You might remember jinnderella, I certainly do! She earned my eternal favor by publicly praising my blog on LGF. Well, while I was away, she started her own blog: Hot Needle of Inquiry! Now I can be her fan too.
A lot of time is spent in the blogverse aguing about the Nature of Islam. Islam is alternately a religion, an addin ('way of life'), a system, a world-view. It is immutable, it is changing all the time, it can never change, it will change. I guess I thought that the addin was the best model, until I got involved with Evolutionary Games Theory (EGT) as a side-effect of one of my interminable and unresolveable arguments about Artificial Intelligence with Zombie.According to Evolution and the Theory of Games (John Maynard Smith), an Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) is a strategy such that, if all the members of a population adopt it, no mutant strategy can invade. Consider that Islam had 1400 years to evolve a stable strategy set. The selective advantage that gives Islam such an edge, is the "uncreated, revealed Qu'ran", which enforces the uniform adoption of the strategy set.
This sounds like Judaism too. Needless to say, Judaism’s ESS is somewhat different from Islam’s.
Go visit her, now!
UPDATE: I just realized that the name of jinnderella’s blog is a reference to the Gom Jabbar (scroll down). I too am a fan of Dune, an account of a fictional ESS.
Posted by David Boxenhorn at August 31, 2004 12:55 PM"Hot Needle of Inquiry" sounds like it should be a Gom Jabbar/Dune reference, but it isn't.
The Gom Jabbar was a poison-tipped needle used in the Bene Gesserit death-alternative trial. The Hot Needle of Inquiry is the name of a spaceship in Larry Niven's novel Ringworld. The spaceship is the creation of a species of intelligent, spacefaring, cat-like carnivores, just the kind of critters that would use a hot needle to extract information from a prisoner.
Jinnderella titles another of her posts "The Art of Kanly" - now that is a Dune reference for sure.
Nice bloggim (yours and hers) - todah rabah fer th' referral!
Posted by: Steve at August 31, 2004 10:26 PM PermalinkI stand corrected. I did read Ringworld once, and I enjoyed it a lot, but it was more than half a lifetime ago. I guess it was the other Dune references that led me down the garden path.
Posted by: David Boxenhorn at August 31, 2004 10:40 PM PermalinkOh, and thanks for the compliment. Did you ever notice what a nice Hebrew word blog would make?
Balagti – I blogged
Balagta – you blogged (m)
Balagt – you blogged (f)
Balag – he blogged
Balga – she blogged
Balagnu – we blogged
B’lagtem – you blogged (m pl)
B’lgaten – you blogged (f pl)
Balgu – they blogged
Evlog – I will blog
Tivlog – you will blog (m)
Tivl’gi – you will blog (f)
Yivlog – he will blog
Tivlog – she will blog
Nivlog – we will blog
Tivl’gu – you will blog (pl)
Yivl’gu – they will blog
Boleg, boleget, bolgim, bolgot – participles
Livlog – infinitive
Bliga – verbal noun
Blog! – blog! (command)