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mav88

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This is an entirely separate argument. My problem with Russell is that he reads the gospels and concludes that Jesus was a great moral teacher which is not one of the conclusions you can draw, no matter what you think of the reliability of the text or the events it describes.

why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant Him a very high degree of moral goodness.

No Bertie. He did not leave that option open to us and never meant to. To call him a great moral teacher is to entirely miss the point. He was either insane or lying or telling the truth.

Nakatomi Space 3 years ago

I remember reading this post around the same time as I came across the concept of psychogeography, an interesting way of looking at how the exploration of our environments and how they're made up affects our attitude and emotions. Die Hard is a great example of this, so is The Shining. The deliberate disorientation and spatial impossibility of The Overlook conveys deep unease just by being what it is.

only beautiful country where old women still gather acorns by hand, and 80 year-old men who are free to hone their lifelong craft of making tofu.

This is absolutely the atmosphere of My Neighbor Totoro.

I went to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam because I was there and it was on the bucket list. Pictures in a book or on web pages do not do justice to how vibrant the pictures are in real life. Plus, in the days before additional security was required, you could go right up to them (within reason) and check them out up close. They look like they were painted yesterday. Not everyone likes his work but I'm a fan.

From a passage of Virgil’s Aeneid, (book VII, v.128 sgg.) it is possible to understand the position of fruits and other products of the fields, on sacrificial breads that function as “tables”. This reminds us of the moment in which the Trojan heroes who had finished their meal of fruits, chose to eat the bread which they had used as containers (tables). This showed the realisation of the Virgilian Epos, where a prophecy had stated that the Trojans would find a new homeland when they “arrived on unknown beaches, finished all the food,” and their hunger made them “devour also the tables”.

Once upon a time, I did the Aeneid in the original and we came across this meaning of the word 'mensa' as a bread base which was weird because it was the very first Latin word we had all learned: table. And then immediately afterwards in the text one of the warriors makes the joke that they're so hungry they're eating their tables as well. It still blows my mind that I could understand a pun written thousands of years ago and find it amusing.

Fans of the Adventures of Tintin comics by Hergé will remember the opening scene in Tintin in Tibet. Tintin has dozed off during a game of chess with Captain Haddock in a crowded café. He suddenly yells, “CHANG!!” so loudly that everyone in the restaurant jumps!

Hah. I just reread Tintin in Tibet recently and that panel is genius. Everyone in the restaurant jumps out of their seat with the exception of Professor Calculus who is course too deaf to hear.

Oh I agree. The euphoria doesn't last. People need to get on with their lives. None of us have any personal connection to these people nor could we influence their lives even if we tried. It's TV. Switch off or change the channel.

And then there’s the audience: massive, constant, mistaking exploitation for fandom. As Truman struggles to escape—the island, the show, and the life that has been imposed on him—he commandeers a boat. The producers create a storm. He falls off the vessel, struggling in the water, gasping for breath. He could die, before their eyes. The audience at the Truman Bar is rapt. “I got two to one he doesn’t make it,” someone shouts. “Hey, I want a piece of that!” yells another. The exchange is 25 years old. It hasn’t aged a bit.

This comment completely ignores the ending where is clear that EVERYBODY watching him is happy, nay, ecstatic, that he escaped. It's part of the reason why the ending is so uplifting. It turns out that his fandom across the globe with their How Does It End? t-shirts really were rooting for him all along, just like us in the audience.

Burnout 3 years ago

Talking about it is good. Rest well and we'll see you when you're ready.

The function runs through the program by incrementing the program counter (*pc++) and dispatching what instruction it sees. It's a stack-based VM so individual instructions are pushed onto and popped from the stack depending on the operation. Is there anything specific you don't grok? Happy to help.

Fascinating insights, thank you. Is it not perhaps that text as is is perfect for programming languages but we could do a lot better in terms of displaying and presenting it?

He's dead. Poison under the thumbnail. His assassin confessed to an associate of mine. The assassin now resides in a hole in the desert. Interesting guy. No, you don't have to believe me. True though.