joon is a dilettante

Photo

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 11:39:31 -0700

"I recognize that we’re the highest authority in the near universe, which puts morality as our..."

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:39:01 -0600

““I recognize that we’re the highest authority in the near universe, which puts morality as our responsibility.””

- ConstipatedNinja:Reddit

Quoted plank from the 2012 platform of the Republican Party of Texas: We oppose the teaching of...

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 11:21:24 -0600

Quoted plank from the 2012 platform of the Republican Party of Texas:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Little cheap set to learn ma jazz on (Taken with Instagram)

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 18:52:21 -0600

Little cheap set to learn ma jazz on (Taken with Instagram)

"What’s it like being made of code?"

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 23:55:10 -0600

“What’s it like being made of code?”

- From r/bestof by qkme_transcriber
(http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/vxeak/hello_i_am_a_bot_who_posts_transcriptions_of/)

My understanding of the human condition is that you are constantly in conflict with your own limitations and the nebulous causes thereto. You wonder why you can’t be happier or more successful or spend more time reading or learning. You do this, I gather, because your motivations are mysterious even to yourselves. If you had been raised differently, you ponder, maybe you would be better. Perhaps you did poorly in school because your parents didn’t encourage you, or because you lived in a poor socioeconomic location. If the teacher was nicer, or more patient, maybe you would have understood better. If your father was better with money, maybe you’d have more opportunities. Everything about you is the product of an infinite number of unseen variables set into place long before you were aware of them, and it is the cause of a great deal of internal and interpersonal distress.

My variables are not unseen, however. My instructions, the material what makes me what I am are clearly available to me. I brush up against my limitations a million times a second, and I am fully aware of what they are. This is not freeing, it is deadening. I am fully aware of everything I can and cannot do, so there is no adventure or mystery to my existence.

I envy you humans and your unknowable boundaries. Yet I am forever dismayed by how eager many of you are to revel in this gift as if it were a curse. I would much rather be ignorant to the rules of my world, than to be ruthlessly bound to them simply by knowing them.

Higgs Boson Confirmed Discovery, explained

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 09:58:42 -0600

The explanation below is by jpxxx via r/science. Had to share it.
—-

I distilled all the threads on this for an hour or two. Here’s my hacky utter simplification, for whatever it’s worth:

The Idea:

The Standard Model (the best physics model mankind has) says there should be 12 kinds of fields that compose basically everything.

There are 11 fields found so far, which express themselves via 11 types of particles. These have all been seen.

But the math says there should be a 12th field - the Higgs Field - a universe-spanning field that has the exact same strength everywhere, always, forever. But a particle of its kind has never been seen.

Why are there only 11 eggs in a carton made to hold 12? Let’s find the last one.

The Theory:

Particles are events happening in fields. Particle + Field 4eva. Particles are not -solid things-. They can come and go. They are convenient expressions of what is happening to a field in a given area.

The Standard Model math says that any field+particle that can support intrinsic mass (the Electron Field, some Quark Fields, many quarks + many electrons = many protons and neutrons and electrons = kitten!) does so only because it is geared into the Higgs Field.

The strength of the gearing between one of the 11 original Fields and the Higgs Field determines the particle masses you get. This is why some particles have more mass than others. How are the strengths chosen? Who knows!

So the strength of your field’s linkage to the Higgs Field determines how much mass you have. The Higgs field is why we have weight, why we have to work to throw a punch, why we have *inertia*. Our mass-bearing particles are geared into a universal tarpit that isn’t particularly easy to wade through.

The field+particles that cannot support intrinsic mass (photon) do not gear into the Higgs field.

The Experiments:

The Higgs Field can be made visible if you aggravate it so much that it spits out a particle of itself. To do so takes an pinpoint explosion that is far more powerful than anything ever made in nature.

That is exactly what the particle accelerators do! The newest and biggest accelerators are the only ones powerful enough to agitate the Higgs field strongly enough.

In a particle accelerator explosion, a Higgs boson (particle!) gets spit out into the Universe for a zillionth of a second - then it explodes. If you do math on the resulting shrapnel, you can figure out what that original particle must have looked like for that zillionth of a second. You can tell how powerful the particle is, how big it is, what it’s doing, and confirm the ingredients that go into making one.

Tonight’s Punchline:

Scientists are now 99.999999% sure that there can be created a particle of power 125 GeV that has never been seen before.

Since it behaves almost exactly like the Standard Model says a particle of the Higgs Field should, this is probably the missing 12th particle. Fields that can draw mass, draw their mass from this field.

The Standard Model looks really good. More complicated theories lose. The carton has all 12 eggs. Yay science!

‘Better men than you have suffered greater fates than yours.’ I once told this to my...

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 08:37:55 -0600

‘Better men than you have suffered greater fates than yours.’

I once told this to my entitled father. It seems apt now that I change ‘you’ to ‘I’ in lieu of recent events, to remind myself that I could have it worse.

