Free the Turtles

I got a question for you ...

2011-03-13T22:27:00.000-07:00

and, I know its a stupid question, but I'm trying to write this quickly while you're out of the room so you don't actually see me writing it. And my question is... what sort of milking stand should we build?

The first source that Google returns is Fia sco Farms. I've already saved the plans from that one. They REALLY look like the one's you've designed. But me, I have to follow directions. Most people can not do anything that even resembles improvisational carpentry. Hey, how did I manage to leave improv carpentry off my list of things about.

The second source is a an eHow page. It's pretty similar to the first one, but not quite as nice (it uses plywood, bah).

There are three different sources of plans here: http://www.woodworkersworkshop.com/resources/index.php?search=goat%20milking%20stand . I've only looked at the first one, same basic plan bit only intelligible to someone who's familiar with reading plans.

This guy on YouTube has a slightly different approach and there's another one here.

So, what do you think?

In case you couldn't read between the lines above; I really think that you're amazing, I love you and I eagerly anticipate the fun things we are going to do together.

This blog may yet be reborn

2007-07-16T18:02:00.000-07:00

For the most part, my blogging activities will be limited to my wordpress blog, and then what? However, I am going to be making an effort to be somewhat more serious about writing on that blog, my new fever dreams will appear here, even though I've already exported most of the older one's over there.

For example, do I really want to put my odd meditations on Traveller vs. D and D. After all, I'd like to keep what readers I have.

During hs, at least, I thought that Traveller was the clearly superior game. I've already blogged about this somewhat, an experience point system and levels forces a story arc onto a campaign and though it allows for some tragedy, its mostly a series of triumphs. Traveller, which had more static characters, allowed for more loss, tragedy and redemption.

The other day, it occurred to me that the experience point system encourages a sort of seriousness of roleplaying and so does the fantasy setting. One of the best moments of my hs campaign was when the party signed on as roadies, body guards and members of a rock band. This lead to a high energy sort of anarchic role play. Staying in character was pretty easy, when necessary, and there could be a nice combination of humor and dramatic tension. One of the more interesting characters was bronzed after death and mounted on the front of the band's space ship. That particular episode, I think, sums of the sort of fun we had and I can't really imagine getting involved in anything quite so wild while questing for the lost huzzamawhatsit of where ever.

2006-12-04T10:06:00.001-08:00

Am I wrong to be intrigued by this:

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/04/academic_warcraft_gu.html ?

Looking closer makes me think it might be a hoax.

Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, is coming

2006-11-21T08:36:00.000-08:00

or so says this blog:

http://www.yourmomsbasement.com/archives/2006/11/galactus_is_com.html

It's always refreshing to find a site that revolves around references to old comic books that strike me as obscure.

Your moms basement is now right up there with Fafblog (http://fafblog.blogspot.com/) as my source for reliable news.

In breaking news, blogger now supports labels, so this blog may well live a little longer.

God is One

2006-11-03T11:58:00.000-08:00

God is One
Originally uploaded by nycgeoff.

Have I ever mentioned that my friend Geoff is a genius? Take a look at his walking around NYC photoset. This shot is just one example.

this blog gets even slower

2006-10-07T17:53:00.000-07:00

I am going to be pretty much abandoning this blog in favor of a new one on wordpress.com. There are two reason for this; first I want to try wordpress, second, because I'd like to further seperate out the parts of this blog. While the new blog will be more traditional and more professional, though not necessarily academic and not related to any classes that I'm teaching, this one will continue to be the home for my more whimsical, nonsensical musings, such as those times when I have a nap dream about a decades old comic book story, or reflections on yesterday when I listened to Sun Ra "Space is the Place" and Parliament's Mothership connection in preparation for the season's premier of Battlestar Gallactica.

Yeah, if I ever get those reflections out, I'll be sure to put them here where they are almost guaranteed to go unread.

How sluggish newbies ruined the marathon. By Gabriel Sherman - Slate Magazine

2006-09-25T16:05:00.000-07:00

The thing I really love about
How sluggish newbies ruined the marathon. By Gabriel Sherman - Slate Magazine
, recently published on Slate, is the way that it allows people who haven't run any marathons, such as myself, feel superior to those who have. After 8 years of interscholastic cross country (high school and country) and intermittent training since then, I feel that I've got enough cred not to be considered a newbie at distance running. On the otherhand, I've never run a marathon. But see, I've always meant to run it the right way with appropriate speed and seriousness. (Note, a 4:00 marathon requires about a 10-minute mile, which is roughly my mile split when I run more than five miles.) Hence, it's not lack of dedication that's kept me from running the long race, it's love of the sport.

Convenient how that works.

2006-08-14T14:29:00.000-07:00

I thought I had finally found an appropriate hip hop style moniker, you know something to use in the online communities that trend young. Calchas seems esoteric and stuffy. "Mo' Fine" Yep, that seemed to have everything going for it, then I remembered that Moe was a Howard, Larry was the Fine.

Oh well, I suppose that anyone who's going to go looking for a 'hip hop style moniker' should probably stick with the stuffy and esoteric.

the big show

2006-03-29T13:45:00.000-08:00

This past December, I took a break from job searching at the APA to have dinner with an old friend, his girlfriend and his sister. After hearing my story about my mad networking at the conference, his sister, a comedian and radio personality, observed that "Academia sounds an awful lot like show business". The call backs and the rejections, the constant search for a steady gig, and the sneaking suspicion that none of this may be quite as important as we have to lead ourselves to believe.The recent Salon article, Confessions of a utility actor really does reveal some broad similarities between these professions. I had meant to write a paragraph or so about the differences, but this is my irresponsible blog.

The similarity comes from the extent to which professional aspiration is built into the very structures of each of these professions. Bull Durham has lead me to believe that minor league ball players refer to the 'big show', the glorious promise of major league ball that makes the grind worthwhile. The group of guys with radar guns that I see behind the net at every Akron Aeros game I've been to also give the impression that the minors are seen as not just another way to play baseball, like Little League is, but a set of activities which would become meaningless without the major leagues. There's an interesting parallel between steroptypical kids and the thoughtless images of people in the aspirational professions. Kids play ball to have fun, minor leaguers play to get into the big show. Kids play make-believe to have fun, actors act because they still believe that their big break is around the corner. Kids indulge their curiousity because it's fun, academics teach and write because ...

Now this was surprising

2006-02-28T14:33:00.000-08:00

You Are Austin

A little bit country, a little bit rock and roll.
You're totally weird and very proud of it.
Artistic and freaky, you still seem to fit in... in your own strange way.

Famous Austin residents: Lance Armstrong, Sandra Bullock, Andy Roddick

What American City Are You?

2005-09-26T15:15:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-27T18:48:00.000-07:00

I'm a Gryffindor!

2005-07-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

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?

2005-07-01T16:18:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-30T18:47:00.000-07:00

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)

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

2005-06-29T18:20:00.000-07:00

Just because I feel the need to share.

MIT Weblog Survey : Preliminary Results

2005-06-28T18:50:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-28T15:33:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-28T14:16:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-25T09:51:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-12T08:16:00.000-07:00

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"

2005-05-09T08:38:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-06T11:36:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-06T10:46:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-05-05T07:48:00.000-07:00

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

2005-03-07T13:12:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-23T11:14:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-22T14:22:00.000-08:00

About Ludicorp Research & Development Ltd.

Hunter S Thompson is beastly dead

2005-02-22T08:39:00.000-08:00

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,

2005-02-16T11:19:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-02-15T14:20:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-04T09:17:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-01-28T09:53:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-24T08:52:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-01-21T14:32:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-01-19T09:31:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-11T15:21:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-05T13:09:00.000-08:00

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.

The Wild Region in Life-History

2004-12-23T11:11:00.000-08:00

I don't know much about the wild-region, as discussed in the book The Wild Region in Life-History, but it is an interesting approach to a problem that I've been thinking about from a completely different direction.

See, it turns out that memories aren't simple things, that there isn't a single sort of memory or a single way of encoding memory traces. The distinction between episodic memory and semantic memory (and any other variety of non-episodic memory that a psychologist might investigate) are a distinction between those memories with traces in the medial temporal lobe and those which are encoded through other mechanisms.

If we accept a multiple drafts picture of the mind, there's not guarantee that there even are discrete physical tokens corresponding to the neural "engram", the physical memory trace. It may be the case that information, in the sense of causal processes orginating with the distal object of perception go there own ways once they get into the nervous system. Some bits about go off to the area looking to recognize spatial orientation, other parts go off to process colors, to serve as memory cues, to answer questions in concert on with other processes ("what's that smell?") or "Seeing the turkey" becomes a relatively distributed task, not distributed in the sense of not correlated to a physical structure, rather decomposed into a set of functions which correspond to what the various parts of the nervous system actually do (as oppossed to what we tend to think they do when we're doing whatever it is that we might be doing, such as looking at freshly roasted turkeys.)

There's always the functional answer, that what's human is what tends to do human things. Some form of this answer has been popular, even dominant, since the time of Aristotle. This answer is good for a lot of practical purposes, but the functions that we find important might not correspond to the one's that our brain is actually carrying out. It also opens an interesting discussion about the relative worth of various functions. Not all of the functions develop in the same way or at the same time. Depending upon what we want to consider the valuable aspects of human development, the critical functions could be formed either early in pregnancy or not for several years after birth. (A lot of what I'm thinking about here is motivated by a book I'm reading right now called The Development of Implicit and Explicit Memory by Rovee-Collier and others).

Which brings us to the question of "who are we?", the cognitive and physiological data is obviously of critical importance, so is the input of naive or folk phenomenology (what we get when studying phenomonological experience without using words like alterity), and more developed phenomenological theories as well. None of these however can be decisive. It would be nice if the anatomical evidence could provide knock down evidence to answer these questions but, for reasons I've been hinting at, there's no probably no "I" operating at a much lower level than my entire self. (In other words, there's no smaller "me" somewhere inside pulling my strings.)

I was recently having a discussion with someone about physicalism and after-death experience. (I am now convinced that these two topics have even less to do with each other than they may at first appear.) He didn't quite pick up on how odd this formulation was, since by dead, he meant not exhibiting life-signs (heart beat, brain functions), while the functions that are of most interest or value tend to be the one's that allow experiences, the traditional life-signs are just more easily observable functions that tend to correlate strongly with having experiences (rather having experiences tends to strongly correlate with having a heart beat). Of course, there's no evidence that there was any experience during the period of clinical death, just after the fact memories.

In any case, continuity of memory seems a critical part of self-identity. I don't care to examine this at the moment since it would require a consideration of Locke and Hume. In any case, this brings us back to the wild-spaces, a phrase taken from Merleau-Ponty. Once again, I'm reminded that I should get around to reading Merleau-Ponty. The anatomical evidence seems to converge with the historical debate, memory by itself is insufficient for telling our stories in a useful way, perhaps the wild region could be useful in this regard as well.

Just a thought.

2004-12-09T13:38:00.000-08:00

The fun part of writing my most recent post was imaging all the different ways in which it would be terrible to live a Little House lifestyle. The boredom. The threat of disease bandits and indians. The possible run ins with US Army forces trying to stop you from stealing the Indians land. Freezing to death, high infant mortality, the list goes on. The possibilities for snarky cosmopolitan humor at the expense of those who romanticize the frontier were many. After all, I can't help, life in a Little House was a mere step from the state of nature, nasty, brutish and short.

My impression of this state is built up as much from having read the books as it is from relating Hobbesian stereotypes about life outside the city. But then I ran out of steam. The last part of the entry, the part I'd really been looking forward to writing, just didn't entertain when I finally got around to it. What after all would be wrong with such a life? Sure, its not the most appealing way of life, and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Henry David Thoreau excepted, not the most conducive to either literature or philosophy (and Thoreau's shack wasn't that far from the settled town of Concord and today would be considered a relatively easy commute to Boston).

Of course, prison has traditionally been considered a rather productive environment for writers of all sorts. So, conduciveness to the life of the mind shouldn't be considered sufficient for a worthwhile form of life.

Maybe I've been infected too strongly by the Socratic bug, the unexamine life holds no appeal and a constant struggle for existence leaves little in way of time for examination, of an either philosophical fashion.

Moreover, I don't have any imaginative connection with the people of the frontier, the people who settled this country. I come more from those people who Howard Dean refers to built America. My forebears left Ireland and the thought of shoving the family into another two room shack to risk starvation would have seemed like defeating the whole purpose of emigration. That, and holy days of obligation were probably a serious inconvenience on the open prairy. I romanticize the tribalisma and corrupt politics of those who came before me in the same way that the descendants of the settlers look back fondly on the struggle to displace indigenous Americans.

Post-message: now there's a nice contrast, the people who settled this country (enamored of the frontier, agricultural background, rural, suspicious of large organizations) and those who built it (the teeming masses, industrial background, urban, at least acclimated to large scale organizations such as trade unions, governments or the Catholic church), to describe the red-blue divide. Of course, it's just as facile as any other simple division.

How Things Should Be Revisited

2004-12-08T11:16:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking more and more about the conservative student who bemoaned that the problem with the world as it is is that thing as not the way they should be. The more I read about the election and the distribution of red and blue counties, the more I see that he's not alone, not at all.

The family needs to be fundamental unit of society, small government is necessary for the family to perform its appropriate functions. Unions are unnecessary. Large corporations are a necessary evil. (I can't see anyone whose primary focus is hearth and home finding much sympathy with something as impersonal as a multi-national conglomerate.)

The point seems to be that the family, working as a unit, is best able to secure the goods to its members, including a relevant sort of freedom. My rough (ie unsupported) conclusions indicate that this position is most commonly held in rural (ie red) counties. I've also seen it described as the position shared by the people who founded this country, by which I think they mean the settlers of various generations. This is the group that tamed the wilderness, settling wherever they could clear their own bit of land to satsify their needs. Quite literally the family would be the most relevant unit of operation. This group contrasts with later generations of immigrants who left Europe for the more familiar context of the cities.

The rural counties have an obvious sort of appeal for someone who'd like to emulate these values and the descendants of the frontier settlers who haven't rejected these values would most reasonably be found in the red counties.

This particular approach reminds me strongly of the Little House books. Pa didn't need any social security. Retirement was an alien concept anyway. In traditional societies, offspring are security in old-age. Here's one more way that contemporary western cultures break with traditional ways of living.

Regulatory government is the death of the Little House approach to living. Environmental regulation prevents the most effecient forms of farming, large scale projects lower the entry costs to the frontier too much ...

But the more I think about it, the less appealing a Little House life seems. The isolation, the crude ammenities, not to mention the occasional brutality and lack of good coffee make all make me glad that I don't live on the frontier.

www.ComicCovers.com - Your source for weekly comic book cover scans.

2004-11-24T13:37:00.000-08:00

www.ComicCovers.com - Your source for weekly comic book cover scans. ahh, this is heaven, and very useful incase I have another dream inspired search for comic book covers.

I have two concerns about this:

1. considering my post earlier this week on hypergnosia, there may be some reason to doubt my grip on reality.

2. the database contains 50,000 covers. Considering that I have, conservatively, owned 1,000 comics over the years and read more, it would seem that 50,000 isn't that many.

EDIT: and they don't have the cover to the immortal Devil Dinosaur. This says something about me, and its something I didn't really want to know.

Hypergnosic Moments

2004-11-22T09:19:00.000-08:00

This morning I'm having a hypergnosic moment that I'm trying to break.

For many, a hypergnosic moment is when the implicate order of the universe is revealed and the oneness of being is made apparent.

For me, a hypergnosic moment is when I make the comic book guy character from the Simpson's look well adjusted. In this particular case, I set out to take some notes on my "thinking about technology", by which I mean "trying to have something relevant and interesting to say". So, while I was trying to get up the courage to continue writing my paper on
the use of blogs in a philosophy class . This lead me to be reading a some other books speculating on technological development, specifically K. Eric Drexler's book Engines of Creation. The book consists of many weak analogies, appeals to ignorance and irrelevant anecdotes. But one of those anecdotes really set me off.

He described how Douglas Lenat entered of his heuristic experiment, EURISKO, into the Trillion Credit Squadron competion in 1981. I was familiar with Lenat's work but not with EURISKO and I had managed to miss the Traveller connection.

Traveller was what I did in high school, probably instead of both homework and dating. I don't say it kept me off drugs because the biggest dealer in my high school was a regular member of my group. I may have felt a strong social pressure not to experiment with drugs because this individual put a higher value on his role-playing games then his drugs, at least until sometime senior year. Traveller had many cool features that would seem fresh, even cutting edge today. Two features in particular: it was modular, you could use just a core set of rules, or any of a large number of independent supplments (far more modular than Dungeons & Dragons ever was, modules or no) and it didn't have an experience point system. The first was great for supporting organic roleplaying groups who could fill in their own galaxy with either a little or, a great deal, of detail already established for them. Later variations of the game became more integrated and more dependent on a continuing backstory and lost my interest as a result. The no experience system was a great feature because it took away the pre-programmed plot that most games have. Instead of a constant upwards arc of power and competence, the players could lose what they had gained, be rich and powerful one moment, impovrished the next. It made for more interesting interaction since there was a greater range of valuables to be gained or lost.

Trillion Credit Squadron was a supplement to the game which focused on the space-ship design rules. In this variation, the players were each given a trillian credits to design a fleet which would then compete with other fleets players had constructed. My own group was pretty heavily role-playing, rather than strategy, oriented, so the number crunching aspects held little appeal and I was left to explore this dimension of the game on my own. But I guess that it was something of a big deal at some point in 1981.

Drexler makes this game out to be a futuristic naval simulation. This set me off on the trail of how this particular game was understood by people since. This became a trek which offended my nerdiest instinct for purity, but it also seemed to continue unfolding until I found that I had grasped a thread was closely enough tied into the story of how the 80s and 90s unfolded that it literally lead anywhere.

BANG!

Hypergnosia.

I'm beginning to come down now, I've started to concentrate on those details that might help me get some work done.

Apparently, Lenat's program did make at least one interesting variation on a centuries old naval planning problem.

First conclusion, there is a significant overlap between the set of people writing about artificial intelligence and those who have experience with early 80's science fiction themed role-playing games. Second conclusion, spelling check has not solved everything as "traveler" (with one l) and "trillion" (with an o) have both been pretty common in sites I came across while developing this entry. On closer examination, this is probably because English spelling is not quite as standardized as we have often been told.

Why use good design when bad design sells better.

2004-11-12T13:08:00.000-08:00

"Soapbox: Why Virtual Worlds are Designed By Newbies - No, Really!" by Richard Bartle is really interesting, if only because of his unstated premise. Bartle's argument is that the design of virtual worlds, or other on-line games, is filled with poor designs. His argument is that these choices are demanded by players. That is, people tend to play games which incorporate certain design mistakes.

So why would anyone want to design that didn't incorporate these poor design decisions, after all, that's what your customers want?

The answer has to be, because he wants to build the best virtual worlds that he can, judged by his own standards.

I find this refreshing.

Kenan Malik's debate with Steve Fuller on the Sokal hoax

2004-11-08T11:39:00.000-08:00

Kenan Malik's debate with Steve Fuller on the Sokal hoax A link to go with my last post.

on the other side of the circle

2004-11-08T11:22:00.000-08:00

The conservative movement seeks to change science curricula by opening them up to considering alternatives, Intelligent Design and more extreme variants of creationism. In doing so, they put question the status of science as a unique method of truth production. Competing "narratives", such as the Genesis narrative could be considered.

This has struck me as a surprising variety of relativism. Even more so since, it seems to at least superficially lead to alliance of the conservatives and the anti-science left such as those who would argue that in post-colonial days, the hegemony of western systems of knowledge needs to be broken up.

While surprising, this parallel makes some sense, American conservatism, in many ways, reflects the interests of, and gives voice to, groups in American culture which are all but looking at the rest of the culture as if they were forces of some colonial power.

the day after the day after

2004-11-04T07:38:00.000-08:00

It's raining pretty hard, I can't see much activity over at the construction site, but I can hear something, so there must be a lot of work going on.

The world shows no signs of imminent doom, but its certainly no better than it was 48 hours ago either.

Election Day 3

2004-11-02T13:44:00.000-08:00

A vote mob representative called me about an hour ago to let me know that one of my students might be late for my 5:30 class. He'd apparently already been in line for an hour. I certainly can't fault the student, its seems that he'd set aside three hours for voting, which is a reasonable amount of time.

Now the student in question is pretty engaged with the class and a good sense of humor, I wouldn't put it past him to have the volunteer call-in just because he could, when they first put phones on planes people would call home just to say "guess where I am".

Still that's a long line, and that's real news from somewhere close to the front lines.

The bamboo is still doing well. Night is falling, I can't really see much of the hill at this point. You know that's where the national guard stood back in 1970?

Election Day 2

2004-11-02T10:26:00.000-08:00

The Bamboo plant is still watered.

When my friend Geoff came to help out with the election, he brought me his copy of Black & White , I think that may replace the Radiohead CD.

The construction crew made it back from lunch, but its raining now, so they're not doing much at the moment.

The hill is still there, I can see parts of now that they knocked down the old dorms, my view will disappear again when the new ones go up.

Election Day

2004-11-02T08:50:00.000-08:00

I'm situated high above the intensely contested battleground state of Ohio, my extensive readership no doubt awaits my insightful analysis of what's occuring here.

Well, the sky is grey, the crew at the construction site across the street seem to have taken a break for lunch and my bamboo plant has been watered. Also, I'm listening to Kid A, but mostly out of apathy. Maybe I'll put on Boards of Canada a little later.

Meanwhile, somewhere just over the next hill, the world teeters on the abyss. I just read electoral-vote.com 's just a little too speculative account of what could happen if the election goes back to the courts and Rehnquist isn't healthy to preside.

More as the day develops. My prediction: the bamboo will have ample water and Boards of Canada won't make it into the rotation.

POW 1

2004-11-01T09:40:00.000-08:00

Last week, the philosophy department here at Kent State held a POW,
short for Philosophy on Wednesday, that was a round-table discussion
of philosophical issues that might be relevant to tommorrow's
election. Prof. Norman Fischer had recruited two members of his
political philosophy class to present on each side. The student
prepresenting for the Democrats was a true representative of the
wonkish wing of the party, all policies and numbers. While I think we
need more of this attitude, the conservative did make a more
interesting subject of study.

He was interesting mostly because I had to work to understand what he
was getting at and how his positions could be interpreted as a
coherent position. So I reconstructed a Conservative from the signs
and clues that I could find in his speech. This was a lot like
reconstructing the achievements of a lost civilization from bits or
pottery. Hence, I won't name my subject, since this reflection isn't
really about, its a reconstruction of sorts.

He was obviously preplexed by the world and the state in which he had
found it. Some of his confusions could have been easily corrected,
perhaps they were even affected for the sake of sharpening his
message. For instance, he expressed great surprise that a blue collar
region shouldn't be conservative in nature. Of course, the reasons why
blue collar workers don't flock to conservativism are pretty clear.
Among other reasons, American industrial workers have benefitted
greatly from union membership and American conservatism has not
enthusiatically embraced the unions. The coolness of that relationship
isn't mysterious either. The unions have often been of as the leading
edge of socialism, which still haunts the sleepless nighttime hours of
many on the right.

My conservative subject had a deeper confusion. Most of his arguments
were supported by constrasting either the current situation or a
Democratic proposal with a well-developed sense of "the way things
should be", as if the justification for his vision should have been
entirely obvious. I think he was confused that others couldn't see
that his imagined America was the true America.

He had difficulty providing other principle on which either this
vision or the road to could be justified. When an audience member
suggested that conservatives tend to utilize principles of individual
autonomy and responsibility, he jumped on this as an important
principle, but I don't think that he would have come up with it
himself. "The ways things should be" didn't seem to have much room for
a robust sort of individual freedom.

He's going to need some decent principles to develop his position so
that others could see it as well as he could. Even accepting the
explicitly stated principles of "the way thing should be" would not
work to bridging the gap. (Unless of course, one were to accept the
reliance on traditional religion in just the manner that he meant it.)
The typical liberal isn't a fan of huge, monolithic, or overbearing
goverment or really of any significant weakening on limits on the
application of power. Most liberals I know place a pretty heavy on the
limited and deliberate use of power.

Since they've already come up, unions act to insure that the power of
corporations (or other employers) is appropriately limited, and unions
do it while minimizing government exercise of power. The government
could fill the same role, but no one really wants that. Of course, a
conservative could argue that the market is the appropriate regulatory
mechanism for wages. This would, however, be evidence that they simply
weren't paying attention. Assuming labor is a resources just like any
other, which it isn't, aggregation leads to effeciency, and is
unavoidable in any but a tightly controlled market. Unions are a
market-driven solution.

How "things should be" without large-scale goverment or strong
unions. One could imagine it to mean power concentrated in large
corporate interests acting without significant limits or balance. I'm
not so sure that my conjectured conservative subject would agree that
that was his vision of "the way things should be". There were definite
signs that family and religion should provide the structures within
which people would be able to lead orderly and meaningful live. This
idyll constrasts sharply with a socialist idyll in which comradeship
and goodwill would cement and energize the bounds of community at a
much more abstract level than that of family or parish. They are both
similar however, in that bonds of affection and loyalty are considered
the skeleton on which a culture is constructed.

The democracy envisioned by the framers did not involve a government
of the scope of the current American government. They also didn't
envision the telegraph, let alone the airplane, superhighway,
computer, etc. These larger scales of organization are not things from which
we can effectively back away.

Marx was on to something when he observed that the the means of
production determine patterns of social organization. One thing he
did not foresee was that the means of production would not remain
static at the stage of the early industrial revolution, they would
change and change and change again. The socialist state becomes just
as irrelevant as a Jeffersonian Democracy because they have been left
behind by the increasing scale, complexity and plasticity of human
organization.

In the case of "how things should be", the idyll would require finding
our way to a world in which there were no large scale organizations
that were not firmly entrenched in smaller, more local, stable
structures. Family and church, without union, government or
multi-national, clearly with no organization coordinating human social
interaction somehow higher than the nation-state, seems the core of
the conservative vision. However, it doesn't seem any more attainable,
or even approachable than the socialist one.

How should things be? Well, I haven't a clue, which is part of why I
had to try to get into the mindset of my conservative subject. What
does seem clear is that the balanced and deliberative limitation of
power allows for human thriving. The large the scale on which power
can be exercised, the large the scale at which the limits and balances
must be pursued.

What has caused this new age to dawn?

2004-10-28T08:18:00.001-07:00

Three years ago, I moved away from Massachusetts. At the time, Eastern Massachusetts, from which I mean Worcester and eastwards, was filled with complaints and moaning. I have a hard time imagining Worcester without a spirit of discouragement. Not me, I like the place and have many happy memories, but the city itself.

Part of the problem was the sort of resignation that comes from rooting for teams that never win. The Patriots had never won the Superbowl, and it had been 1918 since the Red Sox last won the World Series. Perhaps, you had heard this before.

But then I moved away, and everything changed.

They're never going to let me back.

Now we just need one more win.

What has caused this new age to dawn?

2004-10-28T08:18:00.000-07:00

I moved away from Massachusetts a little over three years ago. When I left, Eastern Massachusetts, by which I mean from Worcester in though I can remember a time when I felt like Worcester was deep in the contintental wastes of America, was a land of complaint and sorrow. The Patriots had never won a Superbowl and Red Sox had last won a world series in 1918. Perhaps, you were aware of this latter fact. Since then, things have changed.

They're never going to let me come back.

2004-10-22T13:23:00.000-07:00

You know that Hunter S. Thompson article I mentioned yesterday? In there he says that Bush is worse than Nixon.

That's sort of like Ahab saying that Moby Dick wasn't really that much of a whale.

Fear and Loathing

2004-10-21T17:47:00.000-07:00

Here it is, my secret life's ambition that I share with no one, by which I mean anyone who'll listen to me, I want to able to write like Hunter S. Thompson. See RollingStone.com: Politics - Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004 Tell the truth, even the ugly parts, especially the ugly parts. He may not be as on as he was back when he was writing about Nixon, but he's certainly a lot more on than he's been since before Clinton was president. with the single exception of his euology for Nixon. Which, for whatever reason, does not seem to be freely available on the web.

And its not the profanity or the ad hominem that I'm talking, it's the honesty.

John Stewart pulled it off last week on his cross-fire appearance. (The link probably won't work, but then you've probably see it already.)

And by "truth", I mean speaking sentences intended to convey accurate information. Now, what accurate information means turns out to be what I spend my time trying to write about, which is a lot duller than pointing out that the rot in this administration is so bad that calling them liars doesn't work, you have to be capable of acknowledging the truth in order to lie.

It also makes me part of the problem.

Salon.com Life | Curses!

2004-10-15T13:17:00.000-07:00

Since I'm bloggin Salon today anyway, I should note that what Ken Burns says in this article,
Salon.com Life | Curses!, is correct. It's in the waking moment that I'm aware of being a Red Sox. And it was almost Christmas last year before that particular moment of the day stopped being rather unpleasant for me.

Team America: World Police

2004-10-15T13:12:00.000-07:00

Nobody has ever accussed me of having too subtle or sophisticated a sense of humor. If I'm the only one laughing, people tend to describe the moment as "stupid". Needless to say, I enjoy "South Park" andI enjoyed reading Heather Havrilesky's interview with Trey Parker or Matt Stone, if for no other reason, the their great parting line: And it's no big deal. If you don't want to vote, you don't have to. Fuck that vote or die shit. I hate that.

Reading that I was immediately struck by the guitar lick for a speed metal song entitle "vote or die". Its a good thing I have absolutely no idea how to play the guitar or to otherwise express said guitar lick, so the dar thing is going to have to stay locked in my head forever. There's no need for you to ever listen to it.

2004-10-08T15:53:00.000-07:00

Emacs, AucTex, MikTeX, Aspell.

I got all the odd GNU stuff that I use working well on my new windows system in less than 2 days not the weeks that its taken me on previous installations. I can't say that it Microsoft was responsible for this feat either. Did you know that they finally got rid of the autoexec.bat? It sure took them long enough. The funny thing is that they didn't fix sysedit so that it would stop trying to open this now non-existent file. I had a moment of panic until Geoff clued me in. Not only couldn't I set the HOME variable, but it sure looked like I had deleted a formerly important file.

Why am I posting this? Well, I'm pretty sure that no one's reading this blog, so it makes a fine spot to pat myself on the back for this little achievement. It's the sort of thing that seems pretty trivial to anyone who can understand it and arcane to everyone else.

Consider Run-DMC: "It's Tricky"

2004-10-06T10:18:00.000-07:00

Take a look at New York CiTay's - Run-DMC: "It's Tricky" and pay special attention to the second chorus. Where the English phrase "It's tricky" repeats many times, the German translation uses

"Es ist knifflig (Was ist es, DMC?)
Es ist kompliziert
Es ist schwierig ", translating "tricky" three different ways.

The German translation adds nuance to the song, or at least semantic variety.

I find that odd.

More on Ireland

2004-09-19T15:14:00.000-07:00

The only sign that all was not right in the Republic was watching an armored car make a visit to the bank next to the hotel.

The first thing you saw was a group of large men with very impressive looking guns, not the pistols you might see on American bank guards, taking up positions on the sidewalk. Only when they had the area secured did the armored car even come into view and it was followed by another vehicle. Armored car transactions are taken seriously. I recall from growing up near Boston, that the IRA, or former members of said organization on the run in the US, would occasionally rob an armored car in the area.

Another was just how green everything was. I know, people go on about how green Ireland is, but its still surprising. The one that really got me was the hay fields. Here in OH, if you see a field covered with baled hay waiting for pickup, the field itself will be the same straw color as the hay itself. Even the word "straw" is used for that color because that's the color a field of mowed hay usually here. But in Ireland, the hay fields had already seen another generation of grass start coming up, so they were green.

Maybe it never gets so hot that the grains are burnt out, or so cold that they really stop growing. In Ohio, or in Massachusetts for that matter, you get both extremes.

Back from Ireland

2004-09-10T07:36:00.000-07:00

The Ireland trip was a much more wonderful experience than it even seemed at the time.

One night the hotel smoke alarm went off at around 3 a.m., we were the only ones in the entire hotel who thought that it might be a good idea to leave our room. (I believe that J was the only child in the hotel, so that might have something to do with it.) When we got down to the lobby, the night staff gave us a look like he was surprised to see anyone and asked "is there a fire?"

He later came out and explained that 7 or 8 guys had holed up in room with "a great many bottles, if you know what I mean" and started smoking. When he went up to check on them, they seemed unaware that the loud alarm noises had anything to do with them.

In retrospect, this experience seems like a lot of fun. I'm sure it didn't so at the time.

