A difference between Men and Women
A man will tell you how much something cost. A women will tell you how much she saved.
Wherein I start to understand the Cosmological Argument
Ed Feser’s post here So you think you understand the cosmological argument? drove home, finally, through my thick skull of what the cosmological argument really is. I had, erroneously, thought it boiled down to “Everything has a cause; so the universe has a cause; so God exists.” Hoo boy, was I off in the weeds on that!
Ed: “…[N]one of the best-known proponents of the cosmological argument in the history of philosophy and theology ever gave this stupid argument. Not Plato, not Aristotle, not al-Ghazali, not Maimonides, not Aquinas, not Duns Scotus, not Leibniz, not Samuel Clarke, not Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, not Mortimer Adler, not William Lane Craig, not Richard Swinburne. And not anyone else either, as far as I know.”
Yeah, I felt stupid. But a good stupid, like scales falling from my eyes and bam! The landscape opened up and a great expanse stretched forth. Yes, dur, my mistake, but it was easy to fix.
So what is the cosmological argument at the core?
Ed again: “What defenders of the cosmological argument do say is that what comes into existence has a cause, or that what is contingent has a cause. These claims are as different from ‘Everything has a cause’ as ‘Whatever has color is extended’ is different from ‘Everything is extended.’ Defenders of the cosmological argument also provide arguments for these claims about causation. You may disagree with the claims – though if you think they are falsified by modern physics, you are sorely mistaken – but you cannot justly accuse the defender of the cosmological argument either of saying something manifestly silly or of contradicting himself when he goes on to say that God is uncaused.”
Once that has been established, the next thing to do is examine how if there is a First Cause, this cause isn’t an orderly first thing in a series of things, but rather something that exists that is not contingent, and because of that, doesn’t need to have an explanation because, in principle, it has to be uncaused. Aquinas put forth that the First Cause not only is before all contingent things, at the fundamental base of all contingent existence, it is also what keeps them in existence from moment to moment.
Of course, this doesn’t prove there is a God, it just provides a first stone in a philosophic framework to discuss God. It’s a 2300 year old history, and one I had brushed up against, but clearly had not understood.
Xubuntu
I installed the Xubuntu packages to give that a try.
I really like it! The interface is simpler, lacks a bunch gee-whizery hooha (which has its place, just not what I want right now) still builds of the awesome Debian apt-get combined with Ubuntu’s more aggressive release schedule.
Highly recommended for those not liking Ubiquity or Gnome 3 and want to try something a little less cluttered.
Ubuntu Unity
I can’t use it. I don’t a whole lot Linuxing these days, but Unity is just not usable.
The menu bar is confusing, the taskbar is almost usable but not quite, standard metaphors on how things normally work aren’t there, navigating programs has become a chore.
Ugh. I’m going to try XCFE or something, Gnome 3 has made different errors in different areas.
What the heck has happened to Linux desktop UIs? I’m almost ready to try something like Stumpwm!
Regency Romance Ball
I took my wife to the Regency Romance Ball for Valentine’s Day. It was incredible! I rented a frock coat with tails, bought a simple top hat, my wife made her own Empire style dress, and we danced, hung out with friends, had dinner, and danced even more.
Let me back up a bit to explain how we ended up in period costume dancing reels and waltzes.
We’ve been homeschooling our eldest daughter since the end of last year. Aside from our own efforts, we’re part of an awesome co-op group. One of the mothers teaches a Shakespeare class, and she is friends with the Old Glory Vintage Dance Company; they do dances, like reels and quadrilles, from eras like the Regency. As such, they were working together with the Jane Austen Society of North America Utah region to hold a Regency era inspired ball. Our friend told us about the ball, gushed about how fun it was and the dances involved. We quickly signed up. She was kind enough to throw a pre-ball ball for those of us going to the ball, and teach us the dances, so we weren’t totally lost on the night of the ball.
The Old Glory Vintage Dancers instructors taught the ball attendants about 12 dances over the course of the evening. Although my wife and I didn’t dance all of them, we still remembered most of the steps from the pre-ball.
There was a large turn out to the event, the dance floor was filled, and nearly everyone came in period piece clothing of some sort; a few outside the Regency time frame had put together historically accurate clothing from such diverse eras as the Boer War, the Napoleonic Wars’ Russian Infantry, a Colonial era couple, and a American Indian War soldier. Part re-enactment, part love of a bygone era, everyone there added to the enjoyable atmosphere of the evening.
