Hey Lydia!  Think about trying  this exercise.  I think it might help with your Piriformis problem.  It emphasizes hip stability rather than hip mobility.  This occurred to me while I was dancing samba  last Friday night at Sherwood.   It got me thinking  about different kinds of hip movement, and the similarities between bellydancing and Cuban motion… anyway, think about it.

I'm thinking about having a Dragon Painting Party on Sunday night, or maybe Saturday... Any thoughts? There may be random prizes for people who show up!!!

Call of Cthulhu: I've run a couple of "tester" games and am now willing to throw them open to the public... But not until I get back from Sherwood Forrest Faire and taken care of some production tasks. Realistically we're looking at March. I'll post more info here.

A correction to the earlier Cthulhu post:
The three stats that cost 3 points should be int, pow, and dex, sorry.

 Once Again the call goes out to the masses: whosoever is willing to enpaint or otherwise decorate dragons shall be plied with both feast and beverage, and made to be merry with much audiencing of some anime movies or the like!!!! after five or so at thomas' house...

It is impossible to determine from its effects whether a system is simple or complex.

Effects are not always reducible to simple causes or systems. This is why it is not possible to reduce our brains to  the DNA coding. This is why it is not possible to backhack behavior to a belief, or set of beliefs.
Emergence is not dependant upon complexity, and may not even be related to it. Having the correct proportions of various elements does not allow you to build a being, anymore than it allows you to build a computer. Systems emerge from other systems, even if they are stochastic ones, but one cannot always reverse engineer this process.

In this sense, Life does have a designer, but there is no reason to believe that it is an intelligent one.

You are an embodied experience engine. For some reason, not yet fully understood, you can experience you own ability to experience. Some claim that this is pretty valuable; others think it just gets in the way of actually doing stuff. The first group are deluding themselves, and the second are full of crap. The important part is the embodied bit. If you were not embodied the experience engine part wouldn't mean bollocks. The next important part is that there are other embodied creatures, and interacting with them is more fascinating and complex than your experience engine has room for. The environment in which you are embodied is also quite fascinating, some would argue, more so that the other experience engines.  It is not really certain how much agency embodied creatures have in their environment, but experimenting with the limits of this agency is yet another immeasurably complex situation.

Here we have four immeasurably complex situations:

 The space of our internal selves.

 The space of other selves.

 The space all these selves inhabit.

 The space of possible agency.

Given these immeasurable, but not infinite, possibility spaces, one has to wonder why anyone would ever be bored?

But questions inevitably arise about ones position amongst these dimensions…

Here is a point by point rebuttal. (Sorry, no yootoob Embed, but I couldn't find one)
Both of these videos are extra long but in might be worth a listen.

Christopher Monckton (first video) Issued a rebuttal to the rebuttal...
If you're that interested you can find it yourself

There is this feeling creatures like us have, that loyalty to an idea somehow makes that idea more valid, somehow more authoritative. This is not a very sophisticated feeling but it is a common one.  Some people mistake this strategy for faith, but it is not faith at all. Faith is far more complex and active than this, at least as I understand it.

 Creatures like us ultimately have to make our way in what we call the world, and to do so we develop, are told, steal, learn etc. strategies for this endeavor. Our experience of the world rarely contains much of its inconceivable vastness of possibilities, and so we have to make do with much in the way of secondhand information (like the interwebs). Out of this hodgepodge mixture of truths and demitruths and outright lies we make these strategies. We make conceptual models of things, (bits of the world, which is in itself a conceptual model) which enable us to predict within our limited parameters, what might happen, or how we should behave. Some folk like to cling to some of these strategies regardless of their effectiveness, or truth value, because they have a model of the world in which this sort of thing seems to work better than, say, collecting evidence. They are not wrong, sometimes having a hard and fast answer is a great way to get a desired outcome. They are also not right, because sometimes patience and subtlety work wonders. Keeping to tired and played out ideas can also make folks feel as though they are succeeding at complex decisions, because any other possibility is uncomfortable and unknown.

However, even though this suggests that there is a great degree of relativity or  subjectivity, then, to how we ought to behave, a more accurate (and annoying) conclusion would be that it suggests there is a great degree of subjectivity to how we think we ought to behave. That is, how we  model our behavior.

 Some conceptual models have well withstood the various tests that creatures such as ourselves have put them too, and others have fallen by the wayside to a large degree. Even discredited and useless methods, can still rear their silly heads though. The best defense against their insidious reappearance is to be able to recognize and analyze them. As soon as creatures become aware of the possibility of having a model of conceptual models, meta-model if you will, they can begin a critique of them from a state, that is at least metaphorically, outside of the morass of relativism and subjectivity. This is by no means a foolproof method and, while it is somewhat recursive, it can at least yield a way of judging our rules of thumb from beyond the day-to-day application of such rules. 

Evidence and reason are two of the best methods for judging conceptual models, and while they are not the only methods the earlier they are applied in ones quest the better. If your conceptual model contradicts one of these then it has serious problems. Evidence and reason certainly don’t have all of the answers, but alternative models should almost always be reserved for situations in which evidence and reason have little to say. These methods can certainly be misapplied, but they also include systems of checks that other models do not. The scientific method, while it has very little to say about how one ought to behave, (despite what some might tell you) is also a great bellwether for determining the usefulness of one’s conceptual models.

A word or two on faith:

Faith is a meta-belief, that is a belief about beliefs, rather than a conceptual modeling system per se. Thought many people see their faith as a particular set of beliefs, and while it may be that, it also includes methods for relating to belief in general.  For example: about faith one might properly say, “Believe in…” rather than “Believe that…” At first these seem interchangeable, but there is certainly some value to be gained from distinguishing the two.  To say  “I believe in Evolution” is more properly stated as  “I believe that things evolve” as this is a situation that is demonstrable (or not). Conversely to say “I believe that there is a God” is not demonstrable, so it is proper to say instead “I believe in God.”  It would seem weird for instance to say “I believe in telephones” because the existence of telephones is not in controversy, and to say “I believe that telephones exist” might be followed conversationally by “ I believe in obvious things too.”  Or further:  An expression of potential, “I believe that the telephone is the origin of those voices…" Thus faith becomes a conceptual modeling system for beliefs, and like all such systems, if it is not subjected to an occasional test of use value, soon becomes fairly useless.