Bollywood and feminism touch up

Not a big fan of Bollywood musical cinema but Morquendi has a nice little analysis/thoughts about a few movies with a feminist view point. Have a read ...... while I contemplate on writing something about current op/ed debates on feminism in Oz and Yummy Mummies

Purpose as a self-evident truth

The Purpose Principle:

it is a higher moral principle to pursue purposeful thought or behavior with someone else's purposeful goals in mind, and never pursue a purpose when it leads to someone else's loss of purpose

Thinking about the pupose of purpose this hypotheses/idea in the American Scientist approaches the realms of self-evident truths, at least in my view. Here are a few quotes

The atoms in my brain and body today are not the same ones I had when I was born. Nevertheless, the patterns of information coded in my DNA and in my neural memories are still those of Michael Shermer[note: the author]. The human essence, the soul, is more than a pile of parts—it is a pattern of information......

...Life's most basic purpose is survival and reproduction, and for 3.5 billion years, organisms from the pre-Cambrian to us form an unbroken continuity....

....Humans have an evolved sense of purpose—a psychological desire to accomplish goals—that developed out of behaviors that were selected for because they were good for the individual or the group....

...With provisional purpose we define our goals, but there is an inherent structure to the human condition that helps delimit our search...

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...The width of the pyramid at each level reflects the degree to which purposeful sentiment is under evolutionary control. The height of each level indicates the degree to which purposeful sentiment extends beyond us.....

....Thomas Jefferson suggested one answer in a letter to Thomas Law in 1814: "These good acts give pleasure, but how it happens that they give us pleasure? Because nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses." .....

Purpose is personal, and people satisfy this deep-seated need in countless ways.....

....Morality and purpose are inextricably interdigitated—you cannot have one without the other.....

It will be interesting to see if biological and social sciences can go about trying to prove this hypothesis.

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I feel like blogging a few more words on purpose. Take away the means to a purposeful life from someone and watch them fall into depression or act self-destructlively. IMHO, fullfilling the purpose principles in ourlives is an important (probably the most) part of an individuals abiltiy to lead the good life. Hopefully this will contribute more to Liberal Democratic ideals.

Planes, suites and corporates

It's been a while since I caught a plane interstate around working hours. Today I had a chance and I had nearly forgotten how uniformed the corporate travellers are. Dark suites and light colour shirts/tops seem to cross the male-female divide. The styles of the suites and shirts might change but the dress code is roughly the same. Put this together with the laptop cases and black footwear and you tend to end up with the majority of corporate travellers. The IT guys are specially noticeable as they don't tend to wear jackets but branded shirts, chinos, PDAs and the omnipresent mobile phone placed in an easy to reach position on the body. ( Tablet PCs coming soon ?). Good looking seems to be a requirement in most cases too unless you are IT.

Being a non-customer facing, casually dressed, person I usually don't have to travel but when we have to visit customers/users on-site the dress code appears. What is it about this sort of clothing that attracts people to it? In many ways it is a uniform look eventhough these are not essential services personnel. I think it drives a perception of responsibility, structure and authority. So can the modern uniform display creativity?

Disabled, Discarded and Disinformed

Funny things have been happenning in how we treat the intellectually disabled in Australia lately. Most intellectually disabled look like the majority of people around you and I, but they act in ways we never do. In most cases an intellectuall disablity does not betray itself in the physical appearence of a person but through their actions. Should the law enforcements be able to reconize such a person ? are they trained to handle such situations/people?

Wrongfully arresting and allegedly beating them or treating them as aliens is never an option in a civilisation. So what are we becomming ? unaustralian ? What becomes of a nation that treats it's citizens in this manner?

It's raining records

Link

It's been rainning records in the last 24-48 hrs. I couldn't sleep well, the wind was gusting and thoughts of branches falling on the house kept the nightmares real. The city is usually known for it's four-seasons-in-a-day behavior but having a winter break in the middle of summer has been interesting.

Woke up to announcements asking people not to come into the city unless it was absolutely a necessity. That's a first for me. Apparently the roads around the city were under warter, electricity outages was playing havoc with traffic, trains, trams and vehicles were blocked by flash floods and fallen trees.

I did manage to ride to work in the morning avoiding most of the damage but on my way home a car park I ride across was divided in half by an uprooted tree. Hmmm... must learn how to jump fallen trees. Is this just a freakish storm or part of something bigger?...My bet it's a freak!

Apparently people find the term Climate Change less worrying than Global Warming. Have you heard any US Republicans use the G work lately ?

Link

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Update

Some links above are at www.theage.com.au, registration required or try www.bugmenot.com.

emerge system segmentation core dump - - - Arrrgh!!!!

Lately I've been trying to upgrade my Gentoo installation. I have 2004.0 and It started out as a system upgrade of the latest packages. No luck, compiling glibc causes gcc to core dump. Next ,tried doing a proper migration/upgrade from 2004.0 to 2004.3, glibc is again causing the same problem. Looks like it's this bug.

The next option is to get the 2004.3 package iso(s) and install the x86 binaries before doing a custom build. There is an emerge option to download binary packages from a mirror but there aren't any binary download sites available, have I missed something ?

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Update:

Managed to update gcc to 3.4.3 first. Using this the rest of the system ( including glibc ) compiled and updated safely.