Reg the Fronkey Farmer

Reg,

To celebrate Hamit Coskun winning his appeal for free expression, I will burn an old USB drive that holds 100 copies each of the Quran and Bible to celebrate.

Don’t burn anything to celebrate freedom of expression, especially if you’re concerned about Carbon footprints. Instead. read Al Quran and The Holy Bible out loud on a street corner…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Many U.S. students will very likely start going to Chinese Universities soon.

Might be a good idea for all American schools to start teaching Chinese.

When I was young (I’m 79 now, so a long time ago), the choices were French, German, and Spanish. French was recommended as the language of diplomacy, German for kids…[Read more]

Many U.S. students will very likely start going to Chinese Universities soon.

Simon says someone says it who didn’t say it but lemme display it.

………….

The problem in colleges isn’t indoctrination. It’s a lack of ideological diversity

The right seems to be on a mission to expose universities as centers of leftist indoctrination. Too often we professors waved away the charge. We called these assertions naive at bes…[Read more]

@Simon, – The coordinated flight of birds or the efficiency of an ant colony are examples of true emergence. It is complex order arising from simple, local rules. Each agent behaves independently, yet their interactions create a collective intelligence without any central plan or higher consciousness.

It’s legitimate emergence because the…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
The problem in colleges isn’t indoctrination. It’s a lack of ideological diversity.

The right seems to be on a mission to expose universities as centers of leftist indoctrination. Too often we professors waved away the charge. We called these assertions naive at best, Trumpy at worst. Students, we rightly noted, are…

[Read more]

Thanks for the comment Jake. I was also thinking that old age is wasted on the not-so-young, to twist G.B. Shaw’s line for when people mistake religiosity for wisdom. Needing a comfort blanket against existential fear doesn’t make you wise; it just means you’re still afraid.

Real wisdom comes from remembering what it felt like to be young — cur…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
It sounds plausible, even scientific, but it doesn’t predict, measure, or model anything.

But surely the behaviour of flocks of birds – organisation – emerges from the behaviour of single birds, following a few simple behavioural rules, and the organised behaviour of ant colonies emerge from ants, which have a l…[Read more]

Re the second long read post above; The word “emergence,” when used uncritically, inherits the same intellectual vice as theism. It offers comfort where explanation is difficult. It sounds plausible, even scientific, but it doesn’t predict, measure, or model anything. It stops being a descriptor and starts being a substitute for under…[Read more]

Reg that was poetic without being poetry.

Got me thinking though how theism and de facto theism (communism, nazism, palestinianism…pick your poison) cause their victims to see through the lens of a kaleidoscope. No opportunity for existentialism and its personal nature. The universe is instead viewed through a fixed kaleidoscope. It is…[Read more]

Thanks Reg!

Have a great week!!

I was jogging in the park recently. I passed an older man on a bench for the 3rd time in a row (I do 6 laps – 5k). He quipped….’you are in 4th place’. No, I replied, “I am winning because I am still in the race”. On the next pass he was still grinning. It got me thinking……

Atheism, when treated not as mere disbelief but…[Read more]

was414x736 = viewed on an iphone.

PopeBeanie wrote:
I’ve been experimenting with youtube shorts, which is why you’ll see the “was#x#” underneath each of my video shorts, in case I need to change the dimensions to fit on different screens.

I looked underneath the video and didn’t see that code. Am I missing something?

The original video won’t give me an embed code, so I’m trying the code it offered me to use for sharing. Let’s see if it works any better:
https://youtube.com/shorts/lVpaaTCAetw?si=tvUc_p27IUIlBFys

Well, not for me.

I’m running ChromeOS, but since links I put up (normal ones, not shorts or verticals) tend to work okay, the issue seems…[Read more]

@Jakelafort – the ‘stopped clock’  cartoon in the current edition of the satirical Private Eye would agree with you 🙂

Some big No Trump protests today.

Crowd got something correct even if it is by accident. Kind of like Trump….gets something right occasionally by accident. Or when his self interest coincides with the right move.

I am not great at website dev. but I did a little digging.

To include a thumbnail, you have to use the embed code instead of the standard YouTube link, since only the HTML embed triggers the thumbnail preview. Unfortunately, WordPress restricts HTML for non-moderators, so only moderators can post embeds that actually render the video.

For…[Read more]

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Following this post are several posts discussing the confusion with posting shorts successfully, that will include a copy of the thumbnail. I finally discovered that, after one pastes the short’s URL, all you have to do is change the word “shorts” in the URL to the letter “v”!

I also put this tip in the TIPS group, so if youtube…[Read more]

@Reg – I can view the link, but there’s no “youtube” image on the AZ page.