A Philosophy of Games

Let’s try something a little different.  Before you click the “more” link, do me a favor.  Either in your head or on paper or whatever, define the word “game.”  The more specific, the better.  You probably had something in your head before the undertaking, due simply to the title of this essay.  Hopefully you’ve adequately defined it by now, so let’s continue.

 

Part II: Anti-Green

Continuing the series begun here, we now present a refutation of the pro-green statement:

We first need to determine the “opposite view on the topic.”  We will take the more general “green is NOT the best color” position, as opposed to “green is the not-best (i.e. worst) color,” or “not-green (perhaps magenta?) is the best color.”  To show that green is not the best color, we aim to argue that “best” is an inherently subjective term and that no objective measure of “most satisfactory” can be made.

 

Can A Color Be “The Best”? Part I: Intro + Pro-green

I am currently taking a philosophy course at the local community college, the subject matter of which is “critical thinking and writing.”  It is essentially a logic class, and I am really enjoying being “initiated” into the fold.  Learning the names of the informal fallacies is like learning secret code, and drawing up the contradiction/contrary square and learning about categories is great fun.

One assignment in particular provided me with both a lot of food for thought and a great deal of amusement.  The assignment was to state a “truth claim” and defend it in written form.  Following this, we were supposed to defend the opposite side of the argument.  Finally, the assignment had us come down off the fence and decide which side of the argument we thought had better points.  It was interesting and fun to defend two separate positions as well as possible, and I have decided to post my essay as a series here, taking each part in turn. Comments on the validity of the reasoning, about your thoughts on my decision, or about which color is  actually the best are most welcome.

Without further ado:

 

The Makeover

I’ve been thinking lately about the visual effectiveness of this blog in conveying ideas that are contained primarily in the form of large blocks of text.  Sometimes it is hard for me to read through my own posts, and while I am aware that this is almost certainly my own fault for being excessively wordy, I also wonder whether there is some component to it that is dependent upon sans-serif fonts and blue hyperlinks instead of grey, etc.

Consequently, I have changed the theme to one that is at least a little easier on my eyes, does a bit better to separate block quotes and links from normal text, and in general makes me feel as though I am being very efficient and benevolent to my non-existent readership.

Non-existent readership:  Please let me know your thoughts on this visual shift — if the text is easier to read now, if the layout is more intuitive, and so on.  Our primary concern is to make it easy for you, the reader, to waste time on somebody else’s mundane thoughts, including my newest post on the color green.

 

Muse: The Resistance Review Blurb

Given that this pathetic blog’s name is taken from an album by the rock band Muse, it would exceedingly poor form to not at least pretend to like the band long enough to crank out a half-hearted review of their latest CD (note: I really like Muse but do not particularly enjoy writing reviews.  Be gentle).   I finally purchased The Resistance a few weeks ago, and have been spending some quality time with it.  If you’re a just-give-me-the-verdict kind of reader, read no further: yay. Here, briefly, are some extra thoughts.  Caveats: I am necessarily using language that will make more sense to Muse fans than to those on the outside.  I also reserve the right to use audiophile lingo inappropriately.  All of these songs are available on Youtube, but I’m not going to link except to the official Muse page.

 

Coming Up With Witty Titles: When Writing Intelligent Things Takes Too Long

Filler: Lately I’ve been waffling between a desire to write something here and crippling fear (read: minor discomfort) over whether I even have anything worth writing.  The result has been quite a few creative titles to non-essays that may or may not ever see the light of day.  I’ve taken the liberty of posting some ideas below as a sort of outline to some things I’d like to post here, given an infinite amount of time.  Feel free to comment on which you’d like to see next, given no information whatsoever besides titles.

Hymns Contain Promises

Bosons are Extroverts

“The Soul That Sins Shall Die”

Green: Can a Color Be “The Best”? [in three parts]

Christianity and “The Issues”

Humor is Relative: Critiquing Big Bang Theory

My Charismatic Experience: Christian Fortune Tellers

In Defense of Administration

Dogs on the Beach, or Why I Am a Cat Person

One or more of these is already underway, but I don’t always post things in the order in which they are written.  Something will be posted soon though, hopefully.



 

Childlike Faith: That One Thing That Jesus Talked About One Time

I’ve been helping out with child care on Thursday mornings at the church I attend.  A women’s bible study is meeting and involved mothers will drop their pre-kindergarten youngsters off for a morning of fun with the similar-aged anklebiters.  I signed up not knowing what exactly it would be like; I’ve worked with children of almost all ages from grade school to college (mostly in the capacity of instructor), but toddlers are somewhat of a new bag for me.  Somewhere along the path of aging I seem to have lost the capacity for “Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes” and put-your-hands-in-your-lap-and-quiet-down rhymes.

At the most recent gathering, I found myself hesitating to perform along with my supervisor as she led the children in a Jesu-centric rhyme involving hugging oneself and waggling fingers:

“Jesus is kind and gentle and good.  I’ll be like Jesus and do as I should.”

 

The Decline Of US Reading As Perpetrated By US Schools

Let’s play a game today.  Before clicking on the “More…” link below, please read the following excerpt and post a comment critiquing the writing style by any or all rubrics you deem appropriate.  Feel free to comment on the paragraph’s style, grammar, word choice, but whatever else you do please also include a thought on the paragraph’s “readability.”

Please prepare to supply a readout of your findings and recommendations to the officer of the Southwest Group at the completion of your study period.  As we discussed, the undertaking of this project implies no currently known incidences of impropriety in the Southwest Group, nor is it designed specifically to find any.  Rather, it is to assure ourselves of sufficient caution, control, and impartiality when dealing with an area laden with such potential vulnerability.  I am confident that we will be better served as a company as a result of this effort.

As soon as you’re done grading and posting, read on.

 

Muons Are Difficult To Talk About

For the past two summers, I had an easy job.  That is, easy to talk about.  Every conversation went something like:

“So, what’s your job?”

“Oh, well I’m doing research up at Westmont.  I’m working with the new telescope.”

“Oh really!  How interesting.  What are you looking at?”

“Well, this summer I’m looking at asteroid orbits by performing astrometry on CCD images.  Since the asteroid is much closer to us than the stars, it moves relative to them in successive photos looking at the same coordinates in the sky.  We take three to five images like that each night for about a week, then use those points and essentially “regress” an orbit out of them, since each set of points only corresponds to one orbit.”

“Wow, that’s interesting.  What is the goal?”

“Well once we get an orbit, we can plot it, and see how close we are to the accepted literature.  If we determine that our telescope is accurate enough, we can submit data to the Harvard Minor Planet Center and potentially get published in their circulars.  We can also do some real nice asteroid research.  There are always critical-list objects whose orbits aren’t nicely defined and need to be observed more, or we could look at Near-Earth Objects, which have the potential to cross Earth’s path.”

“Wow, how interesting!  What an intelligent and attractive physicist-to-be you are!”

 

POETRY OVERLOAD

I found it extremely humorous that while washing dishes yesterday, the following limerick, on the subject of our dish towel, suddenly jumped into my head. I blame high school poetry.

There once was a towel in the kitchen.
Its blue and white pattern was bitchin’.
It dried all of the plates
From which we then ate;
All without busting the stitchin’.