Thursday, November 15, 2007
Announcement
As basically anyone can tell at this point this is a dead blog. But if people are curious I'll be heading over this way and posting there at some point in the future, possibly even regularly. I'll let people guess at who I am, if anyone still reading this doesn't know me personally, which I kind of doubt, to tell the truth.
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Poor Sentence Paragraph Structure Or....?
Sometimes I wonder about my students. For example:
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
All great movements have taken someone to break from the mold and go against the current of society. Take, for example, slavery; slavery was so widely accepted and it took a few people to argue the morality of it to begin a massive movement. Slavery is now looked at as a very immoral time that still holds great shame, but the people who started this movement, and the others that believed in it, were hated for it. The same applies to Catholicism....I think this is one of those cases where I just pass over the whole thing in silence.
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Thursday, March 01, 2007
I Thought Alvin Plantinga Was Supposed To Be Clever
It turns out he's capable of utterly empty headed useless nonsense, though.
His review of Dawkins's The God Delusion is completely embarrassing, both in that it says things that are obviously silly, and that it misrepresents much of what Dawkins is saying so clearly that even someone who hasn't read the book can tell. As an example of the first, take this passage:
For those who care, and haven't already figured this out, the lunacy of Hoyle's calculation is that it relies on the notion that chemicals combine randomly. In other words, if we assume that various chemicals present on the primordial earth combined randomly the odds of a single protein (or a living thing, or whatever) showing up are astronomical. This is true, and the argument is more or less valid. Of course, as it turns out, chemicals do not actually combine randomly, but in certain regular, patterned ways, and the study of these ways is called... chemistry. Hoyle's argument, in other words, presupposes that reality is such that science, and any other form of empirical knowledge, is impossible. In such a universe, where chemicals randomly combined as opposed to combining in some fairly limited and predictable ways, the appearance and continual existence of living things would be some rather impressive evidence of something pretty significant. This is mostly because of the significant differences between that universe and this one.
In general, the positive reference to an argument of this stupidity is generally a good reason to stop reading or listening to someone.
As an example of the latter, consider the following (rather closely following) passage:
This is something that is pretty clearly recognizable as a misreading, even to someone who, like me, hasn't read Dawkins's book. Why? Well, because the most current attempt at a Hoyle style argument generally goes something like "Living organisms are really complex, and have lots of information.* This information or complexity could not have come from something with lower complexity. Therefore living organisms haven't developed naturally but have been in some way or another created by something with higher complexity, by which I mean God." The obvious response to this sort of claim is, well, just what Plantinga suggests that Dawkins is saying. The chances that Dawkins is actually advancing the premises of this argument, however, are deeply unlikely (because they are, you know, very very silly - especially to biologists who study in depth precisely how greater complexity arises from lesser complexity, and the like.)
It is also hard to imagine that Plantinga isn't simply being dishonest in his review. He argues that Dawkins, generally and not specifically in this book, is guilty of arguing a certain way with regards to evolution:
Of course, if there's anything of the sort going on in addition to the sort of 'it's logically possible' thinking that Plantinga suggests then of course the argument he claims Dawkins is making would have to look something like the following:
Plantinga's review concludes with an embarrassing display of irrelevant learning: first he argues that there is a long tradition of viewing God not as complex but as simple. This is all well and good: if he is simple then the Hoyle style argument that Dawkins is objecting to fails, as simple things cannot give rise to complex things (or, alternatively, they can and so there's no objection anymore). Secondly he objects that Dawkins claims that God is improbable (whether complex or not), but has no reason for thinking this. But here it's pretty clear that he's sliding a very odd sort of notion of improbability into place. Very quickly, there are two senses in which we might talk of something being improbable (and very closely related): first we might say that something is improbable if, objectively, the odds for it happening are low (flipping a fair coin 8 times and getting 8 heads); secondly we might say that something is improbable if given what we know it is unlikely to be true (it is improbable that George W Bush has a functioning conscience, say). The second is a comment about what is rational to believe, the first is about how reality (in as much as it is probabilistic as opposed to deterministic) is. The second is generally evidence for the first. Plantinga is clearly taking Dawkins to be claiming something along the lines of the first sense ("out of possible worlds W(1)......(Wn) God exists in only n/10 of them"), whereas it's pretty obvious that Dawkins thinks something far more like the second ("given the way things are, the chances that God actually exists, or the extent to which it is rational to believe that he does, is low"). The difference is both metaphysical and practical - mostly in that evidence for the truth or some proposition affects the second sort of talk, but not really the first. Also referring to the Ontological argument, as Plantinga proceeds to do, really doesn't help much when the opponent is speaking in the second sense (and, in addition, it's a little embarrassing to claim that it has never been adequately debunked, given its history).
The review continues on through several more embarrassing arguments, most of which I can't help but suspect even Plantinga finds hard to take seriously**, but I've gone on long enough here as it is.
*Information in the technical sense, that is, meaning astonishingly little. It's a very useful term that as far as I can tell is this way mostly because it says almost nothing above "it looks a certain way to me" but sounds like it means far more than that. At any rate, I have yet to see any useful and consistent way of using this word in a technical sense - though plenty of either of the two conjuncts.
**I am particularly suspicious that Plantinga takes the fine tuning argument, provisionally accepts the notion that there are multiple universes, of which only this one is fine tuned, and then asks "Yes, but what are the probabilities that it was this one that was fine tuned?" It's hard to imagine that he meant this seriously, but there you have it. He also argues that naturalism and natural selection are incompatible, since only the existence of God can make our belief that we can have knowledge at all rational, and hence naturalism is incompatible with claiming to know anything about the world. Or something. It's a little murky exactly where the epistemological and empirical trade off here, but the premise itself is loony enough to be ignored.
