wordverter

ohai

2011-08-13T22:39:00.001-07:00

I realize it's been over a year since the last post here. Dear readers, I apologize to you both.

I hope to add posts on a more regular basis, now that we've got internet at home. Technology is like Pringles: once you pop it, you can't stop it. You're whipped on the things you can do with being wired, and the idea of doing without isn't just uncomfortable - it's downright cataclysmic.

You're like this, I'm like this. Now let's get on with our precarious lives.

But first...the truth about cat videos:

Earworm My Eye

2010-08-27T19:05:00.000-07:00

I met up with an old high-school buddy a couple weeks ago; it was great catching up with him, meeting his partner, and generally shooting the breeze. When it came time to go home, they offered me a ride - sounds good. We hopped into the Mercedes and room-a-zoom-zoom we were off.

The radio was tuned to some '80s station. There was Faith No More, Men Without Hats (no joke)...

...and then it happened:

And so, for the next two weeks, the damn thing kept playing in my head.

It. Would. Not. Leave. I have classes to prep for, syllabi to write. It's there, too-rye-aying right between my ears. That's bad enough. But it gets worse, much worse. I go to work at some warehouse or print shop, doomed to another full day of repetitive tasks - grab bundle, put on pallet, grab bundle, put on pallet, lather rinse repeat - which means there's nothing to think about. Except for that song.

It's 3:30am. The cats are braying for their breakfast. And Dexy's Midnight Runners are too-rye-aying for the umpteen-fuckin'-zillionth time. It really was driving me crazy, almost as bad as the cats themselves.

My wife told me about a kid in her high school who, whenever you said there was a song stuck in your head, would immediately burst into "That's What Friends Are For" - fighting fire with fire.

It didn't work.

You've got to understand, this thing was taking up way too much mental space - and there's not that much to begin with. It was my arch-nemesis, the Khan to my Kirk.

Maybe you feel my pain. Or maybe you don't. And that makes me feel sad, because when you hurt, there's nothing quite like the satisfaction of spreading the pain around to everyone imaginable. You've got to understand, I want to share with you.

There, y'feelin' it now? Do you feel my pain?

I can't hear you!Louder!!!

Sing it with me!

All together now!

Now don't you feel better?

That's what I had to bear for two weeks straight - morning, noon, and night.

Well, it finally happened. I got it out of my head. You know what's there now?

How Not to Kill a Fucking Rat

2010-07-05T17:22:00.001-07:00

I realize I've been away for a while, but this was something I had to post.

My wife and I are lying in bed the other evening, just switched out the light, when we hear something: a faint, intermittent watery-type sound from the bathroom. Did we leave the sink on? (One of our cats likes to drink from the faucet, and we like to humor him.) No, it sounds more like a little kid playing in the bathtub. What the heck?

I get up and turn on the bathroom light - nothing unusual to see. But the sound's coming from the toilet - a leak? Doesn't sound like any leak I've heard before. Better see what's going on in the bowl. I'll have to raise the seat and take a lo--

FUCK! RAT! FUCKING RAT!

That's right, a fucking rat is doing the breaststroke. In our toilet.

What do you do? Flush. Unfortunately it doesn't work. I try again - nothing. Damn.

My wife doesn't want me messing with rats. Rats are filthy critters, and they can bite. I don't want to mess with it either, frankly. So what then? She calls a friend who's worked with lab rats - great, except this person lives in Baltimore, and it's 1:30am there. Naturally there's no answer.

I could sic our fearless cats on it - just let them into the bathroom, lift the toilet lid, and run out of there. But no, my wife will have nothing of it. If I could get bitten, so could the cats, and any medical bill is simply out of our tax bracket right now.

Now what? We decide to call the landlady; it's late, but better than trying to sleep with a fucking rat in the toilet. Pick up the phone, dial the number - she picks up!

Me: Hi, sorry for bothering at this hour, but you'll never guess what happened...
Landlady: What?
Me: Well, um, there's a fucking rat in the toilet.
Landlady: You're kidding!
Me: Nope. Swam up the pipe, and now it's stuck...What do we do? [As if this happened all the time!]
Landlady: Well, you could get something like a bowl and a cover for it, and catch it. That way you can take it outside and let it go...

Pause here for a second. Understand, I like my landlady. She's a decent person, not strictly business and piss off if it's not business; no, she's friendly, caring. She'll buy organic cleaning products, she'll sort her trash, she won't fuss about the rent. But here methinks the landlady careth too much.

Me: Um, I don't think that's an option.
Landlady: Or I could just come over.

OK, pop quiz - what's the most appropriate response to this offer? That's right, "See you in two minutes! I'll make coffee." But do I say this? Nooooooo...

Me: Well, we'll see what we can do. If we need you, we'll call you.
Landlady: OK, sounds fine.

Now my wife has heard the conversation, or most of it. What she did hear was the fucking rat-catching business; what she didn't hear was the offer that followed. Whereas I assumed she'd heard the whole thing, so I say nothing about this offer. And my mind kicks into full fight-or-flight mode.

The funny thing about the fight-or-flight mechanism is how it hijacks your organism while leaving you with the bill; it doesn't matter what the reality of the situation is, but how you interpret it. And when the adrenaline's rushing through you, you simply don't ask questions because this is not the time to be dithering - there's something threatening out there, dammit! So options that would normally be visible to a sane human being get closed off. But - and here's the catch - you're still responsible.

Another thing: the tunnel-vision effect. When in the throes of fight-or-flight passion, implications are slow in the formation. What you see doesn't make sense for a while, you only care if you achieved your goal. It's only when the adrenaline wears off that all the ramifications flood into your mind.

My wife is naturally not keen on me catching any rats, and I've already taken on the duty of handling this situation. There's only one option left to my throbbing brain: kill the fucker. But how?

I look around the apartment for something that looks like it could deliver a lethal blow to a toilet-swimming fucking rat. A broom? - Too long. The toilet brush? - Too light, it'd just bounce off 'im. Plunger? - Oh yeah, we don't have one.

I do have these poles about 3' long that I've been saving. We bought some baker's racks, but some of the support poles weren't machined properly; this meant replacing all of them. I can't swing them in the bathroom, but I can thrust it into the toilet, St. George-style, and mash the fucking rat. It's got a rubber tip, originally for padding on floors, now for cushioning the blow slightly. It won't scratch the toilet if I miss.

My trusty weapon in hand. No fucking rat is safe.

So I take the pole into the bathroom and formulate a plan. Then I steel myself. OK, ready: One, two, three. I flush the toilet to immobilize the fucking rat, then quick-open the lid and *BAM* deliver the lethal blow. The fucking rat doesn't know what hit him until it's too late. It doesn't move.

The toilet is empty of water now: I'd flushed. So where's this water coming from, and why's it going all over the bathroom floor? I don't understand.

Then I see, and I understand. There's a hole in the bottom of the toilet, right under the fucking rat. I see the one by the other just long enough for the fucking rat carcass to hang on the edge, like that final putt at the end of Caddyshack, and then fall in. There is now a fucking rat carcass on the floor of our bathroom, surrounded on all sides by porcelain. And there's water all over the floor.

I have just slain a fucking rat and a fucking toilet. Great. Just fucking great.

The aftermath. Note that the toilet is not in our bathroom when this picture was taken, but in the driveway. We do not go to the bathroom in the driveway.

I mop up, clean off, and go to bed. But I don't sleep very well.

The cats wake me up at 5 am for breakfast, and I have to pee. This is not happening. I put some clothes on and go out for a walk in the rain. Nope, the corner Starbucks isn't open. I keep walking toward the park. On my way back home I see Starbucks has opened, but by then it's already too late.

We arrange to have a plumber come in and replace the toilet in the afternoon. The guy comes, he's a good fellow. One hour and $417 later, we can pee in our own home again.

What I Learned From My Experience

Now I'm a teacher by profession. There are at least three things to learn from all this:

Lesson #1: Toilets are not indestructible. You know this only from the movies, not usually from real life. The worst we hit a toilet with is pee and poo, which even apes know are relatively soft. But toilets - they are heavy and solid, so it's natural to think they're tough. Right? Wrong.

Let's calculate the force of that lethal blow. Now the steel bar weighs about 2 pounds, and it's 7/8 of an inch thick. I'd guess it took all of 0.1 second to ram that fucker into the toilet, and it might have traveled about 12 inches.

Now acceleration = (vf - vi)/t, so the pole accelerated at a rate of 2 feet per second^2. If F = ma, then

(2 lb of steel x 10 ft per second^2) = 200 foot-pounds per second^2

At the moment of impact, which probably lasted about 1/100 of a second, all that force was transferred to the toilet bowl - that makes 2000 foot-pounds. Convert that to inches for the next step, so 24000 inch-pounds.

Since it was delivered entirely through the end of the pole, whose area is 1.373"in^2, the amount of force would be 24000 inch-pounds per in^2 / 0.73 inch= almost 17500 PSI.

Between the steel pole and the vitreous china, it's clear which one would break. The tensile strength of steel is 40000 PSI, whereas that of of vitreous china is only 4000-800 kgf/cm^2, or 5600-11200 PSI, far lower than the steel bar - even when cushioned by the rubber tip and the fucking rat carcass.

Let me reiterate that:

(2 lb of steel x 10 ft per second^2) x 0.01 sec
= 200 foot-pounds of force

Now, just for hypothetical purposes, let's replace the steel bar with the equivalent of poo:

(2 lb of poo x 10 ft per second^2) x 0.01 sec
= 200 foot-pounds of *splat*

Enough said. I don't know the tensile strength of poo, but I expect this would be the result. Which leads us to...

Lesson #2: Toilets make lousy fucking rat traps. There are several reasons why they are unfeasible options for destroying the fucking rat problem:

1. Fucking rats very rarely come up the pipe.

2. Toilet fucking rat traps rely on someone doing guard duty. And who wants to stand around waiting for a fucking rat to come up the pipe?

3. They are not idiot-proof.

4. They break rather easily, as shown above.

5. They're expensive to buy and install.

But perhaps this is too abstract for you. Let's take a concrete example, like New York City. Even at a conservative estimate, we'd have to use up 44 million toilets to rid the city of its fucking rats. This adds up to a cost of 44 million man-hours (not including travel time and loading) and $18.3 billion. Even the Pentagon would pass on that offer - and we haven't even considered the baby fucking rats that get left behind and grow up.

This leads us to...

Lesson #3: If you find a fucking rat in your toilet, call the landlady. Don't wait for her to invite herself over, just get her to come by. And don't forget to make coffee.

Death by Asteroid. Really.

2010-03-05T10:05:00.000-08:00

A panel of 41 scientists has concluded that the dinosaurs were killed off by a giant asteroid, Deep-Impact style. This is apparently "the only plausible explanation", even though it contradicts Gary Larson's hypothesis that the real cause may be attributed to cigarettes. No doubt the verdict will be appealed.

Transferable Skills Are Made, Not Born

2010-02-27T23:04:00.000-08:00

This is for all you job-hunting philosophy students out there. I know you're out there, I can hear you breathing. Hey you! Yeah, you - the one by the white sedan! Let me give some unsolicited advice, to you and to myself: make a conscious effort to extend the range of your abilities. You can, though it might take work.

In the course of my groundless floating (i.e. surfing the Internet), I ran across an interesting bit which prompted this post. It's not even remotely original, but in a volatile job market that practically demands career changes, the lesson is worth reiterating.

When job hunting, you may have to consider positions you haven't been trained for. If you've been trained in (ahem) philosophy, you've educated yourself into a corner (now really, besides universities, how many places hire professional philosophers?) unless you make the effort to apply all those skills you learned in new situations.

This transferability doesn't come automatically. That the skills of philosophical training must be listed is evidence that those very same skills are neither obvious nor obviously transferable.

In fact, I'm tempted to say that every skill requires effort to extend. Case in point: in an FBI study on attackers of police officers it was found, among other things, that a number of incidents could have been avoided by those officers. Many assailants carry concealed weapons which ought to have been detected but weren't.

An irony...is that officers who are assigned to look for concealed weapons, while working off-duty security at night clubs for instance, are often highly proficient at detecting them. "But then when they go back to the street without that specific assignment, they seem to 'turn off' that skill," and thus are startled--sometimes fatally--when a suspect suddenly produces a weapon and attacks.

In other words, cops who get good at spotting hidden arms while moonlighting don't necessarily carry that skill over to their day job. It's the exact same action, only the context is different, namely the role of a police officer. Understand that I am neither blaming nor excusing the victims for their injury, only pointing up a fact. We're all prone to similar oversights.

But should we acquiesce to the facts? Shall we throw up our arms and leave our status quo of abilities be? No: what we should do is beware of our tendency to let habits ossify - and determine where we can put Skill X to good use. This transfer of skills is precisely what's needed in order to get a job when you have to switch gears.

Now the more specialized you get, the more deliberate the transfer must be. Otherwise how can you explain the stupid things philosophers sometimes do? Some plagiarize, others cheat on their spouses, still others set themselves up as experts on 9/11. Philosophers aren't the only idiots; I am simply saying that their abilities, which can apply to many situations, do not do so of their own accord.

I may well be revealing more about myself than about philosophers in general, but it seems to me we've got our blind spots like anyone else. I think our blind spot tends to be an undue pride in our intellectual abilities: we think we're hot shit, that we can do anything simply because we've studied this abstract, complicated thing. C.S. Peirce voiced this criticism over a century ago, and it remains true today; it doesn't seem profound, but that's only because we don't appreciate how needful it was to say it.

We must make an effort to apply our skills appropriately. This means observing the field - where we'll be doing our critical thinking, for example. It means not only analyzing that field and case studies, but also imagining ourselves in various situations: how, O Great Spinozist, how do you teach English to a dozen kids in your class when they've already sat through a full day of school? what book do you find that advice in - and how do you know you'll do it right (assuming it's good advice)? You might have a leg up on, say, a ditch-digger or an air-traffic controller, but it's not always evident.

So. How can we help ourselves make that shift of skills? I'd like to whip up some ways to do that. But, my friends, that's another post.

(Image thoughtfully pilfered from here on Student Work in Photography, Drawing, and Graphic Design)

A Volitionist Argument for the Assurance of Salvation

2010-02-22T01:59:00.000-08:00

Agent Intellect has a very interesting post comparing the idea of salvation as manifested in Islam and Christianity. He argues that since Allah is irreducibly capricious, Muslims can only hope that they will be found worthy in His eyes; a righteous man therefore could be damned if Allah decided it should be so. Christianity's promise, on the other hand, assures that God can, does, and must allow any righteous follower. This is a heavy claim, even without the comparison.

What has always puzzled me is the idea that we can know any limitations to God's nature. After all, if God is all-knowing and all-powerful, why couldn't He perform the impossible? Why couldn't He create a rock that He could not lift? By extension, why couldn't God go back on His word? This is a well-known argument against Christianity: any limitations to God lead to self-contradictory conclusions, and so Christianity is absurd. If that is the case, then Islam presents the only logical conception of God - a Supreme Being who can change His mind in an instant, even deceive us whimsically.

I believe St. Paul supplies a response to this charge. My contention is that the impossibility of a lying God exists and is perfectly logical, but that it still rests on His will. Far from being a limitation, this evidences God's love for us. First we have to trace the nature of this impossibility, and then we can draw out the implications.

Understand that I am not arguing that God exists here. In the following argument

If the Bible is true, God is real and He spoke to Abraham.
If God had this conversation with Abraham, He could not lie.
Therefore if the Bible is true, God did not lie to Abraham.

this post addresses only Premiss #2. Nor am I arguing for theological voluntarism necessarily (!), though this could be regarded as supportive of that position. For the moment I'm simply unpacking this question and offering an account.

Agent Intellect cites several verses supporting the thesis that God cannot lie, but the only one which says it is impossible for God to lie is Heb. 6.18. What's interesting is that He does so purely out of volition, which is confirmed by verses 13-15. God made the promise to Abraham, which really was not necessary; nobody forced Him to make the promise. The force of necessity comes in thanks to (1) the nature of promises and (2) the absolute nature of God, not in His willing to make the promise. Because a promise involves swearing by something higher than oneself, God was compelled to appeal to a higher authority. But since God is the highest authority around, He could only swear by Himself. That's what makes the Law what it is. In other words, in the act of promising, God transmuted His word from actuality to necessity; it became binding because He willed it.

Thus prior to the Covenant there was no necessity behind God's word; it was merely actually so. We can then say He did not lie, though He very well could have. Therefore the necessity mentioned in Hebrews 6.18 rests ultimately on God's decision to make the promise to Abraham. In other words, God created His own necessity.

Does that mean we're supposed to take God's word for it? He cannot lie because He said so...? That's like the ultimate used-car salesman: "Trust me." Let's compare the two cases. The used-car salesman wants to be trusted, but we know there are greater sources of truth than his snake-oil testimony. We can have the car tested and see whether there's any truth in the claim. In the case of God, however, we have no higher authority to appeal to. Assuming that God is real, He is the final arbiter on all matters and therefore the ultimate assurance for a promise - even His own.

The consistency of God's nature manifests itself in His love for us. This is evidenced by the fact that He makes himself trustworthy, as the Covenant demonstrates. Out of the very nature which created the world, God literally creates necessity by binding His word with Himself. He could deceive us, but He doesn't; instead he holds Himself to his word, which is by definition superlative in power and authority.

This rendition comes with an interesting twist: since God's word ought to be binding because it is so, it appears to fall prey to the Naturalistic Fallacy - and yet does not. The reason for this is that the Naturalistic Fallacy depends on immanent conceptions of modality. The domain of philosophy is the world around us, and we try to explain things in terms that anybody could examine. In other words, we cannot explain how necessity of any kind may be derived from actuality in terms of the everyday world. This is true. But God by definition transcends the universe, and therefore its laws do not necessarily apply. In this case alone can we derive an ought from an is. This argument therefore provides a valid speculative link between the immanent and transcendent.

This conception of God seems most consistent with His nature. See Genesis 1.3 or John 1.1: things happen on the basis of God's speaking, and they occur as commanded. I am not arguing from the authority of these verses, I am citing them as evidence of sacred consistency. (My argument for the basis of Christian assurance rests on Scripture, but only to the extent that it asserts the reality of God. Even if we leave the question mark of God standing, the argument remains valid.) The world came into being: none of this had to be, it simply was the case. The complexity of the universe is certainly fascinating, but so what? That doesn't make me go "Wow!" It could be more complex. Big deal. No, it is the world's very contingency which makes it so astonishing - that it exists at all.

So it seems that Paul sheds light on the loving nature of God by explaining why He cannot lie: the will to be true to His word, which only makes sense because of care. God cannot lie because He cares enough for us to make a promise. Hopefully I've got it right, but I could well be wrong.

Musique du Jour

2010-02-15T00:39:00.000-08:00

Grouper, "Hold the Way."

Maya Deren dances with David Lynch.

A Thought - Awards in Architecture

2010-02-14T23:32:00.001-08:00

It seems to me that architectural designs should not be given awards until they've been up for at least fifty years.

1. Buildings are meant to be used, meaning people must live and work in them. If they cannot be used comfortably, they cannot be called good, no matter how pretty they look. What good is a kitchen with countertops only three inches deep? You can't do much with it. What is the point of staircases three inches wide? Ferrets could use it, but who's designing building for ferrets? Buildings are designed around human actions, so they have to be designed in human proportions.

2. Corollary of #1: buildings are not meant to be repaired more than necessary. Fixing a building costs time and money, and it cuts into the everyday workings of the people using the building. Water needs to be shut off sometimes, areas are blocked off, and so on. For regular maintenance this can't be helped, and should be tolerated in the interest of preserving the building. Structural defects are not necessary, they are errors in the design itself and are therefore avoidable. (I'm thinking about the Portland Building fiasco, an avoidable architectural flower of evil. I don't include Portlandia, a sculptural gem.)

3. Neither the use nor the soundness of a building really can be seen right away. This is because we don't always know how people will respond to the building, and an architectural blueprint is extremely complex - flaws won't announce themselves. What looks good on paper, then, might not actually work in practice. But that wouldn't be due to a disconnect between theory and practice; rather, it would evidence an error in knowledge of principles. (See Immanuel Kant, On the Old Saw: That Might Be True in Theory, But I t Won't Work in Practice. For the full text, listen here. Kant's talking about human affairs in general, so it applies to my argument too.)

4. Therefore we should hold off on any special awards for architectural designs for a sufficient length of time - fifty years, I'd say. Candidates could be chosen after half a century, or slated for monitoring that long. Costs for utilities, repairs, and maintenance would be logged up; those costs would yield post-construction rate by which to gauge the building. Detailed surveys could be taken every five years, finding the opinion of tenants of the building concerning its user-friendliness, adaptivity, visual appeal, etc. All this information would be brought to the table along with the blueprints for judging. This would do architecture more justice as a field by evaluating cases on the merits which fit the intent of the field, thus reducing the total amount of crow that needs to be eaten.

Discuss.
(Images haplessly horked from Design Language Etc. and Great Buildings.com *har*.)

Jan Tschichold on Typography, Learning,...and Agapé

2010-02-14T22:35:00.000-08:00

"In a pathological pursuit of things different, the reasonable proportions of paper size, like so many other qualities, have been banished by some to the disadvantage of the solitary and defenseless reader. There was a time when deviations from the truly beautiful page proportions 2:3, 1:√ 3 , and the Golden Section were rare. Many books produced between 1550 and 1770 show these proportions exactly, to within half a millimetre.

"To learn this, one has to examine old books thoroughly. Alas, almost no one does this any more, yet the benefits of such study are imeasurable. Schools of typography, in cooperation with libraries of old books, need to undertake two things: first, a detailed inspection of old books, and second, in support of this, permanent as well as changing exhibitions of these old treasures. An admiringly superficial look at a particularly beautiful set of pages or title pages only is not sufficient. One has to be able to touch these books and carefully study their typographical structure page by page. Even old books whose content is no longer relevant can serve this purpose. It is true, we are born with our eyes, but they will only open slowly to beauty, much more slowly than one thinks. Nor is it simple to find a knowledgeable person one could ask for guidance. Frequently, a general educational background is lacking, even in the teacher.

"Around 1930 a teacher of fine arts was outraged by the fact that a typographer was expected to know his way around in the history of script of the past two thousand years. By the way, demands in those days were more moderate than they are today. If we were to disregard such standards altogether, however, we would return to barbarism. He who no longer understands what he is doing is becoming as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal."

--"The Importance of Tradition in Typography". The Form of the Book, p. 27-8.
(Image recklessly lifted from Linotype.com)

Brian Eno on Belgians

2010-01-30T21:09:00.001-08:00

"I notice two things about Belgians. First, they only get wild with their spectacle frames - Belgian spectacles are spectacular - second, they seem almost universally tainted (blessed?) with personal, regional and national self-doubt - reservation, detachment, melancholy. Almost universally, because the woman in the museum (mid 30s, looked a little like Jill Phillips) had the most genuine and deep smile for all her children (dozens of them) - a smile that only issues from complete sweetness and confidence. What a person to have as a mother. I bet Belgians have very complicated affairs and tortuous, heart-searching marriage breakups.

"But all the same I enjoy these spuddy, craggy, torn-by-conflicting-emotions Flemish faces. When they smile it's like sun in a cold country - so welcome, so sweet. Some fabulous noses. Proposal: A Book of Flemish Noses - coffee-table type, like Roadside Shrines of India."

--A Year with Swollen Appendices, p. 10-11.

