Mission

is all wrong. Or it will drive you batty. It's a tosser. Actually I think it would be wonderful to publish a collection of peoples personal theories on physics. And maybe a companion piece on peoples theories about what Physicists are covering up. Oh, yes. Feynman took me to task on that one. He gave me quite the tongue lashing in his Basic Physical Laws tape. (Only he gave it to me over 40 years ago.) I am duly humbled and will never forget the lesson of the double-slit experiment on light. Hooray, photons. (Just in passing, he mentioned pi-plus mesons, which I foolishly felt compelled to look up so that I could determine that there is no depth to my ignorance.)

At last, the last. I half suspect that blackjohn and I are the only ones reading it anyhow. I've even caught him going cross-eyed on occasion. (Crom! Where is the man these many days?) The last thing I came across that I wanted to discuss was the idea of ideas as strange attractors in the mind. First, what is a strange attractor? Heck, what is an attractor? An attractor is a thing that...attracts. There you go, let's all head for the pub. No, of course it's not that simple - well it is, but it isn't. When you plot a dynamic system (thinking would be a dynamic system) (so would a leaf falling off a tree) in phase-space (a place where you plot dynamic systems) you get a diagram explaining (more or less) changes in whatever is moving dynamically. Of course, it's much more alarmingly complex than that, but that's enough to get to attractors. Most dynamic systems are deterministic. They tend to go to some end point or repetitive cycle. The leaf falling above will end up on the ground - that's the end point. A pendulum pushed once with with no other forces acting upon it will go back and forth the same distance forever - that's the deterministic cyclical motion. Attractors are things that the line representing changes tend toward. Sort of like a planet orbiting a sun; The planet is attracted to the sun and thus it goes through a fairly regular path over time, always being acted upon (by gravity) and thus attracted to the sun. So the sun in that example would be an attractor and the path of the planet the dynamic system. Strange attractors are attractors that cause the dynamic system to tend to be attracted to the attractor except that they have chaotic movement. That is, the path moves like our example planet around the sun, without truly following the same path twice. At least that's how I understand it. Note that this is all tremendously oversimplified and the real chaotic plots in phase space do not necessarily look like planets orbiting an imaginary sun. But the idea is fairly well the same I think. Blah, blah, blah. All that to get to the notion that the brain operates in a chaotic fashion with ideas as strange attractors. Ideas skitter through our minds splitting, dividing, yes, bifurcating if you will. That is they divide, tend to move here and there and act, for all the world, like a chaotic system as I comprehend this whole mess. Let's take the idea "Halloweenie" from the avatar post. That's the strange attractor (strange, indeed) for ideas flowing through my mind. Now, everytime I think of the notion "Halloweenie" I start off with the Bugs Bunny quote I listed in that post. (Sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Ok, that's all wrong, but I thought it was funny.) From there, my ideas caroom off each other, taking a different path, possibly chaotic if you believe any of this stuff. Each time, I start with the strange attractor "Halloweenie" move onto Bugs Bunny and Marvin Martian, then my mind diverges every time. Maybe I think of the relationship of Marvin to K-9 and start thinking about my relationship to my old dog Scooper as a kid. Or maybe I don't go that way and I think of Daffy Duck in Duck Dodgers in the 24th and Half Century. Maybe I think of halloween and carving pumpkins. All this from "Halloweenie" which attracts my thoughts as the circulate around this strange (very strange) attractor and create variations on that theme. The amazing thing is, I can ideate three times in this writing alone and come up with three very different outcomes. Our minds are amazing that way and the more you use them, the better they become at associating. At least mine has. I love associating - I'm sitting here doing it now. But there is a pattern to all this and an order to the chaos (if you will), that suggest to me that chaos mathematics may well describe how our minds work. This means (if it's true) that we could create an artificial intellegence using chaos mathematics that may, if it had our experiences, possibly replicate our way of thinking. It would not necessarily replicate our thinking, though. Just as I have created three different paths in mental phase-space from one idea (which actually is, most likely, due to sensitivity to initial conditions), so an accurately functioning artificial intelligence machine would probably come up with many different outcomes based on it's initial conditions. Gee, now I want to try it.

