Lessons by Flowercast
May 22, 2008
Physicalism and the Walking Dead
May 19, 2008
This post is another question and answer post. Phil the Physicalist writes in with a question about the being of zombies:
"Dear Justin,
My name is Phil, and I am studying physicalism in college right now.
Physicalism dictates that everything is physical and in a very real sense the fact that the brain is the "Sum of its parts." What Vonnegut aptly referred to as "a dog’s lunch."
Recently I have been reading a lot of material about the impossibility of zombies from the physicalist’s standpoint.
Physicalism contradicts zombiism. A zombie, which is physically the replica of a normal human, is very different from its original self mentally.
How would you resolved these contradictions?
Thank you,
Phil"
Phil, thanks for writing and thanks for the very good question.
Physicalism, in the zombie argument, is weighing the physical traits of a different kind of zombie. The argument you mention is an attempt to contradict Descartes’ "automata."
Descartes postulated, based on questions of the state of mind of animals, that a world full of human looking creatures - but without the minds to go with the bodies and actions - couldn’t exist.
Physicalism calls into question the possibility of these "automatas." Physicalism is contradicted by the possibility that creatures exactly like humans, physically, could be different from humans in behavior. That is to say the physical imitation dictates that all aspects of the creature would be an imitation.
In other words, it’s impossible to create an exact copy of you without including the mind and behavior that goes with it.
What physicalism is not arguing against is the existence of the undead. And, I think, when you consider a lack of biological circulation, you will agree that the undead zombie is not an exact replica of his living self.
So, don’t worry, Phil, when the undead horde rise from their graves and start eating the flesh of your fellow philosophers you will be able to rest assured in your knowledge that the universe, as you know it, isn’t being called into question.
Video Commenting on the Flowercast
May 14, 2008
I’ve just discovered that the service I use for my commenting system, Disqus now has video commenting. And, I just couldn’t stop myself from giving it a shot.
Disqus is a third party commenting system. It’s downside is that your comments are stored on a third party server - but the upside is that anyone that is registered with disqus is registered on your blog. It also allows you to respond to comments from your email, and to follow your comment history, as well as others’, across disqus supported blogs.
The video commenting service that Disqus has teamed up with is Seesmic. Seesmic is a stand alone video service for video conversations that just recently went completely public. All you need is an account and a webcam.
I think video commenting is a tough sell, but I like the idea of it.
You can still leave text comments, and I certainly don’t mind those, but if you feel like showing me your mug and telling me what you think in person go ahead and click on that “Record Video Comment” button.
Dana’s iPhone + Toilet Incident
May 11, 2008
Dana’s iPhone had a run in with the toilet last week and I decided to do surgery rather than give up on it. When she called and told me, I told her to turn it off immediately, rushed to the theatre (Where the incident had taken place), and immediately disassembled the phone to let it dry out.
Three days later, I reassembled it, after a bit of customization, and other than a little scratched metal, it seems to be working perfectly.
Here are the pictures:
The Newly Disassembled phone, still a little damp on the inside:
And the final product with the forest green trim:
By the way - it was clean water in the toilet…
Twine
May 9, 2008
I feel like I’m coming in way too early with a review of Twine, but I wanted to give a beginner’s perspective on the service. And since I’ve been using it for three weeks, it’s high time I gave my “beginner’s perspective.”
A lot of the reason I’ve waited so long has to do with the fact that Twine is a service that is rooted in experience: therefore, the longer you use it the better it gets. And, I wanted to be fair with my review.
Twine trumpets itself as one of the first “semantic” web applications. Semantic, when you’re talking about web software, has a lot behind it right now. It’s being heralded as the underlying technology of web 3.0.
“Web 3.0? What the heck is that? Who cares what version of the web application world we’re in?”
I completely agree; but, you should know that Web Semantics is the newest internet software philosophy.
Semantic software is all about making the software understand the language. In other words, if you tell a search engine to look for hillary clinton, instead of searching for the two words “hillary” and “clinton,” a semantic search engine would search for references to the person Hillary Clinton.
The idea is to make the software smarter and, therefore, easier to use.