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
His review of Dawkins's The God Delusion is completely embarrassing, both in that it says things that are obviously silly, and that it misrepresents much of what Dawkins is saying so clearly that even someone who hasn't read the book can tell. As an example of the first, take this passage:
Well, why does Dawkins think there almost certainly isn't any such person as God? It's because, he says, the existence of God is monumentally improbable. How improbable? The astronomer Fred Hoyle famously claimed that the probability of life arising on earth (by purely natural means, without special divine aid) is less than the probability that a flight-worthy Boeing 747 should be assembled by a hurricane roaring through a junkyard. Dawkins appears to think the probability of the existence of God is in that same neighborhoodEither Plantinga is being very clever, and using an example of something being improbable that, as an argument, is utterly embarrassing, or this really is something that he considers worth bringing up. I can't rule out the first - that this is a clever bit of irony - but there's little reason to believe, given the rest of what he says here, that he isn't just that dumb.
For those who care, and haven't already figured this out, the lunacy of Hoyle's calculation is that it relies on the notion that chemicals combine randomly. In other words, if we assume that various chemicals present on the primordial earth combined randomly the odds of a single protein (or a living thing, or whatever) showing up are astronomical. This is true, and the argument is more or less valid. Of course, as it turns out, chemicals do not actually combine randomly, but in certain regular, patterned ways, and the study of these ways is called... chemistry. Hoyle's argument, in other words, presupposes that reality is such that science, and any other form of empirical knowledge, is impossible. In such a universe, where chemicals randomly combined as opposed to combining in some fairly limited and predictable ways, the appearance and continual existence of living things would be some rather impressive evidence of something pretty significant. This is mostly because of the significant differences between that universe and this one.
In general, the positive reference to an argument of this stupidity is generally a good reason to stop reading or listening to someone.
As an example of the latter, consider the following (rather closely following) passage:
So why does he think theism is enormously improbable? The answer: if there were such a person as God, he would have to be enormously complex, and the more complex something is, the less probable it is: "However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747."
...
But why does Dawkins think God is complex? And why does he think that the more complex something is, the less probable it is?
This is something that is pretty clearly recognizable as a misreading, even to someone who, like me, hasn't read Dawkins's book. Why? Well, because the most current attempt at a Hoyle style argument generally goes something like "Living organisms are really complex, and have lots of information.* This information or complexity could not have come from something with lower complexity. Therefore living organisms haven't developed naturally but have been in some way or another created by something with higher complexity, by which I mean God." The obvious response to this sort of claim is, well, just what Plantinga suggests that Dawkins is saying. The chances that Dawkins is actually advancing the premises of this argument, however, are deeply unlikely (because they are, you know, very very silly - especially to biologists who study in depth precisely how greater complexity arises from lesser complexity, and the like.)
It is also hard to imagine that Plantinga isn't simply being dishonest in his review. He argues that Dawkins, generally and not specifically in this book, is guilty of arguing a certain way with regards to evolution:
We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p;Where, of course, "p" is something like "life has come to be as it is now through unguided Darwinian (broadly speaking) evolution". The problem here is that this is only a decent reconstruction of Dawkins's argument if we take it for granted that, really, there is no evidence that things actually have evolved. And Plantinga really does seem to want to give this impression - as when describing Dawkins's general strategy:
Therefore
p is true.
First, he recounts in vivid and arresting detail some of the fascinating anatomical details of certain living creatures and their incredibly complex and ingenious ways of making a living; this is the sort of thing Dawkins does best. Second, he tries to refute arguments for the conclusion that blind, unguided evolution could not have produced certain of these wonders of the living world—the mammalian eye, for example, or the wing. Third, he makes suggestions as to how these and other organic systems could have developed by unguided evolution.Note that what is left out here is any actual suggestion that there is evidence that things really did evolve a certain way. It is as if the entire field of biology were playing what-if games: animals are a certain way, and this might have come to be in way x. I am not a biologist but I suspect that there may be a little more to it than this: say, some sort of attempt to demonstrate how things actually happened, as opposed to how they could have happened.
Of course, if there's anything of the sort going on in addition to the sort of 'it's logically possible' thinking that Plantinga suggests then of course the argument he claims Dawkins is making would have to look something like the following:
We have sufficient empirical evidence that p;Of course, unlike this above construal this is a more or less reasonable sort of way to argue. There is evidence for a claim, there is no immediate reason to discount that evidence - or at least all attempts to do so have failed (laughably) - and so it is reasonable to believe the claim. And all that it takes to change the argument that Plantinga suggests Dawkins is making, and the argument here is the notion that there is evidence for the claim in question: surely Plantinga can't be suggesting that Dawkins doesn't think there is any, can he? And certainly if there is evidence of this, it would be the sort of thing a biologist would be privy to, that being his or her field of expertise.
We have certain claims (x,y....) that p is nevertheless impossible;
But we know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p, as (x,y...) are easily debunked;
Therefore
p is true.
