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

A new policy to stop my lengthy rambles taking up huge chunks of my PS, making it take an age to load and leading me to unsubscribe from dead journal threads: henceforth I shall make the first post brief, and put the substance of the journal entry in the second.

Another Durham year comes to an end, and this time I managed to get through it without collapsing. After some worrying about what grades I was going to get -- in one module the exam was so unfairly weighted that a group of us ended up writing to the Board of Studes to ask them to take that into account (which, to their credit, they did), and one of my Philosophy of Mind answers begins with something like: 'Owing to the glaring absence of a question on A.I., I'm going to talk about the Chinese Room in the context of Twin Earth and whether meanings are in the head...' -- I ended up with a decent pass for the year, and about as good as I could have hoped for given how awkward my achedule's been at times. Next year I'll be living in college again, so if I can resist the temptations of faster, flat-rate Internet access for long enough I'll hopefully be able to get a decent grade overall. Though quite a lot depends on my dissertation, for which I have to do preparatory stuff over the summer; I've decided that what the world of applied ethics really needs is a proper philosophical analysis of claims about 'immoral' media content depraving and corrupting people and causing them to do evil things. I'm shocked by how seldom debates on the matter adequately address philosophical questions about free will and moral responsibility, let alone the internalist hypothesis (roughly, the claim that someone who accepts a moral judgment as true is necessarily motivated to abide by it). What my dissertation director thinks of this I'm really not sure, but I suspect I'll have to abandon plans to call the finished product 'Ban This Sick Dissertation Before It Turns Our Kids Into Monsters', and go for something more academically respectable. Then again, apparently it's now possible to give Philosophy papers titles like 'Death To All Zombies', so clearly many things are possible...

On the subject of censorship, the BBFC has contrived to irk me something rotten again. I quote from a recent PC Gamer coverdisc:

'Notice!

'Unfortunately we are no longer able to run movies on the disc. This is due to a new ruling by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) on the age rating procedure for cover-mounted discs on games magazines. The new procedure would requires us [sic] to submit discs containing movies so early that the rest of the disc contents would be out of date by the time of publication. So Future Publishing has decided that its PC games magazines will no longer run movies in order that we can still bring you playable demos, mods and shareware etc in a timely manner. We'll still provide the best pick of movies every month via links from the movies section. Most of the movies will be small enough to be 56K friendly, and we'll warn you when they are not.'

Why video clips should be uniquely problematic I have no idea; for the BBFC's administrative procedures to keep them off coverdiscs but permit those same discs to link to said clips on the Internet makes a complete mockery of the whole system, and can serve only to annoy people.


Anyway. I didn't manage to write much for h2g2 last term, although I've now started improving and updating some exisiting Entries (and will someday restore the Excel Saga one). I've written a short Entry based on some early research I did for the aforementioned dissertation, and I've converted the Handy Political Opinion Generator from F2045034?thread=622529 to Guide Entry form. The promised Political Party Generator is still somewhere in the pipeline; but I've decided that anything of the level of complexity I'm envisaging would have too many variables for people to be inclined to roll the dice, so I'm thinking of writing a DHTML page that uses JavaScript to generate semi-randomised GuideML, uploading the source for said page to h2g2 and telling people to create it as an HTML file in order to generate the GuideML. (Hopefully that was comprehensible.) It should prove interesting, but I don't know how soon I'll get round to it.

On the whole, though, I do seem to be spending less time here; I unsubscribed from the Forum months ago, having come to see it as more of a Left-liberals' back-slapping club than a debating forum, and after having my patience worn down by threads both in and about PR I've stopped visiting Peer Review too. The catalyst was the Hegel thread in which a remarkably acrimonious argument started to develop about a technical point which was apparently to be decided by what sort of results a Web search turned up; I unsubscribed, and when term started soon afterwards checked an academic journal archive, being hugely amused by an article in the Journal of the History of Ideas written to debunk popular myths about Hegel. I didn't return to the fray; I'd decided that the malaise clearly ran deeper, and had been quite exasperated by the debates _about_ PR raging at the time, in which some people seemed to be advancing the sort of 'users = idiots who shouldn't meddle with things they don't understand' view I usually associate with Microsoft. One of the Scouts is adamant that new Researchers are 'blank slates', and that anyone who thinks otherwise is suffering from memory failure. Part of the problem I suspect is that concerns about the 'flavour' of PR can't be readily tied down to specific examples; but then, nobody supposes that brine can't possibly be saline because you can't point out any salt crystals floating in it.


By the way, in case you were wondering about this thread's title it's the name of the opening backing song from the anime series Paranoia Agent; I recently acquired the soundtrack CD.

*passes through, reads whole journal entry...... just wanted to let him know she found it interesting*

*waves*

*Waves back*

Oh, congratulations on your graduation, by the way. (I thought it would be better to post that here than interrupt a convo in full and fairly quick flow.)

thanks very much

still much more school to do though, unfortunately.

Is that 'school' in the broad sense of 'education' or the narrow sense of regimented, so-many-hours-a-day education? After F1676643?thread=381456&post=4880887#p4880887 (1st paragraph) I'm not always sure.

That's a really good idea. I may do that myself next time I want to make a long journal entry. My page doesn't take long to load here but it occurs to me that it might take a long time to load on other people's. I like it when my journal entries and "my conversations" are the same length.

I understand you're in Durham? And that isn't near London is it? I hope everything's OK where you are.

Actually I'm in Derby for the holidays, but that's still nowhere near London, so yes, everything's fine here; in fact, it feels weird to have everything so calm here (as it usually is during the school term) when the news from the capital is anything but.

for asking.