A number of our friends from the co-op were able to attend, it was really nice to spend time with them outside of gravitational pull of the co-op and kids.
A Mr. Knightly was announcing couples as they came in, his voice boomed, he literally didn’t need a microphone to be heard! He also helped with a couple of the events, such as favorite costume, announcing dinner, etc.
My favorite dances are the Windmill quadrille, the Hole in the Wall country dance, Sir Roger de Coverley reel, the Duke of Kent’s Waltz, the Spanish Waltz, and few more whose names I cannot recall. I thoroughly enjoy these style of dances to the modern shaking about. They are more elegant and refined, and the more energetic of the dances, such as de Coverley, still maintain a courtliness about them. Plus, if you aren’t smiling and having a good time at least halfway through the dance, you’re doing it wrong!
The music they played that night usually started out a decent tempo, but I swear the tempo increased over the course of the song until at the end we were throwing ourselves around and flinging the ladies around with vigor.
We’ll be attending next year’s ball, and the Old Glory Vintage Dancers have a number of other balls planned this year; our intention is to attend as many of those as possible throughout the year, whatever the era!
I’m thinking I’m going to need my own frock coat 
The Real Android Blues
Overall I like my Android Nexus Phone. It’s slim, decent battery life, solid construction, nice screen, snappy etc, etc.
But what I don’t like is the Google Music player. I really miss my iPod Touch’s player. Sit back whilst I elucidate my dissatisfaction with a list!
1. Start Google Music. Choose a playlist, any playlist. Make sure you’ve turned on the shuffle function. Listen to a song or two. Hit stop, and do something else with your phone for awhile. I like Cut The Rope. Now, and since I haven’t timed this I’m not sure how long this takes I can’t say if it happens after x number of hours or what, but go back to the music player and hit play. At the end of the song, the player stops. It doesn’t shuffle onto the next song, it just sits there, mute. I have to manually kick off the next song and then all is well. Until I stop listening, then the cycle begins a new, rise and repeat. I’ve tried to play music just off the internal memory storage instead of the Google Music cloud to see if that was the problem. It wasn’t. My anger stirs every time this happens. Oh, sure, the cloud is storing songs, the store is letting you buy songs, but shuffling consistently? Nah, too hard!
2. No lock screen controls. Dunno if this is to avoid incurring the ire of Apple’s legal department or what, but iOS rocks this while the Google Music player doesn’t even try. iOS is figuratively running laps, backward, around the Android, while Android fumbling around on the track, trying to convince me that making another online music story is super important and could I come back later, please? Hands full, major labels need some PR time, k, thanks, bye. Upmteen trillion in ads isn’t quite enough, the Google clearly needs a slice of the music pie. Heck, even Winamp made some sort of half hearted effort to include a locked screen. All that seems to do, however, is let me see the title of song, pause, and unlocked the device twice. Then crash.
3. iTunes is a music and app manager. I like it. I can listen to music, switch to a podcast, and iTunes remembers where I am in which, and picks right up where I left off. A sync with the iPod keeps it up to date, tracks play counts, positions, etc. I haven’t seen anything out there that does all that and syncs with the Android easily. I’d love to be proven wrong.
4. Highspeed scrubbing playback. Google Music doesn’t have it at all. Enough said. Ok, I’ll say more, I use the faster playback during podcasts. I miss being able to do that on the Android.
Google Music plays your mp3′s just fine, in a average sort of way, and it hasn’t crashed on me recently (unlike Winamp for Android) so it works, but it lacks features and the polish that I took for granted in the iOS music player.
One could say that the player doesn’t revolve around me and my tastes. Such a concept is foreign to me, just look a few posts down to see why. Like it or not, modern MP3 players on phones will be measured against the iOS player, failure to match features will continue to result in sneering jackanapes, like myself, to hurl criticism against such improprieties and assaults on common decency.
And yes, I did use a Cowboy Bebop reference.
WAT
I’m just posting this for the lulz. The geeky, Ruby and Javascript programming lulz.
Minecraft
On whim I bought a copy of Minecraft for Christmas. For those that don’t know, it’s a sandbox game, simple interface, a wide assortment of activities, a bit of a challenge thrown in through monsters, and no narrative except what you create on your own.
