These quizzes can be somewhat addictive. Also, this hints suggestively at possible explanations for my continued silence on the blog front.


You're Brian Eno.
You're a little reclusive maybe, a little quieter
than most people...
But man, who needs outside entertainment when your
brain is like KABOOM all the time? You are
innovative, creative, and intelligent. You
dress flamboyantly, gravitating towards large
feathers and tinsel. Everyone respects you, and
looks up to you. We are not worthy, we are not
worthy...


Which rad old school 70's glam icon are you? (with pics)
brought to you by Quizilla

I'm a Gryffindor!

My blog-rate has slowed way down since summer started. One reason I haven't been writing in my blog is that I've been writing about blogs. I've got a rough draft of a paper available here.

Comments are of course welcome. I don't expect to be picking up the pace to more than one or two posts a week on this blog for a while though, there's also the need to get something tangible done this summer.

Daddy, what did you do during the boom?

Ah, the acrid stench of nostalgia. Now I should get around to explaining that link from two days ago.

Well, I spent the dot-com years in graduate school. I entered grad school under one President Bush and exited under another. There are good reasons to suspect those who have given up a decade to pursue a single degree. I avoided this stigma by working as the Managing Editor for a monthly philosophy journal. I was also seriously fired up about this whole emerging internet thing.

When I first started at the journal we had Hyundai computers with like 286 processors on them. You couldn't get a full line of text to appear on the screen at the same time because the display font only came in one size. (Think about that for a second, it gets more confusing.) Nonetheless, it was clear that the ways that ideas were disseminated was about to change radically. The year before, I had started my own first contribution, developing a page on the old University of Chicago Philosophy Project called Chomsky for Philosophers. My thinking was two-fold, I needed to know about how this web thing worked and I didn't know enough about Chomsky's work, so I thought I could compare the two, so why not combine the two. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing, but I didn't think anyone else did either. This was an ongoing project most of the time that I worked at the journal, and wrote my dissertation, and helped care for my son, and commuted from Worcester to Boston. All of these things, combined with a complete lack of understanding of how corporations worked, meant that whatever thoughts I may have had on philosophy and the internet would remain starry eyed speculations for the moments before I fell asleep on the train each evening. This were often WIRED-powered dreams, HOTWIRED powered dreams at that. I have no idea of when I started developing a Suck habit but it started early and lead quickly to a habit that included Word, Feed and Salon.

The story of Suck chronicled those years nicely. The great Polly Ester columns in my opinion, she hit her stride with this inquiry into Jon Katz's crack smoking habits. Who is John Katz you might ask, that's easy, he's a guy who was immortalized as a crack smoker in filler. These started when I thought that writing about Kant was a good idea. Smoking Crack may have been a better idea. It probably wouldn't have been as expensive. Eventually I escaped from grad school when suck was running great pieces by Ambrose Beers and Peter Bagge when I made my final escape from grad school.

Just in time for it all to evaporate, suck in reruns only, feed gone, word only a memory, and the future of internet publishing transmogrified already into something else altogether.

hey look a test, a meme even

I've made something of a habit of not posting results of various tests taken on the internet to this blog, but this one involved all sorts of inscrutable abbreviations and a really long test, so I figured what the heck, ahhh, the things I do for science.

In typical fashion, I think the entire exercise has raised more questions than it answered, particularly about guids [sic] and wether or not have I've set this up correctly. People take these tests to discover more about themselves, since they tend to increase my general sense of confusion (or wonder, take your pick), tend to stay away from them. That and I don't need any help appearing self-conscious and somewhat dorky.

The one noticeable thing about the test is that I scored "high" in every are but two, neuroticism and conscientiousness (low) and the latter is the category that measures, among other things, how much worth one might find in scoring "high" on a series of tests.

=============================================================
Overview: This post is a community experiment with two broad purposes. The first is to create publicly accessible data about bloggers' personalities, which may have sociological value in addition to being just plain fun. The second is to track the propagation of this meme through blogspace. Full details and explanation can be found on the original posting: http://pixnaps.blogspot.com/2005/06/meme-worth-spreading.html


Instructions (to join in the experiment):

1) Take the IPIP-NEO personality test and the Political Compass quiz, if you have not done so already.

2) Copy to the clipboard that section of this post that is between the double lines, and paste it into your blog editor. (Blogger users may wish to use 'compose' mode to preserve formatting and hyperlinks. Otherwise, be sure to add hyperlinks as necessary.)

3) Replace the answers in the "survey" section below with your own.

4) Add your blog information to the "track list", in the form: "Linked title - URL - optional GUID".

5) Any additional comments should go outside of the double lines, including the (optional) nomination of bloggers you wish to pass this experimental meme on to.

6) Post it to your blog!

Survey:

Age: 36
Gender: Male
Location: Kent, OH, USA
Religion: None
Occupation: assistant professor
Began blogging (dd/mm/yy):

Political Compass results
Left/Right: -4.00
Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.28

IPIP-NEO results


EXTRAVERSION: 73 (high)
Friendliness: 40
Gregariousness: 57
Assertiveness: 56
Activity Level: 52
Excitement-Seeking: 97
Cheerfulness: 85

AGREEABLENESS: 72 (high)
Trust: 91
Morality: 54
Altruism: 46
Co-operation: 51
Modesty: 42
Sympathy: 90

CONSCIENTIOUSNESS: 23 (low)
Self-Efficacy: 12
Orderliness: 36
Dutifulness: 57
Achievement-Striving: 59
Self-Discipline: 14
Cautiousness: 12

NEUROTICISM: 56 (average)
Anxiety: 30
Anger: 46
Depression: 62
Self-Consciousness: 60
Immoderation: 68
Vulnerability: 66

OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE: 88 (high)
Imagination: 91
Artistic Interests: 63
Emotionality: 68
Adventurousness: 66
Intellect: 88
Liberalism: 76




Track List:
1. Philosophy, et cetera - pixnaps.blogspot.com - pixnaps97a2
2. Majikthise - 6ea37d10-e9b9-11d9-8cd6-0800200c9a66
3. free the turtles - BSlgY7j9EzQJ
4. (add your entry here)


=============================================================

Just because I feel the need to share.

MIT Weblog Survey : Preliminary Results

If we're lucky, this link:MIT Weblog Survey : Preliminary Results will lead to the results of the survey I just took which I'm publicizing in through that fairly ugly white patch over on the left.

The Great Brain - Is Umberto Eco's new novel about memory really postmodern? By Robert Alter

In reference to the most recent post, I gather that Eco's most recent novel is about the discovery of one's self from recalling childhood pop culture. I guess I'm in good company. On the other hand Slate's review of the novel, The Great Brain - Is Umberto Eco's new novel about memory really postmodern? By Robert Alter, rightly points out this is really just a story we (Umberto and I) tell ourselves. Real psychologists with real science can tell us how memory and identity really work, this stuff about comic books is composed of speculative ruminations, and I still can't figure out what the point of those things are. That is, unless Aristotle is right and the the finest things are those that are done for their own sake alone. This would make reflecting on comic books a very fine thing to do indeed.

on comics and politics

How could I let this go by without comment: Pandagon on the politics of comic books.

Comic books themselves presented my first awareness of any number of topics, at least in part because I was rather late to reading, being completely uninterested in what the schools wanted to me. Comic books were an important catalyst in my becoming a reader. At least that's what I tell myself. In any case, comic books made me think about politics. There were two stages to this, at first I was the only person I knew who read comics, so I didn't discuss the stories with anyone else because no one was interested.

Marvel comics, especially, are populated with moral ambiguities. The good guy is always good, and the bad guy always bad. But each of them is really in conflict with themselves and their unusual places in their environments. Some manage to over come their problems and become heroes like Spider Man, others are consumed by their own desires and become villians, like Dr. Doom giving into vanity and rage. There's also a significant group, such as Magneto, who walk back and forth across the hero-villian line and the morally ambigous, hulk on a rampage, Nick Fury in his treatment of espers etc. Of course, there are others who are simply unexplained toad people. Why do toad people do what they do? I don't think we're ever meant to know. The point being that the stories can often become a complex dance between the motivations of the characters. The actual punching could come as a relief to trying to understand the problems motivating a story. Since these stories tend to reflect the most prominent anxities expressed at large when they are written, the step towards more real world style political thinking was easy.

Turns out that not eveybody read comics this way. The second stage was after a comic book store opened in my town and created a community of comic readers. In general comic book readers are intrigued by ideas, but don't take to them naturally. I remember one long discussion in which a group of store regulars could not figure out a way in which they could reliably become rich given a time machine. Try this exercise yourselve. Moreover, most felt that the violence in the comics needed to be understood as a literal solution to the sorts of problems that might be considered. (Spiderman's punching and web-slinging was a solution to crime, whatever Stan might say on his soap box. It was as if Godzilla showed the way to fight environmental corruption when he took on the smog monster. Apologies for media jumping.)

The second stage didn't so much change my political reflections as it made it clear that having an intelligent conversation about comic books, at least in my small part of the commonwealth, meant leaving the comic shop.

Online Papers in Philosophy

Here's something so cool I thought I had to link to it, but its not the sort of thing that my students would necessarily be interested, so I put it over here on the audience-free blog, you know the one all my friend read.

Online Papers in Philosophy

University Diaries

I'm strongly resisting the urge to send this link to everyone I know, but I know that it would be taken the wrong way.

No, I know that it would actually be interpreted correctly, that is as critical of positions that some people I know take as both self-evident and personal. This became apparent when a friend and I were discussing Edward Tufte's criticism of PowerPoint and Peter Norvig's hysterical reductio ad absurdum approach to that almost omnipresent software.

We were laughing at PowerPoint, at least in part because Norvig and Tufte are both funny, and there are apparently some things that should not be mocked. We succeeded in giving offense.

The sights of Worcester

One of the most intriquing sites to see in Worcester are the remains of the older Worcester State Hospital. This complex was apparently an example of Kirkbride Buildings, and the Worcester site is represented in about haf of the photographs in the slide show at the kirkbridge site.

The crumbling remains are part of the current State Hospital campus on the Biotech Park side of the campus. It's easier to get to by way of the Bioteach roads. The view from the clock tower must have been truly breathtaking back before UMASS Medical was constructed and White City became an eye-sore. Like any place else in Worcester, you can get here by turning at Dunkin' Donuts and going up hill.

For Foucault fans, the complex includes what seems to have been a panopticon. For non-Foucault fans, this was a round building with places for inmates around the walls and a place for a guard or, in this case a nurse or orderly, to be able to watch any of the inmate s at any time.

For X-files fans, one episode based in Worcester MA features a hospital with an entrance and clock tower that very closely resemble the Worcester Sanatorium building. I belive this was the second season episode Excelsis Dei, but there were at least two X-files episodes that featured action in a Worcester hospital setting and I'm not so interested that I'll put in the necessary google time to figure this out.

Leiter Reports: "Drebenized"

There have been several times this semester when I have had reason to mention this "Dreben" character, usually when we (in the 20th Century class) were reading some passage or other by Quine.

I had the chance to take a seminar on Wittgenstein with Dreben when I was at BU, though I've seen large lecture sections with fewer people in regular attendance.

My one memorably exchange with Dreben occurred when I asked him about how he would interpret my actions if I were to come into class with a duck strapped to my head. He had been trying to make a point about the difficulty assigning adjectives such as insane or irrational. The duck comments managed to bring him up short for the moment since at that moment, it did seem to be an unambiguously irrational activity.

In any case, there's an interesting discussion of Dreben's influence on
Leiter Reports

edit: this post has been duplicated on both of my blogs, sorry.

Isaac Asimov

I was reminded by reading the Isaac Asimov entry in Wikipedia that he "has works in every major category of the Dewey Decimal System except Philosophy." This time I was really struck by the fact that before I read Plato, before I read Godel, Escher Bach, before I had read much else at all in fact, Asimov had been my first real encounter with reading as way to play with ideas.

Much of Asimov's fiction had less developed characters, and sometimes less action, than the Platonic dialogs. Science fiction, thought experiment wedded to literary craft, has philosophy running through it. At least the good stuff does, I suppose that a standard shoot 'em with laser guns counts as science fiction as well, but that's not what the good doctor wrote. He wrote relatively unadorned experiments in thought. Not all the time, he is famous in part for the breadth of his output.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who was lead from Asimov to playing with ideas to philosophy. In a sense Asimov is a little like a low level drug dealer pushing a gateway drug to kids on the play ground. "Take a hit, first one's free", but then after its too late and you've got a serious habit, you find out that he never touched the stuff.

first attempt

first attempt
Originally uploaded by pbroderi.

Since I put new pictures up on flickr, I find myself compelled to constantly go back and look at them over and over again.

Success at last.

Success at last.
Originally uploaded by pbroderi.

The smile of a baby is an elusive quarry. Although quite common, they are also fleeting. Jeremy and I really had to work together to get this picture.

My long over due ode to Dunkin' Donuts

There's an interesting piece on Dunkin' Donuts in Slate today. Kent had a Dunkin Donuts when we moved here, but now its gone. So's the Crispy Creme. The Donut situation out here in the midwest is pretty bleak, even bleaker than the bagel situation.

Of course, this is probably a good thing. Donuts, and the Dunkin variety in particular, are among the least healthy things one can eat. (Though I would gather that a ball of fat rolled in sugar is probably pretty low carb.)

When I lived in Worcester MA, you navigated by the Dunkin Donuts. My son once told a playmate that to get to his house you had to go right at Dunkin Donuts and up the hill. His playmate was shocked, "so do I!".

The reason challenge is to find any place in Worcester that isn't up hill from a Dunkin Donuts. In Worcester, Dunkin Donuts are a measure of distance. For instance, depending on route, it took 6 to 8 Dunkin Donuts to get to my inlaws house.

Then, there's the Dunkin' Donuts in the Government Center Green Line station. Not a full restaurant, but was largely responsible for my meeting my life-time top weight. When I decided to loose the weight, I still had to change trains at Government Center, so I had to stand in front of that Dunkin Donuts, every morning, after riding a bus-train combination from Brockton (don't ask how many from Brockton to Boston, that would be like asking how many fire hydrants there were on the route.) The craving was unbelievable.

Finally, I also spent a year living in Somerville, home town for this particular chain. A city in which you are usually able to smell the nearest Dunkin Donuts, I seem to remember the chains in the Cambridge-Somerville area as being heavier on the sugar than outlets in other areas. These stores were among the few places I've ever been were you could get a second-hand sugar rush.

dwarves and others

From and an interview by Mike Godwin, by way of Kottke.org:
Noted science fiction writer Neal Stephenson is quoted as saying:

It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from [science and technology]. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

Stephenson's comments contain an odd irony.

Here goes, the American Left wasn't always suspicious of a scientific, technical or even nerdy approach to governance. During the period of time from the Roosevelt to Johnson administrations, the American left-moderate coalition run the show from a very nerdy perspective. Not only were technocrats favored in appoints and nerdy ideas were favored in policy formation, but the most hackerish of projects were indulged. These were the people who built the a-bomb, developed the digital computer, and sent man to the moon and, in the end, two of these three projects were pursued for the most nerdy of reasons, to see if they could really work after. Even the more radical left, think the Henry Wallace wing of the Democratic and leftward did things, sometime unadvisable things, for nerdy reasons. The American left's notoriously ambivalent approach to the Soviet Union was, I believe, at least partially motivated by the hope that the soviets were developing technical scientific solutions to human suffering.

What went wrong that caused the end of the nerd golden age in America?

Simple, Vietnam happened.

It became clear to many people that the approach to running the country embodied by the likes of Robert McNamara had something wrong with it, a strictly technical and disciplined approach to governance was no defense against terrible things. So they abandoned it, they threw out the technocratic in favor of the romantic. Science and, one might suggest, hard core science fiction was deemphasized in favor of a reliance on the romantic and the fantastic to find ways to navigate the world. Isaac Asimov and the other hard sf guys are eclipsed by Tolkein's pastoral tales of good vs. evil.

Here's were the irony comes in. Stephenson's own work is not simply a return to the hard science approach of an Asimov. The most memorable passage in Cryptonomicon, in my opinion is the main character's extended theory of personalities based on Dungeon and Dragons character races. In the case, the character describes himself as being fundamentally Dwarven for demonstrating some of the same characterstics that Stephenson praises in the quotation above. Personally, I tend to be more a half-elven type, but that's not relevant here. The point is that Stephenson's own work is supported by the romantic in American thinking, as much as he's uncomfortable with what's wrought.

Finally, yes, I realize I dropped Stephenson's comments about the left-right division almost as soon as I picked up speed. I'll just say that I share a parallel concern about his take on the acceptance, or lack there of, of scientific methods on the right. As an aside, I'm currently working on a paper about the appropriate use of scientific methods and conclusions for revising non-scientific (read, philosophical) positions. If even one person comments, I'll put a draft in my webspace and link to it here.

'nuff said

About Ludicorp Research & Development Ltd.

Hunter S Thompson is beastly dead

No link, the details are simple and if you can't find the story on the internet, then I would be seriously interested in how you came to be reading this post to begin with.

Noam Chomsky has been widely quoted as saying "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." Sometimes words can be arranged to sound like sentences without conveying any meaning. That's Chomsky's point of course.

Did Hunter S. Thompson channel the nightmares of the colorless green ideas in his prose? It was certainly furious and not bound by the usual conventions of what is generally acknowledged to be reality.

Here's the odd thing about the sleep of colorless green ideas, I've brought this example up in a class, and a student became obviously confused for a few moments and then suggested that not only did they understand what that proposition means, but moreover, that its obviously true. Usually when I bring up this example, there's at least one student who really seems on the verge of asserting that the proposition really does make sense after all.

The electricity of HST's prose made it fun. What made it worth reading was the thought that this electric current might actually carrying a message, the insistant throb maybe a way to another perspective of the world.

There's nothing in the bag,

When Jeremy was in pre-school, parents were asked to come into school and address students about what their professions. Rather than asking Nancy go to and explain cancer research, I was tapped to explain what it meant to be a philosopher.

It get worse, the kid whose father was a cop went first and be brought in a supply of toy badges. The folk-singing dad brought in guitar picks. So now, I had to explain what philosophy was to a class of five year olds, give presents and follow the cop and the folk-singer, both of whom have obvious appeal to the preschool set.

I started by wearing my academic robes. Since I got my degree from Boston University, my robes are scarlet and have little shields on them. Sure, this was one step short of going dressed up in a clown suit, but it worked.

Now, to explain conceptual analysis to an audience of people who can't read. I brought in a supply of paper lunch bags, and we chatted for a minute about what sorts of things can be in a bag. Everyone agreed that, unlike imaginary things, only real things could be in a bag. "What's in the bags?" I asked. "Nothing," they said. "Only something can be inside a paper bag, so nothing must be a real thing," I responded.

The cop's son raised his hand. "So you ask questions that don't mean anything and you get paid for this?"

One might find that comment discouraging but that insight is necessary for making the transformation from disciplined truth seeker to academic philosopher.

The other kids in the class probably came away from our little chat with the notion that college is a far stranger place then their parents and older siblings had let on.

After I left, the teachers had the kids make puppets out of the bags.

The important information:
Aoife Bohan-Broderick, 6 lbs, 11 oz at about 2 pm on Tuesday , February 8, 2005.

Pictures may be found at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pbroderick/

Stories I tell myself when I don't think anyone else is listening

Graduate was longer, more recent and a lot more fun than high school. Also, I'm occasionally asked about graduate school by my students.

So, why no long discussions of graduate school?

This is a blog, and blogs tend to be pretty heavy with high school nostalgia. No doubt because so many blogs are written by people currently in or recently graduated from high school.

I'm still in regular contact with people from graduate school. If I want to try to create stories to make sense of my graduate school experiences, I'll just get in touch with my friends, after all they were there. What's more, if I start to weave a private mythology about graduate school, one of them could easily read this and shatter my myths. Nothing hurts like the truth. In particular nothing hurts a good story like the truth.

Roger Kimball writes like the illegitimate love child of Pat Buchanan and sideshow bob. Does this bother anyone else?

bleed over from the other blog

I've been giving 'how to blog' advice in my class-related blog. One topic I've been tempted to take has been quizs. A lot of blogs are filled with these things, such as "what was your highschool stereotype?" This makes sense because it there an easy was to fill space when you can't think of anything to write. Surprisingly, most people I've seen don't seem to take these as inspirations to further writing, writing starter exercises.

I took the quiz mentioned above. This particular survey gave me some interesting answers. I scored over 80% on the loner index and the next one wasn't even close. I was somewhat surprised that 'drama' scored as high as it did, higher than either 'nerd' or 'jock', both communities I has some claim on. (Despite what my HS athletic director might have indicated, cross-country really is a sport.)

Perhaps the drama-folk were really my people, maybe if I was an exile, they were the community from which I was exiled. I certainly liked them the least, at least for many periods in my HS career.

My attitude was cemented in French I with Ms. I. She has the rather obscene practice of organizing the room according to homework success. (To be fair, I found that homework tended to interfere with my roleplaying habit.) Row 1 had the perfect homework people all working on advanced topics, while I sat over in row 5 with the perpetual homework revisers. The students in row 1 tended to be drama people, the people in row 5 tended to be high. By 'tended', I mean everyone except me got high as a way of coping with class. I was told that pot smoked before school could make French class tolerable, but LSD made it down right interesting. As the non-stoner in the row, all I had to fall back on was my hate.

Ms I and I of course managed to find a middle ground. I didn't seek her favor, nor did I seek it. But how was I to feel about those who actively sought the good will of the tyrant? Well, they could have either my respect or that of the instructor, and they had chosen.

ps. my favorite quiz was the one with the theme "which novel are you?", that test alternately pegged me as either Ulysses or Lolita. Both of these tickle my ego in their own way, which is why I mention them. The quizes that get cited are most probably those that tend to entertain the taker the most.

One more reason to love the internet.

e23: Digital Content from Steve Jackson Games

As soon as blogger incorporates something like categories, I'll sort all the back stuff on my blogs so the entries on role-playing games of the early 80s won't be mixed up with the entries about enlightenment scepticism.

Until then, Steve Jackson games still rules.

Two points of interest:

1. last.fm a steady stream of unexpected music, and it has yet to get any money out of me yet , though its probably gettings a ton of choice demographic data. These are the trade offs in the post-privacy world. Since last.fm has such a larger collection of songs, then I do, there's always the hope that last.fm can tell me something about my musical tastes that I hadn't already already known.

2. kingdom of loathing, this game has all the fun of a game that involves obsessive clicking but doesn't allow you to pretend your doing something else other than obsessively clicking. Also, it features great text such as:
"You come across the corpse of a merchant in the Spooky Forest.

It's sort of hard to tell where the meat he was carrying ends and the meat he was made of begins, but you're not too picky."

When I get to 7th level I'm planning on starting a guild, tentatively named "house of fun". If you're reading this, that factoid probably counts as news.

relevance, part 1

There's this letter to the editor in the most recent proceedings and addresses of the American Philosophical Association in which an argument is presented for the opening the association to more inclusive goverance procedures.

Part of this argument depends on the assertion that philosopy is not a practical activity. I won't be arguing this point. However, the writer does seem to think that this is somehow a unique quality of philosophy as opposed to other human activities. That's the part that I'm not so sure about.

At various times I've been told that most of mathematics, 80-90% sometimes (these are mathematicians we're talking about, it would be discouraging if they couldn't quantify their own self-deprecation). My own experience leads me to believe that this is true. There's a good case to be made that, on average, mathematics is less useful than philosophy. And I'm not talking about the applied ethics part of philosophy, I'm talking about the "if a tree falls in the woods and there's no one around to hear it" sorts of philosophy. At least the tree falling in the woods can be used to amaze someone who isn't paying much attention.

Astronomy used to be very practical back in the day when Europeans were trying to find a reliable way across the Atlantic. But current astronomy doesn't offer much in the way of pratical use.

Not that I'm opposed to astronomy in any way, and unlike pure mathematics, it scores more hooks than philosophy.

Theoretical physics makes some pretensions to usefulness, but I believe that there's some truth to that old saw that engineers only needed Newtonian Mechanics to design and fly the space shuttle. Most of the content of current physics is too far removed from the world of experience (ie medium sized dry goods close to sea level) to be of much use. Less precise, but more effecient, methods answer questions with useful answers.

Now these are just the hard sciences I'm discussing. The social sciences are often accussed of being the sciences of the painfully obvious.

Most of the humanities shares philosophies general reputation for irrelevance, for pretty much the same reason. One might object that the impracticality of the sciences are much different than the humanities. OK, but at least the way I do it, philosophy is impractical in both the humanities style and the sciences style, so its twice as irrelevant as anything else on the market. So there.

Of course, that may have been part of the letter writer's point.

music questions

Ok, so musicplasma, seems really cool as an experiment in exploring a large body of densely linked information, I really appreciate the interface etc. etc., but it really leads me to some questions about the inferences about music it seems to support:

why is Neil Young less six-degrees of seperation (and usually only one or two) from just about any other act?
why is Neil Young's orb so much larger than Bob Dylans?

I love Neil Young and all, but still.

What's worse, why is Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros so much larger than The Clash?

The answer is probably that the data source is derive from Amazon and ultimately from buying patterns and that buying patterns are driven by more than just popularity and quality. For instance, those artisits who've recently issued new releases will tend to be over weighted etc.

I really appreciate that Fountains of Wayne is so much larger than Counting Crows. This gives me hope.