Re: gradle wants openjdk-11 even if a newer version is installed? ...
Let me try to disabuse myself somewhat with a bit of humor. Some of
you have been telling me for a long time about how "visually
upsetting" and "procedurally obnoxious" I am and as they say:
"misunderstanding is as mutual as love should be". I can't really make
sense of what you are telling me, nor do I understand why you would
even take the time, energy to do so. Becoming a teacher, taught me to
be a better person and notice a lot of other things about "people" (as
a teacher you must entertain the functional illusion that people can,
do learn, have free will, ... in the same way that when you are a
doctor you must understand that there is an essential difference
between biological beings, rocks and the rain). Now, do you know that
more than a generation ago handwriting was basically written off
curricula in the U.S.!
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/10/gen-z-handwriting-teaching-cursive-history/671246/
I have a hard time even trying to figured out what my students' name
(let alone what they had written), but I would not really care about
the visual aspects of it I would just try to decypher it. The same
problem I have had with the truly crappy code that I have had to debug
and here when I say "crappy" I am not referring to the visual
impression of it (some people tend to make a big deal about the number
of spaces you use for indentation and other people speaking with an
accent), but the logic behind it. Let me not go into why I think that
the new normal being taught is keyboarding.
~
Partially due to habituation, the neurobiology of our perception,
evolutive adaptations, culture, ... we all have our own ways of doing,
liking and disliking things. I am not a visual person, nor is my
brother and mother (both excellent, creative musicians) and there is
"something it is like" not being a visual person. I asked once my
supervisor: "why she was talking in a bossy way to me and why she was
talking like (with the timbre, voice and accent of) my supervisor?".
You walk into a crowded elevator and you overhear two people talking,
your mind goes "I know these 'voices'" and when you turn in an
inadvertent way they happily go like: "Hi, Mr. López! How are you?"
and I put on a smirk while "my mind" goes like: "and who the eff are
you guys?" As girlfriend has told me "I can't just sit and watch a
movie with her". I don't even own a TV set. The idea of "'just'
sitting to watch a movie" I find so out of it all stupid that when
girlfriend has forced me to go to the movies with her (and who am I to
think that I don't have to do what my lady says?!) I invariably go
with my books and almost always have stepped out to the lobby to read
as I wait for her to come out. There are only like five (5) movies I
can watch, have kept watching. I was shocked, very confused when I
have heard Žižek using movies for his elucidations. I had put up with
his philosophical bitchiness because we both love grandpa Hegel, but
that started to give me serious doubts about his smarts and the depths
his mind could reach.
I keep three languages (all of them shamefully enough European), but
even the white space doesn't feel the same in German, English or
Spanish, not even within the same paragraph in the same language (I
have heard other people saying similar things). They somehow feel like
tones within their melodies. Racism (another "visual thing", mind you)
I can't make sense of (I have a very hard time visually telling people
apart, which the police know, so they use it against me). I take it as
"a necessary social, 'functional illusion'", that people choose, need
to believe in to make sense of, "justify" other social needs; kind of
the crazy obsession Nazis/Adolf Hitler had with people's ears. He sent
his "personal photographer" to a meeting some Nazi officers had with
the Soviet nomenclature with the special job to get a good picture of
Stalin's ear, to see "if he was really human", which based on his ear
lobes he was! (what a disappointment!; now, that story is not totally
stupid and hopelessly so, at least there was a falsifiable way to
check your assertions. To gringos Russian people are "un-'American'"
anyway (and in addition to that they are pro Russian?!) and that is
all they need to know, they wouldn't have to prove anything to
themselves). I once read from a scientific report from the times
before the wide spread adoption of the Internet, computers and cell
phones that on average gringos spent (1/4) of the waking time of their
life watching TV! How is that even possible, even Mathematically! and
the funny thing about it is that they make fun of Muslim people going
for their relatively brief prayer calls three times during the day. Do
the Math! I would rather pray to "Vladimir Putin" if it came to that,
than spending (1/4) of my waking life watching TV!
The best story I have heard so far about how we are different is
about a person I know. His wife was dressing as a nun for Halloween
with a large ruler hanging on her waist. She told me the story behind
her dress. Nuns used to beat the left hand of her husband when he was
a child "because" he was left handed. He had grown up hating those
nuns, Christianity and half of humanity and not even "God" could
change him from a left- to a right handed sinner!
When Mathematicians want to mock you in merciless ways with morbid
gusto, they call you "visual". That is not entirely a cultural thing.
Historically, the most stupid cases of "dogs barking up wrong trees"
and following "red herrings" have been based on people who were stupid
enough to be enticed by graphic cues, visual intuitions (take for
example the very long and articulate account while trying to prove the
V postulate in Euclid’s Elements throughout two millennia). That
coming from Mathematicians, whose business if proving the truthfulness
in things and can tell apart "'good' (from stupid) mistakes", even
acknowledging how hard it is to make good mistakes should tell us
something (do you know the joke about how an Engineer, a Physicist and
a Mathematician fight a fire!?! ;-)).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutaka_Taniyama
Taniyama is referenced as a mathematician who was ultimately unable
to prove his conjecture during his lifetime.[3] Reflecting on
Taniyama's work, Goro Shimura stated: "He was not a very careful
person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes. But he made
mistakes in a good direction. I tried to imitate him. But I've
realized that it's very difficult to make good mistakes.[4]"
~
As the Yoruba saying goes: "the forest needs all kinds of wood" and
Hegelian dialectics explain how the only way for you to "be yourself"
is because there are other people who are not "you". So, we are all
good!, or we should be.
lbrtchx
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