Unpopular Opinions

[Daniel]

1 hour ago, oak said:

 

99 lurkers of TDB on the wall... yeah feels like getting drunk and sing all night long...

 

~belly-laughs-omg-belly-laughs~  so good.

[Daniel]

1 hour ago, oak said:

"To speak rarely is natural..." DDJ...23...I'm confused now....is it in the DDJ 23 or The Dao of lurkers ? 🤭

 

What does this mean?  To speak, rarely is natural?  ... rarely is natural?  speaking?  speaking is rarely natural? 

 

ohhhhhh.  I get it.  

 

"To speak rarely is natural" = "To speak is often un-natural!"  Un-natural?  That's the undead.  It's talking about Zombies.  Obviously.

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Unpopular opinion, per Laotzu: Zombies can talk!  You heard it here first.  Although, they really only know 1 word: "brains"

 

Unpopular opinion:  Zombies can dance.  See below. I cued it up to the good part, but the whole video is entertaining.

 

 

 

Edited September 19, 2023 by Daniel

[oak]

2 hours ago, Cobie said:

 

Edited September 20, 2023 by oak

[Apech]

11 hours ago, liminal_luke said:

What if a lurker is pressured to post and then we all change our minds?  Will the mods send a message: we really wanted you to speak up, but on second thought...

They should set up a Lurker sub section - anyone who posts there is immediately blocked from it because they are no longer a lurker.

[Taomeow]

5 hours ago, Apech said:

They should set up a Lurker sub section - anyone who posts there is immediately blocked from it because they are no longer a lurker.

 

This happened to me on a reddit sub.  I lurked for a year or so, then I felt like setting something straight.  To wit, the location of a city that was being discussed as holding the keys to some ancient mystery in its architecture.  I'm all for ancient mysteries and love to look at old architectural landmarks as puzzles full of symbology to decipher, but that discussion placed the city under scrutiny hundreds of miles to the east of where it's actually located, and landlocked it in order to support this or that point even though it was built as a seaport to begin with and remains one to this day.  I pointed it out and was immediately banned.  Turned out the geography genius who came up with that theory was a mod.        

[old3bob]

I was once on a site with a bunch of new age physic's and was not good enough for their groupies, thus got immediately kicked off after I posted  what I thought was hardly disruptive....

Edited September 20, 2023 by old3bob

[Apech]

44 minutes ago, old3bob said:

I was once on a site with a bunch of new age physic's and was not good enough for their groupies, thus got immediately kicked off after I posted  what I thought was hardly disruptive....

New age psychics should already know what you are thinking.

[old3bob]

Just now, Apech said:

New age psychics should already know what you are thinking.

 

some maybe...

[Taomeow]

I wish I hadn't misplaced an early online exchange where I got gently chastised by Marvin Minsky, no less (one of the fathers of artificial neural networks and the founder of the MIT AI laboratory).  The forum was about cognitive neuroscience, another one of his interests (as well as mine), and I made a joke which he found funny but off topic.  (The joke contained an unpopular opinion about gravity and black holes.)

[thelerner]

I was kicked off a Reddit writers short fiction forum.  Early on there was prompt for a story.  I forget what the prompt was but they wanted like, 400 words.  I wrote I could do it 75, wrote my story thought it was good, and got kicked off for not following directions.  sigh.  

[Nungali]

7 hours ago, Taomeow said:

 

This happened to me on a reddit sub.  I lurked for a year or so, then I felt like setting something straight.  To wit, the location of a city that was being discussed as holding the keys to some ancient mystery in its architecture.  I'm all for ancient mysteries and love to look at old architectural landmarks as puzzles full of symbology to decipher, but that discussion placed the city under scrutiny hundreds of miles to the east of where it's actually located, and landlocked it in order to support this or that point even though it was built as a seaport to begin with and remains one to this day.  I pointed it out and was immediately banned.  Turned out the geography genius who came up with that theory was a mod.        

 

Now I am left wondering what secrets the architecture of a land locked seaport might be  ?      

 

...... a really really looooong  slipway ? 

[Nungali]

3 hours ago, Apech said:

New age psychics should already know what you are thinking.

 

nah, because he said  they where actually  " new age physic's  "  .... imagine   tripped out  chanellers  running the Hadron Collider  ... that sorta  stuff

[Nungali]

 

I got permabanned from a forum because , in a PM with another member  he asked me ; " Do you think Mods  ever read our PMs ? " I said " Yeah probably, there is probably one reading this right now ."

