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Fans take their love to extremes — but divine love? That’s the thesis of Theo Zijderveld, who’s doing postgraduate work on the intersection of faith and “World of Warcraft” at University of Colorado’s Center for Media, Religion and Culture.
I’m not a fan of discussing something in the context of that thing’s nature. Thus I dislike saying things like: “well the nature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is such that…” Use of the expression imitates that conception of natural and/or logical necessity that Wittgenstein’s later developments (language games, the concept of grammar) nicely opposed, if not the necessity per se, its ill philosophical effects.
This is going to seem irrelevant but and it sort of is, but we could introduce another sort of language game where I’m apt to use or convey that sense of necessity I just got through justifying a disagreement with. This has more practical relevance – printing requirements. I figured my undergraduate stint with philosophy would, naturally, of necessity (yes I’m stretching it) – represent more in terms of printing costs vs. my graduate studies information technology. After all, those old philosophy research papers from the 1940s, they’re available in PDF, but nobody would think (I hope not) to try to read them on a monitor where resolutions are roughly (something like) 40% that of the resolution of the real deal (i.e., reading a real book). And since IT itself is a new discipline, it stands to reason that documentation ought to be primarily available on screen, right?
None of this turns out, with me, to be true. I’m beginning to mooch off the network printers and/or printers of my family/peers. So yeah, this is all leading up to my find for the week. Practical knowledge is the new metaphysical necessity, it helps to not purchase your printing equipment at oversized vendors with terrible prices. So yeah, this is definitely a practical post.
Printing needs
IT security surveys typically run anywhere from 20-50+ pages with lots of images and/or non-text/colored content. Lexmark printers – especially the inkjets - are pretty good for undergraduate/mid-level printing requirements. I bought the Z1300 a year or so ago and while basic, its completely fine for low to mid-level use. My gripe has to do with the software, and an aspect of it that’s quite irrelevant to its functionality. There’s this annoying voice that activates whenever you use the thing, so I recommend NOT wearing headphones if you’re about to print something. Of course you could shut it off in the options but who remembers that? I’ll have to dig up an article on CNET which – I recall – named the z1300 a definite grab for the price. If I buy online I tend to gravitate towards vendors who’ve been around for awhile and that sport high customer ratings.
Anyway, for printer toners and ink/other printer supplies its probably easiest to buy the stuff online. Make sure to review CNET or Tom’s Hardware Guide or something to make sure the stuff you purchase is legitimate and/or corresponds with your printer. Might pay a few extra bucks for shipping but from what I can tell the price is initially reduced at the best online vendors. If the vendor’s been around for several years chances are you should feel confident buying printing supplies from them.
Scanners
Scanners probably aren’t too necessary for most undergraduates unless they’re into photo editing and/or really wanna share old pictures on social networking sites. Color depth is important to watch out for, although honestly I dont’ know much about scanners other than a few good shopping places online.
Although, scanners would be extremely useful if you’re considering going into digital/online publishing for instance. Especially if you were an editor or content producer for an academic publication, since physical documents are still digitally scanned as part of the update process for large academic databases such as EBSCO.
Yahoo News Search, Image Search and Yahoo Spell Checker services will all be offered as part of this effort. Combine this with Yahoo
’s recently introduced SearchMonkey tool, and you could build a search engine that is entirely your own
Google launched Lively today, a 3D virtual world that can best be described as the search and advertising giant’s take on Second Life. Currently, the service is for Windows users only and requires Internet Explorer or Firefox, as well as a Google account, to take part in.
As an undergraduate, I certainly acted on that impulse to procrastinate. In my limited experience, philosophers or aspiring philosophers are not different in this regard, and in some ways, seem to procrastinate to an even greater degree.
Is this part of the philosopher in me slowly dying? If picture below is any indication, then either (p) I’m growing up or (q) I’m slowly divorcing myself from philosopher-type habits. As it turns out, if p or q, then r: D tracks his assignments.
Millions of Americans are embarrassingly ill-informed and they do not care that they are. Are you one of those people?
My interview on ABC made one thing clear: In our society sex workers are still presented as tragic, lost, Dickensian characters.
Freeware and/or open source websites are hardly uncommon. Having spent many hours (too many) searching out useful (and free) applications/software, there are a few websites I keep coming back to. Here’s a list and brief description of the top three, in my opinion.
These sites are good for many reasons. SourceForge has probably the largest repository of opensource projects out of the three. Its accurately described as a community, rather than a listing or review site, for instance.
I’ve been reading and rereading Longino’s “Feminist Epistemology as a Local Epistemology“. I originally came to it because, in missing philosophy, and in particular epistemology, I wanted to go back and read influential works that curriculum or ideological influences made impossible. Of course, neither of those constitute something intentionally enacted.
I think my favorite part of the essay is where Longino points out problems with the a central ontological commitment that drives empirical research: the idea that, in general, it is best be as simple as possible when it comes to a theory’s commitment to the existence of types of entities. If the data can be explained in a simpler way, then it should be. This idea, one that Longino takes as a standard virtue in epistemology, and often presumed in the natural science, is frequently characterized as “what closes the gap between evidence and theory”.
I understood these virtues also as justification for, as well as motivation to, invoke the use of “Occam’s Razor”. Occam’s Razor is the normative view that more often than not, the simplest theory is the best choice. While this description seems equivalent with the description issued above, it is not the same as Occam’s Razor belongs squarely to the area of theory selection/comparison. Thus is rears its head only in the context of a philosophical or scientific dispute over which one of two or more possible theories a particular scientific community should invoke and/or “project”–to use Nelson Goodman’s terminology.
Longino’s arguments against both the standard epistemic value (simplicity) and the standard method of theory selection (Occam’s Razor) bring up important inconsistencies that many academic philosophers have failed to acknowledge and/or listen to–as Longino also points out.
In any event, here are her most concise arguments levied against these normative constraints:
i. This formulation begs the question what counts as an adequate explanation. Is an adequate explanation an account sufficient to generate predictions or an account of underlying processes, and, if explanation is just retrospective prediction, then must it be successful at individual or population levels? Either the meaning of simplicity will be relative to one’s account of explanation, thus undermining the capacity of simplicity to function as an independent epistemic value, or the insistence on simplicity will dictate what gets explained and how.
ii. We have no a priori reason to think the universe simple, i.e. composed of very few kinds of thing (as few as the kinds of elementary particles, for example) rather than of many different kinds of thing. Nor is there or could there be empirical evidence for such a view.
iii. The degree of simplicity or variety in one’s theoretical ontology may be dependent on the degree of variety one admits into one’s description of the phenomena. If one imposes uniformity on the data by rejecting anomalies, then one is making a choice for a certain kind of account. If the view that the boundaries of our descriptive categories are conventional is correct, then there is no epistemological fault in this, but neither is there virtue.
I will discuss these and analyze them in greater detail in a (near) future post. In the meantime, you can see Longino’s piece Louis P. Pojman’s The Theory of Knowledge-Classical and Contemporary Readings (Third Edition)
I’m adding an FAQ page to this site because I think it warrants one.
Let me know what you think once it’s completed!
Thanks,
David
David