Conquest '11

This year's Conquest was a little bit of disappointment.. Not enough action and this time we (the NPCs) didn't have fortress. So it was more like, players are playing and we were their discomfort element.

The plot was cycling around the closed seal of the "Technische Ratio" (no idea how to translate it properly, sry) It is the 5th and most powerful element of the ostracized (Schwarzes Eis, Untoten, Pestilenz and Leere). For some reason the NPCs cannot open this seal, so the elements got this honor. I personally cannot find much of a sense behind that action, because as we know, the "Technische Ratio" is on the side of the evil. Why should the elements (the good guys) want to set free the biggest evil? Hopefully there is a good explanation, different from "knowing there is a monster behind that door, makes you twice likely to open it". We'll see. Just patience (virtue I don't possess, unfortunately)..

Oh, and there is that awesome LARP I recently found the website of - 42k . A nice mix of futuristic cyber war. DO WANT! Plans in progress…

Bronx vs. Brooklyn

A young man lives in Manhattan near a subway express station. He has two girl friends, one in Brooklyn and one in the Bronx. To visit the girl in Brooklyn, he takes a train on the downtown side of the platform. To visit the girl in the Bronx, he takes a train on the uptown side of the same platform. Since he likes both girls equally well, he simply takes the first train that comes along. In this way he lets chance determine whether he rides to the Bronx or to Brooklyn. The young man reaches the subway platform at a random moment each Saturday afternoon. Brooklyn and Bronx trains arrive at the station equally often - every 10 minutes. Yet for some obscure reason, he finds himself spending most of his time with the girl in Brooklyn: in fact, on the average he goes there nine times out of ten. Can you think of a good reason why the odds so heavily favor Brooklyn?

:) Yeee, it's not a morally right scenario, but the reason is a good one.. I like the riddle..

paradoxes

Surprisingly, the whole western philosophy and logic are grounded on magic and are full of paradoxes. This doesn't make them less beautiful and useful, however..

Here some questions to ponder:


A classical example of statement, that is a paradox, but not recursive..


The Devil's argument:




BUT:

new Chomsky()

The language is one of the most amazing tools developed by humans. It reflects the way we think and the way we perceive our environment. It helps us transfer and preserve knowledge, emotions, experience. In my diploma thesis at the KIT, I had to work a lot with language and speech. I learned much about the acoustics of a speech. And I realized for myself, that the holy grail is the semantics and pragmatics of the language. We understand the acoustic part of human speech pretty well and therefore created accurate models of it. But the last % of perfect speech recognition performance can be gained only by understanding speech on top of parsing sounds successfully. In my opinion it is time to start more eagerly exploring structures that will capture the meaning and reflect the data organization of human mind. The problem here is, we need knowledge from engineering, linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy and behavioral psychology. We need a concept that will merge these areas and people brave enough to step aside of the path that is thought to be "the right". And while waiting for the new universal genius to be born.. a fun comic-shaped fact: