h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

what KB says. Consider Mr Darwin and his wife, for instance.

My dad wrote his initials and the date into a square of concrete at the edge of the patio he laid in 1970. I don't think there was anything buried under it though.

Mol

Oo... cool idea... like the date 'bricks' they'd often put into buildings in the past...

If I ever inherit a bucket of eels, I will definitely offer them to someone else.

The bucket of eels is a metaphore... or an analagy... or, just very random and silly... possibly... even... all three...

Is the roller coaster a metaphor, too?

I'm currently being wooed by a senior lecturer who last night told me about his philosophy of consciousness-based idealism and how he believes in telepathy and the reality of dreams.

Oh boy.

Red flag or just differences of tolerable opinion?

Telepathy: the Professor in "X-Men"
Reality of dreams: "Inception"

Watch enough movies, and your sense of reality can shift

A while ago he had a mental breakdown - and was hospitalised, he still refers to this though as a kind of epiphany.

To me any revelations from that period are suspect, the disordered workings of a mnd under strain, but he think the 'interconectedness' of stuff is a profound insight if only he can describe in mathematically (yesterday he hand delivered to me a 8 page hand-written treatise on prime number prediction using topology.

It's sweet and.. rather unusual, and not exactly what I was expecting and all in all rather confusing but I read this forum and thought I'\d throw in my experience because it seems everyone was agreeing far too much.

Well, there was a certain amount of interconnectedness between Aleister Crowley and L Ron Hubbard, but it's hard to make a case that such unique [understatement!] individuals can be generalized to the rest of us. [ to set up containment chambers]



But, yes, you were right to want us not to agree with each other too much on that issue, Clive.

I've decided to call this whole thing off - it's begun to become creepy. All my instincts are telling me "run"

Not good.

I hope it wasn't anything I said.

Its good to be able to have the ability to hold on to a thin thread of a grip on reality, even if one sometimes spends a lot of time inhabiliting an reality which is, often regarded as somewhat outside the norm Hmmm,,, I say thread, they're more like eels, actually, as one might suspect I'm all for alterd states, and suchlike.... but sometimes one really does have to just do the mundane everyday and kinda be able to experience that, as it is, and for what it is hmmm... I guess

Ohh Eels are a lot more slippery than threads, even though they are much less likely to break when pulled upon. Of course if you grasp onto an electric eel - then the results could be quite shocking ?



F S

Is a mind based on prime numbers necessarily disordered?

Consciousness of idealism sounds platonic.

Ps I guess the lecturer is a mathematician of sorts?

I'm not sure the mind can ever be truely and satisfactoryly explained, mathmatically, or via numbers. Its such an odd assortment of binary hardware, binary software, and utterly analogue software, at the same time.... and in isolation is insufficient itself, to explain its own functioning... one can't regard it in i isolation, without consideration of the hormonal system, which, although it ultimately interacts neurologically, via neurological pathways; biochemical and so forth, is as much a part of its funcnctioning as indeed its own functioning is.

Indeed, perhaps, an explination of brain functioning, determined by a brain, just seems... counterintuative.... like an internal combusion engine explaining how it works, itself...
Personally the analagies regarding opperation, involving eels, or, indeed, of course, penguines, often seem to work better... or at least provide a satisifactory explintion that precludes mathmatical confusionisation...


*goes and locks himself in a darkened room*

The Pythagoreans were pretty dismayed to uncover the irrationals ("shudders"). Then there was poor old Bertrand and North trying to rationally construct mathematics only to be curtly skewered by Gödel (more shuddering).

Some say we have another brain around the gut (seems fair enough) while some females claim the male has an additional brain below the gut.

Males are not unique in that respect