It’s a simple framework, but it has been completely engaging for myself and my kids. All three of them have two worlds going on with no sign of them slowing down tinkering around in their sandboxes.
They have two types of the game worlds; one survival mode world where there are monsters if you want them but you need to mine for your raw materials to build what you want while managing existing inventory (that is, stuff wears out and breaks over time, you need to manage raw material supplies and the finished goods, like pickaxes and shovels to get to the raw material), and one world in creative mode, all the game’s resources are at your disposal allowing you to build whatever you want.
As for me, I’m playing my own version of “Mysterious Island” (the book) meets “Robinson Crusoe” (again, the book) meets “Night of the Living Dead” (the movie title).
The monsters are a great touch to an already solid gaming system. In the beginning, you have your zombies, skeleton archers, and spiders, but the star of the monster show is the dreaded Creeper. The thing is an oblong shaped green thing with four small feet-blocks, it’s sole purpose is to get as close as it can to the player then explode in fit of pique, damaging or destroying anything nearby. I’ve died a number of times by a Creeper! It really sucks to see one of the little buggers in your carefully constructed home base area, one wrong move and you’re picking up the pieces and trying to put it all back the way you had it. Wait, was this gate over to the right more? Doesn’t matter, you get to remodel
Because the monsters spawn at night in any low light area, being on the surface is more dangerous than delving into the earth. And since all the good stuff needs to be mined anyways, I’ve spent more time underground than not. Of course, monsters spawn underground, there’s less room to avoid a Creeper, and it’s easy to hit a lava flow and ruin your day real quick, but a cautious approach is effective. Moreso than being chased by a bunch of Creepers, dodging zombies and getting hit by arrows from the skeletons on the surface!
The developer has made enough money to hire more programmers, and they have been adding new features and bug fixes with sufficient frequency. Well worth the price, highly recommended for anyone wanting to play in an open sandbox and create their own narrative. And for the even more adventurous, one can create mods to change the gameplay, or create new textures to change the way things look.
“The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, ‘If you would learn to be
subservient to the king, you would not have to live on lentils.’
Said Diogenes, ‘Learn to live on lentils, and you will not have to be subservient to the king.’ ” – from “The Song of the Bird” by Anthony de Mello
I’m sure you wanted to know
For grins I took an online narcissist test, I scored a 23, which frankly surprised me.
“Your Total: 23
Between 12 and 15 is average.
Celebrities often score closer to 18.
Narcissists score over 20.”
The breakdown:
Narcissistic Trait
Authority: 6.00
Self-Sufficiency: 6.00
Superiority: 4.00
Exhibitionism: 2.00
Exploitativeness: 2.00
Vanity: 2.00
Entitlement: 1.0
So, even though I’m hardly vain, I don’t preen, nor do I act entitled, however I’m self confident and understand authority, I’m a narcissist.
Fine, but does this mean I’m also famous? Because I’ll start twittering my future locations so I can sign autographs!
But let’s dig a little deeper by looking the symptoms.
* Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
Nonsense, my superiority has been objectively confirmed numerous times throughout my career and even in my younger days with testing at school.
* Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
I have no idea how this fits in, I’m cognizant that since I am mortal, there are limits that I will never be able to surpass, so why fantasize about them being unlimited? Besides, I’m too busy making things happen.
* Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
Water seeks it’s own level.
* Requires excessive admiration
Define ‘excessive’. But no.
* Has a very strong sense of entitlement, e.g., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
Ha! I get the respect I earn.
* Is exploitative of others, e.g., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
Nonsense. Now go wash my car. And change the oil, I’m busy.
* Lacks empathy, e.g., is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
Mostly because your tiny, insignificant life bores me. I do wonder how they determine this, I try not to be offensive or rude, but neither am I changing my life to suit someone’s mood.
* Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
“Envy”? Why would I be envious of others? Their lives are theirs, earned or no, and best of luck to them. Admiration of someone else’s successes or achievements isn’t envy.
* Regularly shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes
Yes, well, that’s on the money. But I don’t think that is enough to peg me as a narcissist.
So there it is in a nutshell, I’ve got a personality disorder I didn’t even realize I had! And now I know what areas I need to improve, I really need to learn how to exploit people and show off more. I bet with dedication and work, I can raise my school by at least another 4 points.
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