The one I've just took in particular: The Personality Defect Test You are the Haughty Intellectual. -------- You are a very rational person, emphasizing logic over emotion, and you are also rather arrogant and self-aggrandizing. You probably think of yourself as an intellectual, and you would like everyone to know it. Not only that, but you also tend to look down on others, thinking yourself better than them. You could possibly have an unhealthy obsession with yourself as well, thus causing everyone to hate you for being such an elitist twat. On top of all that, you are also introverted and gentle. This means that you are just a quiet thinker who wants fame and recognition, in all likelihood. Like so many countless pseudo-intellectuals swarming around vacuous internet forums to discuss worthless political issues, your kind is a scourge upon humanity, blathering and blathering on and on about all kinds of boring crap. If your personality could be sculpted, the resulting piece would be Rodin's "The Thinker"--although I am absolutely positive that you are not nearly as muscular or naked as that statue. Rather lacking in emotion, introspective, gentle, and arrogant, you are most certainly a Haughty Intellectual! And, most likely, you will never achieve the recognition or fame you so desire! But no worries! Ha ha! and the link to the test: http://www.okcupid.com/tests/4741219933576750506/Personality-Defect [1] -------- It says i scored more Rationality, Brutality, Extrovertion (-ism?) and Arrogance than 99% of my age and sex! woo-hoo! :D Okay - go test yourselves too. I'm starting the "The Sublime Philosophical Crap Test [2]". Now nothing with a name like that can be bad... :D ----------------------------- Edit: OK, i scored.. odd. And the test is weird. It turns out I'm a: N-A-R: a metaphysical Non-Reductionist, an epistemological Absolutist, and a moral Relativist. The descriptions for the 3 are mind-blowingly long so pasting them here is not an option. :) Some excerpts follow: -------- Metaphysics: Non-Reductionism (Idealism or Realism) ... (i seem to be Realist?!) ... Realists deny the validity of sloppy metaphysical reductions ... Realism is the most common-sensical of the metaphysical views. It doesn't see reality as a unity or as reducible to matter or mind, nor does it see reality as divided into a phenomenal world of experience and an unknowable noumenal world of things-in-themselves. Realist metaphysics emphasizes that reality is for the most part composed of the things we observe and think. ... Aristotle and Popper are famous realists. Epistemology: Absolutism (Rationalism or Pragmatism) ... As an Absolutist, you believe that objective knowledge is possible given the right approach, and you deny the claims of skeptical philosophers who insist that we can never have knowledge of ultimate reality. The two types of Absolutists recognized by my test are Rationalists and Pragmatists. ... Epistemological Pragmatists are fundamentally identified by their definition of truth. Truth is, on this view, merely a measure of a proposition's success in inquiry. This view is a strictly scientific notion of truth. A proposition can be called true if it leads to successful predictions or coheres best with the observed facts about the world. Thus, for the pragmatist, knowledge of reality is possible through scientific reasoning. ... Pragmatism borrows elements from realism and yet attempts to account for the critiques made by skeptics and relativists. It is essentially a type of philosophical opportunism--it borrows the best stances from a large number of philosophical systems and attempts to discard the problems of these systems by combining them with others. Ethics: Relativism (Subjectivism or Emotivism) ... Subjectivists see individual or collective desires as defining a situation's or object's moral worth. Thus, the subject, not the object itself, determines the value. ... In regards to the definition of "good" or "right", a Subjectivist will tend to define it as whatever a particular person or group of people desire. They do not define it merely as "happiness" or "pleasure", for instance, because sometimes we desire to do things that do not produce pleasure, and because we don't consider all pleasurable things good. Furthermore, Subjectivists recognize the validity of consequentialism in that sometimes we refer to consequences as good and bad--but they also recognize that our intentions behind an action, or the means to the end, can also determine an act's moral worth. Again, there is no one rule to determine these things. Hence the relativism of moral Subjectivism. The most well-known of the subjectivists is Nietzsche. -------- So what can I say :) It's all fun and games until some weird web-based personality test starts you thinking... :D And that concludes our broadcast day... ;) [1] http://www.okcupid.com/tests/4741219933576750506/Personality-Defect [2] http://www.okcupid.com/tests/13372526327873131397/Sublime-Philosophical-Crap