 

Then I got a warning about telling lies about the moderators , so I asked  " if it was a lie and you where not reading our PMs how did you know I said it in the first place ? "  Answer ?  ..... permaban  for 'telling lies about the site '

 

 

 

 

[Taomeow]

25 minutes ago, Nungali said:

 

I got permabanned from a forum because , in a PM with another member  he asked me ; " Do you think Mods  ever read our PMs ? " I said " Yeah probably, there is probably one reading this right now ."

 

Then I got a warning about telling lies about the moderators , so I asked  " if it was a lie and you where not reading our PMs how did you know I said it in the first place ? "  Answer ?  ..... permaban  for 'telling lies about the site '

 

 

 

A riddle.

In a certain city there were knights who had armor-bearers.  All knights always told the truth and were loyal.  All armor-bearers always lied and were traitors.  

A certain person said: "I will lie to you.  I will betray you."  Was he a knight or an armor-bearer?  

Edited September 20, 2023 by Taomeow

[Apech]

9 hours ago, Taomeow said:

 

A riddle.

In a certain city there were knights who had armor-bearers.  All knights always told the truth and were loyal.  All armor-bearers always lied and were traitors.  

A certain person said: "I will lie to you.  I will betray you."  Was he a knight or an armor-bearer?  

 

Neither - he was the president.

 

 

[S:C]

11 hours ago, Taomeow said:

(The joke contained an unpopular opinion about gravity and black holes.)

Would you mind telling this unpopular opinion?  I’d be curious.

[Taomeow]

9 hours ago, stellarwindbubble said:

Would you mind telling this unpopular opinion?  I’d be curious.

 

The joke was funny when heard for the first time, a long time ago, but by now it's an old joke, probably not even counting as a joke anymore.   

Gravity sucks.  Black holes suck.

 

It's an unpopular opinion today -- the latest view is that, contrary to the earlier picture of what happens in the vicinity of a black hole, over 90% of infalling matter will never make it inside at all.  Instead it will get spewed out into the outer regions of the galaxy and return to the interstellar medium.  Matter is charged.  If a particle misses the event horizon and simply approaches a black hole, it's going to experience humongous acceleration, create a magnetic field, and magnetic fields change the direction of every other charged particle around them.  They will heat up, gain speed, emit light, and produce bipolar jets perpendicular to the plane of the black hole's  rotation.  So, a black hole has no special sucking power, it's just mega gravity, and apparently it doesn't suck.  

 

Good to know, right?  

[Nungali]

On 9/21/2023 at 8:33 AM, Taomeow said:

 

A riddle.

In a certain city there were knights who had armor-bearers.  All knights always told the truth and were loyal.  All armor-bearers always lied and were traitors.  

A certain person said: "I will lie to you.  I will betray you."  Was he a knight or an armor-bearer?  

 

Yes.

[S:C]

On 21.9.2023 at 8:53 PM, Taomeow said:

over 90% of infalling matter will never make it inside at all. 

Yes, sure good to know if one per chance might meet one  

 

Of what special kind is the 10% infalling matter that makes it inside, do you happen to know? Has it a specific charge or something?

Edited September 22, 2023 by stellarwindbubble

[Nungali]

Yes, black holes have always been an unpopular opinion with me .

 

if 'nothing can escape from them '  ..... why they got those 'beams' of (whatever type of ) energy coming outa them ? 

[Taomeow]

 

4 hours ago, stellarwindbubble said:

Yes, sure good to know if one per chance might meet one  

 

Of what special kind is the 10% infalling matter that makes it inside, do you happen to know? Has it a specific charge or something?

 

I don't think there's something special about that matter, just the fall of the dice...  but who knows, Einstein believed "god doesn't play dice" (then again, Einstein didn't believe in black holes.)  The theoretical anatomy of a black hole as envisioned today includes an event horizon, its spherical outer surface/boundary which, once something crosses that, won't let anything out.  But outside that, farther out and away from the boundary there's what they call the accretion disk, which does its own thing with compressed and spun up magnetic forces, and that's where over 90% of particles are going to end up while under 10% will indeed cross the event horizon -- or so the theory goes today.  The accretion disk is much bigger than the event horizon, so chances to wind up there look 90% better for stuff approaching the black hole than their chances to make it to the event horizon.  

 

But even for those that do it may not be the end of the story because there's stuff going on that causes particle-antiparticle pairs to appear, and theoretically it's possible that for some particles, one member of the pair might appear inside the event horizon while the other one will simultaneously be born outside of it.  Which means a doppelganger of sorts will show up outside the event horizon and go about its merry ways even though its double has been enslaved by the black hole.  

