From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V11 #211 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Monday, July 1 2002 Volume 11 : Number 211 Today's Subjects: ----------------- more entwistle [Jeff Dwarf ] 110% robyn content [drew ] Re: The Ox, bassists, and Yoruba ["Fric Chaud" ] asking for it (was: "New Music") ["Poole, R. Edward" ] Re: no time to think of clever subject line [gSs ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2002 01:38:33 -0700 (PDT) From: Jeff Dwarf Subject: more entwistle from: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/06/29/MN147026.DTL Entwistle will be replaced by British studio musician Pino Palladino. Original drummer Keith Moon died of a drug overdose in 1978. He was first replaced by Kenney Jones and later by Ringo Starr's son, Zak Starkey. Palladino played with Townshend on his 1993 U.S. solo tour and recently backed a lineup of rock royalty performing in honor of Queen Elizabeth's Golden Jubilee celebration at Buckingham Palace. A tour organizer said that Palladino had been keeping his schedule open in case Entwistle's heart condition caused him to miss shows on the tour. also an interview with john: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2002/06/30/PK128943.DTL (it's from the "pink section," which is prepared/printed in advance, which is why there are no reference in the intro to his passing. ===== "This week, the White House says President Bush meant no disrespect when he referred to the Pakistani people as 'Pakis.' But just to be on the safe side, White House staffers have cancelled his trip to Nigeria" -- Tina Fey, Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt . Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2002 02:28:08 -0700 From: drew Subject: 110% robyn content > From: "Poole, R. Edward" > This doesn't mean that an established belief is vulnerable to any > challenge > that isn't susceptible to conclusive refutation - the mere proffer of an > alternate proposition that falls short of being a demonstrable > impossibility > doesn't rise to the level of an actual doubt. Hey, dude, you should be a lawyer or something! > The funny thing is, I am a firm believer (in every sense) in Occam's > Razor. Here's some interesting remarks about Occam's Razor: http://hepweb.rl.ac.uk/ppUK/PhysFAQ/occam.html And here's one of the more interesting paragraphs: "Aristotle went too far in believing that experiment and observation were unnecessary. The principle of simplicity works as a heuristic rule-of-thumb but some people quote it as if it is an axiom of physics. It is not. It can work well in philosophy or particle physics, but less often so in cosmology or psychology, where things usually turn out to be more complicated than you ever expected." > just why is it that the nuclear weak force > is set as a natural law just precisely where it must be for matter to > exist? My answer to questions like these -- which I've posed myself before -- is that the formulation is backwards. It raises the suspicion that the nuclear weak force was set with the goal of matter, as opposed to matter appearing as the result of the nuclear weak force. The universe is what it is. It could, presumably, have been something else, and there's no reason to think that we live in the rightest of all possible universes. To pick a larger scale, what up with the Earth being so perfectly calibrated so as to support wonderful whimsical humanity? How did we get so lucky? Shit, musta been by design! It probably didn't look quite like this X million years ago when Earth was all volcanoes and soup. It won't look like such a hot omnipotent design X million years from now when we're all getting swallowed into a bloated red dying Sun. Things look pretty greenhousey now, though, so we conclude that Superguy in the Sky must have made it this way just for us. The truth -- as I see it -- is that we're here because we are, and if we hadn't been here something else would have. Why only one planet that supports life in our solar system? Why didn't smarty-pants God think maybe he should have designed planetary orbits and such so that maybe several planets could be incubator-distance from the Sun at the same time? But no, for one Earth we have 8 big rocks and gas balls. How precise is that? > Maybe there were a near infinite series of bangs & crunches until a > nice, > stable universe What, this one? By what time scale? > maybe some designing force knew that was the right natural law to > create and > just did it. I don't know, I'm just the agnostic in the corner, but > sometimes, not always, but sometimes it seems like it is science > (especially > modern physics) that is proposing the scenic detour around Jupiter, > while > the god crowd is all "He just walked behind the f*ckin' barn, can't you > see > that?" Sure -- the God explanation definitely seems simpler and more satisfying to people who feel intimidated and uncomfortable with the crazy, crazy world of modern physics. People who are observing the world in nice, naked-eye