Other people's diaries
Sumana, breakfast.com is registered, it's just that there's no machine called www.breakfast.com. It's entirely possible to register a domain and not run a web server there called www. The registree of that domain is
[whois.domaindiscover.com]
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Registrant:
The Rotary Foundation of Rotary International
1560 Sherman Ave
Evanston, IL 60201
US
Domain Name: BREAKFAST.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Rotary International
The Rotary Foundation of Rotary International
1560 Sherman Ave
Evanston, IL 60201
US
847-866-3000
klimess@ROTARYINTL.ORG
Domain created on 30-Jul-1997
Domain expires on 28-Jul-2001
Last updated on 28-Dec-2000
Domain servers in listed order:
T.NS.VERIO.NET 192.67.14.16
B.NS.VERIO.NET 129.250.35.32
If you want to see whether a domain is registered, use whois, not a web browser. (Or you can use a DNS query tool like dig or nslookup.)
I try not to let people answer that they don't have access to these tools; if they say that, I'll generally give them Unix accounts.
Also, although there are definitely vegetarians who are bad people, the idea that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian is largely a mistake. Hitler went on a mostly vegetarian diet for part of his life for medical reasons, but he was very fond of certain animal foods for his whole life and continued to eat some of them even while he was on his health food diet.
You can find some references on this from a Google search for "Hitler vegetarian".
I have so many complaints with some of the ways I've seen the "Hitler was a vegetarian" story abused, it's not even funny. So I would like to point out to people that there's a grain of truth in it, but it's a rather small grain.
I guess people use that as some strange sort of antidote to the lists of celebrity vegetarians which includes a fair number of people who are considered moral heroes. I've seen lists of celebrity vegetarians and lists of celebrity atheists, and I think the message conveyed by these lists is supposed to be along the lines that being such-and-such is normal or socially acceptible. In some cases it may go beyond this and try to associate the behavior or belief with positive characteristics of the celebrities -- for example, Gandhi being vegetarian (I have his pamphlet The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism somewhere) and Gandhi being a good person and these having some connection.
I guess one goal could be to show that being good tends to make you a vegetarian, or that being a vegetarian tends to make you a good person. These two conclusions are not at all the same thing ("'Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter. 'You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!' 'You might just as well say,' added the March Hare, 'that "I like what I get" is the same thing as "I get what I like"!'") unless vegetarianism is identical with goodness.
A bad person being a vegetarian would count toward disproving that vegetarianism makes you good, but not toward disproving that goodness makes you vegetarian. Other possibilities from the set of things that someone might be trying to establish with celebrity vegetarian lists include that vegetarianism does not make you bad.
I don't know how many times I've seen the puzzle about the four cards, and "How many cards do you have to turn over in order to know for sure whether..." -- a famous puzzle to show how bad most people are at formal logic. I've seen it attributed to many different people, and I'd like to know something more about its history. I'm sure it's in several Gardner books.
Here's one version. You see four cards on a table and you already know that they are standard playing cards and have either red backs or blue backs. The cards -- as you see them -- are
- A Queen of Spades
- A King of Hearts
- A red-backed card
- A blue-backed card
Now the question is, how many cards (and which) do you have to turn over in order to be sure of knowing whether it's true that "All of the spades on the table have red backs"?
The analogy in this particular case is if you had
- a generally good person
- a generally bad person
- a vegetarian
- a non-vegetarian
then how many, and which, would you have to "turn over" in order to resolve (prove or disprove) various claims about "All X are Y" (all good people are vegetarians, all vegetarians are good people, all bad people are non-vegetarians, all non-vegetarians are bad people)? Or "No X are Y" (no bad people are vegetarians, no vegetarians are bad people, no good people are non-vegetarians, no non-vegetarians are good people)? (Some of those statements are equivalent to others.) There's a general rule involved here.
Of course, in informal propaganda argument, you don't generally try to explicitly prove a universal -- you just try to produce a statistical, empirical inference. But some philosophers of science think that the rules of what lends support to an empirical inference are related to what proves the corresponding universal claim or what disproves its negation. (E.g. evidence akin to what would prove that "All Berkeley students are blue" or what would disprove that "Not all Berkeley students are blue" would tend to support the weaker claim that "Berkeley students are generally blue" or "Berkeley students tend to be blue" or various other versions that aren't categorical.)
It's fun to discover the basics of quantifier logic if you've never been exposed to them.