Don't thank me too quickly...you may actually be right and I wrong. (Although I do believe the things I've said.) You've read a lot for someone who's new. Kudos. I'd treat Pyle's stuff as fact and fiction combined. He seems to be one of the big sources of a lot of the pirate myths that have become "fact". I've heard good things about Botting, but I've never read anything by him. Where's Foxe? He'd be a more authorative source for this info than I am. I honestly don't know. I do know it was a period of political and societal unrest on the mainland and that there were all these political pamphlets being published from reading up on the controversy over whether Defoe wrote Pyracy or not. (Apparently not, BTW.) You might just check out piratesinfo.com, Phillip. They dip more deeply into the scholarly well than we do at this site. You'll find a much more spirited debate over this issue if you search for info on Captain Misson, rebels, and such like. Pay particular attention to posts by Foxe and Tony Malesic. Pay no attention at all to posts by dt. (Tell him I said that. ) _____________________ "The best we can say of any account is not that it is the real truth at last, but that this is how the story appears now." -Joseph Freeman

"Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while." I'll let someone else have a go at this one.

So that would make it your turn.

Well, we know of four pirates out of hundreds who had articles outlining behavior and treatment on a pirate vessel. Others may or may not have had such articles. It is pretty cool, though. I'd have to research it, but I'm not sure we could say they were the first to do so. It was the age of enlightenment... I don't know about the "underlying social changes" you suggest. Can you provide evidence? I'd sure like to read about this from source materials. Books? Angus Konstam is also good (not source). One of my favorite curio pieces is a rather lurid, alleged piece of source material containing short accounts of people who were prisoners of pirates. It's called Captured by Pirates, edited by John Richard Stephens. For general knowledge of Treasure Hunting in general and the Spanish Fleet in particular, I highly recommend Treasure of the Atocha by R. Duncan Mathewson III. It's a very detailed account of Mel Fisher's hunt for the Atocha off the Florida Keys. I found it fascinating personally.

Er, well. I guessed it. This is a really minor line, but if one of you re-enactors doesn't know this one, I shall be severely disappointed. "I ask for nothing!" "And you shall receive it, in abundance!"

I'm not condemning pirates; I find them as fascinating and colorful as anyone on this board. But neither am I going to paint them in rosy hues just because I want them to be something that evidence says they are most likely not. Most of the source material that supports the idea that pirates were rebelling against societal norms that I know of is fictional (the stories of Captains Misson, Lewis and Cornelius have all been proven more or less fictional). Some historical evidence also points to the fact that life on a pirate ship was every bit as difficult as it was on RN vessels. Many pirate captains were very strict and the punishments meted out were harsher than on a Naval vessel. I'd be cautious of any book by Marcus Rediker. He knows a lot of history, but he has a definite agenda in his books...he admittedly leans heavily towards Marxism and has a tendancy to use information that supports that from what I've read. Most of the books available on piracy are not source material. If I were you, I'd stick with The General History of the Most Notorious Pyrates, attributed to Daniel Defoe and/or Captain Charles Johnson (excepting the three stories mentioned above which have been more or less proven to be false) and The Buccaneers of America by Esquemeling. David Cordingly also writes some pretty good stuff based on source material, but it is not true source. If you can lay your hands on pirate trial reports, those are also good. You may even find some material to support your notions there, although a man is apt to say a lot of things to keep his neck out of the noose. As for the end of piracy...it still hasn't ended. There are a lot of factors that figure into the end of the Golden Era. Yours might be one, although I consider it highly unlikely. More likely, it could be due to two facts: 1) In the early/mid 18th century the caribbean island govenors started cracking down on piracy and 2) The british fleet making a concerted effort to better police Europe, the Caribbean and the American colonies. Those are things of which we have proof . _________ "It is scientific to say what is more likely and less likely and not to be proving all the time what is possible and impossible." -Richard Feynman

Oh, ah. Now I see why you think I would have known it. Is it The Fog?