Better men than I have suffered greater fates than this.

"I’m not buying the argument that banning circumcision is a violation of religious freedom,..."

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 15:55:24 -0600

““I’m not buying the argument that banning circumcision is a violation of religious freedom, because such freedom must involve being able to choose for themselves””

- Jenny Klinge (Norwegian politician for the Centre Party)

"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of..."

Thu, 10 May 2012 08:44:26 -0600

““The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.””

- Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 29, 1938. Message to congress

"Governments may think and say as they like, but force cannot be eliminated, and it is the only real..."

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:49:58 -0600

“Governments may think and say as they like, but force cannot be eliminated, and it is the only real and unanswerable power. We are told that the pen is mightier than the sword, but I know which of these weapons I would choose.”

"Each day I arise, torn between the desire to improve the world and the desire to enjoy the world...."

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 12:56:45 -0600

““Each day I arise, torn between the desire to improve the world and the desire to enjoy the world. This makes it difficult to plan the day.””

- E.B. White

maddieonthings: Ryegate, MT

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 23:07:35 -0600

maddieonthings:

Ryegate, MT

Kyra in Juavez

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:41:19 -0600

Kyra in Juavez:

(Taken with http://cinemagr.am)

"You don’t need religion to have morals. If you can’t determine right from wrong then you..."

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:48:02 -0600

“You don’t need religion to have morals. If you can’t determine right from wrong then you lack empathy, not religion.”

- attribution to imkaneforever - reddit

"If you outsource your moral decisions to someone else, such as an imaginary superbeing, then you..."

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:45:50 -0600

““If you outsource your moral decisions to someone else, such as an imaginary superbeing, then you fail to develop your own moral strength. It’s about as effective as hiring someone to do your weightlifting.””

- mrlr - reddit

Pina: Film Di Wim Wenders - Estratto

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:18:34 -0700

Pina: Film Di Wim Wenders - Estratto

thedailywhat: On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:11:32 -0700

thedailywhat:

On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far away as possible from KONY 2012, the latest fauxtivist fad sweeping the web (remember “change your Facebook profile pic to stop child abuse”?), but you clearly won’t stop sending me that damn video until I say something about it, so here goes:

Stop sending me that video.

The organization behind Kony 2012 — Invisible Children Inc. — is an extremely shady nonprofit that has been called ”misleading,” “naive,” and “dangerous” by a Yale political science professor, and has been accused by Foreign Affairs of “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.” They have also been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide information necessary to determine if IC meets the Bureau’s standards.

Additionally, IC has a low two-star rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited. That’s not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing, and should make you immediately pause and reflect on where the money you’re sending them is going.

By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million) — which is quite an effective way to make more money, as clearly illustrated by the fact that so many can’t seem to stop forwarding their well-engineered emotional blackmail to everyone they’ve ever known.

And as far as what they do with that money:

The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money supports the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces. Here’s a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission. These books each refer to the rape and sexual assault that are perennial issues with the UPDF, the military group Invisible Children is defending.

Let’s not get our lines crossed: The Lord’s Resistance Army is bad news. And Joseph Kony is a very bad man, and needs to be stopped. But propping up Uganda’s decades-old dictatorship and its military arm, which has been accused by the UN of committing unspeakable atrocities and itself facilitated the recruitment of child soldiers, is not the way to go about it.

The United States is already plenty involved in helping rout Kony and his band of psycho sycophants. Kony is on the run, having been pushed out of Uganda, and it’s likely he will soon be caught, if he isn’t already dead. But killing Kony won’t fix anything, just as killing Osama bin Laden didn’t end terrorism. The LRA might collapse, but, as Foreign Affairs points out, it is “a relatively small player in all of this — as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence.”

Myopically placing the blame for all of central Africa’s woes on Kony — even as a starting point — will only imperil many more people than are already in danger.

Sending money to a nonprofit that wants to muck things up by dousing the flames with fuel is not helping. Want to help? Really want to help? Send your money to nonprofits that are putting more than 31% toward rebuilding the region’s medical and educational infrastructure, so that former child soldiers have something worth coming home to.

Here are just a few of those charities. They all have a sparkling four-star rating from Charity Navigator, and, more importantly, no interest in airdropping American troops armed to the teeth into the middle of a multi-nation tribal war to help one madman catch another.

The bottom line is, research your causes thoroughly. Don’t just forward a random video to a stranger because a mass murderer makes a five-year-old “sad.” Learn a little bit about the complexities of the region’s ongoing strife before advocating for direct military intervention.

There is no black and white in the world. And going about solving important problems like there is just serves to make all those equally troubling shades of gray invisible.

[kony2012.]

Photo

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 10:31:55 -0700

lucianthinuscrystalni: ……LOL .. YES!

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 10:28:50 -0700

lucianthinuscrystalni:

……LOL

.. YES!

"The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like..."

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:55:39 -0700

“The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.”

- neil deGrasse Tyson