Getting to know you: Mas Sehguh

Do I have questions? Are you kidding?


1. Tell us about your work. What's your situation?

2. Tell us about the thing that is most dear to you.

3. How did you find your way into Ozzu? What kept you here? What's your favorite category, and/or forum(s)?

4. Age?

5. Tell us about hobbies you like that don't involve a computer.

6. Tell us about where you live.

7. You're posts are highly intelligent, very informative and fairly abrasive. You seem meticulous in your endeavor to express yourself succinctly. Is there an explanation for this?

8. What is the nature of the universe?

9. Tell us about your best quality (real or imagined).

10. Who is your hero?


Please feel free to add your questions for Sam to my list.
Just remember, this is Sam's thread. Violators will be forced to endure viewing after viewing of the 1990 cinematic bomb, "Over Her Dead Body". Starring Elizabeth Perkins, Judge Reinhold and Jeffrey Jones.

11. If you were a superhero, who would you be and why?

12. What is the one goal in your life you are focusing most on right now?

13. What is the most life changing event that has happened to you?

Tell us, if as an agent, human being has no choice of his/her actions, how would you justify the existence of social punishments and law enforcements?

Aww come one you guys I hope when my turn rolls around we've got some sick and twisted questions, maybe I can work it into ya before that happens

There never doing you neksus. It was agreed lol


My Question to Sam


If you could have 3 wishes, what wouyld they be and more importantly why ???

1. Tell us about your work. What's your situation?

I am a student. I am probably most interested in mathematics, being a major in the subject, and I could imagine being a high school teacher, although I will probably end up in graduate school.

2. Tell us about the thing that is most dear to you.

Hmmm.

3. How did you find your way into Ozzu? What kept you here? What's your favorite category, and/or forum(s)?

I forget.

4. Age?

225 (but what units? First person to accurately guess will be victorious.)

5. Tell us about hobbies you like that don't involve a computer.

Music. I have played the piano for most of my life, and I willingly asked for piano lessons when I was six. Composing is interesting, although I can't claim to be good at that. I also played the alto saxophone, but never got good at that. I probably improved most at the piano in the most recent three years, when I started playing variations on video game music (primarily Tetris) for fun.

I used to play golf.

I write short stories occasionally.

6. Tell us about where you live.

Troy, New York. I can see constellations much more clearly here than they can be seen near Philadelphia.

7. You're posts are highly intelligent, very informative and fairly abrasive. You seem meticulous in your endeavor to express yourself succinctly. Is there an explanation for this?

This is probably a side effect of having lurked and posted in alt.html, where abrasivity is the norm.

One of the best ways to annoy me is to be ignorant. I cannot stand people who actively avoid thinking. When people ask "how do I do this?" or "How can I get a script to do this for me?", I also get annoyed, because they won't solve their problems on their own by getting off their lazy derrières and learning something. What annoys me most is when people avoid thinking like the plague.

Also, being abrasive makes the person less likely to just accept my answer and more likely to make them think about my answer, which I always see as good, no matter whether they decide to agree with me or not.

8. What is the nature of the universe?

How should I know?

9. Tell us about your best quality (real or imagined).

I always like helping people learn.

10. Who is your hero?

Never thought of one.

11. If you were a superhero, who would you be and why?

Well, naturally, one cool ability would be the ability to walk through walls. Of course, why just have that? Much more useful would be the ability to, when you walk through a wall, all your enemies DIE!!!

If I were a currently-existing superhero, I'd be batman. (He's got such cool technology).

12. What is the one goal in your life you are focusing most on right now?

My only goal in life is to do as much as possible.

Lately, I have been thinking about what a good informational/semantical markup language would be. It would be much like this proposal: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/data/utd.html . I also have been devising a human language which is based off of Reverse Polish Notation in structure. I am also in the middle of writing a Forth interpreter. It won't actually be Forth; it will be a mix of Forth and Reverse Polish LISP (which is much like Forth). Forth is a programming language, by the way.

13. What is the most life changing event that has happened to you?

Birth.

Some of the somewhat less important events in my life are:

The first was when I was between one and two years old, when I realized that since my brother was seven years old, it would be six years before I'd be as old as him. Then my brother turned eight, and I realized that after six years, he would also be six years older, and I could never catch up to him. Then I realized that I'd eventually be an adult. This is the earliest time I can remember doing math.

