January 2011
1 post
“IDEAS: So, even though you’ve resisted the brainwashing, are you a...”
– Old interview with David Foster Wallace
November 2010
1 post
There’s something ironic, in a dark way, about watching Seven on Bravo and going from murders based on pride, lust, greed, etc to commercials for The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Cognitive dissonance in the extreme.
October 2010
1 post
Interview with Marc Laidlaw, the guy who wrote... →
July 2009
3 posts
The El Paso Miracle: How can a comparatively poor,... →
BBC - Earth News - Aquatic deer and ancient whales →
Hints at how evolution may have happened. These species of deer run into the water when pursued and can stay there submerged for up to five minutes, surfacing for air and staying in the water until the threat has gone away. How cool is that?
Manta Rays — Photo Gallery — National Geographic... →
Manta Ray feeding frenzy
June 2009
7 posts
The Bunny Hug →
A good friend with impeccable taste in liquor gave me (among other things) a bottle of Dutch gin. In the course of trying to find out more about the company, I came across this blog, and then found my way to this, the original post.
Someday I aspire to have this author’s ability to take specialized and archaic/esoteric knowledge and make it seem relevant and interesting to a slightly...
America | The National Catholic Weekly →
Interesting little tidbit about the carbon-dating of bones inside the Basilica of St. Paul. Despite what is trumpeted in the popular discourse, faith and reason are not inimical to each other, but it’s still odd to see a contemporary scientific technique used as a verification tool by the Vatican.
Dustin Hoffman, scientist
I caught Sphere on TV the other day, a mediocre yet entertaining version of one of Michael Crichton’s page-turners. In it, Dustin Hoffman plays a psychologist, Sharon Stone plays a marine biologist, Samuel L. Jackson plays a mathemetician, and Liev Schreiber plays an astrophysicist.
Right now Outbreak is on TV, where Dustin Hoffman plays a microbiologist along with Kevin Spacey (with some...
Stunning pictures of 'hole in the clouds' as... →
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8118257.stm... →
Bees make honey. Do earwhigs make chutney? Apparently “stoned wallabies make crop circles.”
Three Percent: The German Donald Duck, or, The... →
Philosophical Donald Duck in German.
“The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial...”
– Antilibraries
Quoted for truth. Taleb on Eco on libraries. This is my own philosophy. Click through for the full passage.
May 2009
9 posts
mental_floss Blog » Rockin’ Out with Animatronic... →
Gloriously creepy. The Arcade Fire one is good, but watching animatronic bears singing Usher is nightmare fuel for the ages.
New post up over at the other blog →
Albert Pujols and Spanish Grammar
So…in a move away from the usual high standards of propriety and grace with which I comport myself on this blog, here comes some vulgarity.
In 2004, during the World Series, whenever Albert Pujols would come to the plate Tai would start giggling. The reason is that the word ‘pujo’ in Spanish, roughly translated, means ‘s**t grunt’.
Today Tai looked it up in a...
Maine and Judicial Activism - The Plank →
This is pretty cool. The governor of Maine is personally opposed to gay marriage, but he signed a bill allowing it anyway after the legislature voted in favor. His reasoning was that an opposing view was unconstitutional, especially in light of judicial judments in other parts of the country.
“If you want to understand the world, not just collect endless factlets, you...”
– Kevin Drum
The Internet and You | Mother Jones
Found this through another blog post from The League of Ordinary Gentlemen. I like the argument, and I think it’s right. It’s certainly true of religious ethics and things like that; I find a lot of great arguments online, but...
“However, is it not also the case that often it is the ideological manipulation...”
– -Pope Benedict
BBC NEWS | Middle East | Pope warns of misuse of religion
I would really rather not hear any snarky comments about this, though they are there to be made. It’s far too easy to mix up the actions of a faith with the actions of its adherents, especially the more radical ones...
“The poems you’ve sent suggest that you’ve failed to perceive a key difference...”
– wislawa szymborska | how to (and how not to) write poetry « poetry dispatch & other notes from the underground
BBC NEWS | Spider sex violent but effective →
And this one is just for the title.
There’s so much greatness in this article. The entomologist named it H. sadistica for its technique of “traumatic insemination” wherein the male spider directly pokes through the abdomen into the ovaries of the female, bypassing the external genitals. You can’t make this stuff up, folks!
How to Wake Up Slumbering Minds - WSJ.com →
Just a good general pedagogical technique article. I’m mostly putting it up here for a later reference.
April 2009
12 posts
Against Readings - ChronicleReview.com →
An English professor writes that reading literature according to theorists like Marx, Foucault, etc. should not be the primary job of a professor of literature. In the process, he develops an affective literary ethics.
