Yeah. Database consistency problem. An entity is removed but ghosts of its relations remain.
Sol, would the processing/storage properties allow the connecion list or count to be re-verified when the user's Connections page is accessed, or would that require too many disk accesses or too much latency?
I have a mod for the opening of =To Find a Sorcerer=. Later today.
His voice was soft,
His manner mild.
He seldom laughed,
But he often smiled.
He'd seen how civilized men behave.
He never forgot and he never forgave,
Not Sweeney,
Not Sweeney Todd—
The demon barber of Fleet Street!
Don't fear the Harvester?
An Elevation of Elves
A Horn of Unicorns
A Chaste(Horn) of Unicorns
A Taling of Fairies
A Growth of Gillis
A Gruesome of Gillis
Following this chapter, I will have an action thread and two-to-four discussion threads to interweave. (Heal patriarch, discuss circumstances, events, plans, show evolution of Shassa and Engalt ... and cross-link.) (And, as I wrote above, I will have a week of disaster-dodging.) But I will try to work the individual threads out, starting with the action thread. I expect two chapters surrounding the patriarch (Maurand, I am thinking) and maybe a short chapter on planning and departure. And then ... the culturing-cellar of corruption.
And along the way, I expect I'll be renumbering a few existing chapters.
But that's a ways down the road.
K appears to be winking in and out of our universe. I find conversations where he is being addressed, but when I look for his posts, they're not there.
The other day upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
He must be with the CIA.
Okay, short transition chapter up. The next one may take a while; I've got another disaster to dodge (and I don't mean the next chapter). But I'm feeling better, and this episode will launch me into the next episode better than anything I thought of before.
And take your fight out in the parking lot! Cheez ...
The collective singular is fine. When you need the particular plural (fishes instead of plural fish) use Gillis plants or Gillis pots.
Geez, some people don't know the proper past tense of sh*t. English is an irregular language, and whatever you're mapping into it can be just as irregular.
What!ticism
Not so funny if you're the one who gets it. Apologize to Amy (grrrrr).
Heck, present-and-past-in-parallel like Dark Shadows, which opened a huge genre door.
I heard they missed one on the 'flu shot this year.
I've done that. It confuses readers and potential reviewers. Die-hard reviewers are not deterred, but what about new ones?
Okay, updates to Shogran's Waifs are out.
If you want a repub so you can get the points you deserve, let me know.
Now, where are all those things I need to do today after I get some sleep?
njc wrote:Newton showed that the laws of physics in the sky are the same as those on earth; I'm arguing (on much less rigorous grounds, to be sure) that our learning of people-society-culture is of the same kind as our learning of hard-soft-hot-cold-safe-dangerous.
...
As a generality, I disagree, but my reasoning is from a complicated understanding that there is in reality no such thing as determinism -- except within a narrow context of classical physics -- which is why you'd have to reach out to Newton to support your assertion. Every horror of Man against man is brought by thinking that all we have to do is teach the individual that X is wrong, even if we have to kill him in the process. ...
Whether X (where X is nothing like landing a lunar module) is a right or wrong thing to do can be ascertained by looking through the prism of morality and not utility, and 'morality' is to an individual's actions as kinetics is to an individual molecules's actions.
I'm not sure I know how to evaluate your last claim, so all I'll say is that I wasn't addressing that point. I was addressing how we learn in the two realms, and to what degree the methods and mechanisms are comparable--if they are at all. I believe, on the basis of subjective experience and the Principle of Parsimony, that to a large degree they are. But of formal proof I have none. (Argument by analogy is an important mode of legal argument, and I believe it also plays a role in much moral reasoning, particularly in in considering what is just in a particular circumstance.)
Implicit in my point (but not occult) is that learning matters, ie. that morality and social regard of others is largely learned behavior.
I'm going to re-open this as a request.
I have a few close-knit reviewers (thanks, "guys"!) and oftimes I would like to repub-for-points--pay my points over again so my reviewers will be rewarded for coming back and re-evaluating my work. I can do this by copy-to-new-version, but then I (and my reviewers!) lose all the existing reviews.
I'm asking Sol and his team to look for a way to accomplish this without messing too deeply with their system. It could be a way to take the money#####points and clear the 'you reviewed this already' info (will that work within the existing data model?) or to copy the text, history, and reviews to the new version while somehow marking the existing reviews as 'historical' so they are not counted when deciding whether to reward a new review (but that could duplicate a lot of data, unless you found a way to link the history stacks), or some more clever way that fits the existing data model.
Of course, it will help to know how many other people will be helped by this.
Try this:
Behavior of ghosts is explained by stories ...
Events occur in the present ...
Behavior of ghosts increases/changes ...