There's an absolutely wretched POS book (IMO) by Frank Sherry called Raiders and Rebels that seeks to make the case that pirates were advancing an agenda of freedom from tyranny and a load of similar tripe. From my research, the facts seem to indicate differently. It was far more financially renumerative to be a pirate than a sailor. It was also far more risky on many levels. I've no doubt that there were some people who appreciated the freedom offered by a pirate's life as opposed to a RN sailor, but human nature leads me to believe that most of them just wanted to make a quick buck. If they had a philosophical stance, it was probably just a convenient way to justify making a quick buck. I would be very skeptical of someone explaining Golden Era piracy in terms of rebellion and revolution. One of the favorite examples used by folks propigating this stuff is Captain Misson. However, I find that most of the rabid people I've talked who support the "pirates as rebels" theory have done precious little true source research and don't realize that Misson is a literary confection designed to roil the politically active European culture. Golden Era pirates were criminals - they may (or may not) have justified this in their minds through some convoluted explanation. This doesn't change the fact that the end goal of pyracy was to steal goods, use them or, more likely, sell them to a fence and thereby make a quick buck. _________ "It is scientific to say what is more likely and less likely and not to be proving all the time what is possible and impossible." -Richard Feynman

I have a friend who has the creepiest grin you've ever seen. It's practically malicious. Even evil. For some reason, I picture them whenever someone writes *grin* of <g>. Smilies are the best emotional conveyance. LOL will do just fine too. I'm too cheap to buy all the stuff I have on VC to DVD. I convert when there's something extra that interests me. I still don't have any of the Bond films on DVD except the last one. Do your feet move like Snoopy's? ("Sup-sup-supper time. Suppertime!")

OF COURSE you mean Tim Curry. I hope. (Otherwise, I can't picture it at all. Explain it to me. Better yet, don't. )

Ah, that's why I don't recognize it. I believe I can count the number of horror films I've seen on one hand. (And that's including Arachnophobia and Silence of the Lambs.)

Y'know, that design would look awesome on a leather jacket. (I'd feel like Tim Curry wearing the bodice, though. Except not so skinny. Besides, I always liked Riff Raff better as a character...)

They do that because they don't yet have a score for the movie. As Joshua said, they find one they can "rent" that fits the mood of the trailer. It's sort of fun to try and figure out which film the music came from for various trailers. (They do stuff like that at the music site where I post.)

Wow, that's cool. (Not exactly my style, though ) They ought to make it in color-dyed leathers. What is it going to cost, if I may be so bold?

Sorry, Mick. All my cartoons are on ancient, creaky ol' video cassettes. I have read good things about the Looney Tunes Golden Collections, though. Not to be contrary, cuz' I generally agree with Sophia's tastes, but I dislike the faux movie collections like Quackbusters and even the acclaimed The Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie. Give me the 7 minute shorts, uncut and unedited, the way I remember them. Most words are fascinating, it is the way people abuse them that is annoying (er, me included). I am no fan of overkill, either. For example LMAO, or, worse, ROTFLMAO is absurd. To console myself when I see it, I sometimes imagine the users of such things doing as much. (Now that's funny.) Sorry in advance if you use them, but I stand firm on this point. Anyone who has seen the Cow and Chicken cartoons may remember the devil character rolling woodenly around on the ground in the opening credits. That combined with the cartoon's queer focus on butts reminds me of ROTFLMAO.)

