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Sam Kitonyi

Sam Kitonyi's Public Library

16 Aug 09

Richard Butler: George Santayana: Catholic Atheist

In his life and writings, George Santayana prefigured the dilemma of the faithful skeptic, caught between the appeal of belief and the demands of critical thought and personal integrity.

www.spiritualitytoday.org/...863843butler.html - Preview

religion philosophy history biography santayana catholicism

  • I heartily agreed with the Church about the world, yet I was ready to agree with the world about the Church; and I breathed more easily in the atmosphere of religion than in that of business, precisely because religion, like poetry, was more ideal, more freely imaginary, and in a material sense, falser.
  • Santayana was not, in a technical or scientific sense, a philosopher at all. He was a poet reflecting and commenting on life in the universe as it appeared to him.
  • 4 more annotations...
28 Jun 09

37. Lamia. Keats, John. 1884. The Poetical Works of John Keats

  • Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,        235Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile madeThe tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.
24 Feb 09

Using Mercurial - GeeklogWiki 

    • [ui]
      ssh = c:/path/to/putty/plink.exe -ssh -v -l [your username] -pw [your password]
      username = [your name] <[your email address]>

      • No quotes are used in defining the .ini paramaters
      • Path to plink.exe can not have any spaces in the actual directory names
01 Feb 09

Commodity fetishism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • Debord developed a notion of the spectacle that ran directly parallel to Marx's notion of the commodity; for Debord, the spectacle made relations among people seem like relations among images (and vice versa). The spectacle is the form taken by society once the instruments of cultural production have become wholly commoditized and exposed to circulation.
03 Jan 09

Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works: Kenneth Grahame

  • "One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and, if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man
    tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can't criticize it, because it is criticizing us. But I must give you one word of warning.
    When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on
    yourself. You may be worthy: I don't know. But it is you who are on trial."

    --A. A. Milne

Kathryn Cramer: The New Weird, p 2

  • The Matrix is half a good idea (inspired one way or another by PKD?). The irony is that its rendering is too flat. It feeds off the conceit of its audience: playing off the idea of their 'knowledge' that reality is an illusion. What the audience fails to see is that actually their 'real' condition as proposed by the film is intensified rather than alleviated or solved by watching it. (Pods in a gigantic illusion machine.) 

It inducts them into its illusory world, for the purposes of making gigantic amounts of money out of nothing - just as the people in the pods exist purely for the purposes of generating energy for the machine. 

It is a machine in which humanity is denatured; but not replaced by anything. 

An action film in which there is characterisation and a meaningful story is Crouching Tiger. I felt that there was a genuine sober sadness in it.
  • I agree about Crouching Tiger, MJP. 

Re Matrix and Greg Benford. I think he's spot on, Cheryl, about it being a gung-ho reprise of the New Testament, but equating Neo with Jesus is pitiful and disgusting and bankrupt, though the responsibility is the W. brothers' and not Benford's. A few pietas and nods to some theological names doesn't make Neo a human saviour. The entire film is a hard-bloke fantasy and the hard-bloke is the enemy of compassion. 

OK, you have warrior folk in theology like Arjuna hanging back until Krishna points out that the battlefield is that of the self and the kinsmen he's killing are his own inner demons but this isn't the story of the Matrix. Here it's a bunch of machines vs humans, there's no hint of inner conflict or awareness of the real problem, as MJP points to it, of the inner/outer world. 