Eric Voegelin on the Essence of Christianity, and Our Reaction to It

2009-12-10T22:31:00.000-08:00

"The nature of this drive [to pull the Christian eschaton from the divine to the immanent] cannot be discovered by submitting the structure of the fallacy to an even closer analysis. The attention must rather concentrate on what the thinkers achived by their fallacious construction. On this point there is no doubt. They achieved a certainty about the meaning of history, and about their own place in it, which otherwise they would not have had. Certainties, now, are in demand for the purpose of overcoming uncertainties with thier accompaniment of anxiety; and the next question would be: What specific uncertainty was so disturbing that it had to be overcome by the dubious means of fallacious imanentization? One does not have to look far afield for an answer. Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity. The feeling of security in a "world full of gods" is lost with the gods themselves; when the world is de-divinized, communication with the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith, in the sense of Heb. 11:1, as the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things unseen. Ontologically, the subtance of things hoped for is nowhere to be found but in faith itself; and, epitemologically, there is no proof for things unseen but again this very faith. The bond is tenuous, indeed, and it may snap easily. The life of the soul in openness toward God, the waiting, the periods of aridity and dulness, guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance, forsakenness and hope against hope, the silent stirrings of love and grace, trembling on the verge of a certainty which if gained is loss - the very lightness of this fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust for massively possessive experience. The danger of a breakdown of faith to a socially relevant degree, now, will increase in the measure inwhich Christianity is a worldly success, that is, it will grow when Christianity penetrates a civilizational area thoroughly, supported by institutional pressure, and when, at the same time, it undergoes an internal process of spiritualization, of a more complete realization of its essence. The more people are drawn or pressured into the Christian orbit, the greater will be the number among them who do not have the spiritual stamina for the heroic adventure of the soul that is Christianity; and the likeliness of a fall from faith will increase when civilizational progress of education, literacy, and intellectual debate will bring the full seriousness of Christianity to the understanding of ever more individuals. Both of these processes characterized the high Middle Ages. The historical detail is not the present concern; it will be sufficient to refer summarily to the growing town societies with their intense spiritual culture as the primary centers from which the danger radiated into Western society at large."

- The New Science of Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952, p. 132-133.
(Image rambunctiously bobbed from http://www.thoughtsongod.com/?p=6008)

Update: 8CHRSAOK

2009-12-06T20:18:00.000-08:00

Dear readers, you have spoken! and I owe an apology to both of you. I was mistaken: the New York DMV does allow eight-character license plates for a personalized Empire State plate. The type of plate I referenced is different from the one in the picture. My error lay in believing that personal license plates were all the same, but obviously not.

Apologies also to Mr. Sorkin, Mr. Murdoch, and Ms. Maddow are also in order. Especially to Ms. Maddow: gravely have I insulted thee by lumping you together with Murdoch!

Yes, the post was about getting facts straight, so the irony weighs heavily. I try to teach my students to be accurate in their research, and believe it or not, I try to live up to that myself. But even Homer nods, and I'm nowhere near Homer's stature. Live and learn.

More importantly, though, truth in research presupposes honesty. Fact-checking is just a special case of that; necessary retractions are another. And so I want to reiterate that. Correct me where I'm wrong.

The original topic in the 2008 post had to do with photojournalistic fraud - photoshopping pictures that are supposedly factual - which is not merely a lapse in the fact-checking but a deliberate breach of trust in the media/audience relation. What's so insidious about it, it seems to me, is that it takes advantage of two beliefs: the first one being that "seeing is believing" and the second being "publication = true".

Maybe you're thinking, "Oh come on, don't be so naive. Wake up and pay attention: there are plenty of sharks out there, ready to put one over on you." I'm aware of that. But it doesn't excuse the shysters' conduct. Everyone makes mistakes, that's bad but unavoidable; but not everyone commits fraud, which is really bad and definitely avoidable.

The Virtues of Spinning the Pic

2009-12-05T21:43:00.000-08:00

I've posted before about how an increase in the plasticity of the media results in a corresponding decrease in trust of the media. When things like this find their way into books and TV news, it lends temporary credibility to the particular hosts; however, they are followed by a lasting credibility gap in their general domains (read: the media). When you get burned, you'll run from any flame.

But I also said I'd post about the potential benefits of this sort of thing. Here goes.

Basically, the media seem to be teaching the public to discern fakes to a finer degree - thanks to the combination of increased accessibility of information on the one hand, and the media's own lack of use on the other hand. If journalists will not police themselves or each other, it's up to us to play "spot the phony." Which the snarky Internet generation is only too glad to do. By supplying fake pictures, then, the media are potentially educating us in critical thinking and observation - but only inadvertently.

(Now watch, Rupert Murdoch or Rachel Maddow will take this up and use it to spin their errors to their own advantage.)

2LNG2BEREAL

2009-12-05T21:03:00.000-08:00

A recent ripple in the news media and blogosphere concerns some material published in the latest book by Andrew Ross Sorkin, and also on his website. A picture appears to show the vanity plate that was spotted in Greenwich, CT. The plates read "2BG2FAIL". On a Porsche. Owned by a banker.

Sounds too good to be true - it would be like them, wouldn't it? But a sharp-eyed reader of The Blue Marble pointed out that the New York DMV allows personalized plates to be no more than six characters long. The alleged vanity plate has eight characters; in other words, it must have been photoshopped. Yet another case of journalists presenting fake evidence. It's things like this that make it unsurprising that folks today are so jaded.

Journalists are people too, I know. But this sort of thing is so politically charged, the lack of attention is inexcusable. The resentment against bankers (which I can't help sharing) runs so high that things like this only feed the fire. Truth would be a better fuel.

The Case of the Case in Point

2009-12-02T23:24:00.000-08:00

If there's one thing that's misunderstood about philosophy, it's the thought-experiments. Some are good, some are bad; how do you tell the difference? I want to try and articulate that here, because it can spell the difference between a genuine conversation and a mere bull session. Seems to me that real problems reflect reality (pace Rorty), and their significance is directly proportionate to the amount of discussion they attract. Paradoxes are great examples of philosophical problems, and I do have a pet theory about them. But that's another post. Anyway...

Philosophers sometimes get ridiculed for their examples and thought-experiments - just implausible, its said, implausible or downright silly. There couldn't be any connection to reality, right?

Truth truly is stranger than fiction. Case in point: during my ethics course Monday, we were covering Rawls. In chapter 7 of A Theory of Justice, Rawls distinguishes between the unjust, the bad, and the evil. He cites the example of a person who pursues excessive wealth, pointing out the difference between the unjust man, the bad man, and the evil man (TJ 439). An unjust man commits an act that is unfair to other folks, though the motive would be considered legitimate if kept within limits - say, acquiring money for security. He would be bad if the action was unjust but pursued for its own sake; he enjoyed the mastery of money, for example. Again, that motive would be regarded as legitimate if restrained. He would be evil if he deliberately set out to fleece people because it was unjust to do so; if he enjoyed the unjust act, he'd be evil.

Some of the students asked for another example to clarify the point. "Sure," I said, "consider the case of a person pursuing excessive sex - interpret that any place you wish, it doesn't matter." They considered this to be silly. How could you be regarded as unjust, bad or evil for pursuing excessive sex? Simple: when the libido of one partner outstrips that of the other, and they simply act on it, it is unjust. Depending on the motive, the action could be judged bad or evil. If it were excessively violent, the same principle applies.

By chance a friend of mine posted a news item on Facebook about a British couple that was banned from having sex on account of the excessive noise. The woman appealed the case, and lost. In Rawls's language, their lovemaking was unjust in the sense that they were disturbing the peace. Had it been a party, or a football game, the end result would be the same: too loud.

Unjust indeed. I am so vindicated.

You see, my example was pretty tame as philosophical examples go. There is the brain in a vat, which is a variation on the theme of Descartes's evil genius and Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Such problems pose the question of epistemology - how do you know what's real? - and metaphysics - what is the really real? There's the whole zombie philosophy thing, which has to do with identifying consciousness.

And then you have the medieval philosophers. They came up with some doozies, but we ridicule them because we misunderstand them. For instance, "Did Christ carry a purse or not?" This was an economic question: the Mendicant Order of monks complained about the discrepancy between the poverty of Jesus, their ideal, and the growing wealth of the Church. They had serious intent behind them. Questions about angels - such as whether they were created in beatitude or not - have a great deal to say about rational creatures such as ourselves.

The take-home lesson: don't knock something until you understand what it's really about.

(By the way, the "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" is of disputed origin, but it seems only to have become well known because of its use in ridiculing the medievals. Not surprisingly, the only folks citing this question use it lampoon the medievals - without once considering whether there might actually be a real reason for posing such apparently silly questions.)

Now this brings out at least three things:

Generally speaking, we don't get to exercise our imagination enough. We could all use the exercise.
When an otherwise sane-looking person poses an otherwise ludicrous question in a philosophical debate, there's probably (or, should I say hopefully) good reasons behind their doing so.
When considering theoretical questions, ludicrous questions can prove to be remarkably concise ways of taking the inquiry to its extreme - and that's where we really learn something.

The problem this brings out is: how do you know when it's a real philosophical problem, as opposed to a BS question? There seems to be a palpable difference between questions such as

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody's around to hear it, does it make a sound?

and

What if your tail chased you?

Triumph the insult comic dog - bon jovi
Uploaded by AC310DC. - Watch funny animal videos.

Badly needed comic relief intermezzo

Well, if you're talking with the guy who poses the puzzler, and the reason isn't apparent, ask. If you're reading a text and find said conundrum, look for the rationale in the text itself. Usually it's right there. And if it isn't? Time to hit the library. Do some research, find out everything you can about said person and their circumstances; if they did not write about this themselves, chances are somebody else did. And if that turns up dry? I mean, really turns up with nothing to show for it dry? Then it's time you did some digging into the world of the author. There may well be notions they assume the reader will have; that's not unusual, since folks usually and mainly write for an audience of their own time.

Once you get an explanation, consider the ideas being challenged. Philosophers love to enjoy doubting the most ordinary-looking things. It may be BS, but then again, it may present a genuine problem. How to tell the difference? My reflex answer is basically, you learn by experience. That is, if it kicks up a living doubt in you, you'll be concerned and set out to find an answer. Sometimes the problem can be settled quickly - say, with some detail that was forgotten when the question originally came up. Or it may niggle at you for days, or even months. The greater the irritation of doubt, the more significant the problem relative to our current state of mind.

If a problem seems genuine, a good way of double-checking this is to talk it over with someone. It's happened that I mulled over some difficulty for days, and then it vanished when I brought it up with a friend. Putting the question out in public threw it into a different light, and I discovered that I had simply ignored some basic fact or other; once that was obvious, the doubt went up in smoke *poof*. Then again, a genuine problem will rarely fail to get somebody's attention. Maybe not always immediately, but when it finds an audience that will take it seriously, the problem will show itself to be a window on some avenue of thought that hasn't been covered yet.

How Scientific Can Philosophy Be? or, Scientific Progress Really Does Go Boink On Occasion

2009-11-07T21:27:00.000-08:00

This was originally going to be a comment; it only seemed to be fair to talk directly to someone when giving feedback. But since the site wouldn't let me post it (no idea why)...here it comes.

A study done recently claims that people tend not to assume an objective standard in morality. The writers of the study argue that, contrary to the view of many philosophers, most normal people have a fairly relativistic view of ethics. The conclusion isn't what I have a beef with; it's the method of arriving at that conclusion that irks me.

The experiment is as follows. Subjects were asked to imagine two people who are asked to evaluate a situation involving killing. One of these hypothetical people is a college student, the other is (a) also a college student, (b) from an Amazonian culture, or (c) a cruel extraterrestrial race. In this imaginary scenario, one person thinks the act is morally permissible, the other thinks it's morally wrong. The subjects were then asked whether the hypothetical evaluators would agree or disagree in terms of their moral judgment.

Depending on how closely related the two speculative people are, the subjects responded variously. In the case of (a) two college students from the same campus, they were imagined to agree. In (b) a college student and an Amazon, they were imagined to be less in agreement. In the case of (c), a college student and Evil ET, the imagined level of agreement was even lower.

In other words, a few college students in philosophy courses believe that between two individuals, the level of agreement is inversely proportional to the closeness of the similarity of those two individuals. The greater the difference between cultures, the greater the difference of agreement on ethical issues.

I'm afraid the experiment seems quite flawed. Leaving aside the more general problem of the extent to which statistics should determine how we actually think about ethical questions (doesn't every logic textbook consider the argumentum ad populum to be a fallacy? Har-har); leaving aside the even more serious problem of the extent that those numbers should influence how we ought to think about such problems, there are serious difficulties with the experiment presented here.

Basically, the actual sample is not representative - of anything, let alone of "ordinary folks." All the participants were students taking philosophy courses at one college. Hardly the average Joe. And it was a small sample at that: only 223. Let's put that into perspective. In 2006-7 alone there were 11,969 philosophy BAs awarded. This comes from a total number of 1,524,092 BAs awarded in that year. (Figures taken from the National Center for Educational Statistics.) The study doesn't specify whether all the subjects were philosophy majors, but for the sake of perspective and generosity, let's assume they are. And because we're feeling extra generous today, let's assume that all the undergrads completed their studies.

In other words, the sample consisted of 1.45 x 10^-4 of the total undergrad population. This out of an estimated general population of 301.6 million. Assuming the number didn't rise between then and now, this means the sample would only account for less than 2% of the philosophy undergrad population, which itself constitutes less than 1% of the total undergrad population. In the US. (The Census Bureau's estimate for 2007 can be found here; world population figures taken from the Population Reference Bureau.)

That means the study yields a sample of 7.4 x 10^-7 of the US population, or 3.38 x10^-8 of the world's population - in a snapshot of the world's history. Representative it ain't.

Now I confess to knowing little about what experimental philosophy is up to. But if it's trying to be more scientific about philosophy by collecting data, it has to be more scientific in its data collection than is presented here. If a physicist published such dismally designed research, she'd be laughed out of court. Philosophers have been criticized for their "unscientific armchair theorizing." Experimental philosophy is attempting to use scientific methods of gathering information. Put simply, it's doubly important for philosophers to do the work right: to curry favor with scientists and the broader community that esteems natural science so highly. Take a tip from them - get bigger, more representative samples.

Ode to Turkish Coffee

2009-01-26T13:04:00.000-08:00

Today's post is half-and-half: one part serious, the other not so much. I'm not sure myself how seriously it should be taken, so - sensitive or snobbish? delicate or dorky? You be the judge. (Oh, and it'll morph like a Wikipedia entry, so mind the timestamp when you cite me for your term paper.)

I want to make a case for the supremacy of Turkish coffee; I'll do this by way of analysis of the idea of civilization. If there ever was a pretentious-sounding word, it's "civilized." With that one word (or its negation) you can piss on anything you want, verbally speaking:

"He doesn't wash his hands? How uncivilized."

"Oh, you can't eat with utensils - use your fingers, like civilized people."

I'm no sociologist, but it seems to me that civilization is marked by at least two things: gratuitous objects and exercise of self-control. And I want to say that it's not merely a matter of one or the other, but the instances of both occurring in an object - something you lovingly devote a fair amount of effort to, even though it serves no purpose beyond its own existence. When, say, you start playing with the decor just because you can, that strikes me as one of those things: there's no reason to move the furniture around except to stave off boredom. But see? you can afford to be bored by the decor.

Let me take coffee as one of those indexes of civilization. If I'm right about all this, the highest form would be Turkish coffee.

Think about it: you don't need coffee to begin with, but there it is, waiting for you to cradle in your hands. Doesn't that feel nice? There's no nutritional value in coffee; we got along just fine without it. So right there we've got something totally useless. "But I need it to stay awake!" you protest. Fine, have a Red Bull then. Mmmm, cough syrup with a kick. And you can chug it.

Too much Red Bull?

We like fast. (How else can you justify the fast food feed bag, even as a joke?) Now you can run by a Starbucks for a triple-shot skim-milk cappuccino - wet or dry - or you can go in some drive-thru joint and grab a paper cuppa. And it's all fast. But a Turkish coffee can't be made fast. You could easily automate it, but you can't speed it up much: its essence is precisely the process of slowly heating up the brew, stopping just short of a full boil - three times. To make good Turkish coffee, you have to be patient.

And even when you get it in your hands, you have to be patient. First you wait - some more - to let the fine coffee silt settle. Then when you do drink the coffee, you can't just swill it down: it's one sip at a time. At best you can hasten slowly. But why would anyone want to hurry down a cup of this deep, rich, gratuitous drink?

This sort of patience is an exercise in delayed gratification - or, put another way, self-control. Little kids think that way: more is better, so a lot more must be a lot better. Faster is better here, so it must be better everywhere, and the faster the better.

Self-control seems generally to be considered the path to quality. Ask any artist or athlete, they'll tell you it takes a lot of work and discipline to make it. You've heard it all before: "Talent will only take you so far; to go that extra mile, you gotta work."

Have I learned this valuable lesson? Not fully, I have to confess; there are plenty of times I've gone for the quick-and-easy way out. I need more practice. Hmmm. Think I'll have me another Turkish coffee. It's good practice.

(Images perilously purloined from http://www.flickr.com/photos/blhphotography/501306828/ and http://www.troys-drums.com/archive/2006_10_01_troys-drums.htm)

Will Pay to Work for Free

2008-11-21T05:19:00.000-08:00

Un-friggin-believable this is, if true.

According to mediabistro.com, Room to Grow is celebrating its 10th anniversary at Christie's in NYC. Among the festivities: internships at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone to be auctioned off. In other words, you can buy your way into an unpaid temporary position.

Just for fun - OK, and to procrastinate a little - I did some snooping. Room to Grow is indeed having their wing-ding at Christie's, and indeed there is an auction. But what they're auctioning isn't disclosed on the website. If it turns out to be true, though, that's a bit troublesome to me.

It wouldn't be the first time: in May the Associated Press reported that a man got an internship at GQ Magazine for his son. How? By paying more than $30,000 - on EBay.

Unless this is common practice, I take this as a bad sign. And if it is common practice, it seems like a pretty iffy one. My understanding was always that internships (and paid jobs) were landed on the basis of merit, not moolah. Readers, I'm appealing to both of you to enlighten me on this point.

In Memoriam: Aimee Alcarez Cowan (1975-2008)

2008-11-19T14:21:00.000-08:00

I was blessed to know her in my first two years at TMC. I heard how she did right, teaching at Tufts - she must've been a good professor. Today she passed away. A bright little light has gone out, but I was lucky enough to see. I was lucky enough to be her friend. My prayers go out to her family and friends, but so do my memories. We've all been blessed to know her.

Brian Eno and Harold Budd, "Late October"

Awakenings

2008-11-06T10:55:00.000-08:00

I just realized something. In 1988 I was a god-damn no-good dope-smokin' tie-dye wearing long-haired starry-eyed hippie freak.

Well, twenty years later I don't smoke - anything. I don't wear tie-dyes anymore, and my hair's not so long.

So I guess I look different.

Do I regret any of it? Am I ashamed?

Not on your fuckin' life.

Links, links, links

2008-11-06T09:33:00.000-08:00

I don't have time for this, but I'm gonna take time anyway. It can't be said strongly enough: Tuesday was one of the biggest days in recent history, not just American history but world history.

Whatever I say really can't do justice to the significance of all this; instead let me offer links to various thinks...Obama said this was a long time coming - just ask Amanda Jones. Courtesy of Agent Intellect, who got it courtesy of Instapundit. Parasitic, these blogs.) The Onion, known for its satire, manages to tell the truth here and here.

For those who think all the racist bigots have gun racks in their pick-em-up trucks - and why the election is so important - check out this by Untravel, which took place right here in so-called cultured Europe, and his friend's little encounter in Moscow. (Stupidity knows no bounds, probably because it can't read a map.) Agent Intellect has rightly said that we should pray for Obama; he couldn't be more correct.

Lots of people have great expectations for Obama; some doubt he'll do much in the Oval Office. I think this: he's there. Obama. Is. There. And that speaks volumes, both for him and the nation that elected him. Never mind quibbles about his being half-black; get real, it doesn't matter. What does matter is - something is happening...

Out of the Mouths of Babes

2008-11-02T18:00:00.000-08:00

"Sweetheart, what do you want for your birthday?"

"A president that doesn't suck."

"That's nice."

Done? Well, I'm getting close...

2008-11-02T07:49:00.000-08:00

Please accept my apologies, dear readers; I don't want either of you to think I'd been ignoring you. The dissertation is almost finished (yay!), but it's going to take a lot of work (boo!), which means I have no time to blog (hiss!).

One of you - or both, I forget - might've been told the work was almost done. And I forget how many times I might've told you that. Really, I must sound like Bullwinkle...hey, now here's something I hope you really like!

Something good had to come out of the financial meltdown

2008-10-21T06:56:00.001-07:00

This must be read to be believed.

Hedge fund investor Andrew Lahde retired in style at 37, leaving behind the ripest farewell letter you ever saw. You can read the whole letter here. The whole financial sector gets lambasted, from Lahde's rivals (whom he candidly calls "idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA") right down to their very lifestyle.

It's only right that somebody as jaded as Mr. Lahde would go into a field he would prefer not to, become one of the players and succeeds wildly by playing the game to the hilt, and then reveal the game for the dysfunctional burning house it is. It's too bad the word could only come out of the ashes.

I can't say the financial sector is inherently evil; that seems more ideological than factual. But certainly there were folks who thought they could work the system in their favor. And the consequences of such short-term thinking, by so many people, came together in an awful way. They were in it for the money, and so was Lahde. The difference: Lahde knew what he was about, and he knew what the game was all about. His fallout rivals knew neither.

Moo

2008-10-03T14:19:00.000-07:00

Um, this was just too utterly bizarre - had to post a link to this little animation I ran across:

Wow.

Another chapter in the cautionary tale that is moi

2008-10-01T06:27:00.000-07:00

Here's something I just figured out; I wish I'd learned it sooner, but better late than never. Hopefully it'll help you too, either by making you recognize the problem in yourself or by spurring you to identify the root of your problem. And we all have problems.

One of my problems is procrastination. Particularly, as Eliot so nicely put it, "Distracted from distractions by distractions." Here I am, sitting in my dank little studio, the rough draft of my dissertation sitting before me. The deadline hangs over my head like the sword of Damocles. And I'm surfing the Internet. Do I realize this? Not always: sometimes it only hits me that two hours have slipped by while giggling my way through LOLCats. (Yes, it's true - I love that stuff.) Of course the time can't be recovered, so I have no choice but to drag my discouraged ass away from the monitor and...work. But it's 11pm or whatever, so no point.

Last night I ran across two long paragraphs that need serious work. Not putting the same material into new words, but recasting the whole damn thing from scratch. It went in the direction I wanted it to go, but the elements were wrong and the formulation unclear. I have to rewrite it from the ground up. - Ouch. (I should be used to it by now, having rewritten half a chapter already. But apparently some things you just don't get used to.) Did I start that rewriting? No, I checked my email. And Facebook. And did searches on authors that have no relevance whatsoever to my dissertation. In between Web pages, I'd jot down something on the back of an envelope, vaguely dissertation-related. But you can't get anything done that way. As soon as I realized the absurdity of it all, I packed it in. It was 11pm, and I couldn't think straight, so I just went to bed - not that I got any sleep.

Today I picked up where I'd left off, and got through a few more pages. This time I tried to work out a logical question: why conditionals are asymmetrical. Why does P imply Q, but not the other way around? The truth table describes the asymmetry, it doesn't explain it. I finally got it (it has to do with dependence), but my scribblings and citations didn't quite bear out. Hmmm...what about those files I've been meaning to organize?

And then it hit me *dork!*: I distract myself when something doesn't fulfil my expectations. Since nobody's around to kick my ass back on track, two hours can easily get lost before I know what happened. It's like I said, "Oh, that didn't work. Screw it." The rational response would be to say, "OK, why didn't it work out? What's the real answer, as opposed to the one I'd believed?" Then and only then would I stand to learn something new, better than what I'd thought before.

So now it comes down to this: I'll find a way to make a habit of asking that question whenever experience runs counter to my expectations. Or die trying. (Better the former than the latter.) It's not my only problem, but it'll be one less to worry about when I get over it.

There's a lesson here. (I dislike moralizing, but this seems important enough to add.) If you've got the same kind of problem, take up the same solution. But even if you don't distract yourself when events let you down, you probably have other problems you need to solve. For what it's worth, I'm suggesting you keep watch for them. Find that nasty habit - big or little, it doesn't matter. Dig up the reason why you do it, and find a way to get yourself back on track. You'll be glad you did. Because you'll discover - no, experience a bit more of the real meaning of "The truth will set you free." You don't have to be religious to know how true that statement is.

