zimboes

TRX
September 21, 2011
303:
[quote]Those of you in the USA could tell me if the myth perpetrated by pop- culture that middle class parents often gift their sixteen year old offsprings A FREAKING CAR? I can't believe such mass lunacy - giving a perfectly healthy young'un, completely capable of hiding a bike or walking or taking a bus,[/quote]

What bus?

I got my license and car at 16, in 1976. My siblings all got theirs at 16 as well. We were an ordinary middle-class family.

We'd all had bicycles, but they were only useful for visiting someone in the local neighborhood. Bicycling to any other place - any store, the library, school etc. - involved using the highway for 5 miles or so until you got near the center of town. While technically legal, wasn't a very smart thing to do if you wanted to stay alive, or at least unhospitalized.

About 7 miles away from where we lived was a gas station that also doubled as the bus depot. As I remember, Greyhound made a morning-to-afternoon round trip to the capitol on Tuesdays, and Continental made a round trip on Thursdays.

While growing up we lived in towns in five different states in the USA; most of them were similar to here.

Note we actually lived *in* a town. Many of our friends lived in rural areas where things were a lot further away.

According to the latest US census, more people live in the cities than in the country now. But that still leaves at least 150 million of us where there has never been any other infrastructure than the automobile, nor is there ever likely to be any due to the lower population density. I frequently travel through places that have no cellular coverage, and occasionally through places that have no radio that the car can pick up. Until five years ago - bear in mind I live in one of the larger cities in my state - the only internet access in my area was dialup, and I never saw a throughput of over 14,400 bps.

From my point of view, these are small prices to pay for not having to live in the kind of urban hives some people seem to expect we should want to live in.

TRX
October 11, 2013
18:
@root:
You can quizz the zimboe about their reading matter and they can answer factual questions about the text, but they can't tell you why Elinor and Marianne are feeling any given emotion, because they lack the theory of mind - the cognitive toolkit - necessary to infer interior states and ascribe them to other entities.
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I can do, on a descending scale of intensity, irritation, anger, wry amusement, and ROFL. Mostly I just cruise along in neutral; days or weeks may go by before I notice a "emotion event."

To hear some people talk, they live their lives in a perpetual emotional storm and ridiculously complex interpersonal entanglements. Their point of consciousness rattles around their head like a marble in a blender.

Some people act like it. Maybe it's true. I can accept that there are people who can perceive and reliably identify "green" and "red", but I can't see those, either. I see people torn up over some emotional reaction to things that I perceive as utterly trivial. It may be real to them, but I can't devise a test for it. Are their emotions real, or just in their imagination? Does it even matter? Apparently it does to them; I've known two who decided suicide was the way out.

Flip it the other way; all these people letting their emotions hang out; are they real, or are they just behavioral constructs they use among their social groups?

TRX
October 12, 2013
69:
@46:
I believe that libraries are basically much better (for society, rather than for publishers or authors) than private individuals buying copies of many books in many cases.
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That would certainly change the writing and publishing businesses; talk about market shrinkage...

The problem with libraries is they're limited to what the librarians choose, not what you or I choose. I worked in the library when I was in high school; one day we were told to remove all the novels by Samuel Clemens and a couple of other authors, since it had been decided that the authors were "racist." And thus the school was cleansed of the badthink of "Huckleberry Finn" and "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court."

My local public library caters to a much different demographic(1) than mine. I don't have any use for cookbooks, travel books, NYT bestseller fiction, or romance novels, which comprise virtually all of its selection.

It has maybe 100 science fiction novels; I have over 3000. It has maybe 10 engineering books, I have about 300. I also have more general science and history books than the library.

I check the shelves once every few years to see if there's anything new, but I mostly use it for the Inter-Library Loan service.

(1) library demographic: children, either parked there while their parents shop, or using the encyclopedias for schoolwork. 90%+ of adults are the damp women with their hair up. Adult males are almost always "senior citizens." Everyone else together fits into the low single digits.

TRX
October 12, 2013
70:
@56:
I always thought "role model" meant somwone who got to do fun things that others wanted to do; whether discovering new things about the universe or racing motorcycles or whatever.
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I think the word for that is "celebrity."

@56:
The concept that "What would (role model) do?" is actually a strategy rather than a joke is bizarre.

Especially because (role model) is by definition smarter/richer/better resourced/more famous than the person asking the question. ---
A role model is someone who exhibits proper behavior, for current/local values of "proper."

Suppose someone bumps into you on the sidewalk.

If your role model is Miss Manners, you might say "Excuse me" or "my goodness", step to one side, and continue.

If your role model is Nigel the tommy-boy, you'd signal your pack and beat the aggressor into a bloody pulp.

TRX
October 12, 2013
71:
@60:
Can you now trivially pass the Turing test? The answer is still no,
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A substantial number of humans can't pass the Turing Test either, at least by Turing's original definition. I get business mail that looks like a cross between a stream-of-consciousness brain dump and the output from the old "Eliza" program. Asking for a clarification just sends you down the rabbit hole.

Even worse, look at transcripts of spoken conversations sometime. Try "The White House Transcripts", which contains conversations in the Oval office during Watergate. Even given that tone and inflection probably carried a lot of the original information, it sounds more like a bunch of people talking to their phones instead of each other.