Examination of the ghost stories show they are inconsistent with history, human motivation, etc. (See Fridge Logic on TVTropes.org) ...
Present events are linked to the ghosts' history and their stories ...
Present events have dangers which are unknown and misunderstood ...
Correct interpretation of the ghosts and their stories reveals history that explains present events ... and leads to resolution of mystery/jeopardy (and 'jeopardy' might include Romance as a secondary element).
The challenge, after doing it at all, is to keep it from becoming formula. If you frame the stories well enough and with enough different twists I think you could play it for at least eight or ten stories, perhaps of multiple volumes each. False or incomplete solutions can keep things going. (Ellery Queen did that a lot in the early stories: "Solves two murders three times!") Histories of WHEN the apparitions have historically occurred may also provide clues, just as subsequent murders can muddy--or reveal--the truth of earlier ones.
My sympathies. You have a lot more responsibilities than I do, so I let it go longer before going out to get dosed. With my history, the doc authorized a refill on the 10 days of levoflaxin. If the symptoms aren't completely clear by day six (unlikely they will be at this rate) I'll get the refill and take it until I'm clear of symptoms for at least five days.
I will indulge in a parting shot, then, and suggest that rejecting my analogies also rejects the idea that people learn about people by mechanisms alike to those by which they learn about things.
To those who might still be listening, I ask whether there is so great a sacred-profane divide between our human environment and our physical environment that our learning processes of them must have nothing in common.
Newton showed that the laws of physics in the sky are the same as those on earth; I'm arguing (on much less rigorous grounds, to be sure) that our learning of people-society-culture is of the same kind as our learning of hard-soft-hot-cold-safe-dangerous.
We judge people not only by their results but by their motives. Great injustice and great harm arise from forgetting, ignoring, or rejecting consideration of either motives OR results. People who wish to praise often concentrate on whichever is praiseworthy; people who wish to condemn, on whichever is contemnible.
To the claim that I argue at the level of Charles Bell, I deny the claim: He argues (and thinks) at a very high level of abstraction and categorization. When I have parsed his arguments, I often disagree at least in part, and sometimes agree in part. He and I have to work hard to reach the point (stasis) where we understand and agree on our disagreement. But it is a challenge for me to work at his level and (pardon me, Charles!) the effort is often hard for me to budget. It would not surprise me if he has to work as hard to reach down to my level, and I thank him for the times he has obliged me.
The foregoing has been edited.
We thank you for listening and now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion ...
In Chapter 20, Atticus says in response to a heinous lie;
"Which, gentlemen, we know is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson's skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you."
Surely someone who is not the victim of endemic racism would say;
"Which, gentlemen, we know is in itself a lie as plain as the nose on your face, a lie I do not have to point out to you."
Maybe it's just me being oversensitive, and saying, 'a lie as black as Tom Robinson's skin,' is a perfectly non-racist metaphor.
The same as saying, 'a lie as black as chimney sweep,' But hold on, the connotation there is dirty or grimy not evil. In Atticus's world a white man with black skin is grimy whilst a black man's skin is abhorrent.
It may also be a lawyer-advocate using the words that will hit home hardest, by choosing a metaphor that links their assumptions of guilt back into themselves.
I don't think you're oversensitive to note the use. But I argue that you need to consider the whole constellation of motive and means in the character.
I would love for my characters to inspire such tangled discussion!
So if I grew up inland, where the lakes and rivers are freshwater, and one day learned the hard way that a tidal estuary is salty, I would be an anti-salinist? If I were a child who wandered off his cul-de-sac into heavy traffic, I would be an anti-motorist?
It takes time to unlearn, and it should. One outlier should not invalidate all data, but supplement it, and re-open the conclusions to question, not close them again. Nor should one throw away all new data. Just because Party W has always seemed to represent your interest, you should be ready to recognize when it doesn't.
And there is the greatness of an Atticus, surrounded all his life by blacks who have been forced to act inferior and subservient. Without changing his beliefs about people's capacities, he recognizes injustices that transcend his learned error and acts on them. He does not confabulate the one 'fact' (as he regards his error) with the question of Robinson's guilt or innocence.
You might say the same of the news-publisher ... but he knows that the free press relies on the courts to remain free, and he may also have it in for the Establishment of the town, so his motives might not be so clear.
So if I grow up surrounded by black people who are the product--or wreckage--of inner city schools, and I am surprised to find a black doctor in the emergency room, who rapidly computes dosage for a body weight and reels off alternative drugs and their side effects like the street kids name their half-brothers, am I a racist, or just exhibiting the limits of my experience?
Amy, AJanet, This link's for you.
I've been getting better, thanks to the levoflaxin, and I've done a little work. Today I've done a bunch of reading. Tomorrow I have to catch up on life (and my life is far simpler than yours, but still ...).