Blog for your life

2008-09-09T14:36:00.000-07:00

Dear readers, allow me to invite both of you over to a new blog of mine, CriticalFitness. I've wanted to put that together for some time, and have decided to take the plunge. Hope you enjoy it!

Another modest proposal: sleep your way to the top!

2008-09-07T11:11:00.000-07:00

How many times have you heard about the problems surrounding work before you realize something has to change? It's not easy finding a job you love, let alone a career you love. Considering you spend one-third of your life at work, you'd better find something you can be happy doing, right? Trouble is, not everybody can find a job: Barack Obama has gotten a lot of mileage out of the fact that unemployment in America is at a five-year high.

And how many times do you have to be reminded that you're tired all the time before you do something about it? It's disturbing, all the numerous reports about how we are overworked and overstressed, yet we aren't getting enough sleep. We're supposed to spend one-third of our lives in bed, and we can't. Any why not? Because of our jobs.

Now business thrives on efficiency. If somebody can find a way to get two things done at once, all they have to do is patent the idea and live off the royalties. One guy has actually designed a treadmill desk so you can walk the whole day while making calls, checking email, etc. And you could lose 57 pounds in a year - with no gym fees! Now that's what I call using your noggin!

OK, here's my bright idea: make sleeping your job. That's right, make money in bed, and without prostituting yourself. How many jobs can you say that about?

Think about it. By combining the two tasks, 16 hours can be whittled down to a mere eight; that's a time savings of 50%! You are then free to do other things, the things you really want to do. The treadmill desk would become obsolete. People would get the sleep they so badly need, and they'd get paid to do it. Oh, and did I mention the flexible hours?

I know a lot of people would be willing to put in overtime. Working on the weekends would be encouraged; the only ones wouldn't are most likely those party animals - and let's face it, they wouldn't want to work weekends. They call it living, I call it shiftless.

Sleeping on the job could get you promoted, not fired. Speaking of getting fired, the unemployment problem would drop to practically zero. Every applicant would be seriously considered - "We are an equal opportunity employer." Imagine the possibilities!

I'm not sure what the pay scale would be, but most probably on the basis of experience and merit. Let's face it: some people just sleep better than others. Would you want to pay someone the same for doing a worse job? Not me. Real Americans have no truck with those socialist practices. If employees don't learn to increase the quality of their output, they shouldn't be rewarded for it.

I have no doubt that everybody would benefit from this plan - and society would be a better place. The crime rate would surely go down. Since everyone gets enough sleep and has a steady job, crime would lose its profit incentive. Legalize it, don't criticize it!

Of course kids and retired folks wouldn't be barred from sleeping; they just wouldn't get paid for it. Child labor laws prohibit the hiring of minors, and senior citizens, well, they can do whatever they please after retirement. Right? So it's just economically unfeasible to keep people working past retirement age. Besides, it's just common sense that older folks don't work as long as younger folks do - but then they need less sleep, so hey, it checks out.

I know what you're thinking: "But Wordverter, who's gonna keep the shops open? who's gonna fix the pipes? who's gonna grow the food, and build the buildings?" The answer, my friend, is...not what you're thinking. No, we're not going to pay anyone for those things. You get paid to do your job; what you do on your own time is your thing. Folks can work it out among themselves who does what - if kids can do that on the playground, why can't adults? You've got 16 hours of down time, you've got a good head on you; so use it! C'mon, you're big boys and girls.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some serious work to do. Do not disturb.

(Image cagily kiped from www.mooqi.com/. Sorry for not getting the full address, my browser's not working the way it ought to. Wait a minute - it is!)

Picking the Spin, Spinning the Pic

2008-08-25T12:19:00.000-07:00

A recent article in Newsweek starts off asking, "Could the Montauk Monster have been faked?" But it deals only incidentally with the Montauk Monster; the main issue is with doctored photos. It quickly seques into an interview with John Long, chair of the ethics committee for the National Press Photographers Association.

I have to say that something seems fundamentally wrong here.

According to the article, photojournalists have to work back up to the respectability of the other journalists. But it seems to me the other way around - namely, snapshots have come down to the level of respectability of the rest of the media.

Photos have been perceived as the last refuge of honesty in the media. OK, writers will put a spin on text or sound bites; we're used to that. Even the editing of video - we know somebody's spinning it there too. But now static images somehow seemed...pure. The last few years have pretty much dashed that rosy image.

My guess is the relative difficulty of doctoring photos. To fix a photo, you had to really know what you were doing because the technology wasn't available to just anybody. It was time-consuming and expensive. Even though doctoring photos goes back at least as far back as 1860, digital tech has made it so much easier to pull off. Hence more widespread. It's pretty obvious, just scrolling down and glancing at the dates of the pictures.

(Speaking of, check out the one dated December 2007. The executive editor defended the paper, maintaining that "the photo did not blur the line between news reporting and editorial commentary." Of course not: that line was blasted years ago. I'd love to blame Fox News, but that's probably just me.)

What's effectively happened is an erosion of trust in the media as such. People complain of apathy among students regarding current events, when the media themselves are at least partly responsible for this. And is there any real question why that is? Kids aren't stupid; they know when somebody's trying to put one over on them. Succeeding generations are more media-savvy than ever, and more cynical. This is a natural response, I think. Number one, there are more cameras around than ever; you can make your own video in minutes or even seconds, and post it on Youtube in seconds. People know how easy it is to dress up a picture anymore. Number two, despite this widespread knowledge, there are more visual distortions passed off as genuine than ever. This is lying, pure and simple. And it's not by joke-loving Youtubers or armchair bloggers (Le blog, c'est moi); it's professional journalists, who get paid to inform people about what's going on.

Your friend lies: how do you react after you've been burned?

Somebody you know is a pathological liar: how do you react to anything he/she says?

A one-eyed babysitter depicts lies, cover-ups, and plain old stupidity - committed not simply by subjects of the media, but by the media itself - over and over: how do you react?

I'd like to try and write up some potential benefits from this sort of situation, but - you guessed it - that's another post.

Quote of the Day

2008-08-25T11:14:00.001-07:00

I'd like to borrow an honorable tradition from my friend over at Agent Intellect: the tradition of posting interesting quotes.

Today's quote has to do with the economy of research. Sounds dry, but is actually fascinating:

"A leading principle of inference which can lead from a true premiss to a false conclusion is insofar bad; but insofar as it can only lead either from a false premiss or to a true conclusion, it is satisfactory; and whether it leads from false to false, from true to true, or from false to true, it is equally satisfactory. The first part of this theorem, that an inference from true to false is bad, [follows] from the essential characteristic of truth, which is its finality. For truth being our end and being able to endure, it can only be a false maxim which represents it as destroying itself. Indeed, I do not see how anybody can fail to admit that (other things being equal) it is a fault in a mode of inference that it can lead from truth to falsity. But it is by no means as evident that an inference from false to false is as satisfactory as an inference from true to true; still less, that such a one is as satisfactory as an inference from false to true. The Hegelian logicians seem to rate only that reasoning A1 which setting out from falsity leads to truth. But men of laboratories consider those truths as small that only an inward necessity compels. It is the great compulsion of the Experience of nature which they worship. On the other hand, the men of seminaries sneer at nature; the great truths for them are the inward ones. Their god is enthroned in the depths of the soul. How shall we decide the question? Let us rationally inquire into it, subordinating personal prepossessions in view of the fact that whichever way these prepossessions incline, we can but admit that wiser men than we, more sober-minded men than we, and humbler searchers after truth, do today embrace the opinion the opposite of our own. How, then, shall we decide the question? Yes, how to decide questions is precisely the question to be decided. One thing the laboratory-philosophers ought to grant: that when a question can be satisfactorily decided in a few moments by calculation, it would be foolish to spend much time in trying to answer it by experiment. Nevertheless, this is just what they are doing every day. The wisest-looking man I ever saw, with a vast domelike cranium and a weightiness of discourse that left Solon in the distance, once spent a month or more in dropping a stick on the floor and seeing how often it would fall on a crack; because that ratio of frequency afforded a means of ascertaining the value of pi, though not near so close as it could be calculated in five minutes; and what he did it for was never made clear. Perhaps it was only for relaxation; though some people might have found reading Goldsmith or Voltaire fully as lively an occupation. If it were not for the example of this distinguished LL.D., I should have ventured to say that nothing is more foolish than carrying a question into a laboratory until reflection has done all that it can do towards clearing it up -- at least, all that it can do for the time being. Of course, for a seminary-philosopher, to send a question to the laboratory is to have done with it, to which he naturally has a reluctance; while the laboratory-philosopher is impatient to get a whack at it." - C.S. Peirce, "The Essence of Reasoning" Collected Papers 4.69

Which tells me that Dr. Thunderdome was no philosopher at all.

Busy, busy, busy

2008-08-20T03:57:00.000-07:00

It's a busy month, and will be a busy few months, so - if you haven't noticed already - I'll be posting less frequently for a while. Of course, I've said that before. And what happened? I posted the next day!

But really, Dear Readers, I have to concentrate a bit more than usual. I would love to write more, but duty calls.

So, for your meantime enjoyment, here's a little joke - yes, I'm easily amused. Stop me if you've heard this one:

A kid goes to the local whorehouse. "Give me the skankiest hooker you got, the most disease-ridden one," he says to the madam.

The madam raises her eyebrows. She says, "Our ladies are not skanky." The kid pours his piggy bank on the table. "Right this way."

They go the parlor. The madam calls out a vile-looking vixen. "Say, what do you want this one for?" asks the madam.

The kid says, "Because Mom and Dad are going out tonight, and the babysitter has sex with me while they're gone. So she'll get sick."

"Why do you want to get your babysitter sick?"

"Well, when Mom and Dad get back, Dad will drive the babysitter home - he does that every time, and they have sex in the car."

"Now why do you want your father to get the clap?"

"So that Mom catches it when they have sex."

The madam is getting a little worried by now. "What do you want your mom to get the clap for?"

"Because when Dad's at work, she has sex with the mailman, so he'll get sick."

"Why do you want that?"

"'Cuz he ran over my frog!" the kid cries.

What I Learned from Skipping Stones, 25 years later

2008-08-09T02:48:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up in North Dakota, Dad often took my brother and me to a nearby lake. We'd fish for a while, and then, when we got bored, would often start skipping stones - which pretty much guaranteed no further bites for the day. For anybody.

The best stones are flat and smooth; they'll sail along for six, even eight skips before coming to rest at the bottom of the lake. Unless you've experienced it, you will never understand the joys of a good skipping stone. They just feel so good in the hand: they fit in the palm of your hand, have a nice heft. And to stroke the smooth surface is particularly gratifying in its way. Some have interesting colors - or maybe you just notice whatever color it is, and it's interesting. Even gray can hold its fascination. (Boys don't think this way; the appreciation is there, the words aren't.)

You can get so fascinated in a stone that you almost forget why you picked it up in the first place. And that's where a problem sometimes comes up: do you keep it and hunt for another,
maybe less pretty rock to skip? or do you give this one a good throw, and maybe beat your personal record of skips? You know that if you throw it well, you're bound to get beautiful results. But if you do, you won't get to admire the stone anymore. It won't be yours.

Nine times out of ten, you throw it; after all, that was the point. Besides, if you put it in your pocket and take it home, what happens? It ends up in a drawer, and you won't think of it again until you're rooting around for a paper clip. You remember the rock-skipping; you forget the rock in your drawer.

- - -

I forgot about all this until almost a year ago. There was a Taize workshop here, my first chance to find out what it was all about. The theme of the day was love, drawing on John 15:11-13. Due to some recent events in my personal life, it was already a pressing theme. So the question kept turning in my head the whole day; I wanted to find some answers.

In the afternoon we had a workshop in clay molding. The leader set some music on a CD player, and instructed us to form the clay as we saw fit. (For you writers out there, a sort of freewriting session, only with clay.) I had no idea what to do with my lump of clay, so - better to just muddle through until something happens. (That's something I learned from freewriting: you can't stay truly aimless for very long. Sooner or later you'll strike out in some direction.)

After a few tries, I discovered that I could make the clay smooth by stroking it. Soon afterward I found that I could make round discs that were smooth just by holding the clay in one hand, covering it with the other, and rotating them in opposite directions.

It quickly became an obsession to make a perfectly round, flat piece, smooth all over. No depiction of anything in particular (so I thought), only the desire to make the perfect form. What was going on around me, I had no clue. The question of love was turning more now. My hands went and did their thing as I kept thinking on the question. Only gradually, as I kept trying to get it right, did the memories of skipping stones arise. The rock hefted in my hand, the soft texture of the hard stone. I remembered the joy of the act - of finding a good stone, winding up for the throw, launching it sidearm, watching it arc and arc again over the water, leaving a line of splashes behind.

The leader called for us to wind it up; I snapped out of the trance. She asked us to place our work on the table in front. I was surprised at how elaborate and - well, how big some of the pieces were. What did I have? A few crappy pieces of meaningless abstract form, and a couple small discs. They'd get lost up there. Maybe be taken as leftovers, rather than a finished piece. The leader encouraged us to talk about our work; if we wanted to, we could explain what the pieces meant. Many did, and some had quite elaborate ideas going on. I had some memories, and that's all.

I put it aside, on a nearby desk. I didn't know anybody there, I hadn't known what to expect there. I wasn't going to embarrass myself by stammering through some disjointed memories and pointing to a little lump of clay that you could barely see. No way.

We packed up and headed out for dinner. Another fellow told me he couldn't think of anything either; I wonder if he wasn't in the same boat as me. As we left the room, I noticed that my lumps were piled together with all the other pieces of leftover clay. It was just as I expected - only an explanation could have saved them, and I'd wasted my chance. Still, it hurt a little to see them treated that way. They weren't much, but I had tried to make something of them.

- - -

A couple nights ago, the memory of all this came up again. It started making more sense this time around, and I felt that somehow it was worth saying. Rather than try and analyze it to death, it seemed better to just place on the table for you to see. If it has anything to say, it will. So, for what it's worth, here you are.

If you're too lazy to exercise, come closer...

2008-08-05T08:59:00.000-07:00

Lazy-asses of the world, unite! in emptying your wallets. But relax, there's still time to get over your mortgages and credit card debts before sinking into this hole. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

A recent news item has it that somebody's created "exercise in a pill." According to said item, mice given the drug burned more calories and ran farther than a control group. Whoa! Little fur-bearing Carl Lewises and Jackie Joyner-Kersees, made by a pill? Sounds like training day is about to become a relic of the past, like belt machines, exercise bikes, and Jane Fonda workout tapes.

The author of the article, a medical doctor, adds that the drug would take years to get FDA-approved. Maybe, but I'm not so sure that will prevent idiots from buying it when it does come out. And it eventually will come out, I predict. Because there are enough potential buyers to justify whatever research costs.

Also, he says the exercise drug would have to give all the benefits of real exercise. That would only be true if it were supposed to replace exercise. Do I agree? As you expected, I do not. This sounds more like wishful thinking than anything. I seriously doubt that any synthetic chemical will replace the complex reactions that occur when training. We won't go into all of that, simply because I don't know all of it. And besides, it wouldn't fit into a blog entry. Suffice it to say, the R&D guys will keep trying to satisfy lazy asses by making a pill to do the job - all in the name of progress.

Progress it might be if we discover all the intricacies of the body. But the cynic in me seriously doubts that's the motive behind this. If this pill gets the FDA green light, you know damn well what's going to happen.

Can you say "Bandwagon"? I knew you could.

You know what's going to happen: Fitness magazines and gyms will be falling over themselves to market this stuff. Celebrities will make special appearances on Oprah to say how much it's done for them. Every website will be choking with banners hawking it. Infomercials will run 24-7 like the Rapture's on its way:

New! - Miracle Fitness Pill!!!
Buy now before it's too late!!!!

Yes folks, it's a snake-oil salesman's wet dream. And it's coming soon - break out the umbrella, or better yet, build an ark.

(Image cleverly five-finger-discounted from http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/11/17/fat-men/)

Pre-op checkout

2008-08-04T00:53:00.001-07:00

Dear readers, I have a confession to make. Today, in about an hour, I am off to the hospital for a bit of minor surgery. And I don't like it, not one bit.

It's not the surgery itself that bothers me so much. It's not the fact that I'm losing time on my dissertation. Nor is it the overnight stay in a room that might have three other dudes. These things do not make me happy, but they're not what's eating me right now.

What really annoys me is that I can't have breakfast. No cereal, no coffee, no juice. No water. Nothing.

So here I am, killing time, thinking about what to amuse myself with in the hospital, and my stomach is growling. And dammit, I want to do my breakfast ritual! I want to hit the alarm, stumble into the kitchen, get the water going, fix a bowl of cereal, hunt around for a clean spoon. And I can't. Dammit all.

But would they schedule the surgery for 9am or something like that? Nooooooooooooooooooooo - 11am! I've got the whole damn morning to kill. Believe me, it would be nice to get some work done in that time; every minute counts now, really. But it's hard to focus when you know you're going into a hospital, where they're going to put you under, and you won't know what it'll be like afterward, and dammit I want my damn breakfast now give it to me!

*sigh*

Might as well blog.

(Image supernaturally swiped from http://cruelkev3.blogspot.com/2007/04/man-rises-from-dead.html)

Waiter, there's a blog in my soup!

2008-08-03T07:11:00.000-07:00

Here's something you might find interesting: Waiter Rant. (It's in Ye Olde Blogrolle too.) Fine writing about working in fine dining establishments. Play catch-up, like me, by going through it (hint: going chronologically helps when reading some posts). One entry I rather like can be found here.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I worked in the kitchens of a few restaurants. I can't say it was my favorite job, but it was a good experience in several ways. So The Waiter has got the Wordverter Seal of Approval for taking that experience - much more than I got - and turning it into something even better: a comment on living.

(Image coolly purloined from http://julesverne-art.nl/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=16)

Film or Fetish? YOU decide.

2008-07-31T13:51:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to work this out, but never quite got around to it. I like movies, a lot. Always have. (There was a falling-out once, but we've made up since then.) And of course it becomes something I think about when I get the chance, which isn't often these days. So this is just trying out some thoughts...

I've had several conversations with folks who will say things like "I don't like war films" or "Drama's stupid, I like comedies." Those kinds of statements never used to make me wonder, but now they do.

"Why?" you ask. Because it seems to me that they are basically saying they have no interest in film. What I mean by this is that they're more interested in a certain kind of movie than in the medium of film itself. If they were interested in the medium, they would want to know what could be done with it - in terms of writing, or cinematography, etc. - in any genre whatsoever. They'd read up on film, take a class. Some do, but many don't. So they prefer this form of the art, not the art itself.

(I'm not talking here about conditioned, negative repulsions. Some people are highly sensitive to violence, and avoid films with a lot of it. I respect that. It's a separate matter that is up to the individual to address. What I'm talking about here is a positive attraction to some genres and indifference to others.)

Now here's where it gets a little tougher for me, because I risk stepping on people's toes. Movies, whatever they deal with, if they have anything to say, say something about the human condition. That goes for your slasher flicks as well as the musicals. If they didn't, there wouldn't be anything interesting in them except the medium itself. Even your animal adventures speak to man, by showing our kinship to the animals. So, in limiting your moviegoing to a few genres, you limit the dialogue that's occurring in the darkened theater.

Also, people tend anymore to identify themselves with their interests. (This is especially true with music.) Some people, when they say they like comedies, tend to be talking about themselves - "I have a good sense of humor, I like to laugh,..." It's the "Soundtrack of Your Life" syndrome: the music for who I am, the movie that expresses me. Le film, c'est moi.

And now for the real toe-stepping: I can think of no other word for this than fetishism. If you say you like movies but you only like certain kinds, that's a fetish. Which, by that logic, would mean there's a whole of fetish going on. (I'm not talking here about conditioned repulsions. Some people are highly sensitive to violence, and avoid films with a lot of it. That is a separate matter that is up to the individual to answer for him/herself. What I'm talking about here is an attraction to some genres and indifference to others.)

"You self-righteous bastard! You think you're better than us?" Am I above this fetishism? Am I saying that I am holier than thou, who callest thyself a moviegoer? In terms of film, yes - but I've got my own fetishes in other departments. Music, for instance: I've got definite tastes there, though little by little I'm trying to get over them. Reggae, for example, I just can't listen to it. But it's very popular, and there are great names in there, so it speaks to many people. So my theory is equally identifying a weak spot in moi-self, even while it's talking about movies.

"So why are you posting this? is it somehow timely or relevant to the news?" No, I just wanted to know what you thought about it. Comments and criticisms are all welcome. Dear readers, both of you and your thoughts matter to me.

Addendum: It might be objected that folks are simply unaware of the medium, which is why they have no interest in it. To some extent I can agree, but the degree of self-consciousness within the media makes this claim hard to uphold. The Simpsons is unbelievably ironic and metacritical. Film in particular has long made movies about...making movies; Singin' in the Rain comes to mind, or Borat today. Or little reminders that jolt us out of the genre - The English Patient, when Kristin Scott Thomas bangs her head against a low beam in a room, and breaks the romantic spell that has been set up to that point. Or the brilliant machine-gun shot in Miller's Crossing - yeah, the one where Albert Finney seems to make a day filling one guy full of lead. The outtakes at the end of every Jackie Chan flick. All these things remind us: "This is film, you guys."

And you know damn well it's going to come out on DVD - most likely with the extra features, including "The Making of ___," which are so obviously planned into the whole production from the beginning! When filmmakers themselves exploit this sort of meta-comment regularly, isn't it hard not to notice it yourself? Or have they effectively buried the message?

(Image involuntarily donated by http://cubeme.com/blog/?s=lynch&x=0&y=0)

Stupidity Running Ramthant

2008-07-10T06:09:00.000-07:00

This sort of rant shouldn't have to be written. It's been done before I-don't-know-how-many times, by I-don't-know-how-many better thinkers than me.

If there's one thing that pisses me off, it's New Age claptrap. Let me rephrase that: it pisses me off when New Age claptrap claims to be somehow superior to contemporary science. In reality, such talk often betrays a complete misunderstanding of science. What's especially disturbing about it is its popularity, sort of a Scientology Lite.

Case in point: Water, a documentary film about the substance. In the trailer, our announcer tells us (in deep, dramatic tones, of course) about how essential water is for life and how we the people have so many different uses for it. True enough. But - and here's where the credibility gap yawns wider than the Grand Canyon - he informs us that water "acts outside all physical laws of nature." (Seek to 1:00 if you don't believe me.)

Acts outside all physical laws of nature? Holy Trevi fountain, Batman! You're playing with fire! It's such an obvious fallacy, I'd be surprised if nobody pointed it out.

Have the filmmakers ever heard of fluid mechanics? Apparently not.

Do they have a perspective on what "physical laws of nature" means? Nope. Physical laws are those regularities which govern the behavior of matter. It's the way things are - nature.

Water is about as natural as can be: hydrogen, oxygen. Physical elements. And the relations among the atoms are as common as can be. You can find this stuff in any chemistry book. True, water does have remarkable properties, but supernatural? Come on! If you really believe water defies all physical laws, you don't know anything about fluid mechanics (see above), you haven't opened your eyes to the plain facts around you, and you probably also think bumblebees defy the laws of aerodynamics.

Do the filmmakers understand what science is all about? Not in the least. To say water acts outside all physical laws is to presuppose we understand everything there is to know about physics. But we don't. If you think science is a finished product, think again. Science is a form of inquiry, making rigorous use of the same forms of reasoning that every human being has in their noggin. It is not the body of knowledge that results from inquiry, it is the process itself. What that means is knowledge evolves over time. Einstein's theories of relativity - do they overturn science? Of course not, they're products of scientific inquiry. And that inquiry is highly rigorous, not to beat you down but to identify and test factors of an event.

What this means is, science generally takes baby steps. That manifests itself in at least two ways. (a) Relatively slow progress. Those baby steps may accumulate in a giant leap forward in an overall theory, but you can't forgo the baby steps on that account. We're making much more progress now than before, but that's because we've honed the technique, we're training to do research, and doing a lot more of it now than before. Oh yeah, and we've got more people to do it - overpopulation has its upside. (b) Relative ignorance. We don't know the half about the physical universe. Seasoned scientists are painfully aware of this, which is why they keep doing research.

