. NICE is a hypothetical example of what a scientific institution might become if it took ideas that were in operation in the 1940s to an extreme, as happened in Nazi Germany. (NICE has some similarities to Nazi Germany, but I don't think it is a symbol for it, just like Tolkien's Morder has some similarities to but is not a symbol of Nazi Germany.)

For Lewis, science is not evil, but it can be used to dehumanize, especially when people focus solely on the scientific and throw out or de-emphasize all other aspects of human existence. Anyone who cannot see some measure of dehumanization in the modern world is blind. I see huge changes just during my life. When I was a child, we knew the names of at least 20 families within a block of our house, and had been in the home or had had in our home at least half of them. Now, most people have much less knowledge or contact with their neighbors, and that isolation is greater for those who benefit the most from the fruits of modern technology.

If Lewis had lived to see the moon landing, I think he would have admitted it was an awesome achievement. I certainly think it was. It was a defining moment in my childhood (I was 6 years old). However, if you compare the pre-modern conception of the moon with how we see it today, it has been reduced from a heavenly body to a large rock in space. This reduction is symptomatic of the reduction of our conception of our own humanity from spiritual beings loved by the creator of the universe to accidental products of random, blind, impersonal, physical interactions. The modern conception of man is a product of evolution that was probably a bad turn since we seem to be damaging the planet on which we arose.

If you think Lewis was dogmatic, I'm sure you must really think Tolkien was, since he was Roman Catholic, which is by definition dogmatic. (To be a faithful Catholic, you must believe the dogmas of the Church. Anglicans, which Lewis was, have no such requirements. In fact, I don't think the Church of England has anything they call a dogma, but I could be wrong.) I don't know if Tolkien said anything against space exploration, but he did have strong views against the headlong rush of scientific progress that had no regard on its effects on humanity or the environment. I think most people today can see that his environmental concerns were well founded, even if they don't see the deeper human impacts.

These things sound like a kind of socialism to me (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism#Economics).

"Various work programs designed to establish full-employment for the German population were instituted once the Nazis seized full national power. Hitler encouraged nationally supported projects like the construction of the Autobahn highway system, the introduction of an affordable people's car (Volkswagen) and later the Nazis bolstered the economy through the business and employment generated by military rearmament. The Nazis benefited early in the regime's existence from the first post–Depression economic upswing, and this combined with their public works projects, job-procurement program and subsidised home repair program reduced unemployment by as much as 40 percent in one year. ... Upon being appointed Chancellor in 1933, Hitler promised measures to increase employment, protect the German currency, and promote recovery from the Great Depression. These included an agrarian settlement program, labor service, and a guarantee to maintain health care and pensions."

Of course, you could say that Republicans in the United States have also done some of these things, but again, that would be Socialism on the right.

Socialism requires a powerful centralized government. Powerful centralized governments have the means to great propaganda power since they control most of the media, and they usually need to use that power because the people won't always like the choices the government makes for them.

Although left and right are ambiguous terms, a generally agreed upon example of a socialistic regime on the right is Nazi Germany. Nazi is short for National Socialism. Whereas Soviet Communism was a socialist system with a goal of spreading throughout the world by a series of revolutions, National Socialism was a socialist system with a goal of spreading throughout the world via German conquest. Both aspired to world domination, but the means were different.

Your consciousness separates from the body. https://magiscenter.com/nde/

Also, I will launch into a philosophical discussion of existence from a purely materialistic point of view while ignoring the religious dimension that is almost completely universal to human experience throughout history. I can get away with that because it has become the dominant mode of thought in our materialistic age.

The problem is not government, but highly centralized government at near continental and global scales. Power needs to remain as local as possible. This Facebook move is not a solution because it just puts some global-scope power in another entity, that just happens to be an Internet company.

I assume you are joking, but your statement highlights the problem with a "moral" system rooted in maximizing shareholder value. I think free enterprise markets have many advantages, but there has to be a better grounding for ethical decisions.

I'm 56, and my first job out of college was at General Dynamics Fort Worth Division, which is now part of Lockheed Martin. I did not work on the F-22, aka Advanced Tactical Fighter, but I did work on avionics software for the A-12, aka Advanced Tactical Aircraft, which got cancelled by Dick Cheney in January 1990. I had some contact with ATF engineers because at that time (I can't speak for later), ATF and ATA both used IBM's Common Module computing hardware and the Ada '83 language. We used MicroVAX workstations for our Ada compiler as well as our CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering) and documentation software. I was not on the program when the software tools decisions were made. I do know that other programs at General Dynamics used Apollo and Sun workstations, which were Unix based. I can only assume that either someone thought the VAX environment was better, or DEC made them an offer they could not refuse. I was a Unix fan at the time and would have preferred Sun, but the VAX was not a bad system.

My first job was programming a Sony SMC-70 Z-80 based computer that ran CP/M using the BDS C compiler. (BDS stands for Brain Damaged Software. It was an integer-only version of C.) The SMC-70 was connected to a Sony Laser Videodisc player. It controlled the videodisc over an RS-232 connection and put the video out from the videodisc into an overlay circuit that allowed use to overlay computer graphics onto the video. We used this to create interactive training programs for the US Air Force.

I use MacOS at home and Windows 10 at work. I find iCloud access from Windows to be pretty awkward. Am I missing something?

I use Windows in my office and I also develop Python software to accomplish some tasks related to my job. If I really had to save money, I might consider a Raspberry Pi, but they are less reliable (SD Card versus robust SSD) and are not as fast. Also, I need Microsoft Office for my job, so Windows makes the most sense all the way around.

If you are looking solely at Python software development, a faster, more reliable machine is always helpful, but some may prefer Linux or MacOS over Windows. All that said, the Pi is a great way to break into software development at a low cost.

If you are using Windows and Mac, you might want the same browser on both.

You are probably thinking of the Circus of Nero, which was the place where St. Peter was crucified upside-down. Peter was buried in a nearby necropolis, which is now the site of St. Peter's basilica. Drawings I've seen show that the east end of Circus of Nero site intersects the southern portion of St. Peter's Square. Also, the obelisk in the center of St. Peter's Square was previously in the center of the Circus of Nero, similar to the obelisk of the Circus Maximus shown in the video. There are enough similarities between the two places that confusion is understandable.

I am looking forward to seeing the movie, but this article is strange. It seems to be grasping at straw in order to throw doubt on the "fail often, fail fast" (foff) philosophy. My take on foff is that it recognizes that the fear of failure can keep us from taking the risks needed for success. This seems orthogonal to concerns of privilege or the adverse effects of technology. I do think we in technology need to think about the adverse effects our work may produce, although I don't think the General Magic folks could have foreseen the smartphone issues we are dealing with now, no matter how hard they had tried.

That's the urban lifestyle in general, isn't it?

There are lots of ideas floating around today regarding what is a soul and what makes humans different from other animals. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century had a very clear conception of this, rooted in Aristotle, that I believe is still relevant today.

First of all, he said all living things have souls because a soul is the principle of life. By definition, it is the thing that is the difference between something that is alive and something that is not. Although we know a lot about the mechanisms of life today and how that breaks down as something dies, I think it's safe to say we still don't know exactly what makes a thing alive, and we certainly don't know how to create or restore life. If nothing else, soul is a useful label for that principle.

According to Aristotle and Aquinas, what makes humans different from other animals is not the existence of a soul, and neither is it consciousness or emotions. What makes us different is that we have a rational soul, which means we are capable of recognizing universals and dealing with abstractions, which is connected with our use of language that can express and communicate these concepts.

I recommend biologist and theologian Rev. Nicanor Austriaco, O.P. [1] for an explanation of how this developed and how the biblical idea of Adam fits in with modern evolution. I also recommend philosopher Dr. Michael Augros [2] for a very rich explanation of how we can understand that we have a rational soul, and what are its characteristics. Both of these men draw heavily on Aquinas, but they bring his ideas into modern biology and philosophical discussion.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MsJ67qtHYY 2: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0746R3TXN/

I used WATFIV in 1982.

Cool. The WATFIV (Waterloo FORTRAN IV) was what I used in my first college programming class, on a pair of Amdahl 470 (IBM 370 compatible) mainframes, but as a high school kid I had taught myself BASIC and Pascal on the Apple II. At the time, I felt like FORTRAN was a step back in time, but I have more appreciation for it now.