Plantinga's review concludes with an embarrassing display of irrelevant learning: first he argues that there is a long tradition of viewing God not as complex but as simple. This is all well and good: if he is simple then the Hoyle style argument that Dawkins is objecting to fails, as simple things cannot give rise to complex things (or, alternatively, they can and so there's no objection anymore). Secondly he objects that Dawkins claims that God is improbable (whether complex or not), but has no reason for thinking this. But here it's pretty clear that he's sliding a very odd sort of notion of improbability into place. Very quickly, there are two senses in which we might talk of something being improbable (and very closely related): first we might say that something is improbable if, objectively, the odds for it happening are low (flipping a fair coin 8 times and getting 8 heads); secondly we might say that something is improbable if given what we know it is unlikely to be true (it is improbable that George W Bush has a functioning conscience, say). The second is a comment about what is rational to believe, the first is about how reality (in as much as it is probabilistic as opposed to deterministic) is. The second is generally evidence for the first. Plantinga is clearly taking Dawkins to be claiming something along the lines of the first sense ("out of possible worlds W(1)......(Wn) God exists in only n/10 of them"), whereas it's pretty obvious that Dawkins thinks something far more like the second ("given the way things are, the chances that God actually exists, or the extent to which it is rational to believe that he does, is low"). The difference is both metaphysical and practical - mostly in that evidence for the truth or some proposition affects the second sort of talk, but not really the first. Also referring to the Ontological argument, as Plantinga proceeds to do, really doesn't help much when the opponent is speaking in the second sense (and, in addition, it's a little embarrassing to claim that it has never been adequately debunked, given its history).
The review continues on through several more embarrassing arguments, most of which I can't help but suspect even Plantinga finds hard to take seriously**, but I've gone on long enough here as it is.
*Information in the technical sense, that is, meaning astonishingly little. It's a very useful term that as far as I can tell is this way mostly because it says almost nothing above "it looks a certain way to me" but sounds like it means far more than that. At any rate, I have yet to see any useful and consistent way of using this word in a technical sense - though plenty of either of the two conjuncts.
**I am particularly suspicious that Plantinga takes the fine tuning argument, provisionally accepts the notion that there are multiple universes, of which only this one is fine tuned, and then asks "Yes, but what are the probabilities that it was this one that was fine tuned?" It's hard to imagine that he meant this seriously, but there you have it. He also argues that naturalism and natural selection are incompatible, since only the existence of God can make our belief that we can have knowledge at all rational, and hence naturalism is incompatible with claiming to know anything about the world. Or something. It's a little murky exactly where the epistemological and empirical trade off here, but the premise itself is loony enough to be ignored.
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
We Fear Change
Apparently I can no longer get away with ignoring Blogger's recommendation to change to the new version. The real question now is whether I should go back over all the template settings/etc and try to see what's new and if I should change things around (like getting rid of that odd profile thing at the right), or just be lazy.
If you thought that was a serious question, though, you're mistaken. I'm not going to do anything (except, maybe, eat some peanut butter).
Update:
Being absent minded pays off! I didn't make it to the bus stop in time to go to my earlier class today, and as a result was around when the UPS man delivered a package!
Sadly, though, it's not a package I was really interested in getting. (That would be the nerf pistol I ordered, but which hasn't arrived yet. Soon, though....) It was a care package from the church I used to attend (I have complained about this before, right? They still haven't stopped.*) It's kind of amusing to note that they still seem incapable of grasping the distinction between college and 'school-after-high-school', though, both in terms of what they think to send, and that they send anything at all my god why won't they stop. Also that they just send so much random stuff (the prize last time was a single, large butterfly clip singly packaged). This time I recieved:
1 Cup of Nissin Cup Noodles (beef flavor)
3 packages odd chocolate covered peanut butter and bread snacks
1 tube of Mentos mints
1 Ziplock bag of granola (I hope to god it's homemade granola, because otherwise that's scary)
2 lollipops (one with bubble gum in the center)
4 packages Swiss Miss hot chocolate
1 single serving package of salted peanuts
1 single serving package of Quaker Breakfast Bites (apple crisp)
11 Disposable ballpoint pens
1 white board style felt tip marker
1 Small oval box containing stationary paper printed with folksy drawings of mistletoe
1 Package of Pop Tarts (no flavor information included)
1 Package Doublemint Gum
1 Reese's Peanut Butter Cup
4 York Peppermint Patties
1 Hershey's bar (with Almonds)
4 Packets Austin brand crackers (1 cheese with peanut butter; 1 toasty crackers with peanut butter; 1 wheat with cheddar cheese; 1 vanilla cremes)
5 Nature Valley trail mix granola bars (Fruit and Nut flavor)
2 Crunchy brand granola bars (Oats 'n Honey)
1 Crunchy brand granola bar (peanut butter)
2 Nature Valley brand granola bars (peanut butter)
1 Nature Valley brand granola bar (Oats & Honey)
1 Nutri-grain bar (blueberry)
3 Lifesavers (fruit flavors)
8 Lifesavers (mint)
1 Copy of Three Stories from The House at Pooh Corner, by A.A. Milne. (Printed in 1970, with Illustrations by Ernest H Shepard).
I really am baffled by this situation: I don't have any particular desire to keep receiving these random packages from this place. But I also don't have the ability to be mean or to tell them to just leave me alone because (1) I never see them, ever and (2) this is still the church that my parents attend, and I don't have any desire to make trouble for them. I can only wait and hope that sooner or later enough people will forget me (not likely, as these are Mennonites), or will eventually decide that I'm probably old enough to stop counting as a college student. Of course, since I'm 26 now the latter is looking less and less likely, but I don't think they'd keep sending these things once I was out of graduate school, would they?
*If you didn't read previous complaints, the general issue is that I attended this church while in high school, and then, when no longer required to go, never returned.
**
Ok, and then I edited the template after I said I wouldn't. But who wants to see my name right up there, anyway?