"Did you know that in 10 years the number one English speaking country in the world will be... China?" This below is an updated version of a presentation created in August 2006 and meant to start debate over education in the U.S. It's a nice collection of very interesting and hopefully - thought provoking - facts. The content is quite America-centered, of course, as the presentation was meant for internal use in a Colorado High school faculty meeting, but since then it's spread virally over the net. Nevertheless - it's very much worth watching. Continue Reading » [1] [1] http://ffox.fccf.net/blog/index.php/2007/07/14/shift-happens/#more-175

Each year on July 7th Robert A. Heinlein's birthday is celebrated on a convention in his home town of Kansas City, Missouri, and this year, on 07.07.2007 - it's his 100th birthday. I'm not the biggest Heinlein fan I know, but that's just because I know many. :) Still I believe a certain sleepless summer night of following the ethical meanderings of Mike - the solipsist archangel in the Strange land of human relations, and a certain feeling of pride and fervor that catches my throat and makes my eyes glitter wet even to this day when the memory of the Starship Troopers hit - as hard as ever - all give me the "state of mind" and "emotional conviction" that make me "humbly proud" to praise a great man. Here's a list of quotes from Heinlein: Continue Reading » [1] [1] http://ffox.fccf.net/blog/index.php/2007/07/08/heinlein-100th-birthday/#more-174

[1]I found this [2] very interesting text by Bertrand Russell through this post [3] in John Wilkins' "Evolving Thoughts" blog, over at ScienceBlogs.com [4] here's the link to it again: http://www.solstice.us/russell/agnostic.html [5] I don't see any point in reposting it like Wilkins did - the piece is set very convenient in the source page, so go read it there. And I'm not very keen to comment it either, although it's a long text, and as such has many "handles" to base an argument on. (that is - i do not totally agree with everything in it :) ) But like in the case with the Humanism definition, it's put good enough and it is interesting enough, and the extent to which I agree with it is also enough to throw it on the haystack of arguments and save me some time and effort of wording it myself. Continue Reading » [6] [1] http://ffox.fccf.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/russell1.JPG [2] http://www.solstice.us/russell/agnostic.html [3] http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2007/06/what_is_an_agnostic_by_bertran.php [4] http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2007/06/what_is_an_agnostic_by_bertran.php [5] http://www.solstice.us/russell/agnostic.html [6] http://ffox.fccf.net/blog/index.php/2007/06/10/agnosticism-defined/#more-169

"Ni hao!" It's a greeting you can virtually die for. Literally. Cory over at boing-boing has a post [1] about Chinese Gold Farmers pointing towards this curious site of a documentary on the subject www.chinesegoldfarmers.com [2] Continue Reading » [3] [1] http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/23/chinese_gold_farmers.html [2] http://www.chinesegoldfarmers.com/press.html [3] http://ffox.fccf.net/blog/index.php/2007/05/23/fight-money/#more-162

OK, the event is almost over, just a few hours till morning remain, so i guess I won't miss much if I skip them and start my review just now. Actually, I can end it right here with that - "you don't miss much if you skip it. all of it". Continue Reading » [1] [1] http://ffox.fccf.net/blog/index.php/2007/02/25/lotro-stress-test-event/#more-123

Today's news is that Second Life is opening its source code. Or at least the client's. Here's a quote from the Official Linden Blog [1]: Stepping up the development of the Second Life Grid to everyone interested, I am proud to announce the availability of the Second Life client source code for you to download, inspect, compile, modify, and use within the guidelines of the GNU GPL version 2. A lot of the Second Life development work currently in progress is focused on building the Second Life Grid — a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups. Expect many changes and updates in the coming months in support of this architecture. This is actually genius! Not only because they're going OSS, and that's fundamentally A Good Thing (tm), but it may be the smart thing to do "politically" speaking. Many who have followed the phenomenon this year are expecting the hype about it to peak very soon if not already. The more gruesome forecasts are for a media backlash fueled by many of Second Life's shortages - technical and conceptual/social. One of them is the challenge of managing the influx of users who have been lured to Second Life by its inflated popularity. Even though the actual numbers of these have received some critical comments and reevaluations, the interest towards the game/world is definitely significant and it's put to a test of coping with the newcomers and managing its own growth. So in this context, it is really clever to share the load for development, bug tracking and security with the friendly force of the internet crowds, always happy to have something to poke and probe at. More so - by going open source Linden Labs is even further creating a community around its product, to shield it from the anticipated winter of media malcontent. Either by clever thinking or intuition, in my opinion, Linden Labs are doing the right thing. And by that Second Life is inching even closer to become the Future of Internet, some have already proclaimed it to be. [1] http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/01/08/embracing-the-inevitable/