2004-08-31T16:54:00.000-07:00

the other blog doesn't seem to be working

Mission of Burma

2004-08-26T09:07:00.000-07:00

I used to listen to Mission of Burma a lot. But I wasn't cool enough to listen to the band back when I should have. Instead I had to wait until a friend of a friend left a cassette copy in my car. The tape had most of the songs form "signals, calls and marches" on it, but I'm sure it also had "Academy Fight Song", so either that song was added to a release of the EP back in the days before CDs, or else this was tape that someone had put together themselves. I vaguely remember audience sounds at some point so it may have been a boot leg. Given the vagueries of memory, and the fact that this was an audio cassette played in a pretty crappy automobile sound system its tough to say exactly what I was listening to, but it really made mornings on the Mass Pike more bearable.

I was sad when that tape broke, and I didn't have much opportunity to listen to MoB much until recently. Yes, of course, I was surprised by their brilliance, but by much else as well. I was surprised by the extent to "post-punk" actually meant something.

The music I've been reading about has been praised so much for its "Pop constructions" and the sonic nature of the music. Think about any "Beastie Boys*" album, the most sophmoric lyrics can be ignored because they're tossed in front of interesting noise.

MoB, aren't old school punk, at least in the sense that everyone has learned to play their instruments and the sounds are carefully constructed. There's still a raw quality, but that's been carefully constructed.

(I once covered a specialty Punk radio show for a friend of mine who was passed out. I knew he took pride in running a good show so I kept a careful log of everything I played, and I constructed the show out of samples of his old play lists. Turns out the log was worthless since the track lists on the album sleeves didn't correspond to the track list on the albums. In any case, it was a good thing no one from the FCC tuned in.)

"New Nails" for instance, "There once was a special book it got changed by fascist creeps". All your Marilyn Manson nihilist posturing, or even Beastie Boys new age political awareness style fades in comparison to the anger that fuels MoB rebellion. There's more to be said here, but I'm not going to say because I lack the bands courage.

*legal disclaimer: nothing in this post should be taken as evidence that I own any Beastie Boy's music, despite my obvious committment to "kicking it old school".

Blog this gives me weird titles.

2004-08-19T15:01:00.000-07:00

jay is-jay bibby's rants and raves of technology and games, very cool. DIY games are cool. More on games later. Anyone who reads this is probably already fascinated with games, so you don't need a warning.

When people bring up Dungeons and Dragons around my wife, she says that she got ahead by marrying the dungeon master.

You have been warned.

The Direction of Time

2004-08-18T15:51:00.000-07:00

I'm right now reading Hans Reichenbach's The Direction of Time, the section on the "The sectional nature of Time Direction" is breath-taking in its imaginative scope. If postive time direction is defined as the direction in which entropy increases, and thermodynamic processes are random, then the positive direction of time will change at different "times". However, a time sequence can still be determined (that is, thermodynamics will give us a unique ordering of events, but not a consistent postive direction).

Reichenbach goes further, since human life could not survive in the peaks and troughs of entropy values, there is no possibility of experiencing time as flowing in the other direction and no possibility for contradicting experience.

This is not as detailed as Reichenbach's preceding arguments, and the conclusion itself is such an excessive speculation that, had it been presented along, I would have put the book and not come back. I prefer my science fiction with characters and plot. However, the arguments preceding this are so carefully constructed and the methods of analysis so interesting in the book, that I can afford to really enjoy Reichenbach's moments of imaginative freedom.

Of course, Reichenbach doesn't leave the apparent paradox in play. Reference to non-deterministic laws might be useful in figuring out which way the future lies, but more importantly, the various branching processes that we encounter in everday life are always increasing in entropy, so that must be the positive time direction, those temporal regions in which time might flow in the opposite direction are so distant as to not exist.

more signals

2004-08-13T11:31:00.000-07:00

I'm reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I'd sworn to read it after reading All Tommorrow's Parties, but then I'd promised that I wasn't going to read that after reading Virtual Light. This one though is well worth reading. This novels influence can be seen in my recent posts.

Signals do arise from the noise, that's the odd thing.

Signals arise in three different ways:

1. spurious signals, everything from paranoid delusions to various procedures for finding patterns that are really only reflections of the procedure (from reading tea leaves on)

2. genuine signals, appropriate inferences on available evidence leading to deeper knowledge. Looking as the movements in the sky and inferring that there are planets, that move in regular orbits and are explained a certain. Looking at the movement of a speck of pollen and inferring the molecular nature of matter. But not only scientific truths. Listening to person's speech and learning things about that aren't explicitly stated, where they're from, who they've spoken to and so on.

Whenever I get into the sorts of moods about how surprising it is that the world makes sense, someone tries to deflate my euphoria. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and if the deflators point is that I'm engaged in irresponsbile navel-gazing, well I have no defense. More frequently someone will object that order of either sort is not surprising because there are human minds around that are very well adapted for recognizing patterns. In fact, over-adapated for pattern recognition, which accounts for spurious patterns.

This strategy frustrates me. It's particularly frustrating when Peircean distinctions are used to deflate my mood. "Its simple," they explain "Every symbol means something for someone under some interpretation. There's no mystery because patterns only emerge for somebody."

Time to reread Peirce.

What is a person? "A Person is nothing but a symbol involving a general idea" (as he says in "Man's Glassy Essence" refering back to "Some Consequences"). Even more than being a natural system that can detect order, a person is a naturally ordered system. While the physical details of how the brain works still need to be worked out in their entirety, it's pretty clear that this is all something we do with our brains.

Explaining the human ability to recognize signals and patterns is equivalent to explaining the existence of signals and patterns through the existence of a special sort of signals and patterns (those that occur in brains). This come real close to circularity. Either the mind is something other than a naturally occuring patterned activity, or the mind can not be used in a non-circular way to explain why there are symbols, patterns or signals.

This dichotomy isn't really a challenge to any naturalist. Just explain the mind as a information process in turn explained physiologically. Thus, the third sort of symbol to be explained is

3. mind

signals in the noise

2004-08-09T13:22:00.000-07:00

There are hidden messages. Some of these are guerrilla art, intentional acts of expression hidden in plain view. Some are the simple coincedental juxtaposition of informative elements into a psuedo-message. Do the latter count as messages? Guerrilla art instances that I've been thinking of recently are:

Screaming baby, There was a sign, maybe a route number or instructions to pedestrians. Smallish for a traffic sign. But the original sign had been covered with a poster of a screaming babies face. The poster was the same size as the original poster and the same black and light grey.

That Stupid Pencil. No link. This was a stunt that some people at my undergraduate institution* tried where they drew pictures on the boards of empty classrooms and took out classified adds in the paper which featured a cartoon pencil sharpened to a nub and a sentence like "It's coming." The problem was that the cartoonist in school paper had been using the same sigil as a signature for over a year. Anyone observant enough to notice their guerilla message had probably also noticed the cartoon. When I asked about it, I was told there was no big event planned, it was just to get people talking, but the stunt was never that interesting.

Andre the Giant. This campaign had some advantages: Andre the Giant is cool, and the posse vibe simultaneously intimidates and offers promise of belonging to a secret clique. Some people still look at me oddly when I mention that "Andre the Giant has a posse." If you've never heard of Andre's posse, then how did you get here.

Ana Ng. The song that really turned me to They Might Be Giants. I had appreciated them before I heard this song, but only because of their novelty flavor and because I had friends who liked them. I can remember a time when MTV would show this video back to back with Rockit by Herbie Hancock. MTV was cool once. When was the last time they put anything by a veteran of the Miles Davis Quartet in heavy rotation?

There's an important difference between Andre the Giant and Ana Ng. In the first case, some guy who sells t-shirts has conspired to hide his messages in the environment, while in the second, the messages arise on their own.

* refering to your "undergraduate institution" immediately identifies me as one of those people who aren't to be trusted.

Legal Reasons

2004-08-05T15:40:00.000-07:00

Tim Wu, posting on Lawrence Lessig's blog gives a very cogent example of disciplined reason giving. This is reason in the thin sense, there's no need to refer to a substantive faculty to make sense of this entry. That's nice because it doesn't put any undue burden on other sorts of theories that might be contiguous to your legal reasoning.

Also, I agree with the general point that Wu is trying to make, and he makes it well.

2004-08-03T15:10:00.000-07:00

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. -- Hanlon's Razor

Bumpersticker wisdom fails to satisfy. I find treatises by talking dogs and the Hulk far more entertaining. Moreover, I tend to try to think through the consequences and has so far each bumper sticker tends to lead to consequences other than the initial, surface meaning. The possible exception is "Sound fiscal policy doesn't fit on a bumpersticker."

I'm not judging you, I'm judging me

2004-08-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

This is not my first journal, not by any means. I have 12 volumes kept in a closet at home, I keep volume 14 in my book bag wherever I go. One volume dissappeared when my bag was stolen in 1997.

This is also not my first expirement of publically displayed writing. I wrote a weekly column for the Stonehill College Summit from 1988 until 1991. This column, Meditations, was distinquished both for making a long string of deadlines on time, perhaps even a record, and generating exactly 0 letters to the editor, thus making it, word for word, the least controversial thing published in the paper, microscopic copyright notifications and straight news stories about new selections in the cafeteria not excepted.

I don't like thinking about the consequences of these observations.

The True Cyberpunks

2004-08-02T11:26:00.000-07:00

I'm finishing Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, its sort of fun, a through back to the days when the likes of Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling were writing something like straight science fiction. Gibson reports, I think on behalf of that cohort of writers, that the cyber-punk movement had to end because the future had arrived and it was much stranger than he had imaginged. Morgan doesn't feed any obligation to make his world any stranger or more inventive than the real world. He doesn't even hold up a mirror to the way the world. The Takeshi Kovacs books give voice to violent fantasies without having to really consider the consequences of that violence.

One of Moran's important characters is a "data rat", a skill hacker, part merc, part detective. Similar characters existed in the classic cyber punk works. These skilled professional were at the center of the action. Its not too much of a stretch to suppose that they were the characters with whom the reader was supposed to be able to best identify. Their abilities analyzing data gave them both power and freedom. The emerging culture surrounded the internet, at least in the early days of the boom, were energized with this sort of promise. And, to a surprising extent, the technology paid off on this promise. At least to the extent that it's inspired the above writers to move into contemporary and/or historical fiction.

But what about the promise of the data-runner. I remember the thrill that I got when I first developed some skills in teasing out hidden facts and discovering unseen patterns in the vast web of electronic data. There was a definite rush. I was working as a part-time proof reader/ copy editor. I bet fact checkers get the same rush. I bet mercs and detectives have more important things to do with their time. This sort of character has elevated the lowest position in the traditional publishing hierarchy to that of super-powered noire anti-hero.

I suppose it shouldn't be suprising that people in this position should find themselves elevated in genre fiction. What else is a struggling novelist going to do to buy food before selling that first novel?

Title

2004-07-27T11:59:00.000-07:00

Other possible titles for thes blog were:

Silence, Exile and Cunning
This Machine Kills Fascists
That's When I Reach for my Revolver

What these title all have in common is that they make me sound like I'm 22 and think I know what I'm talking about.

I chose "Free the Turtles" because its something I came up with when I was 16, depressed, sleep deprived and completely full of myself. Since I came up with this myself during a crazed moment, I can be reasonably sure that the reference is as inscrutible as possible.

I have another blog, where I write in professional persona for a particular audience. Here, I write what I really think. Also, maybe I can fool myself into thinking that I'm 22 and I know what I'm talking about. Either of these would be good feelings.