GENIUS FORUMS

Some really interesting speakers in the most recent atheist/humanist symposium.It's extremely long but some of the speakers are worth waiting for.

QSR may be particulalrly interested in the cosmologist and quantum phycicist speakers at the end of the 2nd session.The cosmologist argues for a eternal or "beginingless" past, and the the QM argues that the Bohr circle were rather premature in regards to "shit just happens".

http://thesciencenetwork.org/BeyondBelief2/

Ataraxia wrote:Some really interesting speakers in the most recent atheist/humanist symposium.It's extremely long but some of the speakers are worth waiting for.

QSR may be particulalrly interested in the cosmologist and quantum phycicist speakers at the end of the 2nd session.The cosmologist argues for a eternal or "beginingless" past, and the the QM argues that the Bohr circle were rather premature in regards to "shit just happens".

http://thesciencenetwork.org/BeyondBelief2/

Waitaminit. I just finished uploading Epictetus the other day (http://daybrown.org/epictus/epictus.html) and one of the things I ran across was his question of how do you know that the reasoning faculty you bring to questions like this is adequate to the task? Who gave you the criteria to evaluate whether the evidence you think you have is relevant or trivia?

Enlightening most men would consist of this without the paraglider.


http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... &plindex=1

daybrown wrote:Waitaminit. I just finished uploading Epictetus the other day (http://daybrown.org/epictus/epictus.html)

I reckon that would benefit from a different font,if possible.

Ataraxia wrote:

daybrown wrote:Waitaminit. I just finished uploading Epictetus the other day (http://daybrown.org/epictus/epictus.html)

I reckon that would benefit from a different font,if possible.

There are other places online to find Epictetus. Everything I post is in an experimental font. I know it looks weird, but dunno how far I can go to maximize readability, and then too, there's the ongoing evolution of the monitors themselves.

But for one, we are not trying to conserve ink on this screen. So, I've filled in the hollows of all the consonants. There is work by neurologists like Ramachandran that point out the algorithms in the occipital lobes that pick up on whether a form is filled or hollow. Theoretically, once your occipital pattern recognition subroutines pick up on this, you'll read lots faster.

My efforts are complicated by the way different monitors of different resolutions render text. with the lower res, say 1024x768 SVGA, the verticals in some letters like b,d,h,l, become so thin they disappear, Lots of them cant tell the diff between a lower case i and l with the dot above the i so small you cant see it. and if an i is next to an l, then sometimes it looks like two "l" like in the word "fall" which cant hardly be discerned from "fail",

But I post long works so that if you can get into one of them your occipital subroutines will pick up on the diffs before a couple chapters. I assume the work will be around a while as well. If you already have one of the new flat panels, say 1600X900, then the clarity is dramatically better. At the current rate of production, everyone will have that on their desktop in a couple years.

Then too, there's the issue of the content. Epictetus challenges a lotta sensibilities, and starts with the fact that everyone assumes that their reasoning powers are adequate to reach the truth. In this, he agrees that St. Paul, who said that reason is not adequate. But disagrees that faith is the answer. He makes the case that you can improve your powers of reason, and when you do, then you can approach these philosophical questions and get somewhere.

I'm not trying to make something that is easy to read. I am trying to put as much content on this screen as possible so that, as previous authors were aware, you could glance back at the "facing page" to see if what follows is logically consistent. Authors pretty much abandoned the scroll (which is what html is) in favor of the codex so that facing and previous pages could be easily referred to.

With the work I post, every idea appears on the same position on every page. Whether you are aware of it or not, your short term memory knows, so, as you do when reading a real book, you dont skim back looking for a particular string of words, but a particular location on a page where an idea was presented.

I just recently picked up on this, and have been suggesting that you open a second tab so that chapter can load while you read. Then, its easy to flip back and forth between pages to check to see if the presentation is, indeed, logically consistent.

The church only got as far as it did cause nobody ever stands up to challenge some bit of bullshit from the pulpit, showing the contradiction between the last remark and what was said earlier. ANZI text is designed hoping to facilitate the cross checking. The font is made as small as possible so as to put as many ideas on this screen as possible so that if there are logical inconsistencies they will be seen at a glance and thus more obvious. But to make the font small but still readable requires new ways to render the letters in more distinctive ways.

One trick I've not yet worked out is the data showing that the occipital lobes respond well to the diff between vertical and slanted lines.