Also, I don't have the ability to edit comments anymore. This is really frustrating - what am I supposed to do with spam posts when I'm bored - delete them? Good grief, it's only been a few hours and I already hate the new blogger.
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
If you thought that was a serious question, though, you're mistaken. I'm not going to do anything (except, maybe, eat some peanut butter).
Update:
Being absent minded pays off! I didn't make it to the bus stop in time to go to my earlier class today, and as a result was around when the UPS man delivered a package!
Sadly, though, it's not a package I was really interested in getting. (That would be the nerf pistol I ordered, but which hasn't arrived yet. Soon, though....) It was a care package from the church I used to attend (I have complained about this before, right? They still haven't stopped.*) It's kind of amusing to note that they still seem incapable of grasping the distinction between college and 'school-after-high-school', though, both in terms of what they think to send, and that they send anything at all my god why won't they stop. Also that they just send so much random stuff (the prize last time was a single, large butterfly clip singly packaged). This time I recieved:
1 Cup of Nissin Cup Noodles (beef flavor)
3 packages odd chocolate covered peanut butter and bread snacks
1 tube of Mentos mints
1 Ziplock bag of granola (I hope to god it's homemade granola, because otherwise that's scary)
2 lollipops (one with bubble gum in the center)
4 packages Swiss Miss hot chocolate
1 single serving package of salted peanuts
1 single serving package of Quaker Breakfast Bites (apple crisp)
11 Disposable ballpoint pens
1 white board style felt tip marker
1 Small oval box containing stationary paper printed with folksy drawings of mistletoe
1 Package of Pop Tarts (no flavor information included)
1 Package Doublemint Gum
1 Reese's Peanut Butter Cup
4 York Peppermint Patties
1 Hershey's bar (with Almonds)
4 Packets Austin brand crackers (1 cheese with peanut butter; 1 toasty crackers with peanut butter; 1 wheat with cheddar cheese; 1 vanilla cremes)
5 Nature Valley trail mix granola bars (Fruit and Nut flavor)
2 Crunchy brand granola bars (Oats 'n Honey)
1 Crunchy brand granola bar (peanut butter)
2 Nature Valley brand granola bars (peanut butter)
1 Nature Valley brand granola bar (Oats & Honey)
1 Nutri-grain bar (blueberry)
3 Lifesavers (fruit flavors)
8 Lifesavers (mint)
1 Copy of Three Stories from The House at Pooh Corner, by A.A. Milne. (Printed in 1970, with Illustrations by Ernest H Shepard).
I really am baffled by this situation: I don't have any particular desire to keep receiving these random packages from this place. But I also don't have the ability to be mean or to tell them to just leave me alone because (1) I never see them, ever and (2) this is still the church that my parents attend, and I don't have any desire to make trouble for them. I can only wait and hope that sooner or later enough people will forget me (not likely, as these are Mennonites), or will eventually decide that I'm probably old enough to stop counting as a college student. Of course, since I'm 26 now the latter is looking less and less likely, but I don't think they'd keep sending these things once I was out of graduate school, would they?
*If you didn't read previous complaints, the general issue is that I attended this church while in high school, and then, when no longer required to go, never returned.
**
Ok, and then I edited the template after I said I wouldn't. But who wants to see my name right up there, anyway?
Also, I don't have the ability to edit comments anymore. This is really frustrating - what am I supposed to do with spam posts when I'm bored - delete them? Good grief, it's only been a few hours and I already hate the new blogger.
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Friday, February 23, 2007
I don't have to grade papers - I'm doing Research!
Can I jump from a standing position and clear the couch in the living room?
No.
Can I make it if I get a one-step running start?
Not without tipping the couch over in the process. But I'm a lot closer.
(Note to roommate: I caught the sofa before it fell, everything is fine.)
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
No.
Can I make it if I get a one-step running start?
Not without tipping the couch over in the process. But I'm a lot closer.
(Note to roommate: I caught the sofa before it fell, everything is fine.)
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Thursday, February 22, 2007
It's the little things, really.
Just this week my life has gotten quite a bit better, as the weather here in Minneapolis has risen above the freezing point (well, at least during the day, and a little above). This is good not because I have some principled objection to the cold, but because my bike apparently does - at some point this year it started seizing up whenever the temperature dropped significantly below the freezing point. I imagine this is mostly the result of something or other caught in the gears or axle, but there's not much I can do about it above washing the bike (which didn't help). So this sudden warm spell means that I can start riding my bike to the University again, instead of taking the hated, hated bus. The bus is not hated because I have some principled objection to the bus, but because I don't like having to get up earlier, and because on one occasion it drove right by me when I was waiting at the bus stop, making me late for an important final.
And, to my surprise, even after two months of not regularly riding my bike I'm finding that my legs are adjusting astonishingly quickly to the task. Within three days I've gone from pain and trembly feeling legs to a barely noticeably soreness. But even better than this, and the fact that I really do enjoy riding my bike to the University (it gives me a chance to listen to house music on my headphones - really loud), is the other less immediate effects of starting to ride my bike again.
For example, it has had a remarkable effect on my diet. Now, I'm far from a dainty or delicate eater (rather impressively far, in fact), but having laid off the biking for so long in favor of not dying, and instead just working out in warmer (ie, inside) contexts has made the transition back somewhat shocking to me. Yesterday, for example, I ate five cookies, a bag of potato chips, a half a bag of Fritos, one of those packaged cinnamon rolls, a large bowl of rice (one cup, dry) heavily covered in green curry (with Tofu - I'm finally using my leftovers!), and somewhere between 2/3 and one full pound of capellini with, as a sauce, a tin of tuna, a quarter stick of pepperoni, a green bell pepper, three stewed tomatoes (finishing off a tin), and three large eggs (and various herbs/etc, of course, but those really don't count too much). And I woke up today... hungry.
