Callie

I had no idea that was the result of typewriters. Why did people put two spaces after a period when using a typewriter? Edit: I learned to put two spaces after a period, but I don't remember where I learned that from.

Pick the option that most often applies when writing formally. I recognize that some people's preferences vary considerably, but I wanted to keep the options limited. Please point out mistakes. (Safari thinks slith mages should be sloth mages) Question 11: What are your preferences in regards to gender-neutral pronouns? - My answer to question 11: I use "their" as a third-person, singular, possessive pronoun. I try to use "one" in the subjective if it's not awkward; I use "s/he" otherwise. I don't use "them" as a third-person, singular, objective pronoun: I use "him or her". I wish there was an accepted set of gender-neutral pronouns, because I would use it exclusively. Edit: IPB thinks a poll should only have one space after a period. I suppose that means the poll took the poll …itself?

Yeah, it's a little odd to me that a political compass lacks a question about gun control. Gun control is probably more relevant to one's political ideology than abstract art or astrology.

My AP Composition teacher was a middle-aged bald man who did two specific actions when nervous: rub his head with his palm and itch his left inner ear with his pinky. When we read Swift's said essay, I could almost hear the squeaking.

Economic Left/Right: -1.00 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -9.13 Aran has a map of past results here, but it doesn't seem to be working.

I don't scream philosophical musings, even in the figurative sense, I think… I hope; that would be like George Carlin yelling "TOPOGRAPHY!" in a crowded theater. I enjoy board games, this forum and all of its follies, bike riding, 4x strategy, engineering, etc. All of those activities involve neurotransmitters that elicit some sort of emotion that I interpret as happiness. I'm not a paranoid android, so I've willed to live to the point of writing this paragraph. Just because I think life is without inherent meaning does not mean I don't enjoy life. I just believe that my will to live is not inherently different from that of a diatom floating around in a sewage treatment plant. There is no way to prove or disprove that belief; that's what's so fun about metaphysics. Also, me being Nalyd's alt account would have some frightening implications. "A cause" can be an abstract, collective noun that could encompass any number of causes or one singular cause. Events A, B, C can cause event D, but they can collectively be referred to as event X. What you interpret as an infinitely reproduced echo, I interpret as an multitudinous ordered set. (I wonder if such differences in interpretation are key aspects of someone's personality. Maybe I'm thinking backwards with this parenthetical statement.) Edit: Erroneous comma

No, but does anything else really matter? Meaning is just another one of our constructs. /nihilism

I believe in predetermination in the sense that the movements of particles constituting our being are hypothetically predictable. Of course, I'm not educated enough in physics to know if that's a sensible conclusion.

I think Alorael was being facetious with that comment. Oh I definitely agree, and I was making a statement to that effect in one of my previous posts. I've been waxing philosophical lately, but I still have a lot of inconsistencies in my logic; Nalyd pointed that out. I also made a typo in one of my earlier posts: I said hard incompatibilism when I should have said hard determinism. Also, I think "Post hoc ergo you're wrong" might be my favorite of Alorael's PDNs. It made me laugh out loud (or lol, as the common internet lingo would have it).

That's a good point. I haven't thought about it that way before.

This is definitely my main complaint about likes: it fuels group polarization (I think that's the correct term, correct me if I'm wrong). Edit: I'm certainly guilty of that.

oh dear. ha. aha. next thing you'll tell us you think free will is a thing Nope: if I am pressed, I am inclined to lean towards hard determinism, but I do not feel strongly about it. I do like to comfort myself with the illusion of free will, though, if that is the case. (Late reply, I know, but I haven't had internet access) Edit: Wrong term

i took french in high school and very much like the language naiveness just doesn't have the same ring as naïveté

Appeals to nature are usually not meaningful, unless they're in direct rebuttal to a likewise fallacious appeal to nature. My parents indoctrinated me to believe that homosexuality was somehow unnatural and abominable, yet our two male cats would frequently employ a certain numerical position on the couch. You have never heard two cats purr so loudly. Chimpanzees were thought to be inane and nonviolent creatures, but they actually engage in violent, cannibalistic, territorial warfare. Carl Linnaeus gifted science with binomial nomenclature, but he classified the whole of humanity into four different subspecies. Linnaeus' view is egregious, considering that our number exhibit a surprising lack of genetic diversity. As for humans, we have some demonstrably unusual sexual characteristics. Humans are notably less sexually dimorphic than some other primate species. Hidden estrus and menopause are unusual traits in the animal world. Males lack an os penis, and have disproportionately large genitals. Females have protuberant breasts during their entire adult lifespan and are fertile year-round. There are many other examples, and such traits are often noted when discussing presumed natural sex differences. In nature, the bonobo displays the sexual behavior most similar to humans. I don't know about you, but I would hate to have a relationship the way a bonobo does. Our intelligence transcends whatever our hypothetical, natural, inherent aspects may supposedly be. Are we naturally inclined to study physics or attempt to discern our own nature? I think not. Observations of reality are ultimately tainted by cognitive biases. The conclusions our forebears set forth about our nature are now comically inaccurate and indicative of prejudice. To claim that our current selves are liberated from such bias would require a great deal of hubris and naïveté. We are not necessarily damned to false conclusions, but must take caution to avoid doing so. I find it interesting that in heterosexual couples, the male is generally older than the female. Our fiction frequently involves a narrative in which a heroic male is rewarded with a young, attractive female. I've not seen any gender reversals of that trope. Many female protagonists in the Hollywood universe are princesses of some sort (princesses were, historically, treated as diplomatic objects… yuck!). The princess is somehow fulfilled in life by gaining a relationship with an older man. Often, the man is markedly unappealing or a literal beast. Again, how often does the gender-inverted trope occur? Society apparently believes that women should gladly accept a man's flaws without reservation, but the man should always expect a young, improbably attractive, virgin woman as his bride. Of course, what's considered attractive varies wildly by culture, but the culture usually enforces a patriarchy that grants heterosexual males sexual gratification. Gender roles are unsettling and bizarre. Notice that I don't have any direct evidence for causation; I just posited that the age difference is due to societal gender roles. I like conjecture, but my conjecture probably contains bias that I am not consciously aware of. We should certainly study the means by which we arbitrarily divide ourselves, but I do strongly believe that we should not make assumptions about human sexual behavior without an earnest attempt to remove our prejudices.

I took the survey. As for Denver: I once laughed hysterically in the airport. That's all I remember about Denver.

This mnemonic just won the entire thread. The Pauli exclusion principle is useless to me now.

No soup for you!

I would not be saddened by Facebook's destruction. Why, someone posted an image yesterday that said, "Like this post or grandma dyes". My grandma is both dead and had dyed hair. What vacuousness!

Do the Borg, as cybernetic beings, need mnemonics? Or do they just assimilate everyone else's mnemonics?

Wow, that sounds extremely uncomfortable.

I'm glad that I spring to mind. It's far better than catapulting.

Hollywood is dominated by heterosexual, white males who can't seem to write a story without a heterosexual, white male. Fantasy novels are like that, but to a lesser extent.

Like Kelandon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer springs to mind. She definitely falls into that pattern to some extent and her depicted relationships are problematic in many ways. At the very least, though, she is ultimately more powerful than any of the male protagonists; the show deals with a lot more than romance. It's uses and subversions of tropes are numerous (the site TvTropes spawned from a Buffy forum). I'm not familiar with Twilight. It's a romance novel, so I'm not interested, but people's descriptions make it sound like an abusive relationship. I don't know if that's a fair assessment, but I couldn't really know without reading it.

I'm apparently Tyrion and Frank. I have no idea what that means, though.