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Cake day: March 12th, 2024

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  • A lot of things from my Philosophy and Literature class:

    In the Old Testament (or at least Genesis) a man’s semen is literally a bunch of little hims and thus impregnating a woman with a son is creating a new him, and something went wrong if it’s a daughter. Obviously that’s wrong, but if I pretend to go back in time to when nobody knew anything about biology beyond the super obvious, it makes a very basic sort of sense. More importantly, it has provided me with a lot of context for why Abrahamic religions have (or have had) the views they have on masturbation, abortion, and patriarchy.

    Gulliver’s Travels is a bunch of satirical metaphors that go right over the head of someone lacking the cultural context of the time it was written. The Lilliputians are at war with other tiny people because of how they eat their egg delicacies (I think they eat it out of a bowl while the others eat out of a cup or something). This is making fun of the schism between Catholics and Protestants taking communion where one believes the bread they eat becomes the literal body of Christ while it’s more figurative for the other. End of the day, they both eat bread to worship God and cleanse their souls, but they’ll kill each other (at the time anyway) for how the other does it.

    Many have heard of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Some men are in a cave and shadows are cast representing real things, but only in an illusory way. They then leave the cave and discover the reality of those things. But what I didn’t know is who was casting the shadows. In ancient Greece around this time there was a group called the Sophists who basically told people what to think/know, ‘soph’ being the root term meaning “knowledge/to know.” Literally the knowers. These Sophists are the ones casting the shadows, claiming to give knowledge while only giving the illusion of it, trapping the men in a cave of falsehoods. What enables them to leave is what Plato calls philosophy, again ‘soph’ but also ‘philo’ meaning “love of/to love.” Essentially to escape the false illusions given by sophists and discover reality one can’t just claim to know things or be told things and take them at face value, they must have a love for knowledge that will lead them to seek it out and try to learn the best ways to seek it out.




  • I live around the Twin Cities metro of Minnesota (two cities split by a river), which installed its first passenger light rail about 20 years ago. I recently moved from the north suburbs to the south side of town. I was very excited to be able to drive 10 minutes east on the freeway to my buddy’s house within walking distance of a station to take the 10 minute light rail ride downtown for a basketball game. Previously I would have driven 20-40 minutes (depending on traffic congestion) to pay $20 to use a parking ramp because the light rail doesn’t extend north.

    Over the last 20 years they have extended the rail between the airport/Mall of America on the south side to the downtown of one city, and connected that downtown to the downtown of the other city across the river. If you live anywhere north of the city proper, or more than a few miles away from the one line running south, there is little reason to use the rail system over driving the whole way. If you do though, it’s pretty great.

    That’s just been my experience, my understanding is some larger cities (Chicago and NYC are what come to mind) have more robust rail systems, but many cities (mine at least) have limited access for most people living in them.



  • I think I see what you’re trying to say, and I don’t necessarily disagree with everything, but based entirely on this one comment (which may not be indicative of how you generally communicate) I have to wonder if the communication issues you see stem at least partially from your own over-articulation of thoughts and use of “fluffy” language.

    I think this bit highlights what I’m trying to say best:

    are virtually never taught if not en passant and indirectly This statement feels like it’s saying the same proposition three times, but if I dig into it it is saying three things, but in a confusing manner. I think it would have been better served by replacing “if not” with something simpler like “or taught” to more easily connect the first idea with the other two in the reader’s mind. I probably would have replaced it all with “are taught incidentally at best,” which I think captures the meaning you are trying to convey in terms that are easier for anyone to understand.

    I don’t say this to try to bring you down. I just find beauty in seeing a concept existing in one’s mind, unbounded by the world, given a vessel structured by the words of language not to constrain or limit that idea, but to focus it into something that can be shared and understood with others. The vast majority of the time I see that vessel be too loose without giving proper shape to the idea it wants to convey. Yours is one of the very few internet comments I see that does the opposite, where it feels forced into a shape that’s too rigid. That makes me want to say something, because the mind that does that is a mind I think could learn from stepping back a little, rather than being told to force itself forward.

    This is as much me challenging myself to understand what bugged me about your comment as it is a comment on your comment, and for talking about giving shape to thoughts I don’t think I did a super job of it.

    I do think that humans are one of the only creatures capable of overcoming the difficulty in communication between minds because we are one of the only creatures capable of complex language to do that stuff I said earlier. But it is a skill that is difficult and requires a lot of time and effort to learn or teach. I do think communication is highly valued, or at least a lot of frustration espoused about a lack of communication, but modern society does make it difficult to work up the effort and acquire the resources to develop that skill.




  • You just have to live in the right city with sufficiently high rates of alcoholism! In Fargo, ND you could get a tall 200 lb+ man proper sloshed over an evening downtown across 5-8 bars for $50 or less as recently as 2019. Not as cheap as drinking at home, but enough that most folks without kids working full-time could do it every other weekend.