And the real joy in all of this, to get to the point finally, is that every morning when I go to the bathroom for the first time, I get to feel like I've really accomplished something. Seriously - I mean, we're talking close to a third of the volume is above the water level and everything. It's a wonderful start to my day, honestly.
(Out of curiosity, is this one of those things that everyone can humorously relate to in a sort of "yeah, I guess that is true" way, or am I just going to get looked at funny if I say this sort of thing in public? I mean, I'm probably going to either way, but I like to know and I can't usually figure it out on my own.)
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
And, to my surprise, even after two months of not regularly riding my bike I'm finding that my legs are adjusting astonishingly quickly to the task. Within three days I've gone from pain and trembly feeling legs to a barely noticeably soreness. But even better than this, and the fact that I really do enjoy riding my bike to the University (it gives me a chance to listen to house music on my headphones - really loud), is the other less immediate effects of starting to ride my bike again.
For example, it has had a remarkable effect on my diet. Now, I'm far from a dainty or delicate eater (rather impressively far, in fact), but having laid off the biking for so long in favor of not dying, and instead just working out in warmer (ie, inside) contexts has made the transition back somewhat shocking to me. Yesterday, for example, I ate five cookies, a bag of potato chips, a half a bag of Fritos, one of those packaged cinnamon rolls, a large bowl of rice (one cup, dry) heavily covered in green curry (with Tofu - I'm finally using my leftovers!), and somewhere between 2/3 and one full pound of capellini with, as a sauce, a tin of tuna, a quarter stick of pepperoni, a green bell pepper, three stewed tomatoes (finishing off a tin), and three large eggs (and various herbs/etc, of course, but those really don't count too much). And I woke up today... hungry.
And the real joy in all of this, to get to the point finally, is that every morning when I go to the bathroom for the first time, I get to feel like I've really accomplished something. Seriously - I mean, we're talking close to a third of the volume is above the water level and everything. It's a wonderful start to my day, honestly.
(Out of curiosity, is this one of those things that everyone can humorously relate to in a sort of "yeah, I guess that is true" way, or am I just going to get looked at funny if I say this sort of thing in public? I mean, I'm probably going to either way, but I like to know and I can't usually figure it out on my own.)
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Either I am incompetent or someone is playing a very funny prank on me.
Apparently at some point in life everyone else in the world learned how to make their cell phones deal with call waiting.* I... have not done so. All I know is that my cell phone beeps, displays a yellow screen, and then promptly hangs up on everyone involved if I do anything more than just keep talking to whoever it is who was on the line in the first place. I imagine there's some way of switching around those calls (otherwise why tell me? why?), but I certainly don't know what it is.
And like most things that confuse or baffle me this seems to happen, and in particularly confusing ways, an awful lot.
Specifically, it has happened twice in the last week or so - and very suspiciously as the same person was involved in both cases. The second time, this afternoon, I called him and got his voicemail. Before I could hear the tone, I heard those ominous two beeps, and saw that I had a call waiting from him. (This sort of timing is impressive.) So I blindly stabbed at the buttons on the phone, which had the usual effect (see above). This didn't connect me to him, of course, and had no noticeable effect other than to hang up on everything involved. Two seconds later, however, I received a new call from a very mysterious source (to my phone, which told me that it was an unknown caller) who happened to be this same friend. This is not automatically an interesting story, I admit. The first, and logically prior time this happened** though everything went just as above, only instead of the unknown caller being my friend the unknown caller was my friend's voicemail.
This, you see, was the puzzling part to me. I had received a call not from someone in particular, but from someone's voicemail, and there's something awfully surreal about picking up the phone only to hear "...if you wish to send a numeric page...". Luckily after hanging up on it a second time I managed to get through to my friend - but still this was an utterly baffling experience.
Now, normally this is where I would explain how this all could happen, and so demonstrate my amusingly stupid inability to figure it out at the time. But, honestly, I have nothing here. If you're doing this to me on purpose, though, Ian, I do have to say I'm impressed and as soon as it stops being fun for you I want you to tell me how to do that so I can do it to people as well.
Oh, and one final thing - how's that PZ! 30 days exactly! See you next month, sucker!
*I imagine this was at the same meeting when they all learned how to have romantic relationships, and at which no one noticed that I was ill that day and took notes for me. Or something.
**This is a Wilfrid Sellars joke. Feel free to roll your eyes, or sigh, or do whatever you do when I make these sorts of jokes in your company.
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
And like most things that confuse or baffle me this seems to happen, and in particularly confusing ways, an awful lot.
Specifically, it has happened twice in the last week or so - and very suspiciously as the same person was involved in both cases. The second time, this afternoon, I called him and got his voicemail. Before I could hear the tone, I heard those ominous two beeps, and saw that I had a call waiting from him. (This sort of timing is impressive.) So I blindly stabbed at the buttons on the phone, which had the usual effect (see above). This didn't connect me to him, of course, and had no noticeable effect other than to hang up on everything involved. Two seconds later, however, I received a new call from a very mysterious source (to my phone, which told me that it was an unknown caller) who happened to be this same friend. This is not automatically an interesting story, I admit. The first, and logically prior time this happened** though everything went just as above, only instead of the unknown caller being my friend the unknown caller was my friend's voicemail.
This, you see, was the puzzling part to me. I had received a call not from someone in particular, but from someone's voicemail, and there's something awfully surreal about picking up the phone only to hear "...if you wish to send a numeric page...". Luckily after hanging up on it a second time I managed to get through to my friend - but still this was an utterly baffling experience.
Now, normally this is where I would explain how this all could happen, and so demonstrate my amusingly stupid inability to figure it out at the time. But, honestly, I have nothing here. If you're doing this to me on purpose, though, Ian, I do have to say I'm impressed and as soon as it stops being fun for you I want you to tell me how to do that so I can do it to people as well.
Oh, and one final thing - how's that PZ! 30 days exactly! See you next month, sucker!
*I imagine this was at the same meeting when they all learned how to have romantic relationships, and at which no one noticed that I was ill that day and took notes for me. Or something.
**This is a Wilfrid Sellars joke. Feel free to roll your eyes, or sigh, or do whatever you do when I make these sorts of jokes in your company.
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Monday, January 08, 2007
What?
The local grocery store stocks a brand of low carbohydrate pasta.
Yes, pasta that is low in carbohydrates. I don't know what the idea or execution here is. It's also not weird enough that I'm willing to buy it for that reason - unlike, say, jars of gelatinous mutant coconut, or a plain container marked "All Purpose Sauce". So my roommate doesn't have to worry about that, at least, just that some day I'll actually open the jar of gelatinous mutant coconut and try to make her eat some (this will not work, I imagine). The very notion, though, is distinctly odd: pasta is, after all, essentially made up of carbohydrates held together with a hefty dose of protein. This is why it is both fairly healthy and really, really tasty. And low carb pasta would be... what? The label doesn't say explicitly, though they cheerfully imply that it has to do with making some significant amount of the carbohydrates indigestible, instead of using other ingredients which is what other low carb pastas do. I'm uncertain of the nutritional benefits of eating indigestible food, or of what exactly they mean by this.
Also, didn't we all, as a society, get over the whole 'carbs are bad' thing a year or two ago? I mean, there was that Atkins diet fad (official motto: sick people weigh less! eat things that make you ill!), but I figured that more or less evaporated when Atkins died of what may or may not have been heart failure (but probably was), and was notable obese when he did (this is assuming that what is alleged by the Atkins foundation - that he gained over sixty pounds in a little over a week while in a coma due to, um, bloating - is the obvious nonsense it appears to be). The last time I checked, at least, medical knowledge has not changed dramatically since then, and I'm baffled at the continued presence of low carb foods (that is, ones that would otherwise be high carb foods but aren't - not, say, broccoli). Who buys these things?
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Yes, pasta that is low in carbohydrates. I don't know what the idea or execution here is. It's also not weird enough that I'm willing to buy it for that reason - unlike, say, jars of gelatinous mutant coconut, or a plain container marked "All Purpose Sauce". So my roommate doesn't have to worry about that, at least, just that some day I'll actually open the jar of gelatinous mutant coconut and try to make her eat some (this will not work, I imagine). The very notion, though, is distinctly odd: pasta is, after all, essentially made up of carbohydrates held together with a hefty dose of protein. This is why it is both fairly healthy and really, really tasty. And low carb pasta would be... what? The label doesn't say explicitly, though they cheerfully imply that it has to do with making some significant amount of the carbohydrates indigestible, instead of using other ingredients which is what other low carb pastas do. I'm uncertain of the nutritional benefits of eating indigestible food, or of what exactly they mean by this.
Also, didn't we all, as a society, get over the whole 'carbs are bad' thing a year or two ago? I mean, there was that Atkins diet fad (official motto: sick people weigh less! eat things that make you ill!), but I figured that more or less evaporated when Atkins died of what may or may not have been heart failure (but probably was), and was notable obese when he did (this is assuming that what is alleged by the Atkins foundation - that he gained over sixty pounds in a little over a week while in a coma due to, um, bloating - is the obvious nonsense it appears to be). The last time I checked, at least, medical knowledge has not changed dramatically since then, and I'm baffled at the continued presence of low carb foods (that is, ones that would otherwise be high carb foods but aren't - not, say, broccoli). Who buys these things?
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Friday, January 05, 2007
Footnotes I have Removed from Papers This Term
From a paper on Schopenhauer on ascetism and suicide.
"The ascetic continually presents himself with disagreeable things so as to mute the Will to live, and stifle his various desires and cares: he continually abstains from good food, mortifies his flesh, etc(1)...
(1) He is, in other words, a nincompoop."
And from a paper on Aristotle
"(23).... . And there may well be some general account of these sort of significantly other-regarding states of which I am unaware, but if so I am unaware of it."
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Friday, November 10, 2006
Odds and ends
Damn it! Not again - they.... wait, what?
This last week has been a little confusing to me, I have to admit. It's not that I wasn't expecting serious gains by the Democratic party in the election or anything. And while dramatic as all get out the results weren't crazily above what could have been expected going into the thing. But still I'm having some trouble getting used to the results - I mean, what do you do when the election results aren't horrible?
Bear in mind, this is easily the first election in my life that I've participated in that hasn't resulted in people I thought both entirely incompetent and morally bankrupt winning, and I'm just not sure how to react to this. Jubilation? Hope? Vindication?
Well, some combination of those, certainly, but mostly foreboding. Sure things look good now, and the obvious chances for bad consequences turned out fine, but deep down I know exactly how these things end: badly. It's really only a matter of time, isn't it?
If I can derive anything from a contradiction, can it be a free pizza?
The other day, in the list of coupon fliers that inevitably clogs up the mailbox every, oh, other day I noticed a coupon by a local pizza place. It read, in large print, "Five Dollars off Your Purchase of Twenty Five Dollars or More!". And, below that in much smaller print, "No purchase required". Is there any way of making sense of this combination? What would the purchase not be required for? (I am almost tempted to go hand them the coupon and see what they do, but I think I'll just throw it out instead.)
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
This last week has been a little confusing to me, I have to admit. It's not that I wasn't expecting serious gains by the Democratic party in the election or anything. And while dramatic as all get out the results weren't crazily above what could have been expected going into the thing. But still I'm having some trouble getting used to the results - I mean, what do you do when the election results aren't horrible?
Bear in mind, this is easily the first election in my life that I've participated in that hasn't resulted in people I thought both entirely incompetent and morally bankrupt winning, and I'm just not sure how to react to this. Jubilation? Hope? Vindication?
Well, some combination of those, certainly, but mostly foreboding. Sure things look good now, and the obvious chances for bad consequences turned out fine, but deep down I know exactly how these things end: badly. It's really only a matter of time, isn't it?
If I can derive anything from a contradiction, can it be a free pizza?
The other day, in the list of coupon fliers that inevitably clogs up the mailbox every, oh, other day I noticed a coupon by a local pizza place. It read, in large print, "Five Dollars off Your Purchase of Twenty Five Dollars or More!". And, below that in much smaller print, "No purchase required". Is there any way of making sense of this combination? What would the purchase not be required for? (I am almost tempted to go hand them the coupon and see what they do, but I think I'll just throw it out instead.)
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Friday, October 27, 2006
And They're All Phonies Too
Maybe I'm just going wrong or being mislead by my attraction to irony, but when I read this (or parts of this, at any rate, it's a little intolerable after a while) I couldn't help but think it sounded awfully ... childish.
I imagine his Grandfather didn't go on and on about how people were being children or writing what appear to be books about it either. I'm also impressed by how much of that list he writes sounds like "My grandfather didn't have an inner life - he didn't need one!" I suppose there's some consolation here in that if he's right and self-examination and so on is a bad thing it's at least fairly clear that he hasn't done too much of it.
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
I imagine his Grandfather didn't go on and on about how people were being children or writing what appear to be books about it either. I'm also impressed by how much of that list he writes sounds like "My grandfather didn't have an inner life - he didn't need one!" I suppose there's some consolation here in that if he's right and self-examination and so on is a bad thing it's at least fairly clear that he hasn't done too much of it.
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Guy Ritchie is Dead To Me
Hey, remember how great Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was?
Ok, maybe not great, but fun at least, right? Lots of fun. And remember Snatch? That was just an awesome movie.
Well Guy Ritchie has another movie out - and it's another crime/heist sort of movie too! It's just amazing and you should all see it- really. It's called Revolver, and the plot revolves around a con man who takes down a casino owning crime boss at the gambling table and then finds himself in a lot of trouble. First a bunch of people close to him are murdered in an attempt on his life. Then he discovers that he has a fatal illness which will kill him within the next three days. Then he becomes involved with a bunch of loan sharks who start taking all his money, and he plays a lot of chess and has some very involved discussions. Then we learn that his ultimate enemy is named "Mr Gold" and the loan sharks are somehow associated with him. Then we learn that... Mr Gold is.. the voice inside his head? And is hiding from him pretending to be part of himself, and there's a lot more involved discusion. Then we leave the room in annoyance and do some cooking. Then we come back to discover that the entire movie seems to be about Ray Liotta looking particularly sweaty and drooling while wearing nothing but bikini briefs and shot through a blue filter yelling "Fear Me!" for no apparent reason. Then we make sure to leave the room until the movie is over.
Seriously, I mean, what the crap?
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Ok, maybe not great, but fun at least, right? Lots of fun. And remember Snatch? That was just an awesome movie.
Well Guy Ritchie has another movie out - and it's another crime/heist sort of movie too! It's just amazing and you should all see it- really. It's called Revolver, and the plot revolves around a con man who takes down a casino owning crime boss at the gambling table and then finds himself in a lot of trouble. First a bunch of people close to him are murdered in an attempt on his life. Then he discovers that he has a fatal illness which will kill him within the next three days. Then he becomes involved with a bunch of loan sharks who start taking all his money, and he plays a lot of chess and has some very involved discussions. Then we learn that his ultimate enemy is named "Mr Gold" and the loan sharks are somehow associated with him. Then we learn that... Mr Gold is.. the voice inside his head? And is hiding from him pretending to be part of himself, and there's a lot more involved discusion. Then we leave the room in annoyance and do some cooking. Then we come back to discover that the entire movie seems to be about Ray Liotta looking particularly sweaty and drooling while wearing nothing but bikini briefs and shot through a blue filter yelling "Fear Me!" for no apparent reason. Then we make sure to leave the room until the movie is over.
Seriously, I mean, what the crap?
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Two Stories
Dropping the Soap
Sometimes I really impress myself with my ability to do very unlikely things. Unfortunately, those unlikely things are almost universally things that no rational person would ever intend to do, and as often as not things that I myself would never intend to do. For example, a few mornings ago I managed, while showering, to accidentally grab the soap in just the wrong way, causing it to fly out of my hands and fall down around my feet. Bear with me, because that in itself is something that everyone does. What I did that was so impressive was that I managed to drop it with such precision and dexterity as to cause the bar of soap to strike the hot water faucet on the way down in such a way as to turn it to the off position entirely.
No, I'm really not sure how that worked, but I am very sure that it did. I didn't realize this at first, of course, since it was early in the morning and I didn't have my glasses on, for very obvious reasons. But I did realize what had happened very, very quickly. As I recall my exact thoughts were something along the lines of "Shoot - there went the soaFUCK! FUCK! FUCK!!"
An interesting fact about the shower in my apartment is that despite being a full (claw footed, like all bathtubs in Minneapolis that I know of) tub, the shower curtain and hence the usable portion of the tub is somewhat smaller. This made my incoherent thrashing to avoid the sudden freezing cold water less than effective, as there really was no place that I could stand that wasn't more or less directly underneath the water. After a few agonizing seconds I managed to strike the nozzle of the shower, directing the water immediately downwards and away from me, but it was an impressive few moments, I thought.
Of course, this only meant that to turn the hot water back on I had to go and get underneath the cold water, but at least this time I had the time to prepare myself for the shock.
Nice Backhand You've Got There
I just recieved a very nice thank you from a friend whose wedding I attended a month ago or something. While overall very charming it also included the following line: "And I can't get over what a handsome young man you've become!" The last word really brings up a lot of questions, doesn't it?
I would be offended except, really, it's pretty clear that I wasn't one earlier, and I remain nothing of the sort.
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Sometimes I really impress myself with my ability to do very unlikely things. Unfortunately, those unlikely things are almost universally things that no rational person would ever intend to do, and as often as not things that I myself would never intend to do. For example, a few mornings ago I managed, while showering, to accidentally grab the soap in just the wrong way, causing it to fly out of my hands and fall down around my feet. Bear with me, because that in itself is something that everyone does. What I did that was so impressive was that I managed to drop it with such precision and dexterity as to cause the bar of soap to strike the hot water faucet on the way down in such a way as to turn it to the off position entirely.
No, I'm really not sure how that worked, but I am very sure that it did. I didn't realize this at first, of course, since it was early in the morning and I didn't have my glasses on, for very obvious reasons. But I did realize what had happened very, very quickly. As I recall my exact thoughts were something along the lines of "Shoot - there went the soaFUCK! FUCK! FUCK!!"
An interesting fact about the shower in my apartment is that despite being a full (claw footed, like all bathtubs in Minneapolis that I know of) tub, the shower curtain and hence the usable portion of the tub is somewhat smaller. This made my incoherent thrashing to avoid the sudden freezing cold water less than effective, as there really was no place that I could stand that wasn't more or less directly underneath the water. After a few agonizing seconds I managed to strike the nozzle of the shower, directing the water immediately downwards and away from me, but it was an impressive few moments, I thought.
Of course, this only meant that to turn the hot water back on I had to go and get underneath the cold water, but at least this time I had the time to prepare myself for the shock.
Nice Backhand You've Got There
I just recieved a very nice thank you from a friend whose wedding I attended a month ago or something. While overall very charming it also included the following line: "And I can't get over what a handsome young man you've become!" The last word really brings up a lot of questions, doesn't it?
I would be offended except, really, it's pretty clear that I wasn't one earlier, and I remain nothing of the sort.
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
Monday, October 09, 2006
How to speak deceptively
From the New York Times article on the recent nuclear test by North Korea.
So the timeline goes something like this: in the 1980s it became fairly obvious that North Korea was trying to get nuclear weapons (probably quite sensibly given its history, though of course this is hardly an endorsement). And by the early 1990s they had a pretty threatening looking program under way. The Clinton administration negotiated an accord under which their nuclear program was locked up and under careful international scrutiny, and it basically stayed that way from 1994-2002. In 2003 Bush decided that this deal was no longer a good one, and changed it to the now very familliar tactics he uses on almost every occasion. North Korea started their weapons program, expelled the people watching their sites and materials, and now have several nuclear weapons.
And this is what is summarized in the above paragraph?
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
But the explosion was also the product of more than two decades of diplomatic failure, spread over at least three presidencies. American spy satellites saw the North building a good-size nuclear reactor in the early 1980’s, and by the early 1990’s the C.I.A. estimated that the country could have one or two nuclear weapons. But a series of diplomatic efforts to “freeze” the nuclear program — including a 1994 accord signed with the Clinton administration — ultimately broke down, amid distrust and recriminations on both sides.
On the one hand, this paragraph is exactly right, but it is right in a way almost guaranteed to be dificult to puzzle out. For example, talking of failure spread out over three presidencies is quite right, however mentioning Clinton immediately afterwards when, as it turns out, his administration was not one of those presidencies is a trifle deceptive (the three presidencies were, from the dates they give, Reagan, Bush, and the second Bush). Clinton's acheivement was hardly a failure - it only collapsed in 2003 when Bush decided to renege.
So the timeline goes something like this: in the 1980s it became fairly obvious that North Korea was trying to get nuclear weapons (probably quite sensibly given its history, though of course this is hardly an endorsement). And by the early 1990s they had a pretty threatening looking program under way. The Clinton administration negotiated an accord under which their nuclear program was locked up and under careful international scrutiny, and it basically stayed that way from 1994-2002. In 2003 Bush decided that this deal was no longer a good one, and changed it to the now very familliar tactics he uses on almost every occasion. North Korea started their weapons program, expelled the people watching their sites and materials, and now have several nuclear weapons.
And this is what is summarized in the above paragraph?
If there's any more, you'll see it here....
