what day is this?

oh, yeah, I have a test at 8am in AH100, so it must be Thursday...

Bleh, couldn't get to sleep last night, so only five hours of sleep. My employee (whom I think of as The Guy Who Gets Paid) will be her in a bit, and then I'll scamper off to class.

I've been thinking over what johnpalmer and towersofgrey sais yesterday about the business. What I've decided is that, if I can't get paid at least $3/hr, I just can't go on. If it doesn't pick up significantly in November, we'll close December 1st.

On other fronts, Justin's Auntie took the puppy -- for a while. He'll be a time-share puppy; there during the weekend, and at our house on weekends. We still have Crystal's puppy at the house, but at least she's housebroke.

Eeeeviillll

In an interesting Scientific American article, Selmer Bringsjord, a logician, philosopher and chairman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Department of Cognitive Science, defines evil:

To be truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some morally wrong action with no prompting from others (whether this person successfully executes his or her plan is beside the point). The evil person must have tried to carry out this plan with the hope of "causing considerable harm to others," Bringsjord says. Finally, "and most importantly," he adds, if this evil person were willing to analyze his or her reasons for wanting to commit this morally wrong action, these reasons would either prove to be incoherent, or they would reveal that the evil person knew he or she was doing something wrong and regarded the harm caused as a good thing.

And what this very clever fellow has done is make a AI that is evil. He, of course, would never let it loose. It's just an interesting thought experiment.

Personally, I'm not so sure about the definition. If a person intentionally harms another and their reasons for doing so are incoherent, we usually call that insanity, not evil.

It makes me wonder at that line; I tend to think of all evil as insane. Slippery words, those.