Andy Lowry @AndyLowry@qoto.org

@_4_d_4_m_
My country has an entire political party based on that. As, I gather, does yours. 😉

@dankennedy_nu
Excuse me, I have to go lie down for a while because that thought resulted in a classic case of Blown Mind Syndrome.

@_4_d_4_m_ @jayarava
The ones with rope glued on plaques.

@_4_d_4_m_
I bet Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary" is on the internet somewhere, it's been public domain for a long time.

@SignalsAndSorcery
Oh no, now I've got the Dark Shadows theme playing in my head.

@_4_d_4_m_ @jayarava
Yeah, not lately anyway. I've gone out of my way to follow as many funny people here as I can. 😎

@jayarava
Oh my yes, I've seen rather a lot of that. There's a sobriety forum I'm a moderator on that's had a "daily Buddha" feature for years, and it's exactly what you're talking about. I've sometimes corrected a garbled sutta quote, because I simply cannot let something like that stand, but otherwise just sigh and move on.

@jayarava
And I do wonder a bit at the apparent lack of interest in Mastodon-world, though I guess it might just be a matter of timing-- when there were 300,000 people here, I can see how there might not be so many people interested in Buddhist phililogy. Now that I see numbers more like 9 million, it might be that things are about to change.

I wonder if mentioning your presence here on the Sutta Central forums might help gain some readership for you here? You're semi-famous, or at least a known entity, in that locale (I think I've mentioned that that's where I first learned of your existence and your work). I could post a thought or two about something you've written over there with a link back to here. Maybe that would help.

@jayarava
Good morning-almost-afternoon to you! I can't help but have at least some rudimentary understanding of what you're on about 😉, having read everything you've done on the Heart at the Raves site. Printed and read. Read and scribbled notes on.

The whole topic is fascinating to me, as it contains crime (well, fraud anyway) and a mystery and an insight into an era in China that already interested me, when Buddhism was being re-shaped and adapted to a non-Indian culture-- and a culture with an already longstanding tradition of high literary accomplishments. You've given me many, many an hour of enjoyment in contemplation of all its facets. I'm very grateful to you for the diligence with which you've set yourself such a thankless task.

@jayarava
I thank you again for reading that so I don't have to. What a peculiar fellow he was.

Your handling of him in your recent "The Cessation of Sensory Experience..." was rather delicious, and I'm hereby awarding you 17 extra Essay Points for the "matter in the eye" line in that work. 😆

@Sheril
I've seen Bose's name mentioned in several physics-oriented general interest sorts of books. The Bose-Einstein condensate is a fascinating topic to reflect on, to me.

That's the first time I've seen a photo of him; thanks for putting a face to a name!

@KansasGrant
You no like werds?

😉

@alanthwaits@noc.social
Oh gosh no, I really am NOT a programmer. I do enjoy putting my mind into that "be creative within these strict parameters" state, because sometimes there's a big Aha moment where a solution for a convoluted problem just comes to you. It's a little addictive. But for an ignoramus like me, there's a lot of sweat and pondering that has to come before that can happen, which can be painful. 😉

If you want a from-the-ground-up look at how programming can be structured beautifully, check out Donald Knuth. His magnum opus, "The Art of Computer Programming," is an amazing classic. I didn't work my way through the whole thing, which I regret, but was able to dive in and out of it to find ways around and through things that stumped me.

I'd always thought that going through the whole work step by step would be a great retirement project to keep my brain working, but when I actually did retire I'd become so disenchanted with arguing with computers all the time that I walked away from it. And gave away my Knuth set. And threw everything Windows out of the house. 😆

Enough time has passed that I'm up for a little bit of fooling around here and there-- I've been playing with Raspberries since the first one came out-- but am not all that serious about it. I don't want to risk going back to that burned-out state I was in for a time at the end of my career.

If you'd like a decent basic intro to networks, administration, security, and so on, Google offers a free set of certification courses through Coursera (which isn't free, but is surprisingly inexpensive, I think it cost me a total of fifty bucks) here: https://grow.google/certificates/#?modal_active=none
I'm self-taught on all that stuff, so did those cert courses to see if I could. Worked out fine, it's a really well-done series.