Also, the enlightenment never happens, whatever they say. If it did Neo would realise that it doesn't matter whether you live inside or outside of the Matrix.
11 Dec 08

Jeremy Bentham-Quotes | Animal Rights History

  • the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
19 Nov 08

Jericho (TV series) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • Several online communities, including the official Jericho forums, launched campaigns in an effort to revive the show. Fans also sent just over 20 tons of nuts to CBS headquarters; this referred to a scene from the season one finale Why We Fight where Jake Green repeats General Anthony McAuliffe's historic phrase "Nuts!" from the Battle of Bastogne.[15] The peanuts and other proceeds from the donations have been donated to charities,[16] including the rebuilding effort in Greensburg, Kansas,[17] a real-life town that was largely destroyed by a tornado in 2007.
  • Several online communities, including the official Jericho forums, launched campaigns in an effort to revive the show. Fans also sent just over 20 tons of nuts to CBS headquarters; this referred to a scene from the season one finale Why We Fight where Jake Green repeats General Anthony McAuliffe's historic phrase "Nuts!" from the Battle of Bastogne.[15]
14 Nov 08

The End of History? - Francis Fukuyama

  • The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is
    evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic
    alternatives to Western liberalism.
  • this phenomenon extends beyond high
    politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable spread of
    consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the peasants'
    markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China,
    the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past
    year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores,
    and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.
  • 7 more annotations...
16 Sep 08

Wall Street: The day the ticking time bombs went off | Business | The Guardian

  • If this is the death of Wall Street as we know it, the tombstone will read: killed by complexity.

    The complexity lies in modern markets' love affair with derivatives - the financial contracts sold to the world as a way to reduce risk. Got too many mortgages on your balance sheet? No problem, slice them up, package them, sell them on. Worried about your trading partner defaulting? Buy some insurance. The possibilities are almost endless.

  • If this is the death of Wall Street as we know it, the tombstone will read: killed by complexity.

    The complexity lies in modern markets' love affair with derivatives - the financial contracts sold to the world as a way to reduce risk. Got too many mortgages on your balance sheet? No problem, slice them up, package them, sell them on. Worried about your trading partner defaulting? Buy some insurance. The possibilities are almost endless.

  • 4 more annotations...

Financial time bombs that threaten mass destruction - Times Online

  • the parties to derivatives also have enormous incentives to cheat in accounting for them. Those who trade derivatives are usually paid on “earnings” calculated by mark-to-market accounting. But often there is no real market and “mark-to-model” is utilised. This substitution can bring on large-scale mischief.
  • The valuation problem is far from academic. Some huge-scale frauds have been facilitated by derivatives trades. In the energy and electric utility sectors, for example, companies used derivatives and trading activities to report great “earnings” – until the roof fell in when they actually tried to convert the derivatives-related receivables on their balance sheets into cash.
  • 3 more annotations...

Sixteen Small Stones: IE JavaScript Bugs: Overriding Internet Explorer's document.getElementById() To Be W3C Compliant Exposes An Additional Bug In getAttributes()

  • There is a well known bug in the Internet Explorer implementation of the getElementById() method, which, contrary to the W3C standard, allows the method to return an element if the element's id attribute _or_ its _name_ attribute matches the id the programmer is looking for. The standard example of why this is problem is as follows:



    <html>
    	<head>
    		<title>Demonstrate IE7 document.getElementById() bug</title> 
    		<meta name="description" content="matching on this is a bug"/>
    	</head>
    	<body>
    		<textarea name="description" id="description">This is information about the bug</textarea>
    		<script type="text/javascript">
    			alert(document.getElementById('description').value);
    		</script>
    	</body>
    </html>




    If you view the example in Firefox, you will get a JavaScript alert message containing the content of the textarea. However, if you view it in IE7 the JavaScript alert will contain the word "undefined".

10 Aug 08

The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code - Joel on Software

    • The Joel Test



      1. Do you use source control?
      2. Can you make a build in one step?
      3. Do you make daily builds?
      4. Do you have a bug database?
      5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
      6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
      7. Do you have a spec?
      8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
      9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
      10. Do you have testers?
      11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
      12. Do you do hallway usability testing?
04 Aug 08

Pumping lemma for regular languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • For example the language L = {anbn : n ≥ 0} over the alphabet Σ = {a, b} can be shown to be non-regular as follows. Let w, x, y, z, p, and i be as stated in the pumping lemma above. Let w in L be given by w = apbp. By the pumping lemma, there must be some decomposition w = xyz with |xy| ≤ p, |y| ≥ 1 such that xyiz in L for every i ≥ 0. If we let |xy|=p and |z|=p, then xy is the first half of w, or all p of the as. Because |y| ≥ 1, it consists of a non-zero number of as, and xy2z has more as than bs and is therefore not in L (note that any value of i ≠ 1 will give us a contradiction). We have reached a contradiction because, in this case, the pumped word does not belong to the language L. Therefore, the assumption that L is regular must be incorrect. Hence L is not regular.


