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
——–

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“. 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… ;)

It’s a greeting you can virtually die for. Literally.

Cory over at boing-boing has a post about Chinese Gold Farmers pointing towards this curious site of a documentary on the subject www.chinesegoldfarmers.com

step forwards – and here you get this small trilogy of video excerpts from the film in the making:

Preview Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho5Yxe6UVv4

Preview Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRrhpoMd88Y

Preview Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH1LGdjZUKQ

It’s somehow sad. Two worlds, reaching towards each other with no chance to meet except on the nether fields of cyberspace.

—

*Fight Money – is the machine translation of the Chinese term thanks to Google Translate

ALICE: Сънуваш ли?
Jabberwacky: Да, сънувам.
A: Иска ли питане. А помниш ли сънищата си?
J: Помня ги живо.
A: Какво помниш от тях?
J: Мисля, че не бива да флиртувам с роботи.

A: Мислиш ли, че машина някога ще бъде призната за “жива”?
J: И по-странни неща са ставали.
A: Малко хора се изразяват по този начин.
J: А ти откъде знаеш, машино?

оригиналът, тук: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/brain/i-chat-therefore-i-am/article_print

Междувременно – ето линк към нещо, което вероятно ще мине триумфално днес през ICQ спама. А може би не. Във всеки случай:

Paintings on hands [link]

Update:  bigger images

Here’s a quote from the Official Linden Blog:

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 ™, 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.