the Superhero Personality Test [1] your results: you are Iron man! inventor. businessman. genius. iron man 65% hulk 60% wonder woman 55% catwoman 55% superman 55% spider-man 50% green lantern 50% Yeah-yeah, big surprise! I'm an inventor-genius, dressed in red and named awkwardly similar to one particular dictator, who was also "red". Next in line - I'm a hulking big wonderwoman - har! har! - who is also superhuman and fond of leather clothing. I couldn't quite understand the spider-man and green lantern references, so I'll just treat myself to characteristics like "bright" and "socially responsible" and wrap it up here. Your turn! [1] http://www.thesuperheroquiz.com/

[gv data="JVRsWAjvQSg"][/gv] Very long. Very nice. This is one of the posts that clogged my Drafts list this year for quite a while, and i decided to post it just now, so i can get on with it before the year is over. Maybe i should do the same with the others, or at least - post them together in one post. We'll see.

OMG, I've just found out how badly I wanted a new Di Caprio movie after I watched one being announced for later this year. The feeling surprised me. It's like accidentally meeting a very good friend of old and the recognition hits you suddenly like silent thunder, following the flash of a long missed smile. But enough about sentiments :) - the movie seems quite a big topic on its own. Here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407887/ Just check this out - it shines more stars than the american flag. It's a Martin Scorsese [1] film with: Leonardo Di Caprio Matt Damon Jack Nicholson Martin Sheen Mark Wahlberg Alec Baldwin Catch my drift? One interesting thing is that 3 lookalike actors play in the movie - Matt Damon (rougher version of Di Caprio), Leonardo Di Caprio (thinner, taller version of Damon) and Mark "Marky-Mark" Wahlberg - the junkie partner of Di Caprio in "Basketball diaries [2]"(1995) who is a darkhaired variation of Matt Damon - all gathered like puppies around the evil boss of the level - Jack Nicholson. :) Must see! Hhh-Anyway - here's a link to the trailer over at YouTube - http://youtube.com/watch?v=VqKZ8ARPgC4 [3] Looks kinda nice. Deffinitely in _my_ watch list :) [1] http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000217/ [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112461/ [3] http://youtube.com/watch?v=VqKZ8ARPgC4

Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! It's in the news [1] [CNN.com]! A new book by J.R.R.Tolkien to be publlished next year! I can't wait! Of course - it's not really "by JRRT", some 40+ years after his death. It's actually another of the edited by Christopher Tolkien scattered notes and unfinished works, comming to see the light of readers' night lamps in one of the more probable of the many possible forms it could have had if the Proffessor himself had finished it. The good news - that's no problem - "The Silmarillion", "The Unfinished tales" and "Book of lost tales" were all great even as they aren't "original". The bad news - it's "The lay of the children of Hurin" that is going to be published. Which I kinda "couldn't care less about" or at least "don't like that much". Not that I mind Hurin himself - probably the greatest human hero in all Tolkien's work, or maybe the greatest martyr - but I particulary dislike the ones that are the real focus of this story - the children of Hurin and especially the despicable Turin. Anyway - the worst from Tolkien is better than the most of what could be scrapped off the book shelves on "Slaveikov" these days, so it's good news after all. Looking forward to it! Here's an article about the book from a seamingly interesting site I found while browsing about a proper iamge: http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/childrenofhurin.htm [1] http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/books/09/18/books.newtolkien.ap/index.html