Priorities

Priorities:

This man has them wrong.

The Washington state man who's on a 60-day all-potato diet wishes he had set a goal of one month instead of two.

Chris Voigt told the Tri-City Herald that — as good and healthy as potatoes are — there's only so many ways they can be prepared. And, about halfway through his tuber diet, which began Oct. 1, he's had them boiled, baked, steamed, grilled, fried, marinated and mashed...

"Tuesday was a rough day for me," he told the Herald "I really, really wanted a pickle."

We all know the proper answer to that, I assume?



The underlying tune to that, by the way, is the same as the theme to Sesame Street. It's even clearer in this version.

How Plebe Are You?

How Plebe Are You?

Mixed results, in my case. The Daily Caller linked to this article, which itself was a reaction to a Ricochet article, about elitism. My results on the “How Plebe are You?” quiz:

1. Can you talk about “Mad Men?” No.

2. Can you talk about the “The Sopranos?” Sure.

3. Do you know who replaced Bob Barker on “The Price Is Right?” Not even.

4. Have you watched an Oprah show from beginning to end? No.

5. Can you hold forth animatedly about yoga? Not animatedly or in any other way.

5. How about pilates? No.

5. How about skiing? No.

6. Mountain biking? No.

7. Do you know who Jimmie Johnson is? No.

8. Does the acronym MMA mean nothing to you? Nothing at all.

9. Can you talk about books endlessly? Sure.

10. Have you ever read a “Left Behind” novel? No.

11. How about a Harlequin romance? No, but do I get partial credit for Diana Gabaldon and "Out of Africa"?

12. Do you take interesting vacations? I don't take any vacations. I like it here.

13. Do you know a great backpacking spot in the Sierra Nevada? Nope.

14. What about an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor? Where?

15. Would you be caught dead in an RV? We lived in ours for the better part of a year while building this place, with three big dogs, yet.

16. Would you be caught dead on a cruise ship? No (crowds).

17. Have you ever heard of of Branson, Mo.? Yes, but I wouldn't go there (crowds).

18. Have you ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club? No.

19. How about the Rotary Club? No.

20. Have you lived for at least a year in a small town? Does living outside one count?

21. Have you lived for a year in an urban neighborhood in which most of your neighbors did not have college degrees? If this includes "suburban neighborhood," I'd guess some did and some didn't; the subject rarely came up.

22. Have you spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line? Not as far as I know, since school.

23. Do you have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian? Yes.

24. Have you ever visited a factory floor? Yes, but only as bankruptcy counsel.

25. Have you worked on one? No.

Yeesh. I'm afraid I may be at least partly an elitist. In my defense, I love Sarah Palin, nearly all my clothing comes from WalMart, I enjoy pork rinds, I own guns, and I'm an avid NCIS watcher. Oh, and I'm a knuckle-dragging Tea Partier. Speaking of which, who's looking forward to next Tuesday?

I suspect there should be a third category: neither elitist nor plebeian but just sort of "out of it."

Magic Carpets

Magic Carpets

Another plug for the Bing search engine. Yesterday's home picture was an arresting shot, similar to the one here, of something right out of Lothlorien. I can't figure out how to download a high-quality version, but I can do these two links. First, a website belonging to the photographer, Louie Psihoyos (which will give you a finer-grained version of the picture on the right), and second, go to Bing, move your cursor to the little icons in the bottom right of the screen, and choose "previous image" (which will give you something similar by the same photographer).

These are not some kind of fairy habitat but a camping system known as "portaledges," developed for climbers on multi-day rock-wall ascents. I don't think the guys who market portaledges are fully tuned into the visual possibilities of their product. Their website provides admirable detail about cost and construction but misses the chance to show portaledges in all their beautiful heart-stopping context.

I've always wanted one of those romantic mosquito-netted beds that evoke colonial Africa, but I'm afraid they wouldn't last two minutes in my doggified household.

This looks like a useful hammock with a mosquito net and fly.

War & Conservatives

War & Conservatives:

I have a piece at BLACKFIVE, on a not-very-impressive piece of philosophy that somehow got published by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

American Brass Quintet 50th Anniversary Performance

Speaking of music, I had the pleasure of attending this most wonderful event. The husband of a good friend is one of the performers. I've never heard an exclusively brass performance. I tend to love the strings or a full orchestra but this was amazing. I particularly was taken with the Gabrieli piece that culminated the event. Wow! It was an orchestra of brass instruments, broken into five groups of five, all with one of the professionals from the American Brass Quintet accompanying four Julliard School student performers. What a truly special evening.

Of course I thought of all of you, especially when the Three Fantasias in Church Modes started. It was lovely.

My friend met her husband later in life, after they were each already divorced and had children from previous marriage. Her son, a horn player himself, bought her a private lesson from one of the horn players in this quintet, because he's kind of a big deal (they both play French horn). And voila! Both of them: hook, line, and sinker.

She plays in the best amateur orchestra in New York City, the Park Avenue Orchestra, which has four performances in their season that cost $20 a piece, and they take place in an old church! That's a nice New York moment.

New York Premiere for Fixated Nights:

New York Premiere for Chants and Flourishes. I happened to be standing in line for drinks at intermission wtih this composer. Together we lamented the lack of adequate student help behind the bar!

The last piece, Gabrieli, was just tremendous!

A Knight's Tale

A Knight's Tale:

Venus in an instant:

A new meta-analysis study conducted by Syracuse University Professor Stephanie Ortigue reveals falling in love can elicit not only the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine, but also affects intellectual areas of the brain. Researchers also found falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second.

Results from Ortigue's team revealed when a person falls in love, 12 areas of the brain work in tandem to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image.
The findings raise the question: "Does the heart fall in love, or the brain?"
"That's a tricky question always," says Ortigue. "I would say the brain, but the heart is also related because the complex concept of love is formed by both bottom-up and top-down processes from the brain to the heart and vice versa.

Interesting from a perspective of what they used to call 'phenomenology.' It doesn't answer the question of whether you can know enough about the other person to truly love them, of course. This study only treats the sensory experience.

Playing Catch

Playing Catch:

I'm sure you've all read the latest from Bill, but if you missed it, he's been juggling rockets again.

Keep your head down, Bill. We need you to generate clever puns in the comments.

The Birds

The Birds

We caught the tail end of a PBS show tonight about smart crows solving a puzzle that required them to pull up a string, extract a short stick tied to its end, use the short stick to get a longer stick from behind some bars, and use the long stick to remove a treat from the end of a tube. Unfortunately I can't find that clip on YouTube, but here's something similar in one of those great TED talks. The crows do several tricks, of which one of the best is early on. If the narrator is serious (and correct) that the crow doing that trick really figured out that trick with the wire for himself, I'm impressed.

Smart critters. They readily teach their tricks to other crows, which means they have something like a transmissible culture, as humans do.

Weekend

A Slow Weekend:

I'm sorry I haven't posted much -- or responded to many thoughtful comments, below -- but I have been busy visiting with an old friend who stopped in.



The birds are hybrids between saker falcons and gyrfalcons. They belong to my friend, who has a business doing bird abatement in airports, vinyards and other areas that need to drive off lots of birds. These larger falcons are better choices for the work than American hawks like the Red Tail or Harris, because they hunt from the air rather than from trees. Thus, pigeons and such see them soaring, and head for other country -- so he was telling us, in any case.

Instead of productive work, that's meant a weekend of cooking steaks over an open fire, helping him sight in his rifle, and so forth. I'll try to get back to thinking seriously about things tomorrow.

Hope you've been well.

Piano Envy

Piano Envy

A friend who can scarcely afford it is making the plunge to buy a 9-foot Baldwin concert grand for her 14-year-old son, who's delighting her by developing into a fine pianist. My friend is an excellent musician herself (flute) who homeschools her boy and has encouraged his musical talents. They live in an extraordinary collection of tiny buildings on a couple of acres in a town of about 300 souls halfway between Houston and Austin. Only one of the buildings, which normally houses many aspects of the architectural photography business that my friend runs with her husband, is even remotely capable of housing this gorgeous instrument. It's used, but in good condition; I think the picture here that I pulled from the Net probably is a good representation. (And it's a good thing it's used, because they retail new for $89K, decidedly not in the budget. I think she's going to get it for $20K, already a crazy number.)

I hope the piano thing works out well for my friend's son, because I think she just blew the college fund. Well, they can always sell it if his passion dissipates, and there are worse marketable skills to have than the ability to play the piano at a professional level. As for the non-monetary advantage: that's incalculable. Not many kids are lucky enough to have both musical talent and a parent who's fanatically devoted to excellence in instruments.

She called her mother with the news first, only to receive a disappointing response. She knew if she called me she'd get the drooling, panting, frantically approving attitude she was looking for.

Angel

Angel & The Badman

A favorite movie of mine is on Hulu:



If any of you have dodged my earlier attempts to get you to watch it, take a couple hours this weekend.

Mustard

Mustard

We started harvesting our mustard seed last year and making prepared mustard by grinding the seeds with vinegar and a bit of salt and sugar. I found an article that advised leaving it at room temperature until it reached the desired mildness, then refrigerating it. The article also warned that it would taste like toxic waste on the first day, which is true, but don't give up! -- after only a few days it tastes great.

