Solipsism Gradient

Posted by Rafael Fischmann:
I’ve got The Crow as well, but I don’t think it was very accurate. That’s ok, it’s just a quiz in the internet, people vary a lot and it’s just impossible to make something like this that show up certain things about everyone. Nice tip, anyway.

Posted by Web Dawn – Rebirth of the:
Web Dawn – Rebirth of the Social Marketplace wrote

I have been talking recently about making blog comments more like conversations, more like discussion forums. Well, today I met someone who has taken the reverse approach by using forum software to publish a blog. Rainer Brockerhoff started with a…

Posted by Web Dawn – Rebirth of the:
Web Dawn – Rebirth of the Social Marketplace wrote

I have been talking recently about making blog comments more like conversations, more like discussion forums. Well, today I met someone who has taken the reverse approach by using forum software to publish a blog. Rainer Brockerhoff started with a…

Yes, that’s the actual name of this page, where you can find cat clothes – or rather “transformation kits” for your cat. Among other hilarities, there’s marvelous Engrish like this:

1. You need to dress a cat. And you will say to a cat together with a family. “It has changed just for a moment”. [ “it being very dear” or ] You will pass pleasant one time.

2. If a family and a cat become fortunate, you will take a commemorative photo! Therefore, please photo your cat lovelily with much trouble.

3. If it finishes taking a photograph, you will make it remove clothes from a cat immediately. You will say then, without forgetting the language of gratitude to a cat. “– be flooded — a way — good — having done one’s best — ! — “

I’d quote more and post one of the photos, but at the bottom they say:

Unapproved reproduction of a report, a photograph, voice data, and image data is forbidden found in this special feature article.

Many thanks to Karen Marcelo for posting this at Boing Boing.

Der Schockwellenreiter led me to the Duckomenta page, which contains among others this somewhat ominous remake of Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People:



Even more ominous, I suppose, is that I probably should warn readers in fundamentalist countries that the preceding link may not be “work-safe”. Actually, I suppose all links in this post may not be…

Etan Kerner writes:

According to a film my wife saw in her philosophy class, Bertrand Russell received a letter from a woman who proclaimed herself a solipsist.

She went on to say that she was surprised that there weren’t more solipsists.

Besides myself (although I consider myself only a part-time solipsist ), noted SF writer Robert A. Heinlein probably was one – at least he wrote several solipsist stories and even introduced the philosophy of “pantheistic multiperson solipsism” in his magnum opus, The Number of the Beast.

Possibly as a satire of this, Iain M. Banks features a band of solipsists in his Against A Dark Background. Here’s a slightly abridged dialogue between the book’s heroine, Lady Sharrow and the solipsist leader, Elson Roa:

“But if you’re God… why do you need the others?”

…he shrugged. “My apparences? They are the sign that my will is not yet strong enough to support my existence without extraneous help.”

…”What about the others? Do they – the apparences – call themselves God, too?”

“Apparently… um, apart from one, who’s an atheist.”

“Ah-ha”, she said, nodding slowly. “And what does this person call himself?”

“‘Me.'”

“… uh-huh.”

For some time I’ve been trying to recall favorite sites I used to visit in my pre-Mac OS X days; not easy since my old bookmark file went to that great bit bucket in the sky nearly two years ago.

Anyway, an errant neuron just coughed up one of those URLs: Outrageous On-Line Uncle Al: New Weapons of Mass Consumption. Alan “Uncle Al” Schwartz, an industrial chemist by trade, publishes vitriolic essays on varied subjects – he’s at #345 at this writing, and a subscription to “the collected wisdom of Uncle Al” is available. He’s a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon, with the additional infuriating habit of often being right. As they say here in Brazil, when he dies he’ll be buried in two coffins (the second one’s for his tongue). He also was the original inspiration for my disclaimer. (I hasten to disclaim that Uncle Al’s political and philosophical orientation may not be congruent, parallel or even orthogonal to my own.)

Uncle Al’s site’s HTML contains this line:

<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Luxuriate in surreal mentality, indulge in wicked and delicious excess. We have come for a piece of all mankind!”>

Come to think of it, this probably was one of the first weblogs, in intent if not in format. His list of search engines and power user links has been invaluable to me in the past.

Herewith some excerpts to give you an idea:

One is Officially informed that the Food and Drug Administration exists for benevolent safeguarding of US citizenry…

I purchased a 148 milliliter bottle of McIlhenny tabasco sauce amply free of anything your body needs – hence its voluptuous palatability. Printed on the box flap was this warning:

“The Food and Drug Administration’s suggested measure is 1 teaspoon.”

The folks who won’t let you smoke marijuana to prevent blindness from glaucoma, or ameliorate 24 hours of projectile vomiting from cancer chemotherapy, or lessen screaming in Burn Wards recommend you use tabasco sauce by the teaspoon. Shake a drop (1/50 of a teaspoon) on your tongue. What is wrong with this picture?

…As your FDA minimum recommended dose of a full teaspoon of Tabasco explodes within your face, foments massive sensory erosion down all forty feet of your gastrointestinal tact, and finally exists with a searing scream… look at the bright side. Fruits like grapes and peppers contain resveratrol, especially in their skins. Said 3,4′,5-trihydroxy-trans-styrene is the apparent anti-carcinogenic principle of red wine. Those who indulge in tabasco’s searing siren song may be prolonging their life and improving every second of its enhanced duration.

If that is not a valid reason for the FDA to ban the stuff, I cannot imagine what is.

Finally, he also apparently wrote a paper about “Parity pair tellurium test masses will violate the Equivalence Principle in Eötvös experiments” which contains such assertions as

Unitary groups U(1), SU(2) and SU(3) parameter spaces are isomorphic to (in one-to-one correspondence with) the circle, the sphere (a surface) and the “three sphere” (not a ball) respectively. Fields with non-abelian symmetries divide into “electric” (curl-free; e.g., gravitational) and “magnetic” (divergence-free; e.g., inertial) fields as do abelian electromagnetism and the linearized form of Einstein’s field equations for weak gravity and slow matter.

And that’s in the preliminary arguments, where I think I understood all words, if not the entire sentence…

This online test stuff can get addictive, apparently. I wasn’t really going to post about this one, but the result was surprisingly accurate:

Update: here’s my wife’s result, also very accurate: