2004-10-29 tea (utc+1)
�1. Purple haze all in my brain!
Hacking,
again:
There are cognitive scientists who argue strongly that arranging
hierarchies, taxonomies, temporal processes and the like, in the form
of tree-diagrams, may be in effect innate, perhaps there is even a
tree-diagramming module in the brain.
Don'cha know 'ss gonna drive me insane duh du duh duh DUUUHH duh du DUUUH!
�2. Suckers!
If you had to design an octopodular sucker, you might think of
combining a plumber's mate with a bicycle pump, isn't it?
And, modulo some biomechanical trivialities and a radically different
design methodology,
so
did Mrs. Nature.
But did you ever know such a discipline as biology for having names
for things? Memory are like a muscle, and biology tore mine so bad
it's never been the same since, and it wasn't all that similar before.
[via]
�3. Timing
I can get from work to home and back in well under an hour if I think
(at work) that I've left my wallet at home and find (at home) that I
haven't and it'd better be at work after all.
(It was.)
Trevlig helg!
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2004-10-29 11:53
Danish Kronprinsessmary
AKA Knudella desperately needs a new bonnet! Since the Danish Royle
Hice is presumably skint after sorting out prinsess A's divorce
settlement, this 'bladet is lauching an appeal to help out. She can't
even go to the sambafest, on account of not having a bonnet to wear!
(It would be a grave insult to wear the same bonnet to that, of course.)
Kronprins Frederik og Mary skal alligevel ikke til sambafest i Rio
de Janeiro.
Kronprinsfred and Knudella shall not go to the sambafest in Rio de
Janeiro after all.
When the beautiful prinsess can't go to the ball, the situation is surely desparate!
Checks - in any major zloty - to the von Bladet Estate, c/o the
Bank of Latveria, Latveria.
[Permalink]
2004-10-29 10:02
So. I was buying Locke's celebrated Y'unnerstand? second hand,
because that the meatspace shops didn't have it, and Amazon was all
"two or days" and not even working anyway.
And it's duly arrived, which is good. And it's abridged, which is
very very very very ungood. I screened out all the copies with
suspicious page counts, or which said "abridged", of course.
I am very unhappy.
Abridgement makes sense for something like Frazer's twelve-volume
Golden Bough, but squishing an 800-page book down to 300 - even
if the original was an incoherent sprawling mess - isn't an
"abridgement" it's a $!�*&ing mutilation.
[Permalink]
2004-10-28 15:47
�1. Exemplars of the wrongness of leaving out hyphens in compound
adjectives: notes towards a bestiary
Naomi
Chana contributes:
I think I'm pretty well raised
Is that "pretty well-raised" or "pretty-well raised"? The stress
would tell us, and so would a hyphen.
�2. Bogographical
After I was Timber'd,
my referral logs showed traces of Google searches for "Des von Bladet".
I like to think persons were hoping that, or at least checking if, I
was the kind of intellectual who held actual positions and wrote
actual books, and so on.
Accordingly, I have appointed myself to the Latverian
Academy of Sciences, and awarded myself the chair in Dialectical
Malfeasance and the Systemic Abuse of Reason at the State University
of the Free State of Trieste and Trst, and founded the (Degenerate)
Linguistique Circle of Wherever I Happen To Be.
I hold, also, visiting appointments in several other fictional
countries.
�3. Pretty!
I don't like to read philosophie in the Silly Engleesh, of course, but
Continuum Books know my fatal weakness: Snazzy design, foreign
philosophes, not grotesquely oversize and cheap as chips at a tenner a
go.
Here's Libidinal
Economy by Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard, but they also do Gadamer's Truth
Or Dare, Adorno, Derrida, Delusion Gorblimey and, um, Philippe Larkin's Jazz Writings.
The formula is a straight copy of Routledge's classics series,
but it is surprisingly hard to resist the suspicion that it's all a
plot to posthumously wind up Larkin by making him a stable mate of
Lyotard's Libinal Economy.
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2004-10-28 samwidge (utc+1)
Ian Hacking holds the chair in philosophie et
histoire des concepts scientifiques at the Coll�ge de France, and
his article in the LRB in the same issue as Jerry "Cannon" Fodor's
dreary and mean-spirited rant was the highlight, for sure.
Here, though, he is in the NYRB on Antonio
"Dee-Dye" Damasio's quest for Spinoza:
There is a big difference between tending to do something and
striving. A central heating system with the thermostat set at 68�
F. tends to return to that temperature as the winter night sets in. We
may in metaphor say that the furnace is trying hard to keep the house
warm, but we do not seriously think that any part of the system is
striving to do anything. The word "homeostatic," adopted in
cybernetics for feedback systems in general, originated in 1920s human
physiology to name self-regulation of body fluids, digestion, and
metabolism. One of the first examples was the way our bodies
maintain a constant temperature for the blood. We do not say that our
metabolic system endeavors to maintain stability, only that by means
of feedback controls it tends to a stable state. We do not
"anthropomorphize" our digestion any more than we anthropomorphize
furnaces with thermostats.
Minsky famously took a bunch of flak for insisting that thermostats
have a sort of mind, but we are closer to Minsky than Hacking on this
point. (Actually, Hacking is better and more subtle than I've made
out. I wish to read more of his stuff.)
Homeostasis, as Jaques Monod pointed out, implies teleonomy, and from
teleonomy to the attribution of a telos or goal is essentially
an ethical question: this was the theme of my monsterpost,
and I stand by it.
But we like Hacking anyway - he's solved the Engleesh/French dilemma
by being bilingually Canananadian, which is pretty clever, you have to
admit - even if we hate hate hate the Coll�ge de France's
website. (Try it - you will too.)
UPDATE: I don't like him anymore - the fragment of his
le�on inaugrale that's available online suggests that he's swiped my
entire bloody philosophy of science, and used a time-machine (I
assume) to back-date his account of it to a time before I'd even
thought of it!
[Permalink]
2004-10-28 morning (utc+1)
I need need need a copy of Locke's Essay on the Unnerstand so I
went to Amazon and the site was completely fubar. Coefficient of
zonkage 1.9 and rising, even.
So I grabbed the Project Gutenberg two-volume
set, just to have a something such as which is better than nothing,
and then it occured to me that Mr Locke's book, having been published
over three hundred (300) years ago might conceivably be available
second-hand.
Result! It's now on it's way,
and only the post can stop it. (If it isn't here tomorrow, though, I
won't get it till Monday, which is a week after I started looking.)
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2004-10-27 16:07
�1. Malheureusement, je pr�f�re le caf�
My poor forgetful
spicy brain!
Des chercheurs ont d�couvert une nouvelle propri�t� du th� : il
ralentirait le vieillissement des cellules c�r�brales. C'est une bonne
nouvelle pour le Royaume-Uni, qui en a fait depuis des lustres sa
boisson nationale.
Researches have discovered a new property of tea: it slows down the
aging of brain cells. Good news for the United Kingdom, whose
national drink it has long been.
All the links in that are back to the English press, if you can brave
the Frenchy-French.
�2. Of 'bladets
I don't tend to read Engleesh 'bladets, of course, except the BBC's
newsbladet (the Europe section, mostly) and occasional glances at the
Grauniad.
But I am in a state of imminence with respect to the Open University's An
Introduction to the Social Sciences: Understanding Social Change,
and over on the (evil proprietary software powered) online forums they
run, the advice to newbies is to get into the habit of reading the
posher sort of 'bladet. The posher sort, which is to have gone
without saying, of Engleesh 'bladet.
Oh dear. It had not (which is by no means to my credit) especially
occurred to me that a study of the social sciences was likely to
involve having to interface with that said society and particularly
its media.
�3. Ancient traditions, slightly c. 1850
From A Pocket Guide to Superstitions by Steve Roud, extracted
hos
Grauniad:
What we ended up with was a mass of material on the subject, which was
organised and analysed to provide data for informed judgements instead
of guesses. The first principle of the historical approach is that if
a superstition cannot be found before, say, 1850, the idea that it has
survived from an ancient fertility ritual or pre-Christian sacrifice
1,200 years before seems a bit far-fetched.
This seems sensible, but I think it is actually somewhat confused. In
particular, there is no reason to think the historical record has done
an especially good job of recording folk traditions: the things that
have been considered worth writing about - and the bare number of
persons equipped to write about them - are by no means universal
constants.
That people claim a tradition is ancient is no proof that it is, but
that the historical record doesn't mention it is no proof that it
isn't.
If it had existed underground for all that time it would probably have
changed beyond all recognition anyway (imagine a game of Chinese
whispers lasting for 1,200 years), so an examination of the modern
version is unlikely to tell us anything about the original.
Chinese whispers yerself, mate: lots of words in contemporary English
are descended from words (in Old English or other languages) that were
around than 1,200 years, for sure. Even in the absence of ancient
attestation, the comparative method of historical linguistics can
often recover the form, and have some idea about the meaning.
If there are no neogrammarians of superstition, then too bad (I think
Dum�zil
might have a thing or two to say about that, though), but what Roud
really ought to restrict himself to meaning is that contemporary folk
accounts of the origins of traditions should be taken with a
pinch of salt. The linguistique equivalent of which is that folk
etymologies are worthless, and that much is for sure.