 

1 hour ago, Nungali said:

Yes, black holes have always been an unpopular opinion with me .

 

if 'nothing can escape from them '  ..... why they got those 'beams' of (whatever type of ) energy coming outa them ? 

 

 Beams (jets) don’t come from inside the black hole. They come from the accretion disk around it.

 

 

 

Edited September 23, 2023 by Taomeow

[old3bob]

On 9/19/2023 at 4:41 PM, Daniel said:

 

~belly-laughs-omg-belly-laughs~  so good.

 

hey, hey, what do you say to a drunken Tao bum early in the morning....

[Cobie]

 

12 minutes ago, old3bob said:

… what do you say to a drunken Tao bum early in the morning....

 

This?

15 minutes ago, ChiDragon said:

… Tao doesn't even exist. …

 

Edited September 23, 2023 by Cobie

[Daniel]

37 minutes ago, old3bob said:

 

hey, hey, what do you say to a drunken Tao bum early in the morning....

 

hey hey and up they rises... earlay in the morning!

 

All these "bum" jokes cause funny images in my mind.  A bum rising in early in the morning.  Hee-hee.

[Nungali]

Unpopular opinion ;

 

I didnt call extinct  hominids humans and I didnt call elephants and fictional characters people ... and I virtually got modded for that on my history site .

 

has political correctness gone this far now ?   I mean , it isnt even 'daobums' ... thats supposed to be 'academia '    WOW !

 

Silly me , I thought this might be interesting in the world of academia ?

 

https://www.sciencealert.com/evidence-of-a-wooden-structure-that-predates-our-species-uncovered

 

 

is this a wooden structure that predates humans ?

 

 they doth protest to much methinks :

 

" And I point out again that many experts use the word "human" to describe members of all species in the genus Homo, not merely Homo sapiens. And the group of beings who can be described as "people" is in theory possibly much larger than the group of "humans". It is possible that members of some or all of the species of apes, elephants, and cetaceans are intelligent enough that they should be classified as intelligent beings and thus "people". And of course if there are intelligent beings on other worlds they are "people" even though they may be far less "human" than any beings on Earth. "

 

 

 

here I was thinking 'people' where ;

 

" people

1. Humans considered as a group or in indefinite numbers. Often treated as a plural of person, especially in compounds.
2. The mass of ordinary persons; the populace. Used with the.
3. A body of persons living in the same country under one national government; a nationality.

 

No, because ..... wait for it ....

 

" As a long time reader of science fiction I know that humans, whether restricted to Homo sapiens or including all members of genus Homo, are a small subset of all the species of people existing in fiction.

Even people who don't read science fiction must be aware of many alien characters in science fiction movies and tv shows.

In ET: The Extraterrestrial ET is not depicted as being a human, but he is depicted as being a person.

In Star Trek there are species like Vulcans, Andorians, Klingons, Cardassians, etc. who are not depicted as being humans, but who are depicted as being people.

In Star Wars Chewbacca, Jabba the Hut, Yoda, Ashoka, Jar Jar Binks, etc. are not depicted as being humans but are depicted as being people.

And in fantasy there are species which may be more or less similar to humans but are people. In The Lord of the Rings they include Elves, Hobbits, Dwarves, Ents, and Orcs. Dragons are not depicted as being human in The Reluctant Dragon, Pete's Dragon, The Never Ending Story, or The Hobbit, but they are depicted as being people.

So a dictionary definition of "people" that restricts it to Homo sapiens, or to humans more broadly, is hidebound, reactionary, and out of touch with even popular culture which is always behind the most advanced thought. .

And if Earthlings ever make contact with a civilized extraterrestrial species which will probably be thousands or millions of years more technologically advanced, the survival of Homo sapiens may depend on having a definition of people which is not restricted to Homo sapiens or to humans. And some people might consider that a very important consideration.  "

 

So .... I am being against what 'some might consider a very important consideration ' that Chewbacca, dragons orcs hobbits etc  being fictional characters , are also now 'people' .

 

Its very unfair and politically incorrect to deny fictional characters  their right to be people , like us . AND I am being 'hidebound' and 'reactionary' in not considering fictional characters  as people    

 

I am gonna have to get rid of my old school definitions  and stop offending those poor fictional characters   and embrace them into the world of people  .... maybe soon they get their own toilets ?   Mens , Womens , disabled , fictional characters .  ?

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 23, 2023 by Nungali