Nose to the Grindstone

Trevor Stone's Journal

Those who can, do. The rest hyperlink.

13th-Nov-2003 12:15 pm

What's an advantage of downloading 100GB of mp3s in three months?
I can discover interesting music I didn't even know I had, six months after the fact.
On a couple occasions over the summer, I asked my brother "Hey, this sounds cool. Who is it?" "It's XYZ. I got them from your computer."

Thought Universe sounds interesting. I'm not quite sure what electroncia subgenre they fall in, but they're sort of like Matmos, though a bit less seizure-inducing. Sort of spacy, somewhat experimental, fairly austere. Lots of little blips.

In other news, Alt. Rock and Grunge are good at keeping the coding focus. Since several people "came down with the flu" today, my Computer Graphics professor removed the deadline for Assignment 7, though Assignment 8 depends on it. Boy am I glad I didn't stay up all night.

Now I can focus entirely on my philosophy paper (due today) as I skip class all day. I hope our OS group can sufficiently wave our hands about our lack of significant project progress. And hey, I might even have time to figure out how to use Java's StreamTokenizer before I leave for the ACM Regional Programming Contest tomorrow.

Deadlines? Bring 'em on.

Mood:shifting gears
Music:Thought Universe - Bitcrush

Comments

13th-Nov-2003 06:19 pm (UTC)

vvvexation

Ooh, what's the philosophy paper on? For what class?

13th-Nov-2003 08:01 pm (UTC)

flwyd

Concept publicity, for Philosophy of Mind. This is the latest paragraph:

Consider the concept [beautiful]. Unlike the syntactically similar concept [red], different people vary significantly in the objects and people they classify as [beautiful]. To shift to a noun-like concept where most concept theorists feel comfortable, the compositional concept [beautiful person] can be narrowed into the lexical concept [hottie]. Since the requirements for [hottie] status varies from person to person, most theorists’ first instinct is to say that [hottie] is a non-public concept. We can, however, engage in public discussion about hotties, even though the particulars of each person’s version of [hottie] differ. For instance, someone could claim “There aren’t enough hotties in the world,” “Most people prefer to have sex with a hottie,” and “Hotties get paid more than non-hotties.” Despite a lack of public reference, these statements are all understandable. One explanation is to say that we interpret the word “hottie” as referring to those people who fall under the concept [hottie] for the speaker or the subject of the sentence. But this implies that we have a concept [that person’s concept hottie]. This latter concept might encode, say, the role [hottie] might play in a theory of people, it might indicate the sorts of features that constitute a definition, it might be a picture of the person’s prototypical [hottie], and so on. In principle, a sufficiently introspective person could share his concept [hottie] by giving examples, listing features, and so forth. Each person’s concept [hottie] is thus in principle public, even though all concepts [hottie] are not identical.

14th-Nov-2003 01:43 am (UTC)

vvvexation

Rox0r. We just touched on this in my Hume class. I've got issues with your second-to-last sentence there, but I dunno if you want to get into that or if you've had enough of this topic for a while.

14th-Nov-2003 09:23 am (UTC)

flwyd

I have issues with it to. I don't think practically we can describe what makes someone a hottie. However, like most actual examples in the literature on philosophy of concepts, I made a sweeping assumption to allow for theoretical cleanliness. And it certainly seems reasonable that someone can come to have a pretty good idea of who someone else thinks is a hottie.

14th-Nov-2003 01:13 pm (UTC)

vvvexation

Looks like we're on the same page then. :-)

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