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Showing posts from January, 2016

Dorothy Lee Sayers

A quote from Sayers on education, from a 1947 essay: For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain. That insight was one she brought home to her readers through such personal questions as this: Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that to-day, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass-propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?

A quote from Hoyle, 1951

Fred Hoyle, the creator of steady-state cosmology, wrote something for Harper's about his agnosticism, back in 1951. The magazine has reprinted part of it in the January 2016 issue as one of their continuing "From the Archives" series. "[I]t seems to me that religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves. Here we are in this wholly fantastic Universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance. No wonder then that many people feel the need for some belief that gives them a sense of security, and no wonder that they become very angry with people like me who say that this security is illusory."

Annual Dilbert (headlines) post

Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert, has said that there are only nine news stories, constantly re-written.  Every year at about this time I like to check the newspaper with his list in mind, to see if he is right. I'll start with his wording unmodified by examples.  1. EXTREME WEATHER BATTERS SOMEPLACE 2. IDIOTS KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE 3. POLITICIAN DOES SOMETHING ILLEGAL 4. PRIMATE ATTEMPTS INAPPROPRIATE SEX 5. EXPERT WARNS OF FINANCIAL CALAMITY 6. BIG COMPANY BUYS ANOTHER BIG COMPANY 7. FAMOUS PERSON DOES SOMETHING INTERESTING 8. A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY MIGHT BE USEFUL IN TEN YEARS 9. GOVERNMENT FAILS TO ACHIEVE A GOAL  I surveyed the news on one day (a few days back as it happens). Just by convenience, these headlines are all from January 21st. Well, actually, I cheated a little with one of them, but I'll let you dear reader do the work of figuring out which one that is. Without further ado.... 1. An extraordinary South African drought . 2. Let&#

Nurse Jackie

Nurse Jackie is the weekly TV program Edie Falco did after The Sopranos wrapped. I was thinking while I watched an episode via Netflix recently that my mother, who was a nurse 'back in the day,' would love the show. But then I considered the drug-addicted character Falco plays and I thought ... oh, maybe not. Mom has a sense of humor about nursing but she has old-fashioned ideas about what kind of stories ought to be told. Jackie as portrayed in the series is such a mess of a human being that it is hard to imagine the series having been a hit without the genius of Ms Falco. She had made Carmela Soprano sympathetic, she could do so with Jackie Peyton. I was fascinated by a subplot of episode 4, season 1, in which Jackie's daughter Grace is diagnosed with having an "anxiety disorder" on the basis of such facts as that, when encouraged to draw something with crayons, she created a picture with grays and blacks, i.e. with no proper colors. Jackie's react

Paul Tillich: A Quotation

The great mid-20th-century theologian Paul Tillich wrote the words italicized below. They are worth repeating because it seems, reading them, as if Tillich is responding to some of the misguided evangelicals of our day, who want to turn Creation into "intelligent design" and repackage it as "science" for secondary schools. "Knowledge of revelation does not increase our knowledge about the structures of nature, history, and man. Whenever a claim to knowledge is made on this level, it must be subjected to the experimental tests through which truth is established. If such a claim is made in the name of revelation or of any other authority, it must be disregarded, and the ordinary methods of research and verification must be applied. ...Knowledge of revelation is knowledge about the revelation of the mystery of being to us, not information about the nature of beings and their relation to one another."   SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, Vol. 1 Since Martin Luther

The Notorious Stephen Glass

An exchange of letters in the January 2016 issue of Harper's reminds me that back in the 1990s, when Stephen Glass was notoriously making stuff up for The New Republic, he also made stuff up in other publications as well. An article of his ran in the Harper's for February 1998, titled "Prophets and Losses." It concerned telephone psychics, portraying a business in which phony psychics try to keep callers on the line as long as possible in order to sock them with astronomical charges. As was often the case with Glass' frauds, it is easy to believe the broad outlines of what he was saying, which is precisely why people weren't necessarily vigilant about the details, which he invented. In the latest issue, Glass provides a paragraph by paragraph breakdown of what he fabricated for that story, a breakdown that will be unreadable for anyone who doesn't have the actual text of the story n front of them. Fortunately, this is 2016, and you can find that he

Updating the password list

One of the pains of contemporary life is the need to keep a list of one's computer/internet passwords somewhere. In my case, at least, that place is a physical piece of paper, always in a "secure location." I spend so much time on-line that the list has grown to be fairly long. Further, I haven't been able to get away with just having one password and using it in a lot of different contexts. The different sites where I log on with passwords have different rules about what is and isn't allowed, and some require regular change in passwords, etc. So the list keeps getting longer. One of my year-end chores (which, yes, I'm getting around to rather tardily this year) involves a review of the list, with all the scratch-outs and revisions that I have inserted there over the last twelve months, and the creation of a new clean version of it. Oh what fun. Makes me glad I saw a movie about a year ago about Alan Turing. I feel like both the Germans and the Brits i

Calenders for 2016

I have a Dilbert day-by-day calendar again this year. Saturday and Sunday share a single page, each day of the work week has a page, and a comic, of ots own. I'll quote here the comic for January 9/10. Dilbert is sitting at his desk, the pointy-haired boss is standing behind him. Boss asks, "Do we have any actionable analytics from our Big Data in the cloud?" Dilbert, "Yes, the data shows that my productivity plunges whenever you learn new jargon." Boss, "Maybe in-memory computing will accelerate your applications." Dilbert, "Plunge, plunge, plunge." I also have a month by month wall calendar, aptly titled "Puppies," in which I'll be greeted each month by another cure dog-child. January greets me with a photo of a babe beagle, running about in grass with an orange ball in his mouth. Finally, am the proud possessor of a desk book for appointments. For the first time in several years, I'm NOT using one from A

Philosophers Alphabetized

Just as an arbitrary exercise, I thought I'd compile an alphabetical list thus: The greatest philosopher whose name began with A was/is ... etc.  All choices are  arbitrary. Obviously this is NOT a list of the 26th greatest thinkers, and if I drew up such a list a one-per-letter result would be a very odd coincidence.  Here, then, is what I came up with. Averroes (portrayed above);  [Henri] Bergson;  [Albert] Camus;  [Rene] Descartes;  [Mary Baker] Eddy;  [Gustav] Fechner;  [Kurt] Godel;  [Anne] Hutchinson;  Isaac Israeli the Elder;  [William] James;  [Immanuel] Kant;  [Georg] Lukacs;  [G.E.] Moore;  Nishida;  Ockham;  [Blaise] Pascal;  [W.V.O.] Quine;  [Josiah] Royce;  Socrates;  [Leo] Tolstoy;  [Dmitri] Uznadze;  [Hans] Vaihinger;  [Ludwig] Wittgenstein;  Xun Kuang;  [William Butler] Yeats;  Zeno of Elea. Yes, I've rather deliberately snubbed some big traditional names. Neither Plato nor Aristotle, neither Marx nor Hegel, neither Hobbes

Extreme Weight Loss

The December Harper's treats us to some interpretive riffs on the TV show, Extreme Weight Loss, by novelist Rick Moody. I've never seen the program, and was not especially intrigued by most of Moody's riffs thereon. I mention it today only because Moody offers us some well-worded descriptions of the shows host, Chris Powell, describing Powell for example as "an average-size guy with the endearing aw-shucks mien of an Arizona State frat brothe who nonetheless manages to volunteer on the local pediatric ward." I like the word "mien" there. At a less inspired moment, he might have gone with "manner." I will conclude this blog entry with the two sentences that conclude the review: "In our evangelical nation, where all things are possible if you are born anew -- a straight nose, a good job, six-pack abs, a modicum of happiness -- I would argue that the show's host is just messianic enough. After all, the guy's first name is Chr

The Prevalence of Fear

I can do nothing better for you today, dear reader, than reference John B., at "I, Ciceronianus." He has written a fine blog entry on the prevalence of fear. Click here and enjoy.

More About 'The Wire'

On the 7th of this month I mentioned the television show "The Wire," as a way of introducing the lyrics to the theme song. Today I'd like to say something about the evolution of the show in general. In the first season, the writers stick tightly to two antagonists, an investigative unit within the Baltimore PD and a particular drug gang working in the projects. Its a simple narrative arc, and the the most part a 'win' for the police characters -- the major figures on the other side are either locked up or on their way to being locked up as the season ends. In subsequent seasons, the focus widens. We see the War on Drugs from the point of view of the harbor, the longshoremen's union, etc. From that point of view, drug smuggling is seen as part of a broader smuggling-world picture, including the smuggling of people and weapons.   Then we see it from the point of view of the schools, that of reporters on the cop beat' and the organizations they work f