Several months ago I wrote the following:
"Yes, folks, I am back again! As many new noders are destined to, I fell away from the site for a short while, but somehow I was drawn back in, started reading the nodes again, and now have restarted writing. This will probably happen many times; why should I change it?"
After writing this, I did not return to the site until now.
I'm being lazy. I hope this will stop.
For those who don't know me, my name is Paul VanKoughnett, and I'm an American expat living in South Korea. I am interested in many things, starting with mathematics and moving on down to linguistics, go, Surrealism, what have you... Although I'm not a computer whiz, I am very interested in programming for its logical aspects. I'm a big fan of LISP, for example, because of its beautiful structure and its strength in recursion. In fact, I'm a fan of anything that involves paradox, regress, self-reference, or self-replication. This includes Douglas Hofstadter, who gets much less fame than he deserves, in my opinion. Here's an example:
"Thit sentence is not self-referential because 'thit' is not a word."
Politically, I am very liberal: being American, this pushes me into the Bush-hating camp. But I'm often very cynical of most aspects of politics, including the one that dictates that we can only have two political mindsets. More than that, I am a habitual skeptic of many aspects of The System, politically and relating to everyday life. What keeps me going? See above: "Life is good." "Things are not as bad as they seem." And it is true.
Philosophically, I am a skeptic, a Platonist, and a theist: the last means that I believe in God, but not in many aspects of most religions. In my opinion, religion should be personal: mine incorporates aspects of Deism, Christianity, Taoism, and Zen. But that, like everything, changes constantly.
"Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day.
Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
--Terry Pratchett
In the interests of curiosity, do not click here.
Some of you may know what a nomic is. For those who don't, I recommend looking at the site:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm
Anyway, I have started a small game via email, and anyone is invited to join. Just e-mail me at:
a l l i s p a u lATg m a i lDOTc o m. (It would be helpful if you /msg'd me as well.)
I will put you on the mailing list, send you the mailing list, and send you the .txt rules. I have removed my variant of the initial rules, but the basic ones can be found on Suber's site. |