So - is water a wonderful substance? Yes. Has it got strange properties? Sure. Is it magical? I don't think so. The hyperbolic gobbledygook that productions such as Water purvey is the kind of thing that makes scientists look kind of laughable, when they deserve a lot of respect. I don't deny that there is a mystical dimension to scientific inquiry - far from it, I think science does bring us closer to huge questions of cosmological and theological import. I'm simply annoyed when somebody reads a few pop-science books and concludes that they know What It's All About. It pisses me off that they think their armchair's a better place to see these things than in the trenches. That's pretty damn arrogant.

Think I'm exaggerating? These are the same folks who made the annoyingly-titled What the Bleep Do We Know!?, and they're members of Ramtha's school of enlightenment. What do we know? Well, sit back and let Ramtha tell you.

What does our friend Ramtha say? "You are God."
What do I say? "That is Horseshit."

"God" is a highly vague name, and there are numerous ways to interpret it, but it's practically impossible to avoid the sense of somehow being superior to all else. What's a God worth if (s)he can't beat Mother Nature? If the filmmakers are going to attribute supernatural powers to water, how much more to themselves?

"Oh, but it's not just us; you too are God." Of course!

See? I make water!

Dude, spare me; calling any one of us God - calling all of us God, for that matter - is an insult to God.

Interlude - Cheap thrills

2008-07-07T14:52:00.000-07:00

I love it when some of my favorite things come together - in this case, Youtube, Pan Sonic, and images like you see on the inside of your eyes when you close them. I'm not sure if it's a fan video, but it fits the music and is well done. Enjoy.

An Eventful Non-event

2008-06-29T04:07:00.000-07:00

A funny thing happened the other day. It sounds trivial on the surface, and there's probably a reasonable explanation for it. But I haven't found it.

I had two bottles of laundry soap sitting under the kitchen sink. One was almost finished, the other had just been started, so I thought to pour the one into the other. (I'd actually planned this out, but won't bore you with those truly trivial details.)

As I was pouring, I heard something strange, not far away: a soft pat, pat of drops of liquid. What was so weird about it was that it wasn't anywhere near the bottles, but in a quite different location. The drips landed in an area about 7 cm long and 1-2 cm wide, about 36 cm away from the bottle - that is, 20 cm straight ahead from my left hand. When I stopped pouring, so did the drips. The whole thing lasted maybe 10-15 seconds. Maybe: I wasn't timing it.

My first thought was "You're just being sloppy." But I wasn't. If the detergent had gone glub-glub, it would've been a simple matter making the connection. But that would've only been at the start, when the stream first hit the surface; from that point on, all would be quiet. This was an irregular but constant dripping, which stopped when the pouring was done. Besides, the pouring was smooth - easy, gradual, no spilling. Not a hint of suddenness in the action at any point.

Being right-handed, the full bottle was about 36 cm away from where the drips were landing; the bottle was about 25 cm tall, making the rim almost 44 cm away. And, as mentioned, I was careful about pouring - no shaking involved whatsoever. Perhaps it was just lumpy leftover laundry detergent? No, I've never seen laundry soap curdle. And this stuff was uniformly consistent.

Now I was pouring with one hand, and holding a cap from one of the bottles. So it would make sense to figure that the drips came from the cap. After all, I do use it to measure dosage when I do laundry. But I always rinse it when finished, because crusty caps are annoying and disgusting. And I hadn't done laundry in a couple weeks. So no, the cap was dry - and even if it weren't, how could drips travel horizontally from a cap that was being held statically, i.e. in one place?

If anyone has a plausible explanation, I'd really like to hear it. Apologies in advance: If my responses seem contentious, it's not against you. It's just that I'd like to think I've checked every possibility. Nothing seems to add up. (And no, there were no holes in either bottles or caps, as if that could explain drips of laundry soap arcing almost half a meter.) So I appeal to both of you, dear readers, giving as faithful an account as I could.

A Message for Today: "Bomb" is Bob with an M

2008-06-17T15:55:00.000-07:00

Bob Newhart is a great comedian you never hear about today, and folks today are worse off for it. Anyone who decides to make a career as a solo straight man deserves applause; anyone who actually pulls it off, though, is a certified genius.

Evidence that we might be better off comes from strange corners. While many folks complain about how badly the war in Iraq is going, I have it on good word that things over there are actually going quite well - for a campaign. How does that support my suggestion? Apparently Catch-22 is all too real in its depiction of things military, and that sort of thing goes way back. And we postmodern civilians don't realize it.

So, with that in mind, it brings me great joy to relay a blast from the past - because things could be worse. Enjoy.

Addendum: Agent Intellect has posted something about these lines; read it here.

All's well that ends, well, soon.

2008-06-15T13:54:00.000-07:00

My friend over at Agent Intellect pointed me to a book with a...controversial thesis. It's summed up nicely in the title: Better Not to Have Been - the Harm of Coming into Existence. I haven't read further than what's posted on the Amazon site, but it could be an interesting read when done with the dissertation. Not that I expect to agree with the author. But reading disagreeable arguments is important, as it shines a different light on things, so that we can see with a clarity we might not otherwise achieve.

From what I get out of the short reading sample, Prof. David Benatar is questioning some basic postulates about life and existence in general. The idea is that not existing is worse than existing. But murder and suicide are even worse than that, so we're stuck with doing the time. But we can do the world a favor by not having children, performing abortions wherever possible, and basically working towards total extinction of the human species. Actually, he doesn't stop with people: the more life we can take out, the better. So I think it would be most logical to eliminate plants too, even though they're not sentient: as long as life exists, it can evolve, and the potential for suffering remains.

Now I don't know anything about Prof. Benatar, who states flat out that he believes the case he's putting out for review. If he's got kids, it'll be hard to accept this claim - unless there are a lot of moments in his life like here. It's also hard to accept that he's essentially condemning the universe for making existence possible at all, not to mention any possible creator of the universe. But that's what he seems to be doing.

Aside from more direct questions pertaining to details of the argument, there are some other things I think would be worth addressing. Lest they be taken as irrelevant, I'll argue that if you're going to level such a heavy thesis as what's laid out in the book - and it is a supremely heavy charge - you can't blow off the attendant Big Questions that go along with it:

What if it really doesn't matter? The earth isn't going to last more than a few billion more years, meaning we'd better find another home quick. But if it turns out that there's no escape, there appears to be an upper limit to the number of future lives. And if the universe indeed simply ends, without anything beyond, there is no net gain or loss on a universal scale of goodness. So what would it matter if the actual total number of sentient beings were more or less than what it could be?
Do you know where we're going? If the universe evolved to the point where life and sentience appeared, and it seems to be moving in a certain direction - towards an end we know not what - it seems presumptuous to make the judgment call what that end is. (And it doesn't matter whether one holds a theistic or atheistic view: development has a direction, and there's always a certain range of possibilities for any outcome. So there seems to be an end implicit in the workings of the universe. I just don't think anyone's that far-sighted to see the ultimate telos.)
What grounds value and logic? To say this is overkill is to evade the issue, for the whole argument rides on a value judgment and reasoning. The anti-natal, pro-death argument supposes a certain value judgment; but the basis of value is by no means a settled issue. This means Prof. Benatar must not only justify the case on ethical grounds but also on axiological grounds. This theory of value must ground the argument itself and fit with the general logical theory, which itself carries a host of unresolved problems. In other words, the anti-natal, pro-death argument must be supported by a general theory of logic and value - and it must lead ultimately and inexorably to the thesis that existence in this world is worse than non-existence. Otherwise the argument is (at best) only a possible option, one among many.

There are more questions that need to be answered, but I'm just tired; let somebody else pose them.

Whoever thinks I'm treating Benatar's thesis lightly here is mistaken. I do find his conclusion repulsive, frankly, but I also see that repulsion alone is not a sufficient rebuttal. A counterargument is needed in order to meet the case on its own terms. In any case, people will vote with their feet, along with other body parts, so I don't see his argument persuading many folks. However, the philosophical discussion it stimulates make it worth considering.

A Modest Proposal: Blabbermouth Smackdown

2008-06-11T13:44:00.000-07:00

One of these days, I'm going to post something meaningful; today, however, I'm going to kvetch about manners. Particularly when it comes to public speaking.

I was listening to a speech by Richard Rorty; it's quite interesting, and it made take a different view of his thought. (You too can listen here.) After giving the talk, Prof. Rorty took questions. One guy spent I-don't-know-how-many minutes spluttering out his question. I don't know how long it took him, because I was busy hanging laundry. But I know the question was too long, too complicated, or both, because Prof. Rorty himself was a little flummoxed. He handled it well, as expected, but it was an awkward moment. It happened again, with another questioner. What is with these guys?

Of all the things I've been accused of, meanness is not one of them. And anyone who knows me understands that I'm not a person to squash thought and inquiry. But I find myself increasingly impatient with this kind of inconsideration. It's like private and public spaces: let your own place be a pigsty if you must, but clean up after yourself when out and about. Take all the time you want when framing your thought in private, but when several people are involved at the same moment, you'd better get your question out and let the speaker field it so that others get their chance too.

If your thought is too complicated somehow to express concisely, perhaps it would be better handled in a paper - or an email, or article. That's one reason for the literature, folks, to keep a dialogue going. Complicated (or convoluted) thinking needs time to be straightened out. Don't waste anyone else's time.

The consideration of other people is a cornerstone of civilization, more so now than in years gone by. In less charitable moments like this, my mind moves to less charitable sentiments. Such as: If you forgo consideration of others, you forfeit consideration anyone should give to yourself. I'm not saying it's right.

How would I manage the situation? If I had the power, I would make a law requiring questioners to complete their thought in 20 seconds maximum. One question, 20 seconds tops. Anyone who goes overtime - whether they be professor, student, caterer, or me - would be immediately tased. At 21 seconds, bzzzzzzt! People would learn quickly, and it would liven up the scene. If somehow they evaded it, permission would be granted for a public beatdown - bystanders encouraged to join in.

What about speakers who go overtime? When delivering the talk proper, they too risk the buzz. Judging a lecture boring is too subjective; everybody can agree on time. Answering questions often takes longer than asking them, so I figure a minute is enough. Maybe two. Guest speakers should be given advance notice of the disciplinary practice, to avoid surprises. (Residents should know.) Now a taser might not be helpful - it's incapacitating. The speaker should remain cognizant to take other questions. And hey, they're guests; aren't we supposed to be hospitable? Sure we are, but still, we need to learn 'em. So I propose a Milgramesque solution: 40 volts for the first offense, 60 volts the second offense, and so on. Just imagine:

"OK, if you could please clip this microphone onto your lapel - right about there, yes. Thank you. Now for the electrodes..."

Yes, the irony is that Rorty was talking about his belief in moral progress; we do think we've made progress over the ancient Greek position on slavery, to take an example of his. True, and I'll generally go along with that. But don't you wonder sometimes - not always, but every now and then - don't you wonder if, on some fronts, we're being a bit too nice for our own good? OK, it's out of my system now.

(Image lovingly swiped from http://sheepoverboard.com/robots-heaven/index.php)

Cheap Thrills for your Inner Badass

2008-06-08T11:46:00.000-07:00

Here's something to kill time and know thyself: the B-movie badass quiz. (Go on, you know you wanna.)

For those of you who are wondering how my score turned out - and you know you wanna - it's this:

If I may say, this is exactly right. In spirit, if not in letter. (And yes, They Live is a fantastic flick. See it - and whichever B-movie you end up being the badass of.)

So what are you doin' here? Get on with it!

(Image slyly shoplifted from www.quizilla.com. Get yours there too.)

Da capo: going around one more time

2008-06-02T10:51:00.001-07:00

One thing about getting older (I'm not yet ready to talk about getting old) is that your habits show more. The idea of turning into a crinkly ball of hide-bound habits can lead to the fear that you're not really growing, just getting more accustomed - and crotchety. Fortunately there are moments that put the fear to rest, if only for a moment.

One of those moments concerns an interpretation of music. I grew up listening to Switched-On Bach, a wonderful album of pieces performed on the Moog synthesizer by Wendy (nee Walter) Carlos. I still love it, it truly is a great recording. The second track is "Air on the G String," a popular piece by J.S. Bach that's often found in weddings everywhere. Carlos plays it straight through, from beginning to end, from A to B, with characteristic confidence and charm. And as a kid I thought nothing of it except "This is cool."

When I heard another recording of the same piece years later, a few things went through mey head. First, of course: Oh, I love this piece. Then: the clarity of the surface was not quite like S-O B (heh-heh, get it? SOB). Also, the sound - Carlos used more reed-like tones. And it works very well. Other thoughts: the dynamics could be better...

...and then the musician repeated the first part. And I discovered: it's supposed to be played this way! And then the second part was repeated! "Air on the G String" has an A-A-B-B structure: simple, so elegant.

I'd played piano for 7 years, and percussion for about the same, but I hadn't realized the importance of repetition in music. The reason, I think, is simple: There was no rewind button in Bach's day - so it was worked into the system. And it still is, of course. A drumbeat is a rhythmic motif repeated continually, and it keeps a band together. A chorus weaves verses together.

Or, as in this piece, you get a chance to really appreciate the musical phrases; they don't just pass you by, you can take them in and remember them, savor the notes. In that respect, the parts are like soup - they get better the second time you heat it up.

So, pace Carlos, I wish they could've let you record it the right way, doing "Air" to the fullest. The move is understandable, though. Making an album has certain challenges: you're limited by the medium to how much you can play. CDs can hold almost an hour and a half, which is gigantic compared to vinyl. One LP can get some 20-24 minutes per side, tops. So I imagine they had to decide whether to record longer pieces or more - and the choice was more. In this one respect, I think the album is flawed.

Switched-On Bach is still one of my all-time favorites, and always will be, but somehow it's nice to have observed the imperfections of things known youth. What's actually nice is, I don't mind that; I even like it.

When you're a kid, you know somehow that the world's been around a lot longer than you have. And somehow the world had authority: it was big. So grown-ups are perfect because they've been around - that's why they're the teachers and you're the student. When you grow up (and that takes some of us a little longer than others), you realize that grown-ups aren't so perfect. Never were, maybe never pretended to be. They've got problems, and the world has been fucked up pretty much always. But those things and people you loved then and now, you discover you didn't love them because they're perfect. You love them for what they are - and now, probably even more. And once you realize that, being human isn't so bad after all.

My fellow Americans: Cast your own damn vote

2008-05-07T01:47:00.001-07:00

Election Day in the US is months down the road, but it's on everyone's minds. Probably a good time to put some thought into this before stepping up to the plate...

I'm not a political animal, at least not the savvy kind that follows the goings-on of City Hall and Capitol Hill. Over the years, though, I've become more aware of the part I play in things. And with that has come a growing awareness of my responsibilities. I wish you could talk about these things without sounding like a sanctimonious prick, but here goes.

Four years ago, I had a conversation with a fellow that went something like this. See if you can find what's wrong:

DUDE: Who're you voting for, Bush or Kerry?
ME: Neither; I'm calling for Nader. His policies seem better than the rest.
DUDE: I'm voting for Kerry. Nader's all right, but he doesn't stand a chance.
ME: What do you mean, he doesn't stand a chance?
DUDE: If Nader was more popular, I'd vote for him. But voting for him now is just going to detract from Kerry, and I really don't want Bush to win. So I'm going for Kerry.

Have you spotted it yet? It seems to me that the dude erred by playing a numbers game - he was voting for the candidate he thought would win. The safest bet that was close enough to his own position. And I suspect there's a lot of this going on come election day.

One thing votes don't come with is a rationale. You can say who you're voting for, but not why. That's what polls and pundits are for, I guess. But the tacit assumption of the election game, as far as I could ever tell, is that you vote for whoever you want to win, or at least prefer. Isn't this obvious? And if you prefer a candidate who's lower in the polls, it seems those numbers would go up if you stated your preference. Isn't that obvious? Not voting for your preferred candidate, then, is disingenuous.

That's why, dear readers, I'm saying to both of you now: cast your own damn vote. Everything is being done to manipulate us into believing this or that about the candidates - whoever's playing or watching has a hand in this. Don't let them distract you. Make up your own mind, by hook or by crook, and cast your vote accordingly. If it happens to be Democrat or GOP, so be it; if not, so be it.

"Well, yes, but the two-party system has gotten so bloated, it can't be changed. Better to work with the system than against it." I can totally understand the sentiment; I felt that way once. It's wrong. The only reason it's gotten that way is that we made it happen. And it's not going to change unless we make something else happen.

"But there are no alternatives!" There are - you may have to look harder, but they're out there. The Democrites and Republican'ts will drown them out with their braying simply because they can; those parties have snowballed their clout by various means over the years. But it's not written in stone that they are the only parties. It's not even in the Constitution.

"But my vote doesn't count - come on, it's only one vote." Again, I've felt the same way. But it's wrong. Votes add up; that's the point. If you want A to win, throw in for A; if B, then say B's your vote. Groupthink will not help. The numbers game is played by people who are second-guessing everybody else, and hence wasting their chance. The upshot of this is an electoral system that does nothing except maintain the status quo despite all the complaints. So - to be blunt about it - if you don't vote, then you have no right to complain. And if you don't vote differently when you could, that might be even worse. If you want a government of the people, by the people, for the people, the people have to speak up.

Who is the people? That's you - and you over there, and me. Individuals vote, not groups; that's why the US has 200 million potential voices, not two.

You're an individual. So vote like one.

On Theories

2008-05-05T03:56:00.000-07:00

We are both fascinated by and suspicious of theories. This is one reason why:

"...the important thing about theoretical positions is that they lead you to decisions that you wouldn't have taken otherwise, or that you wouldn't have committed: good taste would have militated against them."

Brian Eno is talking about music, but the same could just as easily apply to anything else.

Sex, lies, and videotape - the latest craze?

2008-05-02T03:54:00.001-07:00

OK, I know I said I'd be away for a while, but this dreck awoke me from my blogmatic slumbers. Stupidity has a way of doing that. Remember when ADD was reported, and then suddenly everybody and his dog had it? It was fashionable to be sick. Wait, it still is. But you have to have the right sickness for the time. "Depressed? Omigod, that's like so passe."

Scandals seem to be no different. It's one of those things that just show our world to be getting dumber by the day: a Jimi Hendrix sex tape has supposedly been found. This, after the alleged Marilyn Monroe sex tape. Who's next, Mr. Rogers?

The Marilyn tape has come under heavy fire, and it seems to be Keya Morgan's words against the FBI and Marilyn experts. I expect the Jimi tape will encounter the same fate. Why? Because these things are somehow surfacing all at once, at a time when these sex videos are being made and posted on the Net, I'm just a wee bit skeptical.

We've got a fascination with catching celebrities with their pants down - literally, in some cases. Wouldn't it be cool, then, if we found similar footage of a media icon from the past? Marilyn would seem like prime fodder for this: after all, she did pose nude once, and her affair with JFK is well known. Why not a homemade porno? Well, maybe, but probably not, because it wasn't the fashion it is today.

Jimi could have made such a tape - it was the 60s, right? They were all doing wacky things back then. Why not a hotel-room sex film? Hmmm. I'm not saying it's impossible, only that it's rather unlikely.

And the timing of these "discoveries" is suspicious. So Mr. Morgan won't show the Marilyn tape, so nobody will ever know - though the holes in the claim make it implausible. And we'll have to wait to see if Jimi really did Dallas.

But frankly, it all just smells of trash for cash. We've gotten bored with sex videos of living celebrities, so let's go after the ones who are dead. They're perfect targets: famous people with a racy side who can't defend themselves. How long is this fad going to last? Hopefully not much longer than the Macarena.

Musical Interlude

2008-04-28T11:26:00.000-07:00

Here's something you may have seen already, but it's still a good one. Animusic does this sort of thing for a living, and they seem to be doing well. This is one of my favorites, for reasons I'll not bore you with. Watch it and compare with others, and you'll probably see why. But remember, that's just my preference; everyone should agree with me, but they don't have to. Dammit.

Will post later, but am busy now. In the meantime, enjoy!

Encounter with a Gadfly

2008-04-24T13:16:00.000-07:00

Just got back from Louvain-la-Neuve, where a highly interesting series of lectures was given by Michael Ruse, a professor visiting from Florida State. He's been quite outspoken on the evolution-creationism debate, particularly as it's been shaped in the U.S., and he's also been quite critical of Daniel Dennett and Richard &^$#ing Dawkins. (Oops, did I say that out loud?) Knowing that, it's no surprise that his lectures were on Darwinism.

Let me just say up front that I found his position refreshing: while firmly convinced that Darwin was correct, he refrains from going the way of Dennett and Dawkins, regarding (and rightly so, in my opinion) their doctrine as another religiosity. Prof. Ruse has single-handedly made me interested in the Darwinian theory, simply by not being ham-fisted about it. Strongly convinced, true, but not in such a way that blindly swept away serious issues connected with it.

His final lecture was on Darwinism and Christianity. To be honest, I was fully expecting the "religion-must-go" shpiel that many Darwinian disciples like to bray. Prof. Ruse gave none of that, thankfully; instead (wonder of wonders!) he gave Christian thought a serious look before coming to his own conclusions. By distinguishing four questions, he put the matter into a clearer light:

1. Does the fact of evolution make Christianity impossible? Ruse says no.
2. Does the fact of evolution make Christianity unnecessary? Again, Ruse says no.
3. Does Darwinism make Christianity unnecessary? Yes, says Ruse.
4. Does Darwinism make Christianity impossible? No.

To this I would add another:

5. Does Darwinism make bad theology impossible? I'd say yes, to some extent, and I'd like to think Prof. Ruse would agree.

6. Does Darwinism make bad science impossible? Again I'd say yes, to some extent.

These are actually nothing more than restatements of important features of his lecture, I think.

Question #3 is especially interesting, because it connects with Yours Truly's #5 & 6: Prof. Ruse holds that Christianity is not needed for explanatory value, since Darwinian theory does that sufficiently well. I think good theology would abstain from trying to give scientific explanations, just as good science would abstain from trying to give theological explanations. They are different universes of discourse. Where those universes overlap, they must agree; if they didn't, we'd be forced to believe that incompatible truth-claims could stand side by side.

We'd have to say, for example, that one fellow could proclaim the world's creation in six 24-hour days while another fellow could hold that it took eons for the world to come into existence - and they would not be disagreeing!?

Obviously, that's impossible as long as scientists and theologians assert that they are after truth. So what I'm saying is this: if it's been pretty well established that the physical origin of the world happened way more than 6000 years ago and took more than six days, the literalist theologian will have to account for that in his/her own work. Not to do so is intellectually irresponsible.

Similarly, a biologist who argues that God does not exist because a benevolent Supreme Being would never allow suffering in the world - i.e. natural evil - is clearly ignorant of the theologians' work on this question.

This would seem to be obvious, but the fact that creationism is seriously considered as a scientific theory by some people only shows that they don't have a clear idea what a scientific theory is. Even if they're practicing scientists. Natural science has the natural world for its domain, and it seeks answers in the empirical domain; a transcendant God stands outside that domain, and therefore is not amenable to the procedures of physics or biology. So don't try to push Him in there under the banner of ID.

By the same token, the arrogance of some scientists to hold forth on matters theological is to overstep their own bounds - especially arrogant when they perceive no need to study religion at all. Just because God is not for empirical testing does not mean He is a delusion, only that He is not an object of natural science. (So put away the prayer experiments, please. Why should God play by your rules, or anyone's?) I wouldn't call ID a scientific theory, but so what? It in no way entails my becoming an atheist.

I believe the so-called debate last year between Kirk Cameron and the so-called "Rational Response Squad" encapsulates much of the controversy: nobody's listening to anybody, everybody's talking past each other, they're slinging the same tired words back and forth. This has nothing to do with truth, and everything to do with power.

(I'd love to sound off about all the "debate" between Kirk & Co., but that's another post. Dear readers, both of you will have to wait.)

So what Prof. Ruse's position achieves is clarification of the fields of science and religion. Imagine that - some scientists and theologians could actually get back to doing what they do best, and not be at each other's throats.

"OK, so where do you get off considering yourself competent enough to pass judgment on science and religion?" I'm neither scientist nor theologian; I study philosophy, with metaphysics as a major interest. But I have a concern for definitions, among other things, and that is a matter common to everyone. The definition of a field of inquiry marks out what it treats; it does this by way of the questions it asks. So ballistics asks what are the characteristics of objects in motion; psychology has other questions to ask. (Let's not digress into the status of scientific explanations. No space for it here.)

Often questions do cross borders, providing fertile ground for new ideas or even new disciplines - take biochemistry, for example. So I'm not against interdisciplinary studies by any means; in fact it's at the borders where the really interesting work takes place. But asking questions that touch boundaries is one thing, drawing conclusions that cross boundaries is another, and drawing unwarranted conclusions in other fields yet another. I have no problem with the first, or even the second, but the third merely displays a failure to think things through. And when willfully done, it just reeks of disingenuousness.

If philosophy existed for no other reason, the role of intellectual gadfly would be enough to justify it. Socrates pissed off a lot of folks, and went to the tomb for it. Fortunately he did a lot more. Prof. Ruse has done that in a wonderfully constructive way, and then some; I hope there's more to come - preferably without hemlock or anything.

(Image unwittingly courtesy of http://images.google.be/imgres?imgurl=http://www.carolmoore.net/4secretary/Gadfly.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.carolmoore.net/4secretary/controversies.html&h=551&w=547&sz=11&hl=nl&start=1&um=1&tbnid=rqXqvqjbnCNx4M:&tbnh=133&tbnw=132&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dgadfly%26um%3D1%26hl%3Dnl%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN)

one of their own said...

2008-04-18T10:22:00.001-07:00

In line with the previous post, here is a passage that Mr. Dawkins, Mr. Dylan-Haynes, and all other members of the scientific community:

Find a scientific man who proposes to get along without any metaphysics -- not by any means every man who holds the ordinary reasonings of metaphysicians in scorn -- and you have found one whose doctrines are thoroughly vitiated by the crude and uncriticized metaphysics with which they are packed. We must philosophize, said the great naturalist Aristotle -- if only to avoid philosophizing. Every man of us has a metaphysics, and has to have one; and it will influence his life greatly. Far better, then, that that metaphysics should be criticized and not be allowed to run loose. (Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers 1.129)

Spoken by a man who knew both the library and the lab.

This Island Internet

2008-04-18T08:58:00.000-07:00

Both my dear readers are very busy, so they might have missed out on the news item about the beatdown by Florida teenage girls, which they videotaped and wanted to post on the Web. They might also have missed the discussion that has arisen around it. Apparently everybody involved in the case seems to be saying, "Don't blame me/my daughter, it was the others/the Internet."

And apparently Barry "Men in Black" Sonnenfeld fears the Internet is eroding society. It is so pervasive and hypnotic, he believes, that kids today have no sense of privacy, thus enabling totalitarianism. He might view the Florida incident as evidence of this.

Here's my response...

Point the first: Helen A.S. Popkin, voice of reason and sanity, makes a simple point: you cannot blame the Internet because teenagers sometimes do ridiculous, even horrible things. Teenagers can be like that. (So can adults.) It's not that hard to figure out. You know the old saw, "With freedom comes responsibility"? Well, if you agree with that, you agree with its attendant correlation: with greater freedom comes greater responsibility. This needs to be learned, and it needs to be taught.

Point the second: It does seem that the current generation is more media-savvy than any other. But they do have their limits, as Shakhti discovered recently, and the rest will have to figure it out too.

The take-home lesson here is, I think, that things ain't so simple as we'd like. People are different, they behave differently, which brings me to...

Point the third: Here's my sociological observation. Individuals do not act like groups of people; that's why we talk about mob psychology, as opposed to personal psychology. Seems to me we're forced to come to grips with this stuff called technology, and we have to do it again every day. This means each one of us must deal with it, and society as a whole must too. And these are distinct orders.

Time was when photography was (a) feared because it would put painters out of business or (b) loathed because it wasn't, couldn't be art. Something similar with movies vs. theater. Who would say that now? Why not? Because as a whole, we have learned what we can do with film - the fear and loathing came out of ignorance.

It took a lot of effort and bumbling, but we've learned. And are still learning (as demonstrated by innovative works and stinkers alike). That's what's happening now with computers. We're learning the ropes as we go, as can be seen by the double-edged Youtube and the Florida beating.

My basic point here is that the shifting of responsibility is so human and yet so maddening.

In some ways this is complicated by findings such as this, one where a person's decision-making can be determined prior to that person's awareness of the choice. Interestingly, John Dylan-Haynes (the leader of the study) seems to doubt the reality of free will: faced with an unsavory decision, "We can't rule out that there's a free will that kicks in at this late point....But I don't think it's plausible." (Quoted in Wired.com.) (I'd say the only real thing the experiment proves is there's a delay in awareness, not a rigid determinism. But that's another post.)

But it doesn't complicate everything. Let's assume the experiment is strictly speaking right and decisions can't be changed. Now imagine the following courtroom scene...

Lawyer: Your Honor, my clients could not have been guilty of assault and battery. Sure, they talked about it for days. Sure, they intended to put their appalling act on display for the whole world to gawk at. But so much evidence shows that people do not have conscious control over the decisions they make! Therefore, they cannot be considered responsible for deciding to whup their classmate's ass.

Judge: Oh good, then I'm not responsible for giving them ten without parole. *slam!* Next!

Now, Mr. Sonnenfeld, I'll be the first to admit being mesmerized by the WWW. Look, I've got a blog. But if I don't finish my dissertation, can I really say, "Stupid dumb Internet...kept me from doing my job"?

As for Mr. Dylan-Haynes's comment, I won't go into the hairy issue of free will. I'll only say that he doubts a certain conception of free will, and that is all he can legitimately say. More than that, and he would be committing the same error in philosophy as Richard Dawkins does in theology - namely, assuming that his interpretation of the problem is the only proper one. It is not.

So. Teach your children well, let them make their own mistakes, and hope for the best. Don't blame the Net just yet. But by all means, fear what people can do with it.

Tag, the Reprise

2008-04-15T13:44:00.000-07:00

The tag post has generated unparalleled response: a record 4 comments, the highest to date. Thanks to all of you who read, enjoyed, and talked back! I hope there are some similar good sports among you.

Now, some challenges (real or perceived) have been presented among those comments. A certain astute reader - I won't reveal her name, but it begins with Anna-Lys - asked that I dredge up proof of my musical prowess by posting a recording of the James Bond theme on the ukelele. My friend, I would if I could, but alar, and time. And at this point, I've got none of these.

Said astute reader also requested pictures of (a) the no-good, long-haired hippie freak in my past and (b) the ill-fated jeans of my Chuck Norris days. On this I can deliver somewhat promisingly.
s *sigh*, said proof calls for a uke, a recorde
People's Exhibit A: this was shot at Karaoke Night at my alma mater. My partner-in-crime and I were doing our rendition of "Welcome to the Jungle," TMC-style. Ecce Hippie.

(Photo courtesy of moi.)

People's Exhibit B: this is not exactly me, as you can tell by looking carefully. Nor is this the same kick. However, the subject's jeans have met a very similar fate:

(Photo unintentionally courtesy of Failblog, an online shrine to Schadenfreude.*)

It pains me, but it has to be said: I hope I never get that big. However, if a certain other astute reader decides to see just how much cottage cheese I can put away in one sitting, I could end up like this guy. Especially if I practice.

Honestly, I've never tested the limits of this craving, partly because I've feared that it has no end, and partly because I'm a cheapskate - have you seen the price of cottage cheese? If it's going to disappear so quickly, why spend the money?

And yet (correct me if I'm wrong) it seems RKR actually wants to see just how of the stuff Yours Truly can take. Well, if Paul Newman could eat 50 hard-boiled eggs in an hour, I might actually be game to try something similar. Just to see.

Only make it reasonable, otherwise you'll end up on mop detail for sure.

(*Thanks to the lovely and talented Ms. W, who introduced me to Failblog.)

ps - (For truth-seekers everywhere, BBC gives the scoop on the likelihood of Cool Hand Luke's feat in real life. Read this before dishing out the cottage cheese.)

Verily, I hath been tagged...

2008-04-11T03:34:00.000-07:00

I don't know what I did to deserve this, but - I've been tagged. I'm it, so here we go (hey, this beats writing a dissertation, right?):

The rules:
*Post 10 random things about yourself
*Choose 5 people to tag and a reason you chose each person
*Leave them each a comment directing them to your blog so they know they are it
*You can’t tag the person who tagged you (you’ll have to make new friends)
*As a courtesy to the person who tagged you, please let them know when you have posted so they can have the sheer delight and extra work load of reading your answers)

Drum roll, please...

1. I was born in Eugene, Oregon. I know nothing about the damn Ducks.

2. Can you play the James Bond theme on a ukelele? I can. (Well, at least I could once.)

3. I practiced tae kwon do in high school.

4. Once when I was in high school, I met my mom on the street. As I was showing off a spinning kick, the crotch of my jeans ripped. Mom laughed so hard, I think she almost wet her pants.

5. No matter how much cottage cheese is in front of me, I will eat it. All.

6. I was once a no-good, long-haired hippie freak, and I have the pictures to prove it.

7. A favorite pastime when I was growing up: climbing buildings. Well, that's what us ninjas do.

8. I think my purpose in life can be summed up in two words: object lesson.

9. Case in point. Once when I was a kid, we went out for lunch. I ordered two eggs, any style - with a straight face - and I didn't get it.

10. Switched-on Bach is one of my all-time favorite albums.

Now for some victims. It's probably bad (N)etiquette to tag the already-tagged, and I don't know many bloggers...so that really does mean I have to make some new friends!

A. Matt, because I haven't talked to him since TKD, and it would be nice to hear how he's doing;
B. Anna-Lys, because she has such a lovely blog, and was foolish enough to comment on mine (glad you liked the post);
C. Elliot, because any blog posting its reading level can't be half-bad;
D. Sam, because he's traveling and I'm not (covet, covet, covet! verily, I covet thee);
E. Malin, because he's got a good eye for illustration - keep it up!

There, I've done the deed. Thanks for being good sports, and give it a try; it's not so bad, really.

Interim post (between posts)

2008-04-07T15:46:00.000-07:00

Busy now writing up a presentation for this Saturday. I know you're eagerly awaiting the next post, but unfortunately you're both going to have to wait. Next week, perhaps.

Meantime, enjoy the hypnotic grandeur that is Clows. You gotta love the groove.

Great wait update - strike three, yerrrrrrrrrr out!

2008-04-01T01:46:00.000-07:00

It is now April, and the egregious Encarta Misquotes quiz is still up. Just as I expected, to be frank.

Both of my devoted readers know of my righteous indignation, as well the the contrition which followed. (Just in case you missed it, click here. For the condensed version, click here.) The vitriol and the call to truce were both put half-jokingly, but there's a serious side to all this. It really galls me that such a gross error was not only put out by a major reference source, but that the same source refuses to acknowledge it, let alone correct it. This is outright hypocrisy, pure and simple.

That means only one thing: Encarta is too big for its britches. So the angry young post stays. 'Nuff said.

The Great Wait, part deux

2008-03-19T06:06:00.000-07:00

Still waiting for a response to my request to Encarta. I'm getting pessimistic here. Nine days to go.

I'd prefer that my request be granted, of course, but some sort of acknowledgment would be nice - even if it's to say, "Screw you, we do whatever we want." In its way, even that would not be disappointing; it indicates they actually read their feedback and care enough to respond. Please don't disappoint me.

About the shooting in Israel, and the cheering that followed

2008-03-13T15:04:00.000-07:00

I'm speechless.

Update - The Great Quote-Quiz Wait

2008-03-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

Folks, it's been almost a week since I notified Encarta about the faulty quiz. No word from them. Now I understand that I'm probably not their highest priority - they're very busy with real jobs, for Pete's sake - so they should probably be cut some slack. So I'm giving them three weeks to get back to me, and then the post stays for sure.

I say this not out of cockiness but out of concern. If my opinion matters so much, and it's so critical (and so right, of course), you would think some Encarta rep would want to respond to it. That's what I would hope, anyway. But if my feedback makes no difference, and they don't send me so much as an acknowledgment, it only supports my charges. That's what I'm afraid of.

It's not always pleasant to be right. I actually want to be corrected on this. Trouble is, I don't see how. Encarta, if you're listening, say something - and fast.

Call to Truce

2008-03-07T10:39:00.000-08:00

Can't we all just get along?

Just recently, I gave the last post another look. OK, it felt real nice to vent, and I still believe my position is correct - but how much good will that do? Not only do I hate nitpicking, I hate brute negativity; it's purely destructive, it tears down without building up.

Which got me thinking: when you feel bad about something, it's because things aren't the way you'd like them to be. There's widespread poverty; the Iraq war should never have happened; your job stinks; the cat peed on my bed. We wanted none of these things, yet there they are. Now we have a choice to make: change circumstances for the better, change your view of the circumstances...or just suffer, you shiftless bastard, suffer!

I decided that I wanted to see Encarta do a better job. Generally they are fine, which is why they enjoy the high reputation; when things go wrong, though, it's better to point it out and ask them to try again. Encarta does not deserve to be reviled like I did. So I filled out the "Feedback" form, and am now waiting for a response of some kind.

The reason I'm airing all this is so that I'm not mistaken - and have a clean conscience. I'm not bitter (I hope), nor do I want to be regarded as such. And I don't want to make a habit of smack-downs. That achieves nothing. Anger breeds anger, the coals glow red under the ashes. I don't want to apologize for the content of my post, though I do regret its form. At the same time, I don't feel obliged to eat my words - which is what I'd do if I softened or deleted them. This is something I feel strongly about, hence the strong response.

So what I proposed is this: reconsider the quiz, and I'll reconsider my post. If they pull the quiz, I'll pull my post. If the quiz stands, the post stands. I figured that's fair; let's see what happens...

Our children is learning; it's the teachers we need to watch out for.

2008-02-21T11:34:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not, I hate nitpicking. I hate it when I do it, and I hate it when others do it. So posting this made me hesitate a little as I thought: Now aren't you just a wee bit anal?

No. What I found is so inane and self-important that I had to post haste.

A recent timewaster appeared in the margins of an article I'd read: a link billed itself as the "Famous Misquotes Quiz." Having just had dinner, the idea of an innocuous quiz appealed to me - what better way than test my memory? Once I was pretty proud of myself when correcting a common misquote (It's "A foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"), so the chance to repeat history sounded good.

As it turns out, the quiz is a farce. For one thing, it's not a "misquote quiz," it's a grammar test. Misquoting is just as it says: you quote someone wrongly. In that case, explain this question:

In "Guilty," her duet with Barry Gibb, Barbra Streisand sings, "Out on the street anybody you meet got a heartache of their own." Which is the correct lyric?

It's correct as is.

"Out on the street, anybody you meet got heartache of their own. "

"Out on the street, anybody you meet has a heartache of his own."

That "got" is pure evil. No one should say "got."

Strictly speaking, the correct answer is a). Why? Because that's the actual lyric. The quiz's "correct" answer is c), which is then explained in exhaustive detail. So instead of figuring out what someone really did say, your job is to decide what he/she should have said. Not quite what "misquote" means. (Mind you, this is an Encarta production - the folks your kids are plagiarizing or citing in their class papers.)

Self-appointed masters of language reality can be a royal pain in the ass, especially when they fall down on the job. Take this question:

The poet Robert Frost once said, "I had a lovers quarrel with the world."

This is correct.

He meant to say "lover's quarrel."

He meant to say "lovers' quarrel."

OK, if he said that, what's he getting wrong? How the hell do you pronounce an apostrophe? The quizmeister should have put "The poet Robert Frost once wrote..." - if indeed it was written. I don't know, really. But if you're going to get all huffy about stuff, be able to dish it out the way you think it oughta be. (That's right, oughta.)

What tops off this Roman shower is its less-than-subtle revisionism. Here:

In George Washington's farewell address to the nation, he wrote, "Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports." How should the sentence read?

This sentence is fine.

"Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."

"Of all the dispositions and habits that lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."

I believe the proper Netiquette response to this is, WTF??? By this logic, everyone - and I mean everyone - who put pen to paper before 2008 is a complete Mo-Ron. Washington, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edmund Burke, David Hume, Shakespeare: Mo-Rons all.

I'm not going to go into the finer points of capitalization or the ambiguities of punctuation's function; it is enough to say that for the time and place, George Washington knew damn well what he was doing, and he managed just fine. What he wrote, and how he wrote it, conformed to the conventions of American orthography around him.

Now the last time I expressed concern about how words were so easily abused, I was called anal. (By the coordinator of an adult literacy program, no less. I wish I were kidding.) History will probably repeat itself; after all, it's just a quiz. Right? It's just a quiz proffered by a reputable information resource, a quiz that happens to be so ill-considered that it makes a mockery of the very thing it claims to uphold - good use of language.

So, what is the Misquote quiz really like? This.

(Image cheerfully swiped from http://tns-www.lcs.mit.edu/~izzy/barfbag.html and photoshopped like there's no tomorrow.)

If bullshit were gold, we'd all be rolling in it.

2008-01-24T12:54:00.000-08:00

YOU CAN'T STOP WHAT'S COMING.

I just received a copy of On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt - a short philosophical study of the concept of BS, arguably the first of its kind. It had been circulating privately for 20 years before it got published, and appeared in the Raritan Review before being published in book form. It set off some buzz, and even inspired an anthology, Bullshit and Philosophy.

So, as usual, I'm a bit late in the game. But since there's a lot in philosophy that's still up for grabs, I thought to sound off on some issues raised by Prof. Frankfurt. Before doing so, let me say that this is the kind of thing I love about philosophy - when an prevalent everyday event is observed, and its importance unveiled.

On p. 48, Frankfurt quotes from a novel in which the narrator recalls his own father, who taught him: "Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through." Frankfurt notes that this supposes a distinction between lying and BS, and wonders what that might be - probably not that BS is more effective, though we are more lenient on bullshitters than liars. He then points out that we react differently to lies and BS; when we catch a lie, we're affronted, but BS just arouses impatience. Why that is, Frankfurt says, "I shall leave as an exercise for the reader."

That's where I come in. Feel free to comment, because I'm just trying this on for size. I'm not sure I agree with it all.

My unscientific guess is this: our world is made ripe for bullshit. It wasn't always this way.

Frankfurt says it's impossible to say whether there's more BS around now than in the past, but then he virtually answers that question. He points out that people will bullshit when they are forced to talk about things they're ignorant of (p. 62-3). Let's think about this.

You're more bound to find cockroaches in dirty, run-down houses; it's the right conditions for them. It seems to me that we can be reasonably sure that there is more BS today by examining the conditions for it. If those conditions are more present today than in the past, chances are there really is more BS now than in days of yore.

And I say the conditions are right for bullshit. Why? It seems to me that we are forced into bullshitting situations more and more:

1) There is more information available now to the general public than ever. We can't keep up with it all, and there's more and more piling up. If we can stay up to date in our line of work, that's already an achievement.

2) We don't know how the most everyday things in our lives work, and we can't/won't take the time to learn. Computer breaks down? Call the IT guy. Toaster break? Throw it away, buy a new one. (It's a rare guy anymore that fixes a toaster.)

3) We like to be hip, i.e. up on all the latest stuff. We like to know what's going down, or at least look like it. And we approve of that sort of thing.

4) In a democratic world, we have a right to know what's going on in high places - transparency is the word nowadays. People in high places don't always want us to know what's going on there.

4a) In a democratic world, we're expected to make informed choices when voting.

4b) In a democratic world, politicians want to keep their jobs.

5) We've been fed a lot of crap about how the world is a big construct, so there's no at-bottom truth - one version of the anti-realism Frankfurt mentions (pp. 64-5).

Smells like the makings of a prairie-ful of bullshit!

* * * * *

Now for the moral of the story...

It's a truism that knowledge is power. What's needed in education today is a greater emphasis on critical thinking. Not merely to cut through the crap - I think people are generally more savvy about BS, a by-product of there being so much of it - but also to prevent their own production of it. You can't always make people act the way you want (you can't stop what's coming), but you can control your own actions; if BS is part of the way things are, the place to start cleaning up is yourself. Platitudinous, yes, but true all the same.

Not only should critical thinking be trained, philosophy should be given a lively introduction in high schools. Courses should be run by folks who believe truth is real, valuable, and attainable. Discussions should be encouraged, but prevented from descending into bull sessions. When a question arises that needs follow-up research, it should be assigned as homework. (If students are drowning in homework, perhaps it should be given out more intelligently than has been in the past. But that's another post.)

And we should learn to say, with the elegance of E=mc^2, "I don't know; let's look into it." Say it when you mean it, and relish the honesty (which is just truth, really). If you don't need to know what you're talking about, no problem; if you do need to know, and you don't, it's time to shape up or ship out.

Am I talking down to you, O Reader? No. If anything, I'm talking to myself. Anybody really wanting to be heard would get a high-profile position, and that's not my thing.

(Image torridly kyped from http://www.tamparacing.com/forums/drifting/246330-where-does-go.html)

No Country for Lame Critics

2008-01-21T14:06:00.000-08:00

I just got home from the movies; there was a pre-opening show of No Country for Old Men. Brilliant film, but hardly happy. What got me pecking at my keyboard here were the reviews I was reading. A lot of buzz has been generated about the film, and I felt I had to put my two cents in.

After seeing a movie, I like to find out more about it, as well as what other folks think about it. Not to gain support for my opinion, but to compare and see where we agree and disagree, and why. Sometimes it'll change my opinion: "Oh, why didn't I think of that while I was watching it?" Other times not: "Oh, come on now!"

I knew this was an extraordinary film from the get-go, and that sense stayed with me after leaving the theater. And it was no surprise that the reviews were almost all laudatory - gushing, waxing poetic about it. Since they agreed on almost all the same points, I went looking for the negative reviews. Lucky for me, rottentomatoes.com makes the hunting easy.

So why would anybody diss this flick? I wasn't convinced by the reasons given. Rather than nitpick (which I sure could do), let me just spout my opinion. Anyone who really cares who I'm ranting against can ask, and I'll gladly go into more detail.

Everyone who's seen this film knows it's a tour de force. Everyone knows it. The production is simply fantastic, top notch. Where negative points came up, as I said, the reasons generally don't seem convincing to me. Frankly, I think they were looking for dirt. After all, they are critics, and an enthusiastic thumbs-up doesn't sound very critical. (Maybe my next post will say something on this point.)

One thing that's bugged some is its allegedly nihilistic or pessimistic tone. It is not a feel-good movie, and certainly not a happy one. But I don't believe it stands up to the charge of nihilism or pessimism. Here's why I think it's more affirmative than it might first appear:

There is a strong moral sense in all the Coen brothers' films. Not a moral agenda, a moral sense: they couldn't do such good work by resorting to condescension. No Country for Old Men is no exception. What makes it a bit more complicated is the fact that they're adapting Cormac McCarthy's novel - which I haven't read), so it's hard for me to say what's McCarthy's and what's not. So I'll just refer to the film.

The irony is that many of the critiques of NCFOM are examples of points the film is making. Case in point: one reviewer complains that Ed Tom's "cracker-barrel philosophizing" undoes everything the movie sets out to do. Let's listen in on Ed Tom...in one scene he's reading the paper, tells his deputy about the managers of an old folks' home killing old people for their Social Security checks. Nobody did anything, he says, until a guy ran out of the place naked. It took something like that to get anybody's attention. Har, we in the audience say. But a film can't attract some people's attention unless there's shit blowing up. And Hollywood knows it. The Coen brothers do, and they use it to all its double-edge potential.

This is just one of several ironies in the reviews. Which brings me to my point - and I'm about to let out the secret to the movie: it all depends on watching the whole thing, not just the most obvious parts. Where it's loudest, enjoy the ride. Where it speaks softest, listen up.

And not just to Ed Tom.

I will say no more - no spoilers here. Let me just say I don't see NCFOM falling to the negative floor with a thud so much as I find it hitting the floor, bouncing up, and hovering in the air. Where it goes from there...

(Image desperately abducted from http://www.cinemastrikesback.com/?cat=315)

Peirce's Pragmatic Law - The Point of It All

2007-11-24T14:46:00.000-08:00

I’m afraid I got ahead of myself. For anyone who’s been patient enough to follow me through this working-out, you may be wondering what the benefit of all this is. Let me put the point right up front: The pragmatic maxim gives you a real good tool for sharp thinking. You could say it’s the Ginsu knife of logical tools. What I’ve been doing is spelling out exactly how it works. (The maxim, not the knife.)

It might help to situate this finding in the context of Peirce’s view of reasoning, since he was a big fan of logic – to say the least. As a scientist and philosopher, good thinking is essential; it comes in handy in lots of situations, and everyone knows how sexy good thinking is. So every little bit that helps thinking, helps your life. Peirce knew this. In 1876 he wrote,

All thought rolls upon one thing following from another. That which follows is inferred deductively from that which it follows. This from which something else follows is inferred inductively or by hypothesis, from the consequent. Thus the relation of antecedent to consequent is the most important of all relations to us…[1]

So what is the object of the pragmatic maxim? To clarify concepts and weed out hypotheses that don’t help thinking. The PM is specifically for governing the logic of abduction, or hypothesis – guessing. Hypotheses are basically educated guesses. As readers know, some guesses are sensible, but others may just be off-base; scientists know this too. The reason for the difficulty in guessing is that there seems to be no real rule for it.

This calls for a quick-and-dirty guide to reasoning. There are basically three forms of reasoning:

deduction,
induction, and
abduction.

Deduction is what most people think of, when they think of logic – stuff like

Rule	All detectives are brilliant reasoners.	Premiss
Case	Sherlock Holmes is a detective.	Premiss
Result	Therefore he is a brilliant reasoner.	Conclusio

Rule –-> Case –-> Result. What’s cool about deduction is that the conclusions are certain – no doubt about it. Admit the premisses, and you have to admit the conclusion too. But you can see that knowledge isn't really extended at all here; we've just picked out something in our rule.

Induction is what you do when you generalize. The more evidence you’ve got, the more support for your conclusions:

Result	Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant reasoner.	Premiss
Case	Sherlock Holmes is a detective, like Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Maigret,…	Premiss
Rule	Therefore all detectives are probably brilliant reasoners.	Conclusion

Result –-> Case –-> Rule. Sometimes we can make assertions about every member, but not always: “John Bull is a terrible cook. He’s an Englishman, and so is Tony Blair, John Cleese, and… – but Jamie Oliver is pretty good. So not all Englishmen are terrible cooks (just most of them).” So induction is handy for testing the extent of a notion. But, like deduction, it doesn't really extend knowledge either. We don't get new ideas from it, we just test the ones we've already got.

Abduction is how we extend knowledge. As we saw above, it's basically guessing. Peirce was extremely interested in the thinking going on behind guesses, because that's how you extend knowledge. What you see here is a more fleshed-out version of what we do when we take a guess:

Rule	All detectives are brilliant reasoners.	Premiss
Result	Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant reasoner.	Premiss
Case	Therefore Sherlock Holmes is a detective.	Conclusion

Rule –-> Result –-> Case. Another example might help make things clearer:

Abbott: Who’s on first.

Costello: I dunno.

Abbott: No, dummy, Who’s on first.

Costello (thinking): “Who” might be the guy’s name (because everyone has a name, and this guy on first base has a name too).

There are some pretty good guidelines for inductive reasoning, but not many - or any – for guessing. We’re pretty much left to our own devices. Learn from experience. Heuristics are nice, but not foolproof: sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.

Enter the pragmatic maxim. The PM was designed specifically as a rule for making abductions.[2] What it does is make us aware of what we’re thinking and what we can do with it, so that we can tell whether a certain guess is worth making or not. What’s extremely cool about the PM is its form: it delivers truth in spades.

Granted, it's a sort of "This is true as far as it goes" kind of truth, but that's something. But when making guesses, every bit helps. What's more, that support lends to the surety of the concept - and a few well-done concepts are much better than a bunch of half-assed ones. Think the old story of the fox and the hedgehog: the fox knows lots of things, the hedgehog only one big thing. (In case you were wondering, I think Peirce could be called a hedgehog. And I think he'd take that as a compliment.)

So the PM gives us the conclusive power of a deductive reasoning, while allowing the freedom needed for abductive reasoning. And you can use it in a whole lot of different walks of life. Clarifying ideas – it’s not just for philosophy anymore.

What I’ve done is simply show the logical form underlying the PM, which is what gives it its power. I’ve also drawn some conclusions that seem to follow from the maxim itself. Hopefully my thinking has improved after chewing on this stuff for a while, and if it is helpful to you, then all the better.

[1] W3,203 (1876).

[2] EP2:234–5 (1903).

Further Extensions - Out on the Leafy Edge

2007-11-21T15:00:00.001-08:00

Before the intermission, I argued that Peirce's Law/pragmatism leads to a realism. I'd like to cap that argument with the mother of all reals: the categories. I hope this won’t take as long as the last post did.

Readers of Peirce are familiar with the three categories – Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. This here is not an exposition of those, but rather a demonstration that the signs we use to refer to them imply that they are real. Peirce argues that they are. It will involve a little of his theory of signs, so bear with me.

Signs involve an object, the sign, and an interpretant. The object can’t be the sign itself; it has to be something else, something other than the sign. Now for interpreting the sign, other signs are referred to. We have to use words to talk about something, and we do the same with the categories. But that has to do with the interpretant. The object is simply the thing pointed at: there's just brute reaction here, no intellectifying.

You: What are you talking about?
Tarzan (pointing): Unh!

The categories are genuine signs. That means they definitely refer to something apart from the signs. By the general structure of the signs, it follows that the categories must be real objects and not nonsense, as he determined the Liar Paradox to be. (For those who care, the Liar is nonsense because it refers exclusively to itself. But as pointed out, a sign cannot refer to itself, so it must be nonsense.[1]) The fact that it is the object of the sign means that it is other.

We further suppose that the object caused the sign, and not the other way around. Thus the sign points toward its cause, meaning it tacitly assumes a causal relation. And if that’s the case, and such a relation implies a cause, it follows that the categories must be real.

Now we can try it another way: by tracing back the logical chain. Start wherever you please: pick a thought, any thought. Call it Q. That idea must have been triggered by something else – an idea, no doubt – so let it be a Q to the P that set it off. Assuming that there is a relation, Peirce’s Law determines that it must have been stimulated by the idea P. You check out the effects of that concept in order to know that concept, meaning you’re killing two birds with one stone. That idea in turn was triggered by another one, leading to the same setup as before. This goes on, ad infinitum.

If we start generalizing, as we sure can with ideas, ultimately we’ll arrive at the simplest ones possible. Peirce will argue that these are the irreducible Big Three: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. This is evidently arrived at by way of the pragmatic maxim/Peirce’s Law.

If the categories are real, everything else has to be too. So this portion of the conjecture should be the clincher. So ballsy conjecture #5 is complete.

Of course I'd like to think all this is correct. But knowing myself, I can't be 100% sure. So I'm airing it out to see what needs fixing. If it doesn't need fixing, maybe it'll be useful to someone.

Be fair. Use, and cite this! Plagiarize me, and I'll have yer damn scalp quicker'n you can say "Ward Churchill!"

[1] This he concludes as early as 1865 (see W1,174), and he reaffirms it in 1903 (see EP2:166–9).

An Intermission

2007-11-20T14:17:00.000-08:00

Still working on the next addition to the Peirce series. Meantime, enjoy the show. I probably shouldn't find this amusing, and yet...I hope you do too.

Extensions on Peirce's Pragmatic Law

2007-11-18T05:02:00.001-08:00

In a previous post I went out on a limb to argue that Peirce's pragmatic maxim is formally identical to Peirce's Law, a form found in many logic textbooks today. In a later post, I went a bit further out by suggesting an avenue for (re-)constructing a logical proof of pragmatism; and still further by stating that pragmatism is basically correct if my shpiel happens to be right.

Today I'm going to inch closer to the leafy edge by making a further conjecture, tediously illustrated.

Ballsy conjecture #4: The development of Peirce's philosophy can be seen to assume the pattern of Peirce's Law. In other words, it thoroughly informs his thinking.

If pragmatism is the rule for right reasoning, as he argues in the 1903 Harvard lectures,[1] and if he duly acts on that, we should be able to discern it in the form of his reasoning.

This may be only of interest to scholars, but it seems to me that it would make sense of the trajectory of his thinking. That's got to count for something. Here's a case I've found so far. In 1902 Peirce criticizes Aristotle's venerable argument for first principles.[2] The Stagirite states that every premiss depends on scientific arguments rest on more general principles; those may well in turn rest on still more general principles. If anything is to be true at all, there must be a stop to the regress - i.e. most general principles. Peirce disagrees. He likens the Achilles paradox except we're going backward in time rather than forward (This would be because thinking takes time. Nope, there are no two ways about it - go ahead, try.)

Reasoning would be like what Lewis Carroll pictures in "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles", first published in Mind in 1895.[3] Suppose, the tortoise says, you argue that premisses A and B lead to conclusion Z: what if he accepts the premisses but refuses the conclusion? Well, Achilles can introduce premiss D: If A and B, then Z must follow.[4] What if the tortoise refuses that? Simple – add premiss E: If A, B, and D, then Z. And so on.

Effectively this is attempting to state that if a rule of inference is accepted, along with certain premisses, the conclusion necessarily follows. It would be equivalent to saying that if the rule is accepted, the consequent follows out of necessity. Formalized, it lo0ks like this:

{(C	→	Z)	→	Z}	→	Z	…
T	T	T	T	T	T	T	…
T	f	f	T	f	f	f	…
f	T	T	T	T	T	T	…
f	T	f	f	f	T	f	…
	⇑		⇑		⇑		…

You can see the pattern that is set into motion here: as long as we are trying to derive the conclusion from the premisses, we will never actually reach it by means of the reasoning alone. The arrows ⇑ at the bottom of the table mark the truth values accruing to the conditionals as each successive ramification is added; one can also see that the alternation will continue infinitely. In posing this paradox, Carroll has questioned the notion of implication.

Peirce would reply that the question is misdirected at the outset. He appeals to the act of thinking things out: in the process of thinking we are so busy focusing on the object under consideration that we cannot attend to the process. Once we have reached a point where we can pause and reflect on the path leading up to this conclusion, we search for propositions that do lead up to this conclusion. But the argument represents the last stage of his thought, not what led up to it: we say X is true if Y and Z are true – it follows, granting the premisses. The key element here is thought: thought is thinking about something, whatever that may be. If we try to clarify this, we find that thought is starting on a percept. But percepts cannot be articulated in propositions, for they are not products of thought; therefore the first logical particles are perceptual judgments or facts. But these are radically different from the percepts themselves, meaning that thought is developing on its own processes. What this means for the tortoise’s challenge is that he is right – but only if his picture of reasoning is right. And this Peirce would deny. We do not employ logical rules in order to reach conclusions, we use them to articulate the conclusions we have reached already. So the form (P → Q) → Q gives an improper picture of how logical rules are applied.

The error lies in supposing that the conclusion Q can follow from the relation P → Q alone. A more fruitful inference to make is this: If a relation of inferences to the conclusion implies that we took the steps leading up to that conclusion, then those steps were taken. In one fell swoop, both the tortoise’s paradox is dissolved and the validity of the premisses affirmed. And in doing that, there is no need to justify implication; it is merely posited hypothetically. That it happens to work every time enables us to say that although there is no reason for granting implication, there is no reason against it. Meanwhile all evidence supports its validity, and it has been astoundingly successful. Therefore, until further notice, we have every reason to accept implication as a valid form of inference

We have seen this sort of reasoning – in Peirce’s Law. Much of Peirce’s argumentation is of the form ((P → Q) → P) → P; indeed, it is arguably the framework of all of his researches. Assuming he takes his own pragmatic maxim to heart – a maxim which bears this form as well – his analysis of conceptions follows this train of reasoning. The form has been proven valid, and it explains the maxim; for an explanation is “the adoption of a simpler supposition to account for a complex state of things”, and the logical form is more general. This suggests, then, that the elusive proof of pragmatism is to be found in the proof of Peirce’s Law. The modifications of the maxim are but refinements of the great project which he maps out in the Popular Science Monthly series.

This is a belabored explanation of a single point. But I'd like to think it's typical of the sort of reasoning Peirce employs throughout his career; at least the conjecture I'm making suggests it. It's actually not so controversial as the next assertion I'm holding out for examination:

Ballsy conjecture #5: Peirce's pragmatism leads to realism, and does so by means of its form.

It's pretty well known that Peirce was a nominalist early on in his career. He eventually adopts a realistic stance, but it takes some time. (To be honest, I'm not so sure it's that simple - my own inclination is that he always was a realist, though his intellectual professions said otherwise. But that's another post.)

Taking the conjecture a step further, it seems to me that it leads to realism of its own accord. Suppose that the things we perceive - percepts, as Charley called them - are effects. This means that where's a cause, there's an effect. If that's the case, then it follows that they're caused by something real. This is exactly how we conceive them: images are caused by something.

Note that I am not saying that the percepts themselves necessarily imply a cause, only that we think them so. So I'm not misapplying the pragmatic maxim here. I'm saying that we conceive percepts as part of a causal relation; this means we suppose that real things cause those percepts. And what holds them together is this relation of cause and effect. It is our link to an external reality, and a refutation of nominalism.

In another post, I wish to show that this realism extends to the broadest conceptions possible: the categories.

[1] CP 5.196 (1903).

[2] See CP 2.27 (1902), of which this is a boring reiteration.

[3] Mind, N. S. vol. 4 (1895), p. 278

[4] W4,547 (1883–4).

Peirce's Pragmatic Law - a Conjecture

2007-11-12T09:45:00.000-08:00

In a previous post I noticed how useful and versatile Peirce's Law can be: not only can you understand the pragmatic maxim, you can score with babes. Does it sharpen knives? Well, no, but it might help you figure out how.

In this post I'd like to demonstrate something rather far-ranging about this finding.

Peirce's Law, you will recall, is "((P -->Q) --> P) -->P." If the relation of implication implies the antecedent of that relation, then the antecedent is the case. Peirce coins a certain symbol of his own, which we'll have to represent here as -<; nowadays we render it as an arrow -->. So don't panic, just think "All right, -<." So Peirce himself describes it like this: That it is true appears as follows. It can only be false by the final consequent x being false while its antecedent (x -< y) -< x is true. If this is true, either its consequent, x, is true, when the whole formula would be true, or its antecedent x -< y is false. But in the last case the antecedent of x -< y, that is x, must be true.

This can be succinctly represented in a truth table like so:

x	y	{(x -< y)	-<	x}	-<	x
T	T	T	T	T	T	T
T	f	f	T	T	T	T
f	T	T	f	f	T	f
f	f	T	T	f	T	f

What this means is, given any case of two entities x and y, the statement "((x -< y)" must be true.

Now recall that the pragmatic maxim is like this: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”[1] This is easily shown to have the same form as Peirce's Law. Here is the pragmatic maxim, framed in the most assumption-free manner:

((P → Q) → P) → (Q → P)	((P → Q) → P) → (Q → P)	((P → Q) → P) → (Q → P)
If a conception of an object has effects,	thereby implying that conception of an object,	then those effects imply the conception of the object.

This has the necessary validity as Peirce's Law, without loss or distortion of the maxim. And it does so without presupposing anything. In other words, pragmatism has a firm, presuppositionless foundation. The fewer the presuppositions, the stronger the system.

What does this mean? If the pragmatic maxim is formed in terms of Peirce's Law, then it must be true in any case. In other words, the proof of pragmatism is to be found in its logical form, which is a variation of Peirce's Law. The truth table is a quick-and-dirty logical proof of pragmatism, which turns out to be a self-supporting structure - and the one rule for making hypotheses.

Peirce himself promised a proof of pragmatism, and especially built his case in 1903, but a proof-proof never quite emerged. He intended to use his Existential Graphs for that, but for some reason... Several scholars think it's because he never settled on hammering out a satisfactory account of continuity.[2] For my own part, if Peirce didn't actually go about rendering the logical form of pragmatism in EG, it could well be the way to go.

If EG's validity as a logical notation is demonstrated, Peirce's Law could be mapped out and unpacked by means of EG. This would afford a visual, iconic proof of the proposition.

OK, time now for some ballsy conjectures. I've made two already (WARNING: Pun ahead): the first conjecture started the ball rolling: pragmatism is best formulated as above. The second follows from that: Peirce is and must be correct to the extent that concepts are developed along the lines of the pragmatic interpretation of Peirce's Law.

Ballsy conjecture #3: Peirce seems unaware of the logical form of his maxim. If he was aware of the connection I'm asserting, he didn't let on. So far I haven't read anything where Peirce says, "Folks, the pragmatic maxim has this form, which is necessarily true." This tells me that

(a) I haven't found anything of this sort, but only because I need to keep reading;
(b) nobody has found anything of this sort, meaning we all need to keep reading; or
(c) he didn't write anything of this sort.

Now (a) is definitely true, I've got a lot of work to do; (b) is possibly true, though I won't bet on it. What about (c)? That can't be said until everything he ever wrote has been read, and I dare say nobody has accomplished that. But until further notice, it seems to be the case. He did argue for a long time that categorical propositions were of the same logical form as conditionals (which is common practice in logic today), and perhaps after publishing his belief he took it for granted. That's just a speculation, though.

In 1873 when he was developing the insights that would later emerge as the pragmatic maxim, he repeatedly points out that effects are what earmark something; a cognition has no existence if it generates no further cognitions.

In 1878, Peirce announces the maxim without, however, going into its form. Instead he frames it in terms of belief – which is consistent with a logical mode, but does not prove it.

I don't see evidence that Peirce was thinking of his Law when explaining pragmatism in the 1903 Lowell lectures. And if he was, why wouldn't he mention something about it?

That's my notion, such as it is. Some extensions of it I'll post soon…

[1] Collected Papers 5.402 (1878).

[2] Essential Peirce 2:xxix

But serious, folks

2007-11-10T14:41:00.001-08:00

The last post is, of course, silly - the last half, anyway. I do want to bring out some more serious points regarding it later. But that's another post - stay tuned...

Peirce lays down the law!

2007-11-10T12:40:00.000-08:00

I happened across Peirce's Law the other day; it's a logical form that does some neat stuff. I'd seen it before in the textbooks, but it's only now become apparent to me that it's full of import. Peirce's Law is basically a complex conditional form, like you'd find in algebra.

A simple conditional goes like this:

P → Q

P and Q are variables, where you could substitute - let's put "logicians" for P and "cool dudes" for Q. The arrows (→) show that these are if-then statements, i.e. showing implication; so
may be read variously as

If somebody is a logician, they're a cool dude (or dudette).

All logicians are cool dudes (or dudettes).

Peirce's law reads something like this:

((P → Q) → P) → P

If the case of logicians being cool dudes (or dudettes) implies logicians, then there are logicians.

What's interesting about this is the fact that it fixes an antecedent (P); by this I mean it establishes something (logicians, for instance) as being inevitably there. In ordinary conditionals, logicians are only cool if there are logicians; they have to exist in order to be cool. Which makes for a very contingent thing - we have to hope for some logicians out there. Peirce's Law says that the relation of logicians and coolness determines that there are logicians out there. So if we understand what it means to be a logician, we can confidently say that they are pretty darn cool.

"Big deal," I can hear you say. "Whatta ya gonna do widdit? Here's a suggestion: drink three pots of tea, then go write your formula in the snow. "

I would, but there's no snow. So let me unpack this a little more instead.

Anybody who reads Peirce in Philosophy 101 probably gets his article "How to Make Our Ideas Clear." This is where he formulates his famous pragmatic maxim: "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."

To talk about effects presupposes a cause. So you're presupposing a causal relation. Now if a causal relation implies a cause, it follows that the cause is already in play. So think effects, and you think cause.

This is important because we never observe causes. Effects are what we observe; they're reactions, and what we see is other than us. Our eyeballs react to the light, which comes from a source. Causes are never observed, they are inferred. So if it's a new thing, you guess at the cause, and see whether it really is so. That's what hypothesis is all about.

Concepts also have a causal relation. Think "2 + 2," and you'll probably think "4." Antecedent, consequent. Think Belgium, and you may think waffles, chocolates and beer. Stimulus, response - cause, effect. I won't go into the habit-thing here, that's far afield (though closely related - !) to the matter at hand.

"Whaddaya gettin' at?"

This: knowledge begins with hypotheses, so we need the strongest way to frame hypotheses. Peirce wanted to ground knowledge, so he gave us pragmatism. Now from every appearance, it looks like Peirce got this maxim from his laboratory experience. (He was a scientist and a logician - as well as a lot of other cool stuff.) The trouble is, any scientist knows there's a margin for error in observation, meaning even the most accepted laws are susceptible to revision or rejection. But try this on for size:

((P → Q) → P) → (Q → P)	((P → Q) → P) → (Q → P)	((P → Q) → P) → (Q → P)
If a conception of an object has effects,	thereby implying that conception of an object,	then the effects imply the conception of the object.

The pragmatic maxim fits Peirce's law almost to a T - which is what you'll get if you make a truth table for this eminently valid form. This is how Peirce could equate the effects of a conception of an object with the object itself. The pragmatic maxim didn't just come out of lab work, nor even psychology; it's pure logic, baby.

It's a handy tool to have around, this Peirce's Law. Girls, proceed at once to reel in the guys and rock their world:

Guy: What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?
You: It's Ladies' Night, and I think you're gonna get me drunk, cheap.
Guy: Somebody stop me, I'm in love with the coolest dudette ever.

And boys, you can really impress the chicks, just like the pros:

You: You know how you keep tellin' me heavy metal sucks 'cuz it makes you headbang? Well, that's what you think!
Chick: Dude, you're so cool.

Now go out there and Lay down the Law! Hoo-whee! This gun's so hot, it's sweatin' bullets!

(Image nefariously doctored using originals unwittingly donated by www.iep.utm.edu/p/PeirceAr.htm and www.tvcrazy.net/tvclassics/americantv/bj.htm)

The sweet smell of ourselves

2007-10-28T09:37:00.000-07:00

In the last post I wrote something about kids' fashion, and how some parents are partially responsible for it. I'd like to bring this down to earth a bit more, because it's something that concerns everyone. You'll notice I'm not standing outside the ring here.

Back to Economics 101: Supply and demand. If enough people want something, someone's going to put it up for sale. If not now, it's just a matter of time.

Let's take something popular - dresses, for instance. Women don't want to wear what all the others are. And they may not want to look like their mom, either. So pick out that sun dress that's cut just a little bit higher and lower in the right places. Hey, it gets the guys' attention.

You have just entered the Wardrobe race. Like the arms race, but without the fallout shelters.

*Poot*

Now Bob sells clothes. He notices those sun dresses are moving like crazy: "Hey, why not oonch it just a little bit? Same prices, less material. More profit - sold!" Next year, Bob launches his special line of dresses with a big ad featuring Fergie in one.

*Poot*

Carol, your best friend, runs out and picks up the latest thing that Fergie's wearing.

*Poot*

Ted, my honorable competitor, will not be outdone. He gets the best designers money can buy, and releases his fall collection.

*Poot*

Alice wants to make it big in fashion. She reads the trends, pulls out her sketchbook, pitches the designs to Saks, Bloomingdales, H & M, Penney's, K-Mart, and Filene's Basement. K-Mart bites, fronting the money for next year's back-to-school skivvies.

*Poot*

Laverne and Shirley snatch up the skivvies and make the boys sitting behind them in Algebra II very happy. (That's right, Lenny and Squiggy - you know 'em. Maybe you are 'em.)