[Permalink]
2004-10-27 11:48
John Peel has
died.
When I was a teenager in the suburbs in the '80s there was the
mainstream - a stream of now thankfully inconceivable mainness - and
then there was John Peel, from 10pm to midnight, at which point Radio
1 closed for the night.
Sometimes fashion followed him and very often it didn't, but that was
never the point - he played the new music, whatever the genre,
whatever the era, whatever he happened to like, and there was always
plenty of that.
Glut is the new scarcity, of course, and the kids today have
multi-gigabyte iPods stuffed with empee3s of who-knows-what from
who-knows-where in the inexhastible digital plenitudes, but you still want (I still want) a
trusted pairs of ears to sift it all, and the best there ever was
is no more.
[Permalink]
2004-10-27 09:59
The three (3) bookshops within walking distance of the
university have, between them, zero (0) copies of Locke's Essay
Concerning Human Understanding. (And Jerry "Canon" Fodor thinks
he's neglected, and unjustly at that!)
Certainly, what with all the fuss about the tercentenary, they must've all
sold out.
Also, did you know, that the von Bladet line was enobled by in the
15th century by Prins Emmenthal of Thuringia in recognition of the
service to his court of our distant ancestor, Albrecht ffon Plaget,
author of, in particular, the celebrated Grundrisse alchemisches
Schweinfl�gs?
[Permalink]
2004-10-26 samwidge (utc+1)
�0. Chris von Timber
daylights (under the orthonym of "Bertram") as a political
philosopher, and in the philosophy evening class devoted to Locke in
the tercentenary of his death, he was speaking last night on Locke's
political philosophy. He is by no means responsible for my wilful
misinterpetration of everything, however.
�1.
L�vi-Strauss famously described myths as machines for stopping time.
But is that not also the task or burden of philosophy? Is not the
Western philosophical tradition in fact the legacy of the scandalous
confrontation of myth with its own historicity?
�2.
Locke had a great deal to say about Natural Law, and in particular the
Right of Self-Ownership. I didn't really understand the arguments, so
I'll substitute a borrowed
grook:
Lille kat, lille kat,
lille kat p� vejen,
Hvis er du, hvis er du?
Jeg er sgu min egen
- Piet Hein
Pussycat, Pussycat,
Whose could you be?
Sir, I'm the kitty
Of no one but me!
(My unfaithful Englishing)
�3.
The interesting bit was Locke's invocation of a State of Nature. It
is interesting, in particular, because it makes no sense at all. I
will summarise with my usual care and attention:
- We begin with a state of nature, in which we hold the natural
right of self-ownership, and in particular derivative rights to
non-infringement of the former.
- Everyone has the authority to enforce these natural rights on
behalf of persons who may or may not be themselves
- In the case where the enforcer and the (alleged) victim of
transgression are the same, experience teaches that persons are apt to
be more than somewhat partial in both their accounts of facts and their
interpretations of principles
- In the absence of an impartial moderator, a cycle of retaliations
is likely
- This would lead to a state of war before you could say "He
started it!"
- So, a some kind of state is needed to arbitrate in disputes
The interesting thing about this is just how little sense it makes:
we get from a social condition that never actually existed to
a (possible) ideological foundation for society by means of a
development which necessarily doesn't occur in historical time.
This is, I claim (following, I claim, L�vi-Strauss), precisely the
structure of myth: a myth will typically begin in a kind of past whose
nature owes nothing to any notion of history; a crisis intervenes, and
its mythical resolution is the ideological justification for a social
practice.
�4.
I have learned from
experience, and I waited for a decent interval before appointing myself
First Questioner. Having not learned very much, I consider three (3)
seconds perfectly decent.
�5.
The question I asked was, approximately, how much does Locke's account
owe to myth, with a new kind of logic substituted for the concrete
logic of La Pens�e sauvage?
The question I meant to ask, of course, was rather: isn't
Locke's whole account precisely a myth itself, with this
substitution.
Which is to say, at this early point in modernity you can see the
relationship between philosophy, which is starting to acquire a new
conception of the role of reason in the wake of the rise of science,
and myth with unusual clarity.
�6.
There are two (2) ways of reacting to arguments purporting to offer a
set of principles serving as a legitimate foundation for society:
- The � Aristote, mon coll�gue � Oxford
� approach; we project the philosophe's work onto the screen of
now and debate the merits of the arguments. (There was a fair bit of
this last night, but I didn't pay much attention; sorry.)
- The anthropological approach: we look at the way different
societies have approached a problem, which we take here to be the
justification of a basis for society.
�6.
Radcliffe Richards's hermeneutic investigations into the Will of the
Legislative Spirit established to her satisfaction and ours that
ethical practice is not typically grounded in rational deduction from
accepted first principles; our tendentious
critique aimed to establish to our satisfaction (but not especially
hers) that she implicily accepts a view that we explicitly endorse:
namely that this is just as it should be.
�7.
We reject, which is to say - and we cheerfully acknowledge our debt to
Locke in this - any and all claims to the Unlimited Sovereignty of
Reason. We hold, instead, that Reason can only govern in so far as
its mandates are consistent with the welfare of the its subjects,
whose servant it properly is, and that where it attempts to legislate
otherwisely it may legitimately be overthown.
[Permalink]
2004-10-26 09:44
�1. L'�sprit d'escaliers is all very well, but when you don't get
past the entryphone, the temptation just to buzz again and add that
other thing becomes overwhelming, my exhausting research has
established. L'�sprit d'appareil de t�l�phone d'une entr�e
partag�e d'un immeuble is not going to catch on, I fear, despite
the best efforts of the Acad�mie
�2. When the creaking had gone on for longer than even the bounds of
pharmaceutical enhancement could account for, I got up and started
checking my own flat for possible sources.
�3. Yes, just a little tired.
[Permalink]
2004-10-25 15:38
�1. Habseligkeiten,
will German.
The German language isn't normally thought of as being pretty, but
that hasn't stopped the Goethe Institute from holding a competition
for German's most beautiful world. The winner?
Habseligkeiten. ["Belongings"]
Compared to the silver tongue of the French or the passionate tones of
Italian, it is perhaps little wonder that the aesthetics of German
often go unappreciated. But the Goethe Institute and the German
Language Council hoped to change that.
Do you have any idea how much Italian it takes before I am like
totally lay off of the vowels already, would ya?? It isn't, it
is fair to say, tanto mucho.
(story via David
TEFLSmiler, tack. )
�2. The self-presentations of single Swedish wimmins
They are or have:
- glad och positiv ("cheerful and positive")
- ha skinn p� n�san ("a mind of my own")
- b�gge f�ter p� jorden ("both feets on the ground")
- glimt i �gat ("a glint in my eyes")
To a frankly terrifying degree. Talk about the 'Wegian hive-mind...
�3. The self-presentation of single Engleesh wimmins
Over at Yahoo! personals!
UK! you can set the controls for the heart of post-graduacy, and
still find persons who can't manage a coherent written sentence.
�4. Ontological Austerity Underwhelmment
WVO "ABCD" Quine's aesthetique
quirks have had a profound influence on neo-scholasticisme:
[X]'s overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends
the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes, but
this is not the worst of it. [X]'s slum of possibles is a breeding
ground for disorderly elements.
This 'bladet doesn't share them. We like sprawling, incoherent but
liveable urban landscapes, and we like sprawling, incoherent but
Lebensweltlich ontologies.
[Permalink]
2004-10-25 12:00
�1. Remedial Flirtning Studies, slightly Swedish
From the advice for men:
S�g saker som: "Ber�tta mer." Kvinnor �lskar oftast
m�n som �r bra p� att lyssna, eftersom det n�stan �r exotiskt.
Say something like "Tell me more." Wimmins often love men who are
good at listening, since they are a rare and exotic breed.
�2. A prinsess in a hat!
The best
kind, for sure! (Although that hat is not growing on me, despite
repeated exposure. Maybe it's growing on Knudella, though?)
(link via David
TEFLSmiler, tack. )
�3. It's all about the ontogeny
Hurrah!
Human beings have far fewer genes than originally thought, a
consortium of scientists have claimed in Nature.
The researchers compared the draft human genome with the "gold
standard" version, published last year, to work out how they are
different.
They found the most up-to-date human genome contains only 20,000 to
25,000 genes - which is about 10,000 less than indicated in the draft.
Why is this good? This is good because the persons, only some of whom
are Stephen "Ping-Pong" Pinker, which roam the land insisting on
dedicated genetically-encoded cognitive models for nose-picking (in
men) and grotesque calendars of kittens acting "cute" (in wimmins)
need a lot of genetique real-estate for their absurd fantasies. The
less there is, the sillier they look.
[Permalink]
2004-10-25 not now, oops (utc+1)
The receipt from lunch at Mr Wetherspoons cow and ale emporium
yesterday gives the figure of 16.66 GBP, which is how much it cost.
Less explicably, the line underneath says "DANISH DKR 189,42".
Are you mocking me, Mr Wetherspoon, or do you keep all you customers
thuswisely informed of such matters, which to casual inspection lack
any claim to urgency.
[Permalink]
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