Quiche. So I was vainly trying to find the quote where Bugs Bunny says, "Nah. Too obvious." when Wile E. Coyote is talking about his plans to get Bugs so I could use it on the Sergeant Hulka thing in the movie quotes game thread. (Following all this so far?) And I couldn't find it because it doesn't exist! As I searched through the on-line crapola and my own, personal cache of quotes I have saved in Word format, it came to me that he used that line in Little Red Riding Rabbit with the hilariously obnoxious Red Riding Hood teen. "Hey Grandma! That's an awfully big nose for you. Ta' have!" In that one, Bugs is trying to help the wolf hide in all these absurd places and he says, "Nah. Too obvious." to himself. Which isn't nearly as funny as the Wile E. Coyote gag, which goes like this: Coyote: "What if I lured him into a rock crusher?" Bugs: "Too complicated." Coyote: "What if I built a Burmese tiger trap?" Bugs: "Too much detail!" Coyote: "Yes. Too much detail." This led to me finding a whole bunch of Wile E./Bugs lines, which I am posting here for future reference: "Daddy! You're back from Peru. We thought you'd been run over by an elevator." Wile E. pushes Bugs away, rejecting his "son." "Boo hoo. Oh, boo the hoo. I've been rejected by my onlyest father." "Wile E. Coyote. Super genius. I like the sound of that! Wile E. Coyote. Suuuperrr Geeenius." Coyote, typing: "Rock. Falling. What'll. I. Do. ?" Computer response: "Go back and take your medicine." Bugs: "Are you in, genius? Are you in, capable? In solent? In possible?" Oh God, I love that one in particular. Bugs: "So what are you having for lunch?" Coyote: "Stew." Bugs sticks his ear in to taste the stew. Bugs: "What kind of stew is it? Hmm. Rabbit ear stew. Very good, too." Coyote: "What kind of wine goes best with wild game? You are game, aren't you?" Bugs (smirking): "Oh, uh, I'm game alright." Coyote: "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Mud. Bugs: "And remember: mud spelled backwards is dumb!" And, the piece de resistance: Bugs: "Eh, what's up, doc?" Coyote: "Allow me to introduce myself: My name is Wile E. Coyote, Genius. I am not selling anything, nor am I working my way through college..." Bugs: "I.." Coyote: "...and so, let's get down to cases: you are a rabbit and I am going to eat you for supper. Now don't try to get away! I am more muscular, more cunning, faster and larger than you are and I'm a genius! While you could hardly pass the entrance examinations to kindergarden. So, I'll give you the customary two minutes to say your prayers." Bugs: "I'm sorry mac. The lady of the house ain't home and besides, we mailed you people a check last week." Coyote: "Why do they always want to do it the hard way?" And that's just about the way my mind works. :)

"Chicks dig me, because I rarely wear underwear and when I do it's usually something unusual. But now I know why I have always lost women to guys like you. I mean, it's not just the uniform. It's the stories that you tell. So much fun and imagination. Lee Harvey, you are a madman. When you stole that cow, and your friend tried to make it with the cow. I want to party with you, cowboy. If the two of us together, forget it. I'm gonna go out on a limb here. I'm gonna volunteer my leadership to this platoon. An army without leaders is like a foot without a big toe. And Sergeant Hulka is always gonna be here to be that big toe for us. I think that we owe a big round of applause to our newest, bestest buddy, and big toe... Sergeant Hulka." There you are then. I didn't use it because everyone would have gotten that. (BTW, it's not too hard to put one over on me. Just pick a movie I've never seen...or, occasionally one I have seen. (I can't believe I missed a quote from Patton. Oh, me.))

To be honest, it doesn't ring a bell at all.

Nobody? How about another quote from this movie: "Hey, this is a loading zone. You can't park here." "We're not parking it we're abandoning it."

Those must have been some stickers! Ok, random thought. I hate the background colors on this site. I am sitting here post-eye doctor, my pupils as big as saucers trying to read the site. I have to highlight everything to see it. Who picked dark brown and tan for black text?

Nope. I've never seen Swordfish.

I came across the concept in the book The Selfish Gene. It's kind of a fuzzy thing conceptually, but I really like the word. Meme. Having some programming background, it's appealing on that level as well. Sort of reminds me of classes of objects a bit.

Nope. This has been sitting dead for too long though. It's from Twelve Monkeys - a weird movie, to be sure. Not as weird as Jacob's Ladder though. Here, try this instead: "What happens if I refuse to get on the bus?" "Oh, you look like a sensitive, intelligent guy. Don't make me shoot you."