Video posting concern

chacho
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Tue Sep 22, 2009 4:36 pm

Good on you Matt.

We have a guy over here Matt called Gordon Brown who happens to be our Prime Minister.
He seems to be struggling and not well liked.
This is a good time for a new Prime Minister and I'm voting for you if you would stand for election. :cheer:

Well said and it's nice to see someone with so much passion in something that they truly believe in.

Matt for Prime Minister of England:lol:


tovo
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Tue Sep 22, 2009 4:39 pm

Way off topic I know but you DO know Chacho that Matt is Australian right? An Australian as Prime Minister of England....now I'd like to see THAT! :laugh:


chacho
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Tue Sep 22, 2009 4:42 pm

Now that would be something!
I'm game, this country needs shaking up............. I think I need to start another thread with that one.


TGMatt
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Tue Sep 22, 2009 4:54 pm

Before I am hosed by the vocab police..

Grok
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For other uses, see Grok (disambiguation).
To grok (pronounced /ˈɡrɒk/) is to share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity. Author Robert A. Heinlein coined the term in his best-selling 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land. In Heinlein's view, grokking is the intermingling of intelligence that necessarily affects both the observer and the observed.

From the novel:

“ Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man. ”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines grok as "to understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment." Other forms of the word include "groks" (present third person singular), "grokked" (past participle) and "grokking" (present participle).

In an ideological context, a grokked concept becomes part of the person who contributes to its evolution by improving the doctrine, perpetuating the myth, espousing the belief, adding detail to the social plan, refining the idea or proofing the theory.

Contents [hide]
1 Etymology
1.1 Stranger in a Strange Land
2 Adoption and modern usage
2.1 In counterculture
2.2 In science fiction
2.3 In hacker culture
2.4 Mainstream usage
3 See also
4 References
5 External links


[edit] Etymology
[edit] Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert A. Heinlein originally coined the term grok in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land as a Martian word that could not be defined in earthly terms, but can be associated with various literal meanings such as "water", "to drink", "life", or "to live", and had a much more profound figurative meaning that is hard for Earthers to understand because of our assumption of a singular reality.

According to the book, drinking is a central focus on Mars where water is scarce. Martians use the merging of their bodies with water as a simple example or symbol of how two entities can combine to create a new reality greater than the sum of its parts. The water becomes part of the drinker, and the drinker part of the water. Both grok each other. Things that once had separate realities become entangled in the same experiences, goals, history, and purpose. Within the book, the statement of divine immanence verbalized between the main characters, "Thou Art God", is logically derived from the concept inherent in the term grok.

Heinlein describes Martian words as "guttural" and "jarring". Martian speech is described as sounding "like a bullfrog fighting a cat". Accordingly, grok is generally pronounced as a guttural "gr" terminated by a sharp "k" with very little or no vowel sound (a narrow IPA transcription might be [ɡɹ̩kʰ]).

[edit] Adoption and modern usage
[edit] In counterculture
See also: Counterculture of the 1960s
Tom Wolfe, in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, describes a character's thoughts during an acid trip: "He looks down, two bare legs, a torso rising up at him and like he is just noticing them for the first time... he has never seen any of this flesh before, this stranger. He groks over that...."

Contemporary spiritual teacher Ram Dass, in Be Here Now, quotes a large passage from Stranger about the word.


Numerous examples of its use in the late 1960s appear, including in Playboy and The New Yorker.

The word is also used in passing in The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, and frequently by Wilson in his other work.

In his 1969 counterculture Volkswagen repair manual, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot, John Muir instructs prospective used VW buyers to "grok the car" before buying.

According to Ed Sanders' book The Family, convicted murderer Charles Manson was a fan of Heinlein and Stranger and adopted many of the terms associated with both including "grok" and "thou art God".[1]

[edit] In science fiction
A popular t-shirt and bumper sticker slogan for Trekkies, seen as early as 1968, was I grok Spock (often showing the Star Trek character using the Vulcan salute). Other science fiction authors, such as David Brin or Greg Cox, have borrowed the term over the years as an homage. In the book Daniel X:Watch the Skies, the main character,Daniel,uses the term several times over the course of the book.

[edit] In hacker culture
Uses of the word in the decades after the 1960s are more concentrated in computer culture, such as a 1984 appearance in InfoWorld: "There isn't any software! Only different internal states of hardware. It's all hardware! It's a shame programmers don't grok that better."