chunks and arithmetic as opposed to eensy particles and eye-blistering equations are going to look for a solution that involves going ZAP there's a chunk and loading them two by two onto the ark. But "simpler" is subjective. "Simpler" depends on which facts you're trying to explain. And if you're observing facts about the way the natural world behaves on an ultra-precise scale, you have to figure that if there is a god, she's got to know about all this stuff. She put it all here for us to find, and guess what, what we're finding is probably Tinkertoys to her. She couldn't have gone ZAP there's a person, because when we look closely at persons we find DNA and cells and things that she must have gone ZAP to create and put together. In other words, God and science have to coexist somehow, unless we're figuring that the guy went behind the barn but God planted the idea in our heads and the evidence on our video cameras that he went to Jupiter instead. To me God is not simpler. To me God is a short-circuit, a giant hand-wave, a slice of the Gordian knot (a solution only if you didn't particularly care that your nice string was now in much shorter pieces). God is what we say when we don't really want to explain, like when we tell a kid that something long and complicated to explain is "magic." God is the ultimate "because I said so, that's why." Yeah, that's simpler, because it doesn't explain shit. It does cause problems itself that make it far more complex, though, like: what is God made of? Where does God live? Where does the comprehensible material universe end and where does God begin? Why just one God? What purpose do humans serve? What purpose do tapeworms serve? If it's all by design, what's it all designed for? If God is omniscient and omnipotent and omnibenevolent, why does she allow evil? What kind of twisted fuck is this God creature anyway, and is there anything understandable about her at all? I'm not saying that God doesn't exist. I'm saying God is at least as complicated as physics, if only for the reason that God had to have _invented_ physics. Or invented it as an illusion, which is even more nail-bitingly freaky. Reality is weird and complicated and beautiful, and even Occam's Razor gets a bit dull if you use it too much. Drew ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2002 22:20:56 -0400 From: "Fric Chaud" Subject: Re: The Ox, bassists, and Yoruba On 30 Jun 2002 at 14:25, James Dignan wrote: > >Can he just go back to doing solo work? Empty Glass is ace. > > true. But Psychoderelict isn't. I love it except this folly of "English Boy". - -- Fric Chaud ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2002 00:46:08 -0400 From: "Poole, R. Edward" Subject: asking for it (was: "New Music") >Tanya Donelly, Beautysleep: >Beautiful but I slept. Why do some artists set themselves up in this way? I still remember that sonic youth review I read some years ago (which I completely disagree with): "This 'Experimental Jet Set' is 'Trash: No Star'(s) out of 4 stars." >The Breeders, Title TK: >In the dictionary next to "half-assed." >I'm very disappointed. Agreed. completely. The very few times it picks up any energy -- "Huffer" "Full On Idle" "Forced to Drive" -- it dissapates quickly and it never gets past decent-imitation-of-Pixies-or-"Pod"-era-Breeders. For a record 9 years in the making (well, 9 years in the waiting), it sounds extremely rushed in recording, like albini decreed that doing a second take wasn't punk rock enough, and underwritten as well (these are songs written very recently, I'm guessing; it doesn't sound like Kim's selecting the best of the dozens of songs she's written since "The Amps" but only recorded at home. Camper's "Tusk" -- is fun and frequently unrecognizable as either FM or CVB related. On the other hand, if you've listened to Camper Van Chadbourne material before, you'll be right at home here. - -ed ============================================================================This e-mail message and any attached files are confidential and are intended solely for the use of the addressee(s) named above. This communication may contain material protected by attorney-client, work product, or other privileges. 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To reply to our email administrator directly, send an email to postmaster@dsmo.com Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky LLP http://www.legalinnovators.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2002 09:50:01 -0500 (CDT) From: gSs Subject: Re: no time to think of clever subject line On Fri, 28 Jun 2002, Natalie Jane wrote: > outside the godless-liberal-communist Portland/Ashland/Eugene axis. liberalism and communism are 180 degress apart. when i think of the communists and all the glory communism has brought this world, the first thing that comes to mind is stalin. the communists worship the man, still. how can such a person be so revered? gSs ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V11 #211 ********************************