    The proof that the language of balanced (i.e., properly nested) parentheses is not regular follows the same idea. Given p, there is a string of balanced parentheses that begins with more than p left parentheses, so that y will consist entirely of left parentheses. By repeating y, we can produce a string that does not contain the same number of left and right parentheses, and so they cannot be balanced.

Controlling and minimizing lock time-outs

    • To prevent unnecessary time-outs, lock the minimum amount of code possible. Whenever possible, lock only code that sets or reads variables, not business logic or database queries. One useful technique is to do the following:



      1. Perform a time-consuming activity outside of a cflock tag
      2. Assign the result to a Variables scope variable
      3. Assign the Variables scope variable's value to a shared scope variable inside a cflock block.


      For example, if you want to assign the results of a query to a session variable, first get the query results using a Variables scope variable in unlocked code. Then, assign the query results to a session variable inside a locked code section. The following code shows this technique: 


      <cfquery name="Variables.qUser" datasource="#request.dsn#">
         SELECT FirstName, LastName
         FROM Users
         WHERE UserID = #request.UserID#
      </cfquery>
      <cflock scope="Session" timeout="5" type="exclusive">
         <cfset Session.qUser = Variables.qUser>
      </cflock>
03 Aug 08

Pauline Kael | Trash, Art, and the Movies

  • Alienation is the most
    common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar
    rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser’s delight in small favors, we long to
    be surprised out of it—not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind
    of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without
    self-disgust.
  • . The romance of movies is not just in those
    stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting
    others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course,
    and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than
    about what you love in bad movies.
  • 33 more annotations...

An Interesting Little Problem • OJ’s rants

  • There is an array A[N] of N integers. You have to compose an array Output[N] such that Output[i] will be equal to the product of all the elements of A[] except A[i].


    Example:

        INPUT:[4, 3, 2, 1, 2]

        OUTPUT:[12, 16, 24, 48, 24]


    Note: Solve it without the division operator and in O(n).

  • -- by lf
    scanm f z xs = zipWith f (scanl f z xs) (tail $ scanr f z xs)
    main = print $ scanm (*) 1 [4,3,2,1,2]
  • 3 more annotations...
01 Aug 08

Basics - Mirrors Used to Explore How the Brain Interprets Information - NYTimes.com

  • Rebecca Lawson, who collaborates with Dr. Bertamini at the University of Liverpool, suggests imagining that you had an identical twin, that you were both six feet tall and that you were standing in a room with a movable partition between you. How tall would a window in the partition have to be to allow you to see all six feet of your twin?
  • If the partition is close to your twin, the upper and lower light points have just begun to converge, so the opening has to be nearly six feet tall to allow you a full-body view. If the partition is close to you, the light has nearly finished converging, so the window can be quite small. If the partition were halfway between you and your twin, the aperture would have to be — three feet tall.

Why Abundance Should Breed Optimism: A Second Reply to Nick Carr | Britannica Blog

  • Carr calls me an optimist, which is true. Here’s why: Every past technology I know of that has increased the number of producers and consumers of written material, from the alphabet and papyrus to the telegraph and the paperback, has been good for humanity.
  • Nietzsche’s writing style changed with the typewriter, but was this change for the better or the worse? There is a melodramatic reference to Nietzsche being “under the sway of the machine,” but surely he was just as much under the sway of pen and ink before?
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