The second life-changing event is when my mother brought home a portable computer (the size of a briefcase) in order to do some work at home. I was about three at the time, but she let me type at the computer and watch letters and words show up on the screen. The low-refresh bright light blue LCD monochrome monitor is what first sparked my interest in computers. That and my second-grade teacher, who had a computer, a Mac, in the back of the classroom. She showed us the innards and explained its parts and how it worked, and then she told us about things like the Internet (the fact of which is an interesting thing itself, because this was pretty much pre-WWW).

Sunday School also impacted my life, because my mom made me dress up for that (as all the kids did). I despised dressing up, which made me dislike Sunday School and anything associated with it.

In second grade, I started becoming interested in science. For some reason, my elementary school had a whole bunch of books on astronomy. One of them was named simply "Astronomy," and it described many things about cosmology and physics. I learned the Bohr model of the atom and electron shells, absolute zero, and how fission and fusion worked. I have no idea what this book was doing in an elementary school library, but it made me particularly interested in science.

When I was 12, I wondered, what if there was no universe. Not even a matterless vacuum -- the complete lack of space or a place for matter in its entireity. That is a hard thing to actually visualize, but at some point, something happened and I haven't been looking at the world the same way since. Ignoring birth, this was the most important event in my life.

In 2001, I realized that I shouldn't take my civil liberties for granted.

Tell us, if as an agent, human being has no choice of his/her actions, how would you justify the existence of social punishments and law enforcements?

Consider the alternative: It is impossible to justify the lack of social punishments and law enforcement.

If you could have 3 wishes, what wouyld they be and more importantly why ???

First, I'd wish for an infinite number of wishes.
Second, I'd wish to be able to defy the laws of physics (which is an impossible wish to grant), just to mess with the wish-granter.
Third, I'd wish for all people to be predisposed towards selflessness and trust for one another for the rest of time.

lol, good answer. I think Douglas Adams put it best:




When I was younger, I spent a considerable amount of time trying to contemplate nothingness. It is hard to visualize. In fact, I eventually gave up after I realized that you literally have to think about nothing. The moment you try to visualize it, it disappears.

Actually we do justify lack of social punishments and law enforcements to some degree. The insanity defense. I quote:

" This defense is based on a principle that punishment is only reasonable if the defendant is capable of both controlling their behavior and understanding that they have committed a "wrongful act". It is argued that if someone is suffering from a mental disorder so that they are not capable of knowing or choosing right from wrong, they should not be punished. A defendant making this argument might be said to be pleading "not guilty by reason of insanity" (NGRI)."

So if we are really not free to choose what actions we will take, theoretically there is no justification to enforce law on another person for any wrongdoing. He really had no choice you see. He was not capable of controlling his behavior. If you have to justify punishing a criminal you have to grant that whatever crime he committed, he did that while being in full control of himself. In other words he made a voluntary choice. Do you grant that human beings can make free choices?

If a murderer is acquitted on the insanity defense, that does not mean he's sent back out into the free world to commit the crime again!

Even if someone is unable to comprehend, or control their wrongdoing
then they should not be given an oppertunity to preform wrong doings (not nessicarially jail, but a stop of some kind to prevent them from wrong doing)

Also, theoretically, prison is for rehabilitation, which is why they're called penitentiaries.

Someone pleading insanity defense is not always sent to the asylum. It can be proven that the insanity was temporary. For example drug-induced insanity. In such a case the criminal can be set free non-guilty because he is no longer under the influence of the drug and thus a threat to the society.

However, that's really a trivial point. Even if the murderer was sent to mental hospital instead of being sent to the electric chair, it proves the point that in principle we do accommodate for the fact that a person cannot be held liable for actions that he had not volunturily committed.

first off, NO ONE should EVER be sent to the electric chair. period.

people ARE held resonsible for involintary actions, and they should be. HOWEVER, it should not be considerd as severe an act if you were not mentally responsible

also, in the case to a drugged muder, the guilty should be pounished as he chose the do the drugs. much the same as we should not allow drunk drivers off the hook because 'they were drunk and not at their full mental capaticty'

Guess: Months?
That would be 18.75 years, or 3 months shy of 19.

Cheers.

Drunk drivers and people in that boat (homeless people, drug addicts) is a load of bull$#&@. It's not like they woke up at the bottom of the stairs; they have to consciously keep making the wrong decisions to end up there.

On a side note, I think drunk driving should be legal - but only on designated days. Maybe Sunday's or something. Maybe they'd all go out then...