A hierarchy of epistemic operation levels and levels of abstraction in cartoon interpretation

// upside down because Vi is not radical enough.
(

ObjectiGeeks + UsersOfObjectivism: Enjoy.

Others: Don't give up. you are starting to get it.

)

0.0. Look! A funny cartoon!

0.1. A funny cartoon about a man killing his wife.

0.2. Domestic violence is not funny.

0.3. This funny cartoon conveys a socially important message about the pervasiveness of domestic violence.


1.0. Look! A funny cartoon about President Obama killing Hilary Clinton.

1.1. This cartoon of President Zero killing Her Hilariousness is funny, but the guy needs to learn how to draw reflections and faces.

1.2. Civility, and civilization, are so absent in America, that it is acceptable to publish the delusional claim that the President is plotting to murder a member of His cabinet.

1.3. We So own this judge that we can get him to accept a cartoon as Probable Cause.


2.0. Stupid cartoonist thinks that we don't get that it's about President Obama killing Hilary Clinton.

2.1. Audit him. When someone draws our President making a Killing, he must think that we cannot find his money and audit it. We can.

2.2. The only thing that this cartoon does not tell us about the cartoonist is whether or not he was born.

2.3. We know what we know. You don't.


3.0. When drawing the Phallos is taboo, cartoonists will draw phallic symbols.

3.1. The taboo interpretation is always funnier.

3.2. The subtext is always more taboo.

3.3. Skip to subtext. Is funny.


4.0. I can't believe someone actually drew this cartoon.

4.1. I cannot fathom how this cartoon was not flagged as a violation of the Terms of Service.

4.2. The Terms of Service guy must have read this cartoon as a socially important message about the pervasiveness of domestic violence.

4.3. In Communism, the Censor is called The People's Censor. In Fascism, the Terms of Service are Regulated only by the most minimal Regulations, which are necessary to make sure that the Terms of Service call the expression on the Service "Free Expression," and that the censor is called "the Terms of Service guy."

4.4. Totalitarianism begins, when there is a censor.  Totalitarianism begins to end, when the Terms of Service guy starts pretending that he doesn't get the joke.

How "Axiomatic" became "Foundational:" The true (and only marginally fictionalized) history of the philosophy of physics.

It the beginning, there were academic Philosophers. And later, there were also Academic philosophers. Immanuel Kant said, "One can't know." Auguste Comte said "True is what the majority thinks."  And the Physicist saw that it was Bad.

And the Economist heard what the Academic philosophers had said, and arbitrarily decided that it was Good. The Economist had the most brilliant Contribution To Economics Ever.  He had most amazingly solved the problem that tested his Faith that Blind Risk is, in the long term, profitable. He made investments in blind risks, to provide the definitive falsification of the faithless claim, that blind risk causes loss of wealth. But his faithful investments in blind risks could also lead to short-term cash flow Bottlenecks, as his Faith allowed. And his Faith was tested when a short-term cash-flow problem made it impossible to pay the servant.

And the Economist passed the Test of his Faith cleverly. He moved his family from a comfortable house to a tiny apartment in a tenement. He did not need to pay the servant, because his wife thought that she did not have any choices. And it followed, from not having any choices, that she chose to do the work, that servant was once paid to do, when the servant left.  And the economist arbitrarily decided that his cash flow problem was totally solved.

This Proved the total Faith, of the totally great Economist, to the totally great Economist. It also provided him with funds, from the sale of their previously comfortable house, for more investments in blind risk, to further falsify the ridiculous claim  that investing in blind risk can cause loss of wealth. Thus he had proven his Faith that he was the most clever and important Economist in the Universe.  And Intuitively he also had Faith that Philosophy takes precedence over mere knowledge, and he knew it from Faith. For he already Knew, having read Kant and Comte, that knowledge is impossible.

But the truth of his Faith was hidden from others.  For his wife said, my husband has a gambling problem.

And the Economist said, I shalt show them! I have the Faith of Comte, that true is what the majority thinks. Therefore I shalt call "One can't know" an Axiom. And on this Axiom I shalt forever Prove, that Blind Risk is in the long term, however many millenia I shall arbitrarily call "long term," totally Profitable.

And the Mathematician saw. And the Mathematician intuitively had Faith.  For the Mathematician said: Thus the Economist hath solved All problems.  For if I wished to prove whatever arbitrary crawling Theorem that I wished to prove, the Faith of the Economist hath proven it for me. For with the Faith of the Economist I can Prove anything, by calling whatever arbitrary String that I need, to Prove whatever I arbitrarily wish to Prove, an Axiom.

Another [for the word "Atheist" is not Holy enough to be written in Scripture] said, I don't believe it.

And the Physicist saw that it was Bad.

Another said, Axiom is stolen, and thus Physics is destroyed.

And the Physicist said, they only steal words. I still have the concepts. I'll write "Foundational Principle" instead of "Axiom."  And my words will say, "there is nothing to destroy here."

And the thieves said, Physics is destroyed, let's go destroy something else.

And the Engineer said of Physics, I Can Use!

And the Technology is Good. Very Good.

I just got home. The root canal was so great that I'm blogging about it.

At 67, I expect an occasional tooth canal, but I did not expect that today's root canal was to be this wonderful.

Yes, root canal. Back when I was born, several hours of the greatest pain that one could experience and still be alive afterward.  The proverbial root canal. The previous one for me, about a year ago, lasted an hour and a half, with a moment of pain now and then.

Today's root canal was done by the same dentist. I chose him because he is a Geek like me, but I didn't even expect This Geek.

He must have wanted me to enjoy a surprise; he didn't even show me his new computer-controlled high-power laser root canal gizmo. He just did the root canal with it. A second and a half later I saw and smelled a small puff of smoke. And that was it. The technician put the temporary cover back in, and said it's done, see the receptionist on the way out because to put in a crown.

Pain happens when some neurotransmitter gets out of a damaged cell and hits a pain nerve. Laser, no pain. The whole cell is vaporized to fast that the pain stuff doesn't have time to get out of the cell before it's smoke.

No pain. no risk of pain. not even a possibility of pain.

This is what I experienced: the whole Suffering thing is nearly down to a maybe-once-in-a-lifetime unprevented accident. And we Humans are working on "unprevented."

If it were not for Christians enforcing their "Suffering is a precious gift of God" faith on me, I'd expect Suffering to be a once-a-year-or-so thing before I die.

2500 years ago Suffering was obviously, visibly co-extensive with life. It was so universal that it was one of the first universal facts ever induced. "Life Is Suffering" was a Noble Truth.

And now it is gone in a little puff of smoke.

Hero: UI Psychologist Working On Dropbox Icons

If you experience joy when you identify a Hero - and what user of Objectivism doesn't? - today's information systems are a mine of Joy.

The problem (or, if you like Herakles, the Labor:)

The out-of-buffers bug. Born of some deadline-or-other in the original source of Bell Labs Unix, by 1999 it infected every operating system on Earth. Then it was discovered by criminals, who used it to spread denial-of-service attacks. By 2003 the good guys removed it from every serious OS, including Windows XP. But the out-of-buffers bug survived, silently, in Windows Phone. And then... Windows Phone was injected into Windows 7 to make Windows 8. Applications on Widows 8 were being screamlessly castrated by the out-of-buffers bug as it thrived again. Users of Dropbox thought that their worthy-of-Dropbox files were being immortalized in Dropbox, when they weren't, and would not be until Windows 8 was started anew.

The Hero's Victory, PWN:

Make It Visible. The Hero made the connection visible as a circle in the lower-right quadrant of the Dropbox icon. The circle spun like a hero's shield when the connection was busy with work. When it was idle because everything had been (at least for the moment) won, it displayed the V checkmark of victory. And when the out-of-buffers bug struck it down, it fell, like a hero waiting for the user to invoke Panakeia to bring him again to his feet, and to victory.

Our descendants will envy us, for living in an age when it was possible to be a giant.

Hero, PWN.

H/T Homer.

An lp for cygwin

Windows NT (i.e. all MS Windows distros in recent years) has a System V Unix kernel, badly mangled but still POSIX. Cygwin, from cygwin.com, is a free Linux-style superstructure that one can download and run on top of Windows NT, creating a complete Unix environment as solid as any Linux or Apple distro. With one thing missing: lp.
 
lp (originally short for line printer) is the original Unix print sink. Many commands in the Unix/Cygwin toolkit are meant to send plain text, or postscript, into lp:
 
$ man -t anycommand | lp
 
$ ls -l | pr | lp
 
and so on. And one can copy any text on the screen, and print it by pasting it into the standard input of  lp. Cygwin is incomplete without lp. (Cygwin has a rudimentary lpr command that can send postscript to some postscript printers, but it's not the same thing.) And so...
 
Cygwin does have enscript. Enscript, if properly configured, can accept text or postscript as input, and send its output to a (configurable) postscript spooling command. And a perfect spooling command for Windows NT is available: 'gsprint -', installed as part of ghostview for windows NT. Gsprint, in turn, uses ghostscript (gswin32c.exe) to convert the postscript that gsprint accepts into its standard input, into the appropriate printer format, and spools it to the default Windows NT printer. Note that gsprint uses the regular Windows NT ghostscript, not the cygwin version. The steps are:
 
(1) Download and install
 
http://downloads.ghostscript.com/public/gs907w32.exe
 
(2) Add the ghostscript bin and lib directories (';C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.07\bin;C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.07\lib' on Windows XP) to the Path variable of your Windows NT distro. Reboot.
 
(3) Download and install
 
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/download/gsv50w32.exe
 
(4) Add the gsview directory (';C:\Program Files\Ghostgum\gsview' on Windows XP) to the Path variable of your Windows NT distro. Reboot.
 
(5) Place
 
GeneratePageSize: false
Spooler: gsprint
 
in ~/.enscriptrc
 
and
 
export ENSCRIPT='-MLetter'
export GROFF_TYPESETTER='latin1'
alias lp='/usr/bin/enscript -zZlf Courier-Bold@10.9/10.2 --printer-options=-'
 
(or a different font if you prefer) in ~/.bashrc. Reboot. Enjoy lp in cygwin!