Twine sits on top of web semantics, and although it isn’t perfect the whispers of a better internet can be heard when using it.
Here’s what Twine does:
- Provides a javascript bookmark for collecting links - The bookmark can be hit on any page and a link is created in your personal twine.
- Auto fills titles, tags, and descriptions - This is the real power of Twine, it takes all the manual labor out of the user’s hands and does the grunt work itself.
- Provides a repository for collecting links and notes - A trip to Twine gives you access to all of your content.
- Allows sharing of links and notes with other users - You can join other “twines” in order to share content with other users. The twines divide content into categories. So, for example, I joined a “zombie” twine where I can search existing content and add to the content with my own links and information directly related to zombies.
- Makes all of your content searchable - This is one of the big promises of the semantic web: having searches that give you only the information you’re looking for. After a few hiccups (see the problems below) the search seems to work as advertised.
Throw in the fact that it also analyzes your content and cross compares it to others in order to provide you with more content that is relevant to your interests, and it sounds like a pretty great service.
And, it is. I’ve begun using it more and more. Usually, when I have to install a bookmark in order to use a service, I quickly forget about it - but, twine is different. The reason I can bring myself to use the twine “bookmarklet” is that it is so easy to use. It fills in all of the content for me! It’s a lazy web-surfers paradise.
With all of that said, there are a couple of down sides to Twine.
- It’s hard to understand - This is, by far, Twine’s biggest problem. Even having a good idea about what the semantic web dream is, I had trouble discerning the purpose and usefulness of Twine. It took a week and a half of me forcing myself to use it before I started to derive benefit from it.
- Problems with search - The first week I used Twine, the search didn’t work for me at all. I don’t know what changed, but when search finally started working for me it made up for the problems. It’s now nearly flawless.
Twine is in extremely-private-beta right now, it’s what they’re calling a “true beta,” so it takes a little time to get an invitation, but if you get the opportunity to try it out in its early stages you should.
All in all, I’m very excited about the final product. If it works this well in beta I can’t wait to see what it’ll be capable of in final release.
Related Posts:
Why I Migrated over to Twine
Snapshots in your Face
May 9, 2008
Snapshots is a pop up ad service.
No, wait, that doesn’t do it justice. It’s the most annoying pop up ad service in existence. It presents itself as a relevant semantic web application when, in reality, it’s just annoying.
You can see what they do by rolling over any of the links at Techcrunch and you can see their website at http://www.snap.com.
MySpace, I hate you
May 7, 2008
I had two friends with birthdays this week and MySpace was kind enough to let me know. MySpace went out of its way to send me an email, letting me know about my friends’ birthdays.
The email itself was very nice looking and well-formatted and told me, very clearly about the birthdays. The one thing it left out, of course, was the only thing that in any way mattered: the names of the friends who were having birthdays. Instead of names MySpace was kind enough to let me know that if I visited MySpace I could find out which of my friends were having birthdays.
It was just a reminder of how much I hate MySpace.
From the crappy obscene ads to the crappy user pages that crash my browser and assault my senses. From its auto-play music to the fact that MySpace mobile is completely unusable, I hate MySpace.
I thought that being owned by Rupert Murdoch (the owner of Fox News [a disturbingly conservative news network]) would put enough money in the coffers to truly fix the problems that made MySpace stink so much, but it didn’t change a thing.
At this point MySpace is bloated and falling apart at the seams, and I hate it. I hate the fact that I have to maintain an account because I have so many friends that only use MySpace.
Do me a favor, if you read this, do us all a favor. Put in a vote for decency on the web, a vote for clean easy to use websites that aren’t so obvious about treating its users like eyeballs for their ad network; and at least sign up for, and try out a different social media site.
If you need help finding good ones, take a look at my home page, you’ll find a list of the ones I use and a link to my profiles. I know it’s a pain to recreate your profile elsewhere, but you’ll be glad of it in the end I think. And, when you’ve migrated your stuff to the new service, add me as a contact and let me know.
Learning the Hard Way
May 7, 2008
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About
Justin Flowers
Mad Scientist
Zombie Expert
Fort Worth, TX -
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