Topics

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Did-You-Know-How-Insignificant-the-Earth-Really-Is-in-the-Universe-59306.shtml

Whatcha think?

do we have one?

Anyone know any good IRC channels? I'm mostly interested in channels regarding OS X, C, programming, battle.net, etc.

Mine are White Collar and Spartacus. What are yours?

(Rules: no anime allowed. also no star trek)

By the way, I ask because I'm looking to get into more TV shows. And I'm not sure what's good. It's my opinion that most TV shows suck.

(of more help: i really like shows about criminals, con artists, etc.)

i missed you :(

love,
ender

anyone have some?

Just wondering, cuz that's where I live.

It ruins the overall aesthetic of the boards. :-\

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6di4inToGE

Personally, I think it's awesome =)

Post links to arias that you like on YouTube. Doesn't have to be arias, by the way -- basically anything with good vocals.

http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=5742

So originally I was too excited to post anything lucid on this matter. However, I will explain the brewing excitement!

Kasparov is quite simply the best chess player in the history of chess. Fischer is likely second or third best, but Kasparov is generally considered #1.

Magnus Carlsen is widely considered to be the future world champion. He is an 18-year-old Norwegian who is currently ranked #4 in the world. He is  far and away the #1 junior in the world. He was an incredible chess prodigy and in the past few years has catapulted himself to the top.

The two have joined forces with the goal of launching Magnus to #1 on the world rankings in a year's time. Magnus being my favorite current chess player, and Kasparov being the greatest all-time player, their alliance really blows me away. They truly are the Dream Team.

And what's also so great about this, in addition to matching genius with genius, is that the two players have totally different styles. They can both play any kind of position (any players of their caliber can), however Kasparov most often wins his game on sharp variations from his encyclopedic opening knowledge, while Magnus is more of a positional player who wins many of his games in the endgame. This pairing will be great for Magnus as it will diversify his style and bring a new element to his game.

Board Title: Ender's Book Club
Board Description: For literary discussion as well as some other topics (e.g. chess, real-life anecdotes, etc.)

I asked Blaze a long time ago over IM to name my forum Ender's Book Forum. He named it Ender's Bookhouse instead in one of those furious displays of spite and power that are characteristic of him. I request that my forum name be changed to what I originally intended -- Ender's Book Forum.

Gracias.
--Ender.

I would like to start a forum book club. In case you haven't noticed, forum activity is dwindling, and several prominent members are posting a mere once a week or once a month. I think this would be a good way to energize the forums. Also it will be really exciting for me personally to manage a book club =)

Here's how I propose it can run:

We will read a book a month. Members will propose book titles in a certain thread and the week before the new month we will have a vote on what to read. I think the books should be non-technical and should be comprehensible to everyone. Some possible genres we can cover are literary fiction, popular economics and politics, popular books on religion such as those Dawkins books which I despise >_>, popular science (like Stephen Hawking's book etc.), books on history, historical fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, etc. (So you see there is a diverse range of topics!)

So tell me, who is interested?

1. Tennis
2. Karaoke singing

Now as for #1 I have three good friends I play doubles with. We're all pretty much beginners but we at least get it over the net and our games are pretty close.

As for #2 this is just some whim of mine and I'm curious as to whether someone who's never had formal practice singing could suddenly become decent at it. I think #2 would be a good skill to know for parties, which is why I contemplate it ;P

Any tips for improving at either?

Post what you are currently reading! This will be a good way to share recommendations.

If you want, you can follow the suggested format:

1. Title & Author
2. What page are you on?
3. What's the first sentence of the book?
4. Do you like it so far? (No spoilers. Just say whether you like it or not and perhaps what you're feeling.)

Good day,
Ender

What do you think?

Can you change the title of my forum to Ender's Book Forum?

Thanks,
<3
Ender.

it's been too long since we've talked, this makes me sad.

<3
Ender

Back when we were cavemen, it would make sense that better hearing and vision were naturally selected. (Taste seems pretty irrelevant; it probably only mattered in a much earlier stage in our evolution.) When evolution took us to a certain point, that being civilization, it must have stopped selecting our senses because they no longer mattered in terms of survival. (This is all pretty obvious...) The way that drugs alter our sensation and perception is that they imbalance our brain chemistry, and nature obviously would never have selected it. Imagine cavemen trying to hunt while stoned...

As for Trust losing "trust" in senses and perceptions, it may interest some of you to look into various theories of aesthetics. I think the background of this whole conversation on sensation is the question of whether drugs should be spiritualized or not -- whether altering sensation and perception is good for its own sake. In aesthetic theory, sensation is often viewed as the key to beauty -- in computer science terms, you may think of it as a map, sensation --> beauty. Different aesthetic theories, however, regulate how sensation is meant to be used in apprehension. Two that come to mind are those you read in Oscar Wilde and James Joyce. They are respectively influenced by the aesthetic theories of Walter Pater and Aquinas. (If you want to first learn these theories through reading the novels, you should stop reading this post here.) In Wilde, new sensations should be explored for their own sake, in a rather blind and indiscriminating manner. It is perhaps an end in its own, though more broadly the end is a recourse to Arnoldian Hellenism, in the midst off an overly-Hebraic Victorian society. For Joyce, sensation should be used in a very strict, regulated way. It should only be used towards the more worthwhile goal of artistic apprehension. One must find the modes of artistic apprehension, and discover the nature of beauty, so that sensation can be used accordingly.