Subject:
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Re: I don't "believe" in Australia (was Re: John Leo's opinion)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 3 Oct 2002 03:12:16 GMT
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Viewed:
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803 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, David Koudys writes:
>
> > This is what I meant by Spock phrasing it better--he said something like 'on
> > a planet with positive gravity'--it's ST:TOS--when was the last time I
> > caught one of those episodes? ;)
>
> Was that from "The Alternative Factor?" I haven't seen much TOS in quite
> a while, so my memory may be faulty.
Actually, the phrase can be Googled and a WAV of it found fairly readily. The
episode was "Court Martial" and Spock was comparing his confidence in knowing
that if he let go of a hammer on a planet with positive gravity, he would know
that it had, in fact, fallen without having seen it do so to his confidence in
knowing that his captain would never click the third in a row of identical
buttons (labeled "Jettison Pod") without having first clicked the second button
(for "Red Alert").
Now that my laserdisc player is repaired, this thread was as good an excuse as
any to watch the episode again. Besides the human factor engineering blunder of
having identically shaped and operated controls achieve wildly different
results, there is the horribly sloppy storage (or worse, memory) partitioning
that allows a change in one program (the audiovisual recording of bridge
activities) affect another program (three dimensional chess), and the question
of what amounts to who has root access to the Enterprise's computer.
Don't miss the "lounge mix" orchestration of the theme playing under the
introduction of attorney Shaw.
Constantine
> The problem is that his statement as you quoted it had no boundaries, so
> we could only assume that it applied to the universe at large. With that in
> mind, then my destruction of his statement was valid. When his argument is
> further qualified, then certainly we can make better predictions within its
> framework. But even in that case context is everything--if the hammer were
> attached by a taut bungee cord to a bridge overhead, then the hammer would
> certain not fall when he dropped (ie, released) it, at least not initially!
<snip>
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