The Jargon File, which describes itself as a "Hacker's Dictionary" and has thrice been published under that name, puts grok in a programming context:

When you claim to ‘grok’ some knowledge or technique, you are asserting that you have not merely learned it in a detached instrumental way but that it has become part of you, part of your identity. For example, to say that you “know” Lisp is simply to assert that you can code in it if necessary — but to say you “grok” LISP is to claim that you have deeply entered the world-view and spirit of the language, with the implication that it has transformed your view of programming. Contrast zen, which is a similar supernatural understanding experienced as a single brief flash.
The entry existed in the very earliest forms of the Jargon File, dating from the early 1980s. A typical tech usage from the Linux Bible, 2005 characterizes the Unix software development philosophy as "one that can make your life a lot simpler once you grok the idea".

The book Perl Best Practices defines "grok" as understanding a portion of computer code in a profound way. It goes on to suggest that to "re-grok" code is to re-load the intricacies of that portion of code into one's memory after some time has passed and all the details of it are no longer remembered. In that sense, to "grok" means to load everything into memory for immediate use. It is analogous to the way a processor caches memory for short term use, but the only implication by this reference was that it was something that a human (or maybe a martian) would do.

Grokking the GIMP is a leading book for learning advanced digital image editing techniques using the GNU Image Manipulation Program, the GIMP.

[edit] Mainstream usage
In their book The Fourth Turning, William Strauss and Neil Howe write of 1996 Presidential candidate Bob Dole as "not a person who could grok values in the now-dominant Boomer tongue".

Groklaw is a website with information on legal matters, usually of an IT nature.

GROK LLC is a multidisciplinary design company out of Ferndale Michigan, they do mostly graphic design, web, and 3D.

GrokCode is a website covering computer programming and software development.

Grok is a web application framework, written in the Python programming language and based on Zope 3.

In a 1987 Life In Hell strip titled "What I Learned In School", a character representing "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening is depicted being dressed down by an unseen "hip" college professor: "Mr. Gru-nink, I'm getting bad vibes from you. The rest of the class groks what is going on -- why can't you?"

Songwriter Stephin Merritt uses the word "grok" in the song "Swinging London", from the 1994 Magnetic Fields album "Holiday" - "you couldn't grok my race car but you dug the roadside blur".

Groks Science Radio Show and Podcast is a science program that uses the term in their name.

In an episode of "Night Court" bailiff Bull Shannon responding to Judge Harry Stone asking what a "grok" says it is " A sudden flash of insight derived from a profound empathetic experience." [2]

The name of a commercial federated search engine, grokker.

In an episode of the television show "Silver Spoons" in 1985, Rickie calls chatting on a BBS "grokking".

In The Police song "Friends," lyrics state that the singer will "grok your essence."

In the straight-to-DVD Futurama outing Into the Wild Green Yonder Number 9 of the Legion of Madfellows says their group has "been grokking some super weird junk" from the life force Ch'i. The Legion of Madfellows are a group of (crazy, homeless) mindreaders that defend the universe.


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neverfoundthetime
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Tue Sep 22, 2009 5:03 pm

Woha Amtt! And I get censored for jossing with my friend Bear! What have you been taking?! :woohoo:


RicksPick
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Tue Sep 22, 2009 5:09 pm

Matt

"2 bobs worth"

That was worth at least a ten bob bit m8

For an Ausie you sure talk pommie

RicksPick


RicksPick
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Tue Sep 22, 2009 5:15 pm

And here I thought you were working at least as hard as I was today!

Anon


TGMatt
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Tue Sep 22, 2009 5:19 pm

I think you got censored by Big Jim...but to be fair, you can banter on anything political in that forum section...so I think he wasn't censoring, just keeping the thread on topic..plus you cannot imagine how many complaints I get from both sides about political leanings being expressed in these threads..its just too funny...

But back on the other thread, you gotta say something from your coaching perspective on getting these videos up and breaking through that mental barrier..


neverfoundthetime wrote:
Woha Amtt! And I get censored for jossing with my friend Bear! What have you been taking?! :woohoo:


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neverfoundthetime
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Tue Sep 22, 2009 5:26 pm

yeah, we were only jossing around but we did mention the names of 3 past and present presidents so I suppose that's a bit too naughty. I will go to my room and repent. But I was waiting to see if Neil got his fingers rapped for going off topic first!
Coaching comments take considered thought (jossing around is brainless!) so I was having a think about it. People here are just so good at coming up with positive and constructive comments....


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neverfoundthetime
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Tue Sep 22, 2009 5:33 pm

...and mAtt (that's a genuine typo, not me jossing!! I'm the worst for typos and spelling!) I'm a real Heinlein fan (The Mote in God's Eye is my favourite). Grok: I like it!


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