I can't wait for the retrospective on this Onion commentary!

The spirit of Hitch lives on in videosift comments, where the toss can and will be argued against you.

I don't think i ever appreciated him when he was alive, in retrospect it was a tragic loss. He was a great mouth piece for the rational. I think he expressed in his outlook what it means to be human in many of his religious debates and gives me more comfort in my own mortality than any figment of somebody else's imagination could. In short, care for the ones you love and do what you enjoy (his purpose being to protect and love his kids and er... spread the seed).

*promote this *quality retrospective!

He's quite good...but IMO the photorealistic moniker is thrown a bit generously here.
Do a google image search for, e.g.(restrict to large images):
Ralph Goings, Paul Cadden, Gottfried Helnwein, Robert Bechtle, David Parrish...(from the top of my mind)
If you find the work above impressive, these are going to blow your mind.
To be precise: At the moment when you realize those aren't photos you're looking at, but drawings. Yes, those are ALL drawings.

And if that's not enough mindblowing - try to see them for real. I recently went to the Helnwein retrospective here in Vienna, and it was amazing. The pictures are quite often huge (several meters!), which adds tremenduously to the effect. I'm not sure even large format cameras can capture so much detail.

Mines' best described as "resting asshole." In retrospect, honed as such over time, through encounters with ACTUAL bitches

incidentally, my aunt being the most recent, and I'll show her this thread, next time I see her!

In retrospect... this could explain a lot.

In retrospect, I did find it funny.

^ You can make all of that make sense by simply shifting your epistemological position to the only ones which truly make sense i.e. phenomenology &/or perspectivism.

To rephrase that in less impenetrable terms:
"Materialism" (or in your case I assume "Scientific Materialism") that is to say 'matter is primary', from a philosophers POV is a deeply flawed assumption. Flawed because there appears to be not one experience in human history that did not occur entirely within the mind.
When one see's say a Dog, one only ever experiences the images and sensations occurring within ones mind. You don't see the photons hitting your retina, only the way your mind as interpreted the data.

However the opposite position "Idealism" (mind is primary) is also fundamentally flawed in the exact opposite way. If our minds are the only "real" things then where exactly are they? And how do we even derive logic and reason if there is not something outside of ourselves which it describes? etc. etc.

Philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre' got around this by defining a new category, "phenomena". We know for certain that "phenomena" exist in some sense because we experience them, the categories of mind and matter then become secondary properties, both only existing as definitions we apply retrospectively to experiences. i.e. stuff happens and then our brains kick in and say "that happened because of X because in the past X has preceded similar experiences" or "that thing looks like other examples of Y so is probably Y".

The problem then is that this appears to come no closer to telling us what is objectively happening in the universe, it's more like linguistic/logical housekeeping. The phenomenologists and existentialists did a superb job of clearing away all of the old invalid baggage about how we try to describe things, but they did little or nothing to solve the problem of Kants "nouminal world" (i.e. the "real" stuff that we are experiencing by simulation in our minds).

Its stumped philosophers for centuries as we don't appear to have any way to ever get at this "nouminal" or "real" world we naturally assume must exist in some way. But....

I reckon ultimately one of the first western philosophers in history nailed the way out 3000 or so years ago. Pythagoras said "all is number" and due to the work of Euler, Riemann and Fourier in particular I think we can now make it stick. (yeh its turning into an essay sorry )

Without wishing to go deep into a subject you could spend half your life on; Fourier transforms are involved in signal processing. It is a mathematical means by which spatio-temporal signals (e.g. the vibration of a string or the movement of a record needle) can be converted with no meaningful loss of information into frequency (analog) or binary (digital) forms and back again.

Mathematically speaking there is no reason to regard the "signal" as any less "real" whether it is in frequency form or spatio-temporal form. It is the same "signal", it can be converted 100% either direction.

So then here's the biggie: Is there any reason why we could not regard instrumental mathematical numbers and operations (i.e. the stuff we write down and practice as "mathematics") and the phenomena in the universe they appear to describe. I.e. when we use man made mathematical equations to describe and model the behavior of "phenomena" we experience like say Physicists do, could we suggest that we are using a form of Fourier transform? And moreover that this indicates an Ontological (existing objectively outside of yourself) aspect to the mathematical "signals".

Or to put it another way, is mathematics itself really real?

The Reimann sphere and Eulers formula provide a mathematical basis to describe the entirety of known existence in purely mathematical terms, but they indicate that pure ontological mathematics itself is more primary than anything we ever experience. It suggests infact that we ourselves are ultimately reducible to Ontological mathematical phenomena (what Leibniz called "Monads").

What we think of as "reality" could then perhaps be regarded as non dimensional (enfolded) mathematics interacting in such a way as to create the experience of a dimensional (unfolded) universe of extension (such as ours).

(R = distance between two points)
Enfolded universe: R=0
Unfolded universe: R>0

Neither is more "real", they are simply different perspectives from which Ontological mathematics can observe itself.

"Reality": R>=0

I've explained parts of that poorly sorry. Its an immense subject and can be tackedled from many different (often completely incompatible) paradigms. I hope at the very lest I have perhaps demonstrated that the Holographic universe theory could have legs if we combine the advances of scientific exploration (i.e. study of matter) with those of Philosophy and neuroscience (i.e. study of mind & reason itself). The latest big theory doing the rounds with neuroscience is that the mind/consciousness is a fractal phenomenon, which plays into what I've been discussing here more than you might think.

Then again maybe you just wrote me off as a crackpot within the first few lines "lawl" etc..

*quality comedy that looks weird in retrospect.

In retrospect, I think Assange should have made an effort to only release information that revealed corruption or wrongdoing. I don't see much point in leaking classified information just for the sake of releasing classified information. Less wikileaks, more wikiwhistleblowing. Were there any other major bombshells other than the 'Collateral Murder' video? And what ever happened to those supposed leaks that were to bring Bank of America to its knees? Daniel Ellsberg he is not.

Eeks, I can't "edit" a comment.
My "first" comment way up there could be, in retrospect, so much more poignant.

I would like to hear him talk about this incident now to see how he feels about it in retrospect and with a couple more decades to give him perspective.

Not saying he handled anything wrong here but I suspect he might handle it differently if it happened now.

haha! I thought you were joking!

It's too bad they didn't bring Mark back for the prequels in 2004... or that his jaunt into stage acting didn't earn him the respect he sought.

Still, this is an interesting, albeit chincey, retrospective on an old saga.>> ^Tokoki:

Anybody else spot the soft porn video this was taped over at the end?

GameTrailers.com like http://www.gametrailers.com/full-episodes/aqdx54/gt-retrospectives-grand-theft-auto-retrospective--part-i

I had no idea you'd posted this! (And I think I'd often wondered if you were the same ant from Blue's.)
In retrospect, I probably could have edited everything down to one 10-minute video. I can see why director's cuts can run so long.