*Poot*

I see Laverne and Shirley coming out of high school. I say to myself, "Hubba-hubba. I shouldn't look, and yet...Well, as long as I don't act on them fantasies, it's OK. Right?" Do I speak out for or against? No. And so it goes.

*Poot*

What this boils down to is - Pimpfants didn't just pop out of thin air. Skimpy girl's clothing isn't just something foisted on us from above. To a certain degree we've brought it on ourselves. We're born into a world not of our own making, but once we're there, we make it in our image as much as we can.

It's in the air.

"Dude, was that you?"

(Image of your classmates triumphantly nicked from nostalgiacentral.com.)

Who's pushing who?

2007-10-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

On Good Morning America there was a report on concerned parents. These parents were concerned about their kids dressing too provocatively - too sexy. Short skirts, skimpy outfits, and all that. On screen we see one parent after another gasping at what kids today are wearing. Pop groups and toys are blamed as bad role models, who influence the kids to buy this and that, and poor hapless parents are caught in the middle. Checkbook in hand.

What concerns me is that somewhere in the middle of all this, there is some kind of hypocrisy going on. At least some of the pressure comes from the parents themselves. If you watch the video, seek to 1:39. The item shown there isn't for teenagers, or for preteens - it's a baby T-shirt. And it's not the cut that's troublesome.

Now I haven't read Celia Rivenbark's book, so I may just be repeating something in there. But I don't think so. Ms. Rivenbark says kids are running the show when it comes to what they're wearing (2:10). That's not entirely true. A baby simply will not heckle Mom or Dad for a "My Mommy's a MILF" top. I'm not even a parent, and I know that much; so should she.

A mom's desire to feel attractive is understandable. So is a dad's wish to make her feel that way. That's a big part of what brought them together. But parents using their kids as a billboard advertising Mom's desire to feel attractive - that's messed up. I'd be interested in knowing what the revenues for Pimpfants clothing are, because that's an undeniable index of the hypocrisy.

As for how things got to this point, that's another post.

we're ba-a-a-a-ack

2007-10-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

Greetings, devoted readers - at long last we come up for air. *Gasp* I apologize for the delay; hopefully I can get something in more frequently than once every seven months.

Meanwhile, enjoy this video from a wonderful band whom I cannot understand: "Glósóli" by Sigur Rós. I don't know why, this still seems fresh to me, after watching it umpteen times.

Which raises the question: what's umpteen plus one?

One word recurs to me when thinking about Sigur Rós: generosity. Another word underlies this: love. That seems to be the driving force behind their music from where I stand, what with the wealth of free downloads and the bafflingly protean sound . (Adjectives like "beautiful" and "ethereal" don't do the music justice. They're overused anyway.) And things like generosity, love - all right, and beauty too - are badly needed today. Bring them out, however you can.

Black Metal Saved My Soul!

2007-04-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

I have to confess: although the venerable age of 36 1/2, there's still a teenager in me. Seeing 300 pretty much confirmed this to me. I couldn't say it was a great film...but then, I couldn't say I really disliked it either. All the while, as I watched the spectacle (and it's nothing but), I could simultaneously say, "Oh please, for the love of..." and "Cool."

Another thing that tipped me off was hearing about the latest album by Celtic Frost, Monotheist (2006). (Yes, Virginia, I am a little behind the times.) Out of the slew of thrash and black metal I listened to years ago, CF was one of those bands that I still like to hear. What appeals is their innovative approach, and the fact that they don't mess around. Put bluntly, a lot of rock music is half-assed. A few musicians are not; Celtic Frost is one outfit that's among these ranks.

A lot of things in CF are typical of black metal: lots of dark brooding about death, God, Satan, etc. But they do it so damn well; you can watch their video here.

One thing that's been said often is that contemporary Western civilization is post-religious: we've gotten beyond that, or lost it, call it what you will. It's not in us anymore. To an extent, that's true, but not entirely. Take black metal. What do you think of when you hear that? Gothic letters all cobwebbed up, upside-down crosses and pentagrams, Satan clawing a virgin,... Pretty silly, a lot of it looks. But through it all, there's one thing the standard-issue imagery talks about: God. (Run, kids, it's the G-word! He might even start to evangelize and pray for your soul.)

The relation between artist and artwork is very interesting. We expect to learn something about the one who made this piece before us, and yet we also expect it stand on its own. This generates some controversy as to how to understand art, which I'll go into in a later post.

No, I'm not trying to spread the Gospel here; I do want to point out something worth mentioning. Now while some black metalheads will disagree me - or worse, misinterpret me - I'm going to say it anyhow: this is one of the last areas in regular life where religion is still taken seriously. Martin Eric Ain knows this. (His view of religion is something worth considering, though not here.) The deliberate use of religious symbolism shows a keen sense of their power, which tells me that they're still alive. The inverted world of black metal is a direct negation of what's seen as All That's Good in the World. Why bemoan, rage at the loss of these things if they don't matter? Because it's all cast in such brooding tones, clearly there is a sense of loss conveyed; there is an impact, it does matter. When bands like Celtic Frost cease to have an impact, then I'll know that God doesn't matter in the world today. And I'll start crying.

A friend of a friend in need is a friend of a friend - indeed!

2007-03-10T04:08:00.000-08:00

Maybe you've heard of a TV show on Fox called On the Lot: based on the principle of American Idol, except it involves talent. Herds of aspiring filmmakers have uploaded their shorts (i.e. short movies), so you can watch and vote.

A fellow alumnus from my college has thrown his cap into the ring, a short called Irresponsible. Check it out, enjoy, and vote.

comment on comment

2007-01-22T08:59:00.000-08:00

My thanks to Keira, who commented on the trisection entry (see below). I wanted to reply to her points, but since it is either (a) devilishly difficult to contact her, (b) impossible, or (c) I'm too stupid and/or impatient to hunt for a real contact - I'll assume the last option - I'd like to comment right here.

For your convenience, I'll copy her comment right here:

Sorry, you certainly cannot go by eye or compass alone; you have to do the trigonometry to get actual measurements. The method you show, for example, on a 60° angle, yields two 19.792...° angles and one 20.103...° angle. That's not even very close.

I wanted to thank her personally for pointing this out to me, and ask for an explanation of her method. The fact that I'm asking for that betrays my ignorance of trigonometry, and I won't hide it. But given a little time and maybe a dash of assistance, I think I can understand it, and thus get a better idea of the situation.

To reply: I know that eyeballing it is not kosher for the game of trisection; I also realize that the compass alone is insufficient. But any particular drawing will be imperfect, even a simple bisection will be off a little. The reason for this, of course, is that there are deviations too small to be detected by the naked eye. And in this case, we are facing the venerable dictum that trisection cannot be done in principle.

Jim Loy's website - been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Now I'm not saying that Wantzel's proof is wrong; what I'm saying is that here is a suggestive method for doing the impossible, and if it indeed works in principle - and sufficiently well in fact - then it's worth inquiring into the errors of the proof. I do not have the mathematical know-how to do this; maybe someday, but not right now.

None of this would be to slag Wantzel. I'm neither trying to show anyone's stupidity nor my own superiority. I'm simply asking: please show me that this method is in principle wrong without referring to Wantzel's proof. If the method is flawed, show the flaw - don't dismiss it out of hand. There's a whole book devoted to this sort of thing: A Budget of Trisections by Underwood Dudley. It does not include this method, probably because the author never saw it. And no wonder - it was printed in a small, now-defunct journal in the '70s. All I want is something of a similar nature.

You know, this is just a case study of the value of heresy. If something is true, it should be able to withstand challenges; but if it's not challenged, how can we know its strength? That is all. Peace out.

A Method of Trisecting Angles

2006-12-20T04:32:00.000-08:00

Folks, as promised, here is the method for dividing any angle into three equal parts. That's how it looks to me anyway, and until someone demonstrates that the sections are not equal (rather than simply pointing to the damn proof and saying, "Look, it's impossible!") I will trust my eyes on this one. Try it yourself and see...

Trisection of angle using only compass and straightedge.

1-Draw arbitrary angle A-O-A' (no greater than 180°. If greater than 180°, bisect, work as follows, then rejoin.)

2-Draw bisector, B, of angle through O.

3-Draw arbitrary-sized circle P; on bisector B, with center P, and tangent to inside of angle A-O-A':

4-Draw parallels, C and D, to bisector B, and tangent to circle P'

5-Draw parallels, E and E'; through point P, to angle A-O-A'

6-Draw parallels, F and F'; to angle A-O-A'; tangent to circle P'

7-Draw line, from intersection of lines F and C at G, connecting with intersection of lines D and F^'at H, crossing B at J.

8-Draw circle O' with center at O, through J and new points K, L, M, N.

9-Draw circles J, L, and M' around points J, L, and M, same size as circle P:

10-Draw trisector X-O, from O, tangent to both circles J'and L'.

11-Draw trisector Y-O, from O, tangent to both circles J'and M'.

12-One may also draw hexsectors Z and Z' through points L and M from O. Line D-O is also a hexsector.

I have found it possible to extend this method, enabling one to 5-sect an angle (pentasect, for word techies), 7-sect, or any odd-numbered division of an angle.

It seems evident to me that by measuring with compass, the angles are indeed equally 1/3 the original angle. Still, a proper mathematical proof is required. As mentioned earlier, this would entail an investigation into Wantzel's proof to determine where he went wrong. (Readers can download that paper here.)

Alfred King Aldin. "A Pythagoreanism." Philosophic Research and Analysis, Fall 1971, pp. 6-7.
(This is an obscure journal coming out of Boulder, Colorado, and is has been defunct for some time now. He also published a response to readers in the issue of Late Winter 1973.)

M.L. Wantzel (1837). "Recherches sur les moyens de reconnaître si un Problème de Géométrie peut se résoudre avec la règle et le compas". Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées 1 (2): 366–372.
(Yes, dear research students, I copied that link right off Wikipedia! And I enjoyed it!)

(Image scanned and posted on the Internet with evil delight from Mr. Aldin's original article.)

On "Difficulty"

2006-12-12T07:34:00.000-08:00

At last I'm on vacation! Time to try and get some work done - but first some long-postponed blogging...

One thing that always annoyed me is to be told that something is difficult. "Mathematics is very hard," some people say. Even teachers fall into this trap.

Why is something hard? Who says it's hard? I don't find it easy, but that doesn't mean it's hard for everyone. Some people even find math easy; I wish I were one of those folks. The

How many times have you heard a story about somebody who was interested in something, went ahead and figured it out, and then heard after the fact that he wasn't supposed to be able to do it? This is worth considering.

What makes something difficult? Not the material itself. It's entirely relative to the individual, or culture, or species, depending on what the nature of the challenge is. And then it's largely a matter of practice.

For human beings, it's very hard to walk on two legs - at first. Once they get it, though, they're off and running before you know it. For other critters, they're off and running once they hit the ground.

Answering fundamental questions about the world - now that's pretty hard, always has been. Just when you think you've got it, something or somebody comes along and messes up your tidy little theory. And it's back to square one.

For some cultures, it's hard to imagine an impersonal God. I'm not talking about believing in one, just the idea of one. And the reason for that is they're used to conceiving of a personal God with a face (sometimes literally).

For some individuals, math is hard. Maybe it'll always be that way, but maybe they'll get it and even be pretty good at it. It all depends on the person and the teachers they get - blockheads or angels.

Some things are supposed to be impossible for anybody. There's even proofs to show you that the difficulty isn't just in your head. Take trisection, for example. The task is simple: for any angle, divide it into three equal angles. Easy, right?

Wrong. People have beat their heads against the wall for centuries in an effort to figure out a way to do this. But in 1836 a proof was published by a mathematician named Wantzel that this task is not only difficult but impossible. Mathematicians have been grinning smugly ever since. (You can read all about it here and here. Archimedes cheated - see here.)

The only trouble is, there seems to be a method that works. I found one in an obscure journal years ago, and it obeys the rules of the game. Now I'm not a mathematician, but I know what I see, and this method looks very convincing to me. I've seen many other attempts, but they are either obviously wrong or inapplicable beyond a certain angle. But this method apparently lacks both these shortcomings.

(Yes, I do have a copy of it. Just not at the time of this writing. I will try and post it later.)

What have I learned from this?

1. I need to learn math.
2. I need to learn math to do, among other things,
a. understand that damn proof,
b. see what's wrong with it,
c. prove that this method works.

Is there any practical benefit to this exercise? No, not if you're really asking, "Can it fix your car?" or "Will it make you money?" But those aren't the only benefits around. Consider these:

1. A hidden assumption will be exposed.
2. We will have yet another example showing that we can do more than we think.
3. How we think greatly influences our abilities.

One thing about inquiry is that, to a large degree, it concerns finding limitations. That's what world records are for. Kids do it all the time: How far can I jump? How many pieces of chewing gum can I stuff into my mouth? How much can I get away with before Teacher smacks me? Grown-ups too: What happens if I mix these chemicals together? How long can I ride a unicycle? If I leave this number out, can I pay less on my income tax? The basic question underlying all these is, How far can you go?

If you don't try, you'll never find out. Even when the proofs say it can't be done, it's worth asking, Why not?

(Image joyfully pirated from http://mathworld.wolfram.com/AngleTrisection.html)

Originality, creativity, and philosophy

2006-12-12T06:38:00.000-08:00

Everybody knows Steve Martin from the movies; some still remember that he did stand-up comedy. Not so many know that he studied philosophy. He said that philosophy was one of the best things for thinking creatively. Was he right? At first this might sound odd: after all, aren’t philosophers just those dead white males who analyze concepts? How can that help you be creative? I want to show that Steve Martin indeed was right, maybe more so than he knew at the time he said it.

I should preface this by saying that although I practice philosophy, and am writing this, I’m not doing so in an effort to justify my existence. I don’t need to do that. What I’m doing is showing what the arrows point to, and further how weird it is.

I taught a course in doing philosophical research this semester. It’s a first-year course for BA students, and it gave me a lot of food for thought for the process of doing research – as well as for how to teach it. I’m not sure if my approach was a success; we’ll see with the final papers and feedback forms.

As stimulating as it was for me, I wasn’t able to get all my thoughts out. This is just an attempt to take down some of those so that they will be of further use, either to my students or myself.

The Place of Originality and Creativity in Research. One day I harped on the word “originality” as the most overworked in our working vocabulary, and I still stand by that. The unfortunate thing is that I may have been perceived as being against originality – or its allied word, creativity.

I’m not against either entity, really; what I can’t stand is the overuse of the words. There’s a big difference, and it’s a shame we have no substitute. Which, paradoxically, is not so bad. It forces us to come to terms with what those words really mean. Hopefully then we’ll be more judicious about using them in the future.

Let’s look at them one by one. Each of these is often used to mean that some product or person is unique and positive; we usually save them for solutions to problems and artistic fields. “An original solution to the problem of universals,” says the blurb on a book cover. “The author has written an ingenious book that is sure to stimulate the reader.” What does this tell us? – Buy the book! It’s a gem of an answer shining out among tired, old worn-out ones.

Originality. Such a tired word (yawn). Go back to the etymology, and find what it said: origō, point or place of beginning. As far as the activity is concerned, ask this: who is the source of the questions being asked? Who is in the driver’s seat of the investigation? Nobody can die for you, and nobody can think for you. In fact, nobody can do anything for you. If you are compelled to do something “– or else,” you are still the one choosing to act.

What does it mean when we say a writer has done “original research?” Most of us think of research as mousing around in the library, poring over piles of books. That’s supposed to be unoriginal. But that’s untrue. All those books and note-taking are driven by the questions you ask. Every corporation has an R&D department; are they reading dusty tomes? No, they’re doing experiments. They’re testing whatever it is they’re interested in, tweaking it here and there to see what happens; hopefully they can discover something and use it in some new machine or laundry detergent.

“Research,” according to my Oxford, means “a careful study of a subject, especially in order to discover new facts or information about it.” The idea is simple enough; knowing how that translates into action is the stuff of myth-busting.

In product development, research is for finding new things to sell. In philosophy, there’s something very similar going on. (Please don’t think I put them on the same level; work with me here.) Ideas are the stuff philosophers work with, which is why books are their medium. But don’t mistake the book for the thing itself – the idea is one thing, the words another. When you read up, you’re doing background research; that’s to see what has been done before. The reasons for this are various: to prevent reinventing the wheel, to prevent making the same mistakes. The aim is one – economy of effort. You don’t want to do what’s already been done, and you don’t goof the same way. Find another way to screw up.

Experts focus on what’s known, creators on the unknown. It only makes sense to know the difference so you don’t repeat things unnecessarily. Do your homework. You want to find out what is known, but also what is not yet known. This requires some thinking outside the box.

“Library research” is past-oriented; original research is future-oriented. They are not mutually exclusive.

In the course, what I focused on overtly was giving structure to the library efforts, the preliminary work. This is what is usually considered “research”, but I made it plain (perhaps too often, though) that this is only the half of it. When you study a concept you’re doing research. Analyzing that concept: you’re taking it apart to see how it works turning it over in your mind, asking lots of questions – this too is research.

Creativity. Another tired but starry-eyed word. From creāre, to bring forth, produce, to cause or grow. Thanks to Romanticism, this and “originality” are begging for a bullet in the head. (By the way, I don’t mean to slag the best of the best Romantics – Schiller, Herder, and the like. I mean the romantic notion in the most ordinary of ordinary senses. It’s an unfortunate fact: great minds do not move the world, mediocre interpretations of great minds move the world. The first pose bracing questions, the second proffers stultifying answers.)

As we understand it now, creative thinking has as its essence the questioning of basic assumptions – thinking outside the box.[1] A classic example is the nine-dot puzzle. If you’re not familiar with this, try it before reading on…

Did you get it? The key to solving this is to take it strictly on its terms. Four straight lines, connect the dots – that’s all. You don’t have to stick to horizontal or vertical lines, and the lines don’t have to end at a point. That’s all just assumption. Try it now and see how you fare…

Did you get it now? I hope so. You just saw through an assumption, and found a way out.

Children are often said to be naturally creative. There is a kind of reading into children’s activity here: if creativity has to do with questioning assumptions, children cannot be said to be creative. Why not? Because they simply haven’t formed assumptions yet. One thing I remember about growing up was that I wasn’t surprised by much. Why not? Since I was young, I hadn’t built up many expectations, and surprise always plays on expectations. Until I realized this, my memory of not being surprised had puzzled me. I’m not a very remarkable person, never was, and I wouldn’t find it unusual if others shared the same experience.

Among other things that the wrong kind of experience and education do, they teach kids what to accept without questioning. It needn’t be that way. One thing to do is simply observe what is right there before your eyes. (I said simple, not easy.)

If you ever stopped to think about a simple piece of technology, for example a car – I mean really stopped to think about what it took to get that thing in front of you – if you ever thought about it, you might find it rather amazing. First the manufacturing: the metal has to be mined and refined, then molded; the pieces have to be assembled just right. Then the marketing: somebody had to sell the damn thing, and somebody had to buy it. Now for the design: that car was designed by a person, or more likely, several people. Go back through the history: before that car was designed, there were others from the same company, other companies that were trying to muscle into the market; earlier cars weren’t as efficient, so they had to be improved on; before cars even existed we had horses and carriages, chariots. And to get the technology that made the car possible – well, you get the idea.

So you started with this old ’78 Peugeot which you wanted to junk, and ended up with (among other things) a headful of history. If you’ve got an ounce of sensitivity in your soul, you’ll appreciate what it took to get that rust-bucket on the road. Thinking outside the box.

Now look what at philosophy – what else is it but questioning the most basic assumptions of our world? There is a world, and we’re all in it. If we think about it at all, we just shrug our shoulders: yeah, so what? But wait – why should the world exist to begin with? I’m not demanding the extinction of the world, I’m calling for an explanation of it. We can comprehend this thing, and we naturally seek reasons for things; if we can comprehend the world, then of course we’ll want to know the reason for its being around at all.

Why is there a world? Is that a nonsensical question? Why? If you give me reasons for its being a nonsensical question (“Because it’s stupid” is not a reason), you have to know the limits of reasoning to back it all up. If you don’t, then your answer is not sufficient. That means that if you take the question seriously, you question the assumptions of that question – and those of your own answer. When was the last time you did that? Thinking outside the box.

What then is creative research? It’s explanation that calls the taken-for-granted into question, and seeks a more satisfying answer. Thinking outside the box.

* * * * *

So philosophers engage in creative thinking in the purest form. Does that mean we’re privileged human beings? Yes, with qualifications. (What’s a philosophical answer without qualifications?) Yes, we enjoy a privilege not everybody partakes in. Does that mean we’re some elite class? No, without qualification. I’d argue that every human being can do philosophy, and that everyone who asks a question such as “What’s it all about?” thinking philosophically. Sadly, many shake off the question like so much dust from their shoe. They find the question overwhelming, and hence decide they cannot answer it – or, worse, that it’s unanswerable. Maybe that’s so, but I’ve never seen a proof of that. And even if I did, I wouldn’t believe it. I’ve seen proofs undermined, proofs deemed irrefutable by hundreds of experts. (See the entry above.)

If we go back to the root of creativity, we find it has an organic meaning. This suggests a product is intimately connected to the source, to that which made it grow. That would explain why plagiarism strikes at the heart of a writer or artist. And it would suggest that questioning assumptions is itself a sort of generative act.

If we look at the aspect of producing, bringing into existence what wasn’t there before, we run up against the idea of naïveté. To question an assumption is to look at it without the rose-colored spectacles which keep us from seeing it in the first place – in other words, to see it for the first time. Like a child, who does not even know the assumption exists, except that we do know it. Uncovering an assumption can be an exhilarating experience; it is liberating to see it for what it is – and that we don’t have to accept it.

Immanuel Kant urged us, “Sapere aude!”[2] Dare to know! Buckminster Fuller urged us, “Dare to be naïve.”[3] Both are right. Both involve questioning. Knowing, questioning, being naïve: these are three points that yield a form. I put it this way:

Sapere aude! Quære aude! Nascī aude!

[1] Russell L. Ackoff & Sheldon Rovin. Beating the System: Using Creativity to Outsmart Bureaucracies. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005, p. 25.

[2] Immanuel Kant. “What is Enlightenment?” Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 54.

[3] Fuller, R. Buckmister. Synergetics. New York: Macmillan, 1982. Look here.

(Image daringly lifted from www.rhapsody.com/stevemartin)

Black Light: The Julian Barrett

2006-09-29T13:57:00.000-07:00

A college friend of mine has released a CD recently - kind of Johnny Cash meets Sid Vicious while wallowing in the penumbra of popular culture. It's not a new thing for him, though it might be for you. Listen to The Julian Barrett or Winocreep, and read a little about the voice behind the mike.

These lyrics are not happy, though they are often blackly funny, and some lines are downright blasphemous (or so it would seem). Why, then, does it strike me as being somehow - brace yourselves, this might sound moralistic - good? I don't just mean technically. They're definitely well-written songs, but then that's a different matter. This I'd say is both. I don't have an answer, this is how it is at the moment. Theories don't fit at this time; better to let it cook a while and see what comes out. I just want to enjoy the music. Thoughts come of their own accord.

(Image gleefully swiped from http://www.crawlspacerecords.com/photosmay.html.)

What Education Points To

2006-09-29T13:52:00.000-07:00

This entry will likely evolve as it sits there. I just had to post the topic, which I'd like to develop further.

Aristotle, one of the greatest thinkers ever, had his finger right on the pulse of life when he wrote:

No one will doubt that the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. The citizen should be moulded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy; and always the better the better character, the better the government. --Politics, 1337a10-16

In other words, teach your children into the state. If you want to see what a state is really up to, don't look at the overt workings - this may well be misleading - rather, look at the schools. I think it would give a far more accurate reading, if only we read it with clear eyes.

What are they doing in the schools of the most powerful nation in the world? If you know, please drop me a line. I'm currently on another continent, so it's hard to tell. I've got my ideas, but prefer to chew on them for a little while...

Statistics aren't everything, but they are a good indicator of performance (provided they don't get twisted to an agenda). According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the leading scorers tend to come from Japan, Korea, and Finland. The U.S. clocks in around the middle. Of course it isn't a simple matter, but one cannot help questioning why this is. And I can't help asking - to what purpose are students in various countries educated? This does not show up on any standardized test; it calls for deeper study.

The Most Moral Weapon Ever Invented?

2006-09-21T01:12:00.000-07:00

Just happened to find a write-up published on Boing Boing on Samuel Cohen, a fascinating read for various reasons. For those who don't know who he is, Cohen invented the neutron bomb. It sounds absurd, wacky, and peripheral - but there are some core insights on the military and politics to be gleaned from this little bit. Yes, there is the whole discussion of the game theory behind deterrence policy - i.e. let's assume the other guy is ready to push The Button, so we'd better scare him out of that - but there is more to it than that. More can surely be had from reading Cohen's own book, Shame. It's not available on Amazon.com, but the UK branch has it.

One thing interesting is Cohen's rationale for inventing the device. He was a member of RAND, the first think tank and perhaps the think tank. A passage:

Sam Cohen might have remained relatively unknown, troubled by ethical lapses in government and the military but unable to do anything about them, if he had not visited Seoul in 1951, during the Korean war. In the aftermath of bombing sorties he witnessed scenes of intolerable devastation. Civilians wandered like zombies through the ruins of a city in which all services had ceased. Children were drinking water from gutters that were being used as sewers. "I'd seen countless pictures of Hiroshima by then," Cohen recalls, "and what I saw in Seoul was precious little different. . . . The question I asked of myself was something like: If we're going to go on fighting these damned fool wars in the future, shelling and bombing cities to smithereens and wrecking the lives of their surviving inhabitants, might there be some kind of nuclear weapon that could avoid all this?"

Years later, after he finally got backing to develop it, the design of the bomb was reworked, effectively dissolving Cohen's intent.

One bit is very mistaken, however, but also very revealing:

The bomb would still kill people--but this was the purpose of all weapons.

That's not true. The purpose of weapons, and war, never was to kill the enemy but to overpower them. And you don't have to kill to accomplish that. The ammunition of military rifles is steel-jacketed, whereas hunting rifles use bullets with copper jackets. Why? Steel-jacketed bullets will just pass through the body, wounding but not necessarily killing. Brass-or copper-jacketed rounds, however, are softer and are slowed down more by the body upon contact. Why not just use hunting ammo then? After all, it's more lethal - and don't you want to kill 'em? No. If you kill a bunch of enemy soldiers, the other has to recruit more soldiers; but if you wound a bunch of soldiers, they have to recruit more and nurse the casualties - a significantly more expensive , exhausting, demoralizing consequence. When they can't afford to keep it up, they surrender. (We're assuming, of course, that the opposition doesn't consider leaving the wounded alone as a viable option.)

The military is to the government as the fist is to the brain. War is above all a political tool; people often forget this, as they're hung up on the killing thing. Even Mr. Cohen forgot this to an extent, which gives you an idea as to the force of conceptions on our thinking. I didn't realize the real aim of war until I read Sun Tzu; when a WWII veteran explained to me the thing about bullets, it only confirmed that. He knew the purpose too. What is needed is to see things with a fresh eye, so that the stale ideas we inherit have no undue power over our minds. If you can put 2 and 2 together, you're reasoning just fine. The thing to be concerned about is to see.

(Image ruthlessly hijacked from www.shadowfist.com/html/gallery/cardgallery7.htm)

The 3 Rs: Rantin', Ravin', & Rippin'

2006-09-20T11:50:00.000-07:00

The older I get, the less patience I have with complacency, especially when it comes to education. I've seen two news items in two days that have gotten my blood boiling - that's a lot of blood!

One article was an op-ed piece by Johan Huizinga (not of Homo Ludens fame). You can find it here.

It wasn't the article per se that I disliked - I rather liked it - what I disliked were the troubling situations he brings up and how they're dealt with - or not dealt with, as it were. It was also the one comment by a reader who simply got the wrong idea about it. Satire can be quite subtle, and it seems she missed the irony. I posted a rebuttal there that was...well, sharp and lacking in subtlety. (It should go up in the next few days, I expect.)

My problem was in unraveling the subtleties of Huizinga's article for my response. There's quite a bit going on there; he touches on the complexities of things today, which is why it's hard to just say he means the opposite. One thing we often do is equate simplicity with ease; really, we should know better. They are not the same thing, not by a long shot. Some of the most difficult things are the simplest. Try just sitting in one place for ten minutes, and focus on your breathing. Nothing else going on around you, just sit and concentrate. That's about as simple as you can get, but I don't believe for a minute you'll find it easy.

In my opinion, talk about education problems has no place for subtle wit that can be (mis)taken at face value. That's my only qualm with the piece. It's too easy for someone to misread it, and if that someone is a school admin - well, they could walk away thinking they're doing a good job. I doubt that would happen, but it's apparent that misinterpretation of the satire does happen.

The other piece has to do with a new book that argues against homework. There's an interview with the one of the authors of The Case Against Homework on MSNBC.

In the book Sara Bennett argues that homework is a waste of time. Any homework. The claim is that the quantity of homework has no correlation to achievement, which is measured by teachers' tests. But if the interview is any indication of the content of the book, it has a wildly off-target thesis.

The interview centers on reading. Her example is that reading novels for school is bad because of the attendant tasks - looking up words, answering questions after each chapter. The reasons it's so bad is that there is a method imposed on reading, a method which has no place. More precisely, it's the teacher's view on reading that gets imposed. As Ms. Bennett puts it, "You don't want to be interrupted every five minutes when you're reading or when you're watching a great movie." The reading experience is being taken away from the students.

Am I the only one who sees the glaring contradiction here? First they're talking about the worthlessness of homework - how invalid the very idea of homework is - and then they're talking about the kind of homework that's being doled out! Ms. Bennett doesn't have an issue with homework but with the quality of the homework, but in making her case she's throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

According to her, teachers don't have a clue as to why they assign any homework. They weren't trained on it, they weren't told its importance. They were told to just do it, and they just did it. (What good little Nike-wearing sports.) What does that tell me? The homework lacks any direction, there is no purpose to it. But who's to blame, the homework, the teachers who thoughtlessly assign it, or the trainers who never bothered to explain its purpose, or how it's to be done?

Ms. Bennett says that American schools are currently in "testing mode" (which she never explains), and homework is the teachers' way of foisting unfinished lessons onto the students. Does this sound like homework is inherently evil, or is the current practice evil?

Now I don't disagree with everything Ms. Bennett says. She does state that a family dinner is the most important factor in academic success. I don't deny this; in fact I agree that families don't spend enough time in the same place at once (dare I say it?) communicating and getting along. I also agree there is a profound problem with the way education is being conducted. But I also think that she's wrongly diagnosed the problem.

OK, here's where my unsolicited advice comes in.

Problem #1: teachers don't know what homework's all about. Solution: teach them!

Problem #2: Educators don't know what would constitute good homework assignments. Solution: find out! Ask what you want students to get out of a lesson, and what they want to get out of a homework assignment. Then ask how to get those results. Do research, experiment with different approaches, formats, exercises, etc. Then and only then are you in a position to judge homework as a whole.

Problem #3: Students see homework as a waste of time. Solution: explain it to them! and give 'em meaningful assignments, for cryin' out loud. Kids aren't stupid. Of course they'll complain about how meaningless it is, because it is meaningless. They don't see the point because there isn't any point. Craft the assignments with a little bit of care, tell them how it should be done, and why. If possible, demonstrate the payoff.

Problem #4: Teachers palm unfinished assignments off as homework. Solution: stop it, stop it, stop it! How freakin' hard is that to figure out? If you don't finish a lesson, something has to be changed - the timetable, the class hours, the number of students, whatever. But expecting students to teach themselves is irresponsible when it's done in this manner. Yes, you want to get students to be independent thinkers. This is not the way to do it.

Now I know what one objection will be: "But we don't have enough teachers, and the ones who are there are overworked and underpaid." Sounds like we've finally got some real problems. Part of the difficulty is a lack of funding, true. But throwing money at something won't solve it (though it will make teaching more attractive from one point of view). There are a number of things to be attended to, all at once, which means there's no easy solution. Practical matters, such as the number of teachers or the size of classrooms, need to be juggled alongside pedagogical matters. I cannot say there's a quick fix; I can only say that the case against homework is but a symptom of a crisis in the schools, and we need to do something about it pronto.

A deeper problem is the very attitude we have towards schools, education, and teachers. This is no small matter: it goes right to the core of our value system. It is well known that America has an anti-intellectual streak a mile long, which does not speak well for us as a culture. People of an intellectual bent face strong opposition (usually subtle, sometimes not so subtle).

Take nerds, for example. You know them, the ones who actually like chemistry class, the ones who enjoy doing (yeccch) math. The stereotypes of these guys getting picked on by jocks - it's true! Granted, several can hold their own, but they've got support from family and their environment; many don't have that. Where does all this happen? The good ol' U.S. of A. Now here I am in Belgium, have been for a few years now - do I see nerds? No. Why not? The bias against intellectual pursuits isn't there. I won't say kids here are perfect, but they don't have to deal with the sort of thing I grew up with; either it's such a minor happening or it doesn't exist here at all.

Now if we red-blooded Americans took a sober look at ourselves, and asked what really counts for us, what are we going to say? If we ask, What sort of future do I want my children to live in? how are we going to answer? It's time to start thinking about where we want to go, rather than complain about how we're not getting anywhere.

(Image shamelessly stolen from www.hellofriend.org/parents/homework.html)

A Note to Fellow Readers

2006-09-11T12:48:00.000-07:00

If you haven't done so already, take a moment now, and think about what happened five years ago today. Put yourself there, looking out of the gaping hole in the side of the building, high over New York City. And remember that, for their sake.

For those of you who enjoyed the last entry (see below), we'd like to thank you for your support. However, those coming here expecting me to be some authority on religion are bound to be disappointed. I'm hardly an authority there, or on anything for that matter. Really. There are plenty of folks out there far more competent than me, with better souls to boot. Here's one, a good friend of mine:

http://www.oregonlive.com/weblogs/religionblog/

You'll find a lot to chew on. Do check it out.

The Barbarians Go South Again

2006-09-10T05:34:00.000-07:00

Here is an article in Newsweek concerning a recent wave of prominent thinkers plugging atheism:

1=8535">http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14638243/site/newsweek/?GT1=8506>1=8535

The authors focused on there are Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris. Apparently it was written because all these guys are publishing their arguments at the same time. What irritates me, however - what irritates me enough to interrupt the work I should be doing - is how juvenile their notions of religion and God are. Without exception, they speak as if Christianity were on the same par as superstition: God is this vindictive old guy with a white beard who sits in heaven and makes us suck up to Him. (The last bit is Dawkins's phrase, not mine, and I think all the others mentioned in the article would agree.)

Harris is explicitly mentioned as taking up a literal reading of the Bible, which doesn't speak well of him. By this stance Harris implies that any non-panliteral interpretation is just hedging. But clearly there's a lack of sensitivity to the text. I see no reason why it must be taken completely literally or metaphorically, and there are no reasons given in the article for any particular reading.

I get the feeling that most arguments against the validity of the Bible come from people who are very uninformed about the Good Book, reading it selectively, partially, or not at all.

The same questions are posed. If there's a God, how can there be evil in the world? Really, this question presupposes a lot; it's a loaded question, in fact, which is why I dislike it. Presumably God would not allow disasters, either natural or man-made, because He's so gosh-darn good. But because these do occur - well, how could there be a God? So goes the reasoning.

I don't know about you, but when I was younger, there were a lot of things I didn't understand about my parents. If they didn't think or act as I would've liked them to, they were idiots. And they were idiots because their actions didn't make sense to me. Looking back, though, I see they had good reasons for what they did. I can't say I think everything they did was perfect, but I can see why they acted as they did, and in a lot of cases - dare I say it? - it's a good thing they didn't do what I wanted.

Now, if it's so easy to understand that fact, why isn't it so easy to see it in religious thinking? Maybe God knows something we don't? - what a concept! Maybe God doesn't have to play by our rules. Indeed, why should He? I'm not saying I can sit back and cheerfully watch all the hell on earth around us today, like some Dr. Pangloss, only that the combined intellect of those atheists - the combined intellect of the human species, for that matter - is pretty paltry when held up against the wisdom of God.

Another bit that annoys me is when they say that believers get their ideas out of a book:

They ask: where do people get their idea of God? From the Bible or the Qur'an. "Tell a devout Christian ... that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible," Harris writes, "and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever."

Granted, some people do have a notion of religion this simplistic and sheeply. But for anyone who has a sense of religiousness at all, they know this is not the case. The question of where people get their idea of God is another loaded one; in fact it's not even the question it claims to be. What the atheists imply is that religion is purely a textual matter - if it weren't for the Bible or the Qur'an, we wouldn't be religious. Don't believe me? Check it out: the book by my bed "was written by an invisible deity"! Human beings could not have written it out of a response to some phenomenon, no-siree Bob. Religious experience doesn't exist, and if it did it would obviously be chalked up as delusional.

The question "Where do people get their idea of God?" deals more with how our thinking about God has been conditioned, not with the original source of the idea.

What we find here, then, is a position that is unassailable - unbeatable because it refuses to fight. Walled itself up in its own circle of logic, it is impenetrable. Kind of like conspiracy theories.

What I find most striking about the so-called debate is how much religious thinkers have developed over the years, and how little the atheists have come along. They marshall up the same tired questions, the same evidence, and draw the same conclusions. If this were a real debate, they might listen to the opposing side and learn something from them, if only in an attempt to convince them of the error of their ways.

But they don't, and that's telling. What it tells me is that they have simply ignored religious thought, preferring the sanctuary of their own fantasy-image to actual research. If they had, the article mentioned above would probably have included new material, new questions, new refutations. There isn't any of this.

Is this what passes for enlightened thinking? Is this what's called progress? Looks more like regress to me.

(Image brashly cribbed from www.nivbed.com/junk/ancient_garbage/)

Activity, Clean and Alive

2006-09-03T13:04:00.000-07:00

"But there is also hope in this: music invents itself through musicians working on behalf of music, rather than themselves. This is healthy music, and can be experienced as such. After listening, or playing, one feels stronger and cleaner. No elaborate metamusics is needed to demonstrate this, for it can be simply experienced. The question for the musician is this: do I become alive playing this? For the audience, it is: do I become alive listening to this?" - Robert Fripp, "The Act of Music." Via 10 (1990), p. 88.

I finished my workout last night, feeling pleasantly drained as usual. Nothing much - pushups, pullups, Hindu squats, and so on - I'm clawing my way out of sedentary life, you see. As I cycled home from the playground, the word bubbled up: clean. That's how I felt, and there was no other way to put it.

Clean is the way I feel after a good workout, when it's not too hard but still challenging. It's always been that way, even back when I was practicing tae kwon do, though I never used that word. But there it was last night, and it reminded me of the article by Robert Fripp; you can see he uses the same adjective to describe the experience of playing music. Or listening to it.

Looking back on other moments, I become aware of other times when the idea of clean has come to the fore. And its opposite. Whenever I saw Natural Born Killers, I felt dirty. That is a movie that shouldn't have been made. It's not the violence; I've seen equivalent levels of that in films, but it doesn't register the same way. No, something else in its treatment of violence strikes me as unsavory and - well, let's just say it - wrong. The soundtrack is enough to bring on the feeling of being soiled.

Of course when we act in a way that is wrong, we often say we feel dirty, and want make a clean breast of it. This is such a commonplace, there's no need to hunt for citations. Rituals of purification work on this notion of cleaning - inwardly, outwardly or both. Sometimes that takes on the form of going through the dirt as part of the cleansing, purging. Catharsis.

Having an interest in logic, I can't help considering cleanness in terms of consistency. There's an element of it there too: if we consider Mary Douglas's definition of dirt as "matter out of place", the notion of coherence is unmistakable. Things have their place in relation to one another, and so a misplaced item runs against the order of things.

Which brings me to another, connected sensation - the sensation of conflict. This takes on several forms, depending on the degree and nature of conflict. A paradox piques by its apparent self-opposition, but we don't feel it to be painful; rather, the pique is exciting, stirs us to action. There is dissonance, to be sure, but somewhere at bottom there is a coexistence of the two notes; the dissonance isn't absolute. Contradiction, however, presents us with a dissonance that is absolute, hence intolerable. "Stand there! - no, don't stand there!" Oh, make up your mind! It hurts to be pulled this way and that. We've all been there.

Before I veer too far from the topic at hand, let me just say I'd like to go deeper into the matter. That I'm not alone in noticing the sensation of cleanness in relation to action suggests that there's something important to it in our experience. The phenomenology of cleanness and dirtiness needs to be addressed, if it hasn't been already. If anybody out there knows of studies in this matter, let me know. I'd be very grateful.

The Divining-Rod

2006-09-02T14:21:00.000-07:00

[This is a short short story I wrote last year, one of my last. It gives a window on my view of the human condition; it was born out of a thought, so you could say it's a vessel for propaganda, but hopefully it stands on its own as a story.]

Dr. Jude Theodore awoke one morning late September. He awoke a different man. He gazed at a red leaf that had lighted on the window sill, then turned to his wife and said, “I’m not going to work today.”

“Not going?” she exclaimed. “Why not?"

“I don’t need it. Nobody needs it. We know enough already."

“Know enough?”

“Enough. Plenty. We could go on just like this for the rest of our lives and not ask for anything more. Live like kings.”

“And queens,” she added.

Dr. Theodore phoned the laboratory: “I’m not coming in today.”

“No?” said the assistant. “Not feeling well?”

“No, not really.”

“Well, take it easy, but come in as soon as you feel better.”

But he did not come in. Not the next day, not a few days later, not a week later. His wife brushed her auburn hair before the mirror every morning, wondering when he would snap out of it.

“Why don’t you go back to work?” she asked one day.

“We know too much. First we looked for homes, then we made them. We hunted for food till we learned to grow it. We weren’t happy killing one man, we had to find a way to kill thousands. Worlds we make and worlds we kill: that’s playing God, that’s why we find things out. We know too much.”

A week later she found him sitting by the window, eyes closed, brow furrowed like a wadded piece of paper. He seemed to be listening to the naked branches in the wind.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Setting an example,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“Forgetting.”

He did not get up from that chair, not later that day, not the next day, not after a week.

She found him there, gazing out the window through the branches. She sat down across from him. Again she asked, “What are you doing?” All she received for an answer was a blank sheet of a look.

She would bring food to him, but he just stared at it, uncomprehending. She wept, shook him, screamed at him, pleaded for him to snap out of it, but – he did nothing. For a time he shook his head when she spoke, but even that disappeared.

One morning, as snow was falling in clusters onto the window sill, she sat down across from him; she stared, mumbling, “Who are you? What’s happened? Why?” Frost gathered on the pane, each question hanging like the steam of her breath. But she knew the answers inside: He is Dr. Jude Theodore, my husband. He is forgetting. We know too much. Soon they too began to fade. By nightfall she was silent, silent save for her breathing; and when the sun rose they still sat there, a king and his queen, gods among gods.

On a Battle over Voices

2006-09-02T13:53:00.000-07:00

"I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb." - Herman Melville, letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 17 Nov. 1851. Correspondence, vol 14, The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Lynn Horth (1993).

I was asked by a friend what I thought about Moby-Dick: did I find it hard to read? Well, I said, it is somehow very nineteenth-century, but that's nothing - it's an amazing book. Why ask? I was curious. Then my friend told me about a debate surrounding two competing German translations of the work; one is very difficult but "close" to the original, the other a freer rendering but more readable. Which one was better? Fellow translators in Germany seem to favor the latter more. Why?

The discussion seemed to pool around the mixing of styles, my friend explained, especially in the voice of Captain Ahab. The joining of high diction and low, using Biblical rhetoric and Shakespearian talk along with the language of sailors, and -

- Wait a minute, I said, what Shakespearian talk? Well, all the Thou arts and Thees, my friend replied.

Oh no. Problem. That was not Shakespeare's talk, it was Nantucket's. Nantucket dialect in the 19th century was peculiar in this respect, retaining that archaic style. Ahab wasn't the only one to use Thees and Thous; the whole damn town did that. Several characters in the book, and in real life as well. This is no secret; Melville comments on this trait, mentioning the source of that peculiarity in the process:

"The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation." -Moby-Dick, ch. XIV "Nantucket"

Hardly Shakespearian, and hardly restricted to the voice of Ahab.

What does this mean? What does it mean, that translators never picked up on the speech pattern, so clearly marked, of a community? Were all these translators stupid? I don't think so. Did every one of them skip this chapter? I hope not. What I suspect is that Ahab's voice drowned them out. He is a singular character, so striking and overwhelming that they listened to him and forgot entirely about all the others who had used similar words before him.

You may be wondering why I'm so worked up about this issue. For one thing, I love Moby-Dick; there's good reason why it's still around. A pet peeve of mine is when people - especially critics, who should know better - knock the book for being a stylistic failure. How can they say that? Ahab talks one way in one scene, another way in another scene. So it's artistically wrong to portray a complex character?? My friend related this from the online discussion about it, and I couldn't believe my ears. A work of art exists for its own logic, not the expectations of critics. I hate that presumptuous attitude.

Another thing I hate is seeing widespread misunderstanding when it simply needn't exist. As seen above, there is proof positive that one claim of the debaters is unfounded. If that passage weren't enough, all they need to do is read the other characters who speak in the same way.

Before you think I'm being arrogant here, you're only half-right. I'm chiding myself and them equally. I make the same errors, which is probably why I get so irritated when I come across this sort of thing.

That mixing of styles, my friend continued, doesn't that seem post-modern to you? Then, responding to that very question, added: The same thing happens in the Persian Letters by Montesquieu. And in Robinson Crusoe there are those interminable descriptions of the guy growing corn, or building a hut! Isn't that post-modern too? So the technique isn't so new after all.

Right. And I'm not sure what counts as post-modern, nor do I think we can clearly tell what would really distinguish the period as such. We're too close to it. We may think we know it, and we should certainly try to articulate that perspective, but I don't really believe we have the clearest eye on ourselves - precisely because we are caught up in it. A hundred years from now, historians may carve up the 20th century into three periods, or five, or whatever. Or post-modernism might be replaced by some other term that captures the essence. But our opinions will still be valuable to them; for they will be able to know how we saw ourselves, and can see just wildly wrong we were.

Moby-Dick was not a literary success when it was published, my friend said, or in Melville's lifetime. I would chalk this up as evidence that we do not know our own time. None of us. What works will last as masterpieces? If Melville's own generation did not recognize the genius of that wicked book, and if they were as human as us, can we truly say we have a clearer self-estimate?
In my opinion we are as deluded as any generation has ever been, maybe even more so. For an age when we profess to be more pluralistic and inclusive, we sure do act arrogantly. In honor of being so humble in our self-estimate, we honor ourselves still more. We know better, we judge more fairly: that's quite an honor. Progress goes forward, we learn from our mistakes. It doesn't take long to poke and prod the semblance before the usual suspects come reeling outbetraying our unstated belief that we are the bearers of truth, over and above our predecessors.

Is this new? Hardly. I dare say it's the human condition. My take on this soon to come.

(Image ably nicked from www.whalecraft.net/Whaling_Books.html)

{(C	→	Z)	→	Z}	→	Z	…
T	T	T	T	T	T	T	…
T	f	f	T	f	f	f	…
f	T	T	T	T	T	T	…
f	T	f	f	f	T	f	…
	⇑		⇑		⇑		…

{(C	→	Z)	→	Z}	→	Z	…
T	T	T	T	T	T	T	…
T	f	f	T	f	f	f	…
f	T	T	T	T	T	T	…
f	T	f	f	f	T	f	…
	⇑		⇑		⇑		…

{(C	→	Z)	→	Z}	→	Z	…
T	T	T	T	T	T	T	…
T	f	f	T	f	f	f	…
f	T	T	T	T	T	T	…
f	T	f	f	f	T	f	…
	⇑		⇑		⇑		…