(no subject)
Right,
ericfmyers is up next on my Five Questions Thingie:
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1. How come Godzilla never attacked Chicago?
Well, motherfucker is an amphibian, right? So from a purely practical view, that's a lot of goddamned land to walk across.
Let's say he comes ashore at Colonial Beach, Virginia--which seems to be his best landing area, if he wants to avoid D.C.--and heads straight to Chi-town. That's 766 miles across PURE land.
What if the G wants to get some water in there. Comes ashore at Bridgeport, Connecticut and heads to Buffalo, New York and does some swimming/walking until Detroit. Then it's two hundred miles worth of land from Detroit to Chicago.
Not worth Godzilla's time.
2. If the "birds and the bees" where supposed to teach us about sex, where does the penis and vagina come in at?
The penis comes in at the vagina.
3. Did John Wilkes Booth act alone or was he part of a larger conspiracy?
Conspiracy. It's clear that he had assistance to prepare for the ordeal and the subsequent escape, however bungled it may have been by his ill-conceived jump. Still, they should have left the doctor out of it. What was he gonna do, NOT help Booth and get shot?
Anyway, he had help, but probably no more than most assassins have. I mean, John Hinkley, Jr, nearly managed to off Reagan by himself and he was batshit and lived in modern times. Booth had help but didn't need much.
4. If the human race could organize and time our jumps just right, could we avoid all asteroid collisions in the future?
Yes, by tearing the Earth out of its orbit and plunging it either towards the sun or into deep space. But, hey, at least those options would both buy us a little more time, right?
5. Our senses feed the brain second hand information. Does this mean that life is just another part of our imagination?
I consider our brains to be the most unreliable narrators possible, so I'm firm believer that a lot of what we see could be either wrong or adapted by each of our brains to process as it sees fit.
Ignoring the usual "How do you know that what you call brown is the same as what I call brown" and "If I'm the only one who knows he's thinking, how do I know that you're not all figments of my imagination?" arguments, there's still a lot to be said for what's "real."
Even on the most basic level, the moment I see anything, my brain responds to it in a particularly way, like "light is bright" or "snow is cold" or "Harold and Maude is sad." The assignation of states-of-being or emotional responses to each item we see--not to mention how often those responses change--means that our brain cannot be trusted to feed us a steady stream of trustworthy imformation. Indeed, the same thing may register differently from one day to the next.
As such, yeah. I think everything we see is, at bare minimum, tweaked by what we feel and what we think we know and what we don't know, which is close enough to imagination.
Now shush, I'm disbelieving you.
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Got questions? Ask
ericfmyers is up next on my Five Questions Thingie:
---------
1. How come Godzilla never attacked Chicago?
Well, motherfucker is an amphibian, right? So from a purely practical view, that's a lot of goddamned land to walk across.
Let's say he comes ashore at Colonial Beach, Virginia--which seems to be his best landing area, if he wants to avoid D.C.--and heads straight to Chi-town. That's 766 miles across PURE land.
What if the G wants to get some water in there. Comes ashore at Bridgeport, Connecticut and heads to Buffalo, New York and does some swimming/walking until Detroit. Then it's two hundred miles worth of land from Detroit to Chicago.
Not worth Godzilla's time.
2. If the "birds and the bees" where supposed to teach us about sex, where does the penis and vagina come in at?
The penis comes in at the vagina.
3. Did John Wilkes Booth act alone or was he part of a larger conspiracy?
Conspiracy. It's clear that he had assistance to prepare for the ordeal and the subsequent escape, however bungled it may have been by his ill-conceived jump. Still, they should have left the doctor out of it. What was he gonna do, NOT help Booth and get shot?
Anyway, he had help, but probably no more than most assassins have. I mean, John Hinkley, Jr, nearly managed to off Reagan by himself and he was batshit and lived in modern times. Booth had help but didn't need much.
4. If the human race could organize and time our jumps just right, could we avoid all asteroid collisions in the future?
Yes, by tearing the Earth out of its orbit and plunging it either towards the sun or into deep space. But, hey, at least those options would both buy us a little more time, right?
5. Our senses feed the brain second hand information. Does this mean that life is just another part of our imagination?
I consider our brains to be the most unreliable narrators possible, so I'm firm believer that a lot of what we see could be either wrong or adapted by each of our brains to process as it sees fit.
Ignoring the usual "How do you know that what you call brown is the same as what I call brown" and "If I'm the only one who knows he's thinking, how do I know that you're not all figments of my imagination?" arguments, there's still a lot to be said for what's "real."
Even on the most basic level, the moment I see anything, my brain responds to it in a particularly way, like "light is bright" or "snow is cold" or "Harold and Maude is sad." The assignation of states-of-being or emotional responses to each item we see--not to mention how often those responses change--means that our brain cannot be trusted to feed us a steady stream of trustworthy imformation. Indeed, the same thing may register differently from one day to the next.
As such, yeah. I think everything we see is, at bare minimum, tweaked by what we feel and what we think we know and what we don't know, which is close enough to imagination.
Now shush, I'm disbelieving you.
---------
Got questions? Ask