Like many members of the Brassica family, mustard is ridiculously easy to grow. After it produces a very pretty set of small yellow flowers, the seeds form in a tiny pod that's like a miniature black-eyed pea pod, only about an inch long. I laboriously zipped open the fresh pods until it finally dawned on me that once they were thoroughly dry they could be crumbled open; the chaff is then easily blown away, leaving the tiny seeds.

I don't recommend a mortar and pestle for the blending process. My ordinary blender did a good job, though it took the better part of twenty minutes to convert a cup or so of seeds to a blender-full of prepared mustard. You just keep adding vinegar until the mixture blends properly, and add bits of salt and sugar to taste. This makes an absolutely killer mustard for spreading on the outside of a ham in cooking, along with brown sugar and crumbled ginger cookies, à la Alton Brown.

Last year's crop was brown mustard, the medium kind. Mild American mustards are made with white seed. Crazy-hot Indian food is made with black mustard, which is the kind of seeds that just came in the mail, and which will go into one of our newly prepared beds this weekend, mustard being a cool-weather crop.

The Peons Get Uppity

The Peons Get Uppity

Last night there was a debate between candidates for Congress from the Illinois 8th District. The moderator was asked if the event would start with the Pledge of Allegiance. "No," she answered briefly. The audience began to murmur, which prompted her to begin a lecture about the lack of precedent. The audience simply leapt to its feet and recited the pledge, probably in less time than she was going to spend arguing about it:

The moderator was displeased. “I hope that will be the last time I am disrespected,” she said.

Mmmmm, probably not.

H/t RedState

Internalism and Externalism

Internalism and Externalism:

One of the interesting parts of our discussion below, on Hegel and love, is the question of whether you can in fact know your wife as anything more than an idea. Hegel's position is that you really can't; although that doesn't mean she isn't real. Hegel lets himself out of this trap by asserting that 'the real is rational, and the rational is real' -- and, therefore, that the more you improve the rationality of your ideas, the more it doesn't matter whether you have 'the rational idea' of your wife, or 'the real' wife. The two approach, and in the mind of God attain, identity.

The idea is that our minds (these days, internalists like to say, "our brains" or "our nervous systems") interpret reality, and therefore add a layer to it that it doesn't really have. For example, we interpret light waves in certain ranges as color.

Thus, we cannot know what the things are really like in themselves (as Kant says in his Critique of Pure Reason). We're sort of trapped in our minds.

Mr. Hines supports this idea in relation to his wife:

Even after 89 years of close marriage, we can never know the other person, we only will have learned a lot about that person. Since we cannot merge our selves, we can never completely know the other, and so we can never really know the other. And so we are left with "just" the idea of the other--our perception of who the other is.

There are some good reasons to doubt this picture, even though it comes with a pedigree as exalted as Kant and Hegel. Hillary Putnam raised some of them in some thought experiments that will seem a little odd when you first encounter them, but which make the serious point that the meanings of words don't relate to our mental -- or even our brain -- states. You can explore that at your leisure, if you wish: For example, see his paper "Meaning and Reference." There are now many rational, detailed, analytic arguments against the internalist model.

I don't propose to make another one here, though I'll be glad to discuss Putnam's (or another) with you if you like. The idea of being 'trapped in the head' and never being epistemically certain of what is around you strikes me as a kind of nonsense. So too the concept that we know things only as ideas. There's a way of knowing what a horse is as an idea: you can read about horses, study their makeup and their structure, learn about the diseases that afflict them, read about their gaits, and so forth. That's an intellectual knowledge, an improving of your rational understanding of the idea of a horse.

You can also go out on a misty morning, with a rope in your hand, walk up to a black horse and set your hand on its nostrils. I did that this morning when the neighbor's beasts broke down their fence again, and had migrated down the road toward my place.

Once you put a rope on a horse, you can do many things with it. You can train it to the saddle. You can sit in the saddle, and feel it move beneath you. You can learn how it thinks, and experience the mind of a prey animal firsthand by how it moves and starts underneath you. You will realize -- not think, but know -- that other kind of mind.

You can know when it trusts you, and then you can see as a new world opens for the horse as well as for you: the two of you can do things that neither of you could have done alone. Just as you know its mind, it comes to know yours, and loses some of the fear that lies in its own nature.

You can then ride together, wherever you wish.

That's not my idea of the horse interacting with the horse's idea of me. It's me, and the horse, together. We know each other. The experience does not suggest atomic intelligences that can only know each other as ideas. It suggests living beings that have a certain capacity to merge, at the level of soul.

Hegel II

Hegel, II:

Be sure to read Cassandra's response to our thread below.

Confer

Confer:

How to Love a Woman

Hegel on How To Love a Woman:

This post arises out of reading Hegel's philosophy of mind, which makes a fairly extraordinary claim about the nature of passionate love. I'd like to explore it with you.

