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.