Rule of Three

And...another random thoughts. I'm sorry!

• Tycho has an interesting discussion in today's Penny Arcade newspost, about Dr. Who. He says there's parts of liking it that he doesn't get, because:

  Even as an enthusiast, I don’t know that I entirely understand the appeal of Doctor Who. I have always suspected that I missing some vital continuum of data on account of my yanketude. There are episodes of the show which are objectively bad by any system of measurement. They sometimes (often!) change the LEAD ACTOR and all their friends so that you must to learn to like the show all over again.
  
  For every inexplicable time pretzel or hmm-hummer it presents, though, it’s one of the most distinct shows I watch: it’s mercurial protagonist, who can flip between Implacable Intimidator and Goofy Ultrapacifist in a harrowing instant is one of the more intriguing things about it. It’s a romp, for lack of a better term. It’s a joke that you’re in on, and if you don’t watch it enough to pass through the membrane and get to that inside portion, you’ll probably feel like the show is teasing you most of the time. You’ll see those “special effects” and probably be insulted by them, when for the regular audience they are, in their amalgamation, a kind of “wink.”

  And by George Joan, he made me realize what it is I don't like about the show.
  
  It's camp. Camp may be defined, in this context anyway, as "doing a bad job deliberately, because you think it's funny". Camp rubs certain people the wrong way, and I am one of those people. I think Gabe is too (hey, Krahulik is a Slovak name, and my grandmother was born in Prague—a big part of it is cultural). Tycho also says that Dr. Who is "a show you must meet half-way", and some of us consider it impolite, when offering a product, to make the client do half the work himself.


• Why don't people understand what an ad hominem actually is? Merely insulting a person is not ad hominem. If I say "That's affirming the consequent, you idiot," I have not made an ad hominem error, I have identified a fallacy—and offered an appraisal of your meager cognitive powers. An ad hominem is to assert that because of some characteristic of the arguer, generally a flaw, their argument is not valid.
  
  Incidentally, the entire Marxist/Post-Modern/hermeneutics-of-suspicion paradigm is invalidated, by this fact. "Your objections arise from class-interest" means "you say that because you are a capitalist, or in their pay"—and that's the ad hominem fallacy. If you make that argument, you lose. So don't make it.
  
  Can you tell I've been arguing with people on the internet?


• I don't know if I've mentioned it, but the ad hominem does have one place: as the counter to the ab auctoritate. However, it can only be used as a challenge to improper invocations of authority—if people, say, quote Stephen Hawking about politics or religion, the fact he left his wife for a younger woman is an entirely valid counterpoint, since it undercuts the moral authority he's being ascribed. It is most certainly not a valid counter to his physics theories.
  
  Similarly, asserting that someone is an activist in a field is no challenge to the facts they present. Sorry, but you have to refute facts with facts, vague assertions that "those people" are suspect is not an argument for anything but shooting you in your stupid face. Ironically, it's also how Nazis argued (relativity being "Jewish physics", for example), but if someone calls you apes on that, you scream about Godwin's Law.
  
  Speaking of, it's not Godwin's Law to bring up Nazism if the topic is war or genocide. I know, n00b, you heard that the cool kids on the internet don't like Nazism being mentioned, but it's actually a bit subtler than that, learn to breathe through your nose and think about it for a moment.


• You know when people—generally halfwit Jingo Anglo cheerleaders—say English has a huge vocabulary? Uh, no, no it doesn't. Actually the words in English that are really English are comparatively few; I'm not certain but I doubt "remokon" and "keiki" count toward Japanese's word-count.
  
  Besides which, English doesn't have a special word for big toes, twelfths, or "son of a maternal uncle". Latin does (seriously, its kinship terms are a personal project of Satan). Behold true terror!Why, incidentally, is that system called Sudanese? And why's modern European kinship called Eskimo? It's weird, is what it is. One suspects unconscious racism on the part of anthropologists, that they don't seem to have considered "civilized" peoples a fit subject for their study.


• I wonder, should I have my felinoids' kinship maybe incorporate relative age? I maybe can, I've got some pairs that had been male/female, but now that their kinship doesn't mark sex I might swap those around for older-younger.
  
  Or maybe just old/young as a common suffix, the way male/female is? I like that; languages with lots of optional features intrigue.
  
  Also, I'm wondering what I should do for grandparents. Irish uses "old" as the prefix, most of the Romance and Germanic languages use "big", and elsewhere, actually, using single words, like Latin does, seems to be the norm (but hey, Latin, why not distinguish maternal and paternal grandparents?).
  
  Maybe something like "away" or "far" + parent/child terms. And add "# steps" for degrees of "great"—rather than having to say "great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather" (Hungarian just says "boldognagyapa"), they just say "twelve-steps-away father" (no, wait, thirteen, there's also the "grand").


• I was thinking, my felinoids' cars unfortunately don't have much legroom. Nor do their other seats—because they generally sit on the floor, hunkered. Their society cordons off thoroughfares, in places like airports, because they don't have obvious seats for people who are waiting, and folks'd get stepped on.
  
  Their desks and counters and tables, and such, are lower than in the West, more like traditional Japanese furniture. The exception is when they work with humans; they have waist-height desks, and sit on special chairs (still hunkered). Occasionally, when they ride in human cars or sit on humans' furniture, they have to remind themselves not to dig their claws in (I would imagine that clawing others' upholstery is universally considered impolite).


• Just explained to my 14-year-old brother about the Illuminati—specifically, that the actual group was just a type of Freemasonry and all the conspiracy theories are nonsense.
  
  But it occurred to me, Freemasonry, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, Alchemy, Jungian psychology: they're all Hermeticism. There is nothing new under the sun, your esotericism is still the same thing it was in the 2nd century AD. Heck, Mormonism, Scientology, and Christian Science all also have elements of that type of Gnosticism. Come up with another idea already, human race.


• So that idea that pasta comes from China. Uh, wha? Okay so spaghetti does, maybe couple other types of macaroni, but lasagna is European, it dates to at least the 10th century (only they used to serve it wrapped around a stick), and ravioli was probably Roman.
  
  I wonder, was all pasta Alfredo-ish before Europeans went to the New World? What would be the damn point? Then again green enchiladas usually have a sour cream sauce, not unlike a tomato-less lasagna (enchiladas are so totally Mexican lasagna), so maybe it'd be okay. Another example of how pre-Columbian Europe was a nightmare world would be their only beans were lima and fava. Can you imagine life without pinto beans? I don't want to.