The claim begins in paragraph 448, on the mental faculty of attention. The issue of attention is that you are free to give it, or not; and therefore, if you are to have a passion, it is because you have chosen to give it your attention.

But what is the thing to which you are giving your attention? It is an idea: and, therefore, it is your idea. After all, it exists in your mind, and the thoughts you have are your own. He offers an example:

Thus we know, for example, that if anyone is able to form a clear picture to himself, say in a poem, of the feelings of joy or sorrow that are overwhelming him he rids himself of the thing that was oppressing his mind and thereby procures for himself relief or complete freedom. For although by contemplating the many aspects of his feelings he seems to increase their power over him, yet he does in fact dimnish this power by making his feelings into something confronting him, something that becomes external to him. Goethe, for instance, particularly in his Werther, brougth himself relief while subjecting the readers of this this romance to the power of feeling.

The book he mentions, The Sorrows of Young Werther, sparked a wave of suicides across Europe. The title character is a suicide, killing himself over losing his love.

Why was his love worth dying over, though? She was an idea -- that is to say, she was not just a girl, with all the problems any individual girl might have. She was an ideal girl: it was his mind which had made her an ideal that was worth dying over.

We remember here our discussion around Chaucer's A Knight's Tale, and the objection raised by female readers that the young knights didn't know -- and therefore could not love -- the lady at all. Hegel seems entirely subject to that line of attack.

But now consider his further remarks on passion.

[P]assion is neither good nor bad; the title only states that a subject has thrown his whole soul -- his interests of intellect, talent, character, enjoyment -- on one aim and object. Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion. It is only a dead, too often, indeed, a hypocritical moralizing which inveighs against the form of passion as such.

So to have thrown your whole soul into a vision of beauty, that is passion. To have passion for a woman is, then, not to have some physical longing alone; that belongs to mere appetites, which rank much lower on his scale of mind. Rather, what you have is a longing for an idea of what the woman would be if she were as perfect as you wish her to be.

Well, and she is not; so is this not a lie? And are you not betraying her, if you will not take her as she is rather than demanding some perfection no one can possess?

Here I am reminded of Cassandra's wise words, directed towards men: that biology is not an adequate excuse for bad behavior. It is not what you are that makes you worthy of love, but what you could be; and the fact of trying to be that better thing.

Or we may turn to the Christian admonition to love the sinner, and hate the sin: this is nothing more than to love the idealized vision of the person, separated from their (actual) sin. You are asked to love them not as they are, but as they should be.

Now I wonder if Hegel isn't on to something. I hate to ascribe anything good to German Idealism: but let's talk it over, and see if there isn't something here.

Can't wait till this shows up on netflix. Heh.

Getting the Civil War right

Getting the Civil War Right:

There are doubtless many who would say that we shouldn't spend a lot of time on the American Civil War at all, it being ancient history and all that. Nevertheless, it was one of the most crucial moments in the American story, and we need to know how to think about it.

This story about the Virginia textbook shows one wrong way of handling the matter.

The author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian but has written several books, said she found the information about black Confederate soldiers primarily through Internet research....

Excuse me.

[Bangs head on wall for a few minutes.]

WHY do we have people who are not trained historians writing history textbooks? Is there some shortage of people with degrees in history? The last I heard there was such a glut of Ph.D.'s in history that few could find jobs.

OK. So, one bad approach: quoting Wikipedia and the Sons of Confederate Veterans' website, uncited, in a textbook.

The inclusion of alternative claims is not bad, if they are properly sourced and the controversy around them is explained. The Civil War remains highly controversial in terms of our understanding of it, even among professional historians -- a fact the article plays down to an unhappy degree. There is not general agreement about any of the basic questions of the war. There are probably more books written about it than any other topic in American history.

We went down to Stone Mountain for the Highland Games this weekend, as recently mentioned. I had occasion to point out the relief sculpture on the mountain to a child. I told him the three riders were important men from the war's history, Confederate generals. Could he guess which ones?

"Fredrick Douglass?" he guessed. On examination, this proved to be the only name he knew to be associated with the war.

There are two further errors in that approach: not teaching the controversies, yes, but apparently not even teaching the allegedly 'settled' history. All that the schools appear to convey is the politically correct narrative.

That's not to say that children shouldn't learn about Frederick Douglass, who was a wise and interesting man -- Eric was citing him in an email he sent me just the other day. Absolutely they should know who he was, and what he had to say. I just want them to know a little more, too.

Illustrations

An Illustration:

'You know who's dumb? That Sarah Palin. What an air head she is. Did you hear she said Tea Partiers were going to party like it was 1773? What a moron! We all know... ummmm....'