“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will...”
– From the speech that William Safire wrote for Richard Nixon in the event that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had been stranded on the moon and been unable to return to Apollo 11. There’s more excerpts and details in this article, which is a remarkable “what if” scenario that...
BBC NEWS | Thieving dwarves cause supernovae →
Linked not for the content but for the article title. Isn’t that surreal?
Essay - The Case for Memorizing Poetry -... →
We had to memorize Sanskrit verses in order to learn metres for chanting/singing various works which we were reading. It’s fascinating because, like with other ancient cultures, the ancient Indians had a deep understanding of rhythm and metre and how those could change the way a verse was understood. Since Sanskrit has no word order, the pauses in the chanting could (and do) give the...
A quick response... →
Carl offered a retort to the article I posted a few days ago in the comments. Rather than clutter up the front page here with a long response, I put my answer to him over on the other blog.
Youth
So today at karate, a student asked if we could turn on the radio. He’s 12, and he wanted KISS 108. I would rather stab myself in the eye than listen to that, so I put on what I thought was reasonable, WBCN (104.1). He was clearly not enthused about it.
What befuddled me the most was that the White Stripes came on, ‘Icky Thump’ and he asked if we could listen to something...
An atheist's response to the anti-theists... →
“However, there is much more to religion to the metaphysics. To give a non-exhaustive list, religion is also about trying to live sub specie aeternitatis; orienting oneself to the transcendent rather than the immanent; living in a moral community of shared practice or as part of a valuable tradition; cultivating certain attitudes, such as gratitude and humility; and so on. To say, as Sam...
Top Five Albums of the Decade
So Eric D. just asked me for a top five list of albums from 2000-2009. It was actually harder than I thought and the list I came up with after a browse through my iTunes library was different from what I expected. Here’s two versions:
Artistically best/most significant for me:
TV on the Radio - Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes
Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
Radiohead - Kid A
Arcade...
Hubris paved way to crisis | The Japan Times... →
A Princeton philosophy professor who runs a hedge fund explains the philosophical underpinnings of the economic crisis. It’s got modelling fallacies, hubris, and warfare theory! What more do you need?
March 2009
4 posts
Op-Ed Contributor - Pun for the Ages - NYTimes.com →
It isn’t the most insightful piece ever, but there are a couple of really good ones in here. I especially like the bit about Shakespeare’s wordplay, and the glorious line from Romeo and Juliet that the author cites.
Visions and Revisions: William Zinsser on writing... →
I still have my Dad’s copy of this book, and as I face down another 12 page paper on quaint and curious lore, this article reminded me of why writing is supposed to be fun.
“Asians are not as physically strong as their western rivals. Nor are they as...”
– Fidel Castro, on the Korean team in the World Baseball Classic (who beat the Cubans)
Harvard said no...
…and now moroseness reigns.
February 2009
5 posts
On Poetry - The Great(ness) Game - NYTimes.com →
My Dad recommended this. It’s a great little article about poetry and what constitutes great nowadays.
Greg Mankiw's Blog: Classic Calvin →
Wow this is depressing…
Update
Semester started…overwhelmed with classes and reading and all that stuff. So rather than anything introspective, here’s more data:
What I’m reading:
Ramanuja’s Vedartha Samgraha (a concise summation of Ramanuja’s theology and philosophy)
Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics
Italo Calvino - If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (ostensibly for pleasure…I’d...
January 2009
10 posts
CENTER FIELD :: Propaganda →
Another blog.... →
This will be of interest to maybe .5 of you…it’s for my Sanskrit class, a friend and I are collaborating on analyzing all of the Sanskrit compounds we run across in the particular text we’re written.
Library of Congress!
So I just finished organizing all of my books in lovely Library of Congress order. A project that took about 10 hours, maybe more, of my time. No comment needed.
Here are some interesting stats:
First book: Roland Barthes, Mythologies (call number AC25 .B3132 1972b) which I have only read part of.
Last book: The Ethnography of Reading, edited by Jonathan Boyarin (call number Z1003...
Pope warns against too much Facebook - Articles of... →
The politics of ME, ME, ME | open Democracy News... →
Academic rant of the evening
So Umberto Eco makes a differentiation between reading a text and using a text; not to say that reading a text is intrinsically ‘better’ than using it, but that one is faithful to the Model Author inside the text and one is using it for outside purposes.
I’m grading papers right now and as I read smart people trying to use Buddhist philosophy for environmental or political...
Amazon.com: Ari Brouillette's review of The Secret →
Very nice