I have a moderately embarrassing fondness for 80's rock ballads.

The video for TEotH, however, has always been an amusing heap of "randomly stacking symbolism together to look deep" in my eyes, even when I was a teenager. Thus the linked mockery amuses me way more than it should....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj-x9ygQEGA

The USA elected a black president. Shortly thereafter, swine flew.

Another issue in which the Muppets were ahead of their time:

There are many romantic subplots on the Muppet show, many involving the (human) guest stars. If you put the mack on a Muppet, I think you qualify as a furry.

Suddenly, all of Sam the American Eagle's freaked mundanity makes so much more sense.

In the comics world, there's a concept of "Women in Refrigerators," referring to the inevitable grisly fate of female superhero love interests. (Google it if you want more.)

In any case, I was *not* expecting to see it in my season 3 Muppet Show CD, but, well, take a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ-EJNz2AoE

(Consider yourself warned)


So, a lot of the recent pirate activity has involved rocket propelled grenades. "Arr"PGs.

Recently, a friend of mine got called a "MILF." (This was heard through the grapevine, not to her face.)

No, not the "Moro Islamic Liberation Front (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moro_Islamic_Liberation_Front), the other MILF.

I was expecting something of a negative reaction - after all, the term is crude and arguably demeaning/dehumanizing. Instead, my friend reported being faintly amused. She seemed vaguely surprised, and for that matter so was I.

My hind brain has apparently been chewing on this, since a few minutes ago it spit out the result "This label is a deliberately crude way of saying someone is attractive. Crudeness, however, has a way of fading in impact over time, while people usually like to be attractive. In a few decades, this will be semantically equivalent to a wolf whistle, which used to be considered rude and crude, and now is used as an informal way of indicating attraction. My grandkids will probably consider it a perfectly cromulent term."

Good thinking hind brain, you may be on to something there.

Both kinds, really

http://www.jinxville.com/joshnimp/comic.htm

So assume you have a computer, that on internet chat (or some variant), could pass for human so well that even expert AI scientists could not distinguish it from a co-operative human.

Amongst other things, this means it can discuss philosophy and religion, learn, get jokes, show emotion, and demonstrate a basic understanding of how the real world works.

Is it a person? Does it have rights?

Not exactly a new question, of course, but none of these are. It's just a hard one.

It seems to me that the answer to this is an unambiguous "yes" in a realistic world (Batman's political and Social power are much less than Wayne's potential in these areas), and an unambiguous "no" in the comic world (lacking Batman, everyone in Gotham dies biannually).

The interesting bit is the assumptions of the comic book world that make it so. They are so ingrained that the question about Wayne's influence never seems to come up. Sure he's a well intentioned philanthropist, but despite his vast intelligence, mind boggling wealth and amazing inventive abilities, Wayne is an ineffective socialite.

There are lots of interesting implications here, especially about the audience.

The carrying capacity of the Earth, with suitable management and
technology, is probably very high, but suitable management is hard, and
the tech is expensive. On the other hand, solving the population
problem via population reduction is just possibly worse. Imagine if
every sucessive generation is half the size of the previous - what are
the economic implications? On a more personal level, I grew up amid
population bomb hysteria, in rural Saskatchewan, so I have an odd idea
of ideal population density, yet I am looking at getting the sharp end
of the political stick from retiring boomers.

In other words, this is interesting to me because I am getting paradigm
shift whiplash from it.

This is interesting to me because it rubs my nose in the moral ... I guess "space" is a good word, between millenia. The Romans, by modern standards, were corrupt, slave holding, child-molesting, expansionist fascist[5] bastards. (I could go on, but you get the point.) They routinely did stuff I have no trouble as labeling "evil."

Yet a lot of the better ideas of modern Western society descend from the Romans, and a good chunk of the rest from the Greeks, who weren't much better, morally, if they were not in fact worse.

More, I don't think they were bad people. Times were different, and some things that are evil are amazingly hard to resist. I suspect people two thousand years from now will consider a lot of the things I do in my day to day life beyond the pale, and I further suspect I would be surprised at which parts of my life were so labeled.

The Romans are also a prime example of the importance of "order" in society. Peace and good order are a powerful good in themselves, and the Romans were good at that ... for a while.

... I don't know ... this is one of the trickier ones simply because good and evil are so freaking slippery to begin with. I'm not willing to say slavery or child molestation can ever be "not evil," but I'm not willing to label Roman civilization as evil either, despite it's institutionalization of these things.

[5] (Rim shot.)

This is interesting to me because, well, the ecomomy affects me, and because there's a lot of interesting stuff happening around it. Oddly, I find myself thinking that free markets are vulnerable to what I think of as the "Keynes" problem.

The Keynes problem: Keynes recommended that governments should save in good times and spend in bad, thus evening out the fortunes and misfortunes of the nation. Problem is, people tend to lack the discipline to to the first, so Keynesians tend to spend too much money. Worse, the money spent often becomes entitlements, so there's a ratcheting burden of government spending.

Free markets are most efficient and productive with minimal regulations. Just keep enough up to prevent fraud, and they will be volatile[4], but productive. However, people lack discipline to keep the anti-fraud regs up when things are good, and so free markets tend to be plagued by scandal, which usually results in hasty and ill-conceived regs that don't necessarily help.

Let's not even get into regulatory capture.

[4] "Volatile" in economics is a code word for "some people will lose their shirts, and possibly their lives." Economics is often disturbingly cold-blooded.

This is interesting to me because it is an example of faith taken to extremely odd extremes. The doctrine that the blessed host is literally (and most emphatically *not* metaphorically or symbolically) the body of Jesus is a core doctrine of many branches of Christianity.

I was raised RC. I once got into trouble for asking the priest if communion was symbolic cannibalism. The priest insisted that it was not symbolic at all, transubstantiation made it *real* cannibalism. (Also theophagy, due to other axioms of the faith.)

Millions [2] of people accept this. More than that, they hold it close to their hearts as the core miracle of their faith. There was a time when it was acceptable, even imperative, to kill heretics for not believing it. Queen Elizabeth I got very good at avoiding this specific question because it was in the middle of the Catholic/Protestant scrum in England that repeatedly threatened her life at the time.

These days, transubstantiation is not a doctrinal point that raises much passion in people's hearts. It was an issue of the Protestant/Catholic schism, and that became an unfashionable thing to fight about after a century or so of inconclusive horrific bloodshed. But whenever I see a human conflict that defies reason, I remember transubstantiation. If people killed each other over this, any other reason [3] is perfectly plausible.

Faith. Wow.

[2] Technically, about 1.1 billion do, but I'm betting a majority of them don't think about doctrine much.

[3] Note that there are more obscure and opaque deadly religious conflicts.

So a friend's blog asked for questions the other month, and I sent him random questions that amused me, rather than stuff about his personal life. I guess I just don't get blogging in some visceral way: the sort of personal stuff that a lot of folk blog about I generally keep ... personal. If I want to tell a friend about my personal life, I'll tell them face to face, or spread scurrilous rumors about myself, as my caveman forebears [1] did.

Anyway, in the spirit of fairness, I'm gonna discuss these questions, and why they are, at least to me, interesting.

I'm sure both of the people who follow my blog will find it intensely interesting. (Hi Dear!)

[1] In my family, this means Grandpa.