Biffster's World

This article, titled Looking for Madam Tetrachromat, reminded me of an exercise that I went through in an Introduction to Philosophy class that I once took. In that exercise, we had to prove or disprove the philosophy that reality is what our senses tell us it is. Something is only real once we see it, feel it, touch it, etc. I argued that this is bull-poopy. An object is real, whether or not we see it. It exists, therefore it is real. Even if no one on earth ever sees it, it is still real. A rock is always a rock. A green plant is always a green plant.

Then I read the above article. Apparently, there are some women who can see more colors than everyone else on the planet. Instead of having just red, green and blue receptors in the eye, these women have a fourth receptor. To them, the world appears different, because they see colors differently. That green plant may not actually be green; they may see it as a different, lusher, richer color. This plant, this real thing, will look different to them.

This idea has really thrown me, for some reason. It made me realize that what I assume to be real is dependent on what I see, or smell, or touch. Even though I argued against the idea that our reality is what we sense, I have, in a way, been living this philosophy. Never has something I’ve read forced me to re-examine my philosophy as much as this article has.

There’s a lot of interesting things on the net today! Here is a web-based word processor – sorta. It actually seems to be an artists attempt at showing what his ideal word processor would be. I quite like his project, and enjoy the opportunity to write my thoughts on a bunch of different objects, including a receipt and plug paper!

I find both humor and hope in this article about Microsoft’s appeal. Microsoft has taken an interesting approach to this case: contempt. They are not trying to hide their contempt for Judge Jackson or Jackson’s ruling. They are going after both his Findings of Fact and his Remedy. Interesting strategy. I don’t think it’ll work, but interesting.

I don’t expect Microsoft to be broken up. I fully expect that part of the Remedy to be denied. What I really hope to see, however, is the appeals court to agree that Microsoft needs to release the full set of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), or even the source code to Windows itself. Once this information is public, Microsoft will be less able to control the computer industry.

I found this a very interesting URL. It is a link to YouCANN!, an information page about alternate DNS heirarchies. There is more than just .org, .com and .net out there. This site helps you get there.

Every now and then I come across a website that makes me laugh at its self-righteousness, idiocy and paranioa. I didn’t think that a site titled Take the Contemporary Christian Music Test would meet all of these criteria, but somehow, it did! (And it is a pretty crappy page, to boot.)

eBooks are definitely in our future. Everyone who has watched an episode of Star Trek knows this. We are destined to carry books around on paperback-sized book readers. Until these become ubiquitous, however, it is far more likely that we’ll read books on our computers online. A really cool site to try this is Bookface. Here you can browse and read books for free. It’s a nice site, featuring authors who deserve a break. Give it a try today!