You may wonder why I started a new blog, where I already have a perfectly fine blog on Artima. I am currently wondering too, since somehow my very first entry was flagged as spam by the helpful Blogger spam detection software, and now claims I have to request a manual review to prove I'm not a spammer. I'm guessing that I either used too many long, difficult words referring to schools of philosophy -- I've seen splogs containing long strings of text copied from philosophy textbooks. Or perhaps I quoted too many nonsense words from Anthem. Anyway, I've requested two reviews so far, but still nada. Fingers crossed.
As for the reason to start a new blog, the Artima blog is meant to be technical stuff about Python -- Artima in general is a site about OO programming, and I wanted to write about other stuff that interests me. I have a slew of topics lined up: other books I've read, more about my views on consciousness (with a lowercase 'c' :-), and a silly idea I call "planet of the nerds": what if Captain Kirk ran into a planet whose entire population was made up of nerds with IQs of 250 and no social skills? Would such a society even survive?
Anyway, this is just a test -- Blogger claims I cannot make new posts. Let's see if that's true!
10 comments:
It's a lie! I could post just fine.
Testing comment...
Maybe blogger didn't like words like "bulshytt" :P
The blogspot site we're using as a staging area for the Daily URL was flagged as a spam blog ages ago. I tend to request a review once a month or so, but nothing ever happens. My guess is that the review request stuff is just something they added to the UI, but then forgot about ;-)
I've passed your comment on to the blogger team. Apparently there were some irregularities in the spam flagging process last week that my blog got caught up in, but that shouldn't apply to your blog created ages ago.
Good to see you start blogging again. I've been following your blogs on Artima for the past couple of years but the posts are months apart! Hopefully Blogger's nice WYSIWYG editor will inspire more frequent posting!
In the nerd planet, the ladies would rule, obviously.
For a nice preview of what a Nerd planet would be, just watch a couple of episodes of "The Big Bang Theory", it's hilarious. In some episode, Lennard just acknowledges that a society of nerds couldn't survive at all...
"Nerds with no social skills" do not generally consider social skills unnecessary. Rather, they seem to lack the signaling systems that animals (and most other humans) use to make social interactions smooth. Lots of things get passed unconsciously by efficiently, the way we wield a spoon.
Having "IQs of 250", such persons are bound to devise another signaling system that suits their brains, because such system is useful. Most probably, such system will be quite different from "normal".
So, after sufficiently long time, a non-nerd visitor of such world would feel lacking some non-obvious but complex social skills, that is, like a nerd among "normal humans".
This experience would be not unlike visiting a vastly different human culture on Earth, e.g. a modern Westerner visiting tribal Africa or medieval Japan. It may be funny, or it may be not, depending on flexibility of one's social skills and, probably, IQ :)
Can you please change the theme? My eyes hurt.
Post a Comment