Microcogditations from the front…

This humidity must be part of my penance the priest slipped in when I wasn't listening. Despite everything, Marcus Aurelius never had to deal with this weather!
#TropicalKickToTheHead #Stoicism

•

""Both [Paganism & Stoicism] were consistent, philosophical, and exalted... [but] the first leads logically to murder and the second to suicide. ... It is only the Mystic, the man who accepts the contradictions [of life], who can laugh and walk easily through the world." - GKC

•

Passing an ad for plastic surgery, asked wife if she wants that. Bugged eyes: "No. I'm beautiful."
#MyWifeRocks

•

The nail in the coffin for FTL Neutrinos: LINK.

•

I stand sideways in conversations so people realize I want to go, but doing so only seems to drag it out.
#YouDoItToYourself #Fail

•

I'm leery of writing his O'ness' name in conjunction with the HHS struggle, since doing so not only misses the point (i.e. it's bigger than him, if not bigger than his ego), but also risks making opposition to HHS qua "O____care" a political campaign, at which point religious opponents of HHS have overstepped the very bounds they're trying to protect.

•

@eckharttolle "Real love doesn't make you suffer. How could it?" By making you sacrifice, how about? Saying "I love you" even when you don't 'feel' it is just what validates your love: the difference between loving and being "in love".
#SacredHeart #Crucifixion

•

George Clooney arrested in Washington, D.C. "for protesting Sudan’s attacks on its Nuba people."
"How many more bodies until the Nuba mountains become the next Darfur?"

•

My friend wanted to let me be happy in my "new baby" bubble, filter bad news, but I kneel to a crucified peasant everyday: my bubble is… congenitally open.
#SacredHeart #Crucifixion

•

The duality of human fecundity (maker/medium, male/female, thought/act) finds unity in the absolute simplicity of God as all-wise Creator. Mary's virgin motherhood is but a portrait of the deeper mystery of God's virgin fatherhood. God as Spirit thus transcends and grounds sex. Atheism is ontological solipsism.
#AnalogiaEntis

•

It must never be forgotten that economy originally meant family budget.
#Distributism

•

Scientismatics want a final theory, a theory which would in principle be universally valid, and thus physically deductive, yet they reject religion i.a. because theistic claims are "not in principle" falsifiable. Huh?
#scientism #CultofGnu

A conversation I recently had at work…

There I was, minding my own business, finishing yet another reading of the epistle of James, waiting for the students to arrive, when suddenly my co-worker blurted out, "The Bible?"

"Yes," I said, "that old thing."

"Have you read the whole thing?"

"Yes."

Unlike you, I'd wager.

"Why are you reading it? Just to… re-fresh… your… or…?"

"Yes, I'm one of those. I'm a Catholic."

"Still? Oh."

"I wasn't always Catholic. I was raised Presbyterian, but about five years ago, I entered the Church. I take it you are… interested in the Bible?"

By interested, of course, I mean titillated by your own sophomoric disdain for anything older or bigger than you.

"You mean the official Bible, or the ones that were repressed?"

No, I don't mean the ones that were written later as Gnostic reactions to ancient Christian worship, and which were subsequently rejected by that same body of worshipers for being too old, too weakly linked to the Apostles, and too much at variance with each other, to boot. I don't mean those Bibles, no.

"Ah, yes, I'm familiar with what you mean, but no, I'm reading the orthodox Bible, not the Gospel or Judas or Thomas or anything like that. Do you study religious history?"

As in, do you imbibe as much of the Huffington Post and Youtube clips as your leisure affords?

"Well, I was into history and soash at uni, so… yeah."

Soash!

"So, you like religious history?"

"I like… facts. I mean, not that there are any."

Well, that's a relief. Here I thought you were challenging my faith based on damning facts about the Bible. Good thing there are no facts with which I must contend, aside, I suppose, from the fact of your visceral loathing for Christian tradition and the very idea of truth.

"Ahh. Okay. Right."

"I'm interested in how society… how social ideas can… influence or shape people's actions. Like Scientology, wow! I saw this amazing documentary on BBC last night about Scientology."

Sweet lamb, if only you realized how the "social determinist" argument cuts both ways. If you turn your read, just so, in just the right light, I can only faintly detect the thread of silver running from Dawkins' blog to the ring in your nose.

"Oh, BBC, they're pretty good."

"Yeah, but, well, everybody's got a bias."

Fortunately, everyone but you, right?

"What are you gonna do?"

"I try not to think about it all. I just want to be happy."

Quite.

"Only Black Sabbath can rhyme masses with masses."

Various and sundry…

Strive to learn at least one new prëmbil every day.

+ + +

Everyone is happy until they are not. Therefore, no one is happy. No one can be made unhappy if they are already truly unhappy. Therefore, everyone is happy.

+ + +

Telling yourself over and over again that "telling yourself something over and over again makes it true" doesn't make it true. Or so I am told.

+ + +

If time increases (or "slows") at higher speeds, and time increases in speed (or "flies"), when you're having fun, then having-fun is a slower activity, and therefore closer to the immobility of the divine.

+ + +

‎"The gravity at the CERN site where the neutrinos left, for example, is actually slightly greater than the gravity at the OPERA detector site. As a consequence, time would appear to move more slowly at CERN from the vantage point of the OPERA detector. Failing to take this into account, Contaldi contends, means that '[t]he resulting measurement that the neutrino velocity differs from c is not only unsurprising but should be expected in their setup.'"

–– cf. Gravity May Have Thrown Off Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Calculations - Forbes

“'From the perspective of the clock [on the GPS satellite], the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter….' Which is to say: it is shorter than the distance measured in the reference frame on the ground. [It seems] the OPERA team failed to take this into account––indeed, that they thought of the clocks as on the ground, not in orbit. Van Elburg argues once you take the changing distances between the GPS clocks and the neutrino detectors into account, it cancels out the 60 nanoseconds by which the neutrinos seemed to exceed the speed of light."

–– cf. Netherland Scientist Claims Solution to the FTL Neutrino Problem - Forbes

+ + +

Hilarous cuz it's verdicial. 

+ + +

Class, make sense of this prop. 

+ + + 

"Sean Connery's best line ever." 

+ + +

"Haters gonna hate." 

"Never give up." 

Pick your caption. 

Well!

‎"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks."

-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785

Approval rating…

"Be happy, move ahead, take risks, have faith, don't let fear rule you, live your life--but do it on my time-line with my approval. That is all. Carry on."

"I don't expect unconditional and unflagging support, I expect it now!"

Thought spree...

A: "The movie poster for the last Harry Potter movie is slightly similar to the one for "Enemy Mine"."
B: "That might be its strongest virtue."

+ + +
"From a philosophical point of view...." Is there any other?

+ + +
A: Human nature is a myth. Just look at the diversity of human behavior.
B: The existence of rainbows is an illusion. Just look at the variety of rainbows.
C: The dogmas of human essence, social order, and natural law are yokes upon man's otherwise free and otherwise socially harmonious nature.

+ + +
"There is no fact-checker more ruthless than I when it comes to me quoting myself." -- Elliot Bougis

I think it's only fair that I give credit to me for giving credit to myself for providing such quotable quotations when I needs them.

+ + +
I love losing Facebook friends for ideological reasons!

+ + +
"Universal human rights"––long live speciesism!

+ + +
Yes, yes, but why can't Darwin fix my DVD burner!

+ + +
Faith is at the heart of confidence.

+ + +
David Lewis's "Void and Object" is the funniest thing I've seen all day and the funniest title I've seen all month. (My life really is that arcane.)

+ + +
Amazong!

How Amazon has outsmarted the music industry (and Apple)
By Ed Bott | March 30, 2011, 2:21pm PDT

+ + +
This, from a Church with an INQUISITION! I'm shocked!

Atheists and Catholics in Paris examine question of God
By Alan Holdren

+ + +
Politics is so depressing.



+ + +
It will be nice to get my head shaved to the skin again, it's been too long! Click GOOD if you want to see the pics tomorrow! (If it cracks a hundred people, I might lose the eyebrows too.)

Tales from Lynchdom…

A couple recent Lynch moments.

A few days ago when I got home from the gym, I stopped by a local (grand)mom-and-(grand)pop shop to buy tuna and a sports drink. I had to wait a minute behind another customer and his son (?). Their backs were turned to me but I sensed they were shuffling their hands around a shelf. They said nothing. They turned to leave the shop and came at me with bright red daggers of fingers. Oh. They had merely bought sweetened, dyed strips of squid for a snack. Turns out the father was mute/deaf and he and his son were bickering over how many squid strips they had bought (or could still buy). As they were bickering, in their audibly halcyon way, a middle school girl sidled up to them to join the debate, even though I don't think she spoke sign language. Realize, of course, that whatever fluency the father and son had in sign language was gone with the wind, unraveled by the strips of squid seizing their stammering fingers. I was tired from my workout but also rushing to get a shower to go to work, so the whole thing felt like a time-lapse film.

And the other…

I forgot while writing this post and multitasking on the Internet.

[UPDATED:

I remembered my Lynch moment. Tuesday at my cram school, I got there early to sub for someone, so I was surrounded by students I don't normally see. I was making copies with the machine near the bathroom door and one boy, maybe five years old, came closer, pointing at the bathroom. "It's changed," he chirped. "It was pink, now it's not." Another teacher corrected him that nothing had changed. "It's changed, it's not pink now." As my copies extruded sheet by sheet, I had an insight. I reached over and flicked the light switch on. The floor tiles took on a dull patina of pink. He and the even smaller girl beside him waddled closer to examine the change. "Yes, it's pink, see!" Then I flicked the light off and they giggled. I stepped away and they proceeded to play with the switch for themselves.

This may seem more like a Norman Rockwell than a David Lynch moment, but the reason it struck me is because I imagined myself morphing into a child as I had my epiphany about the boy's perception of bygone pink. And in my reduced state, he swelled to an incredible intellect, like a boyish wizard. And when he pointed into the bathroom again, through the drapes wafting in the doorway, the lights flicked on and off, each second of light revealing Twin Peaks Bob hopping in a crouched ball of sadistic glee.]

But I can tell you about a dream I had a couple nights ago.

I was being extorted by a mobster into pulling a hit on his main rival. I was staked out in a building under construction and was given a long-range bolt gun (a super nail gun, really). The weird part is that my shooting position was across the hallway from the mobster's office, perhaps so he could keep an eye on me and be sure I "done de t'ing right." I think the building was the mobster's new headquarters, and it was already partially in use even while still being built, so all kinds of people were popping in on me. I tried to escape once or twice, I think to go save my family, but I was always brought back to finish the hit. I remember a few close-up views of my targets through the scope and although I killed the rival early on, I had to keep fighting his henchmen as they were firing back at me. This led to a sequence of me shooting numerous nails into a few video-game-esque henchmen on the roof a couple blocks away. At one point they shot a grappling hook cable onto the girder on my (third) floor. I killed the henchmen, unhooked the grappling hook, ran downstairs and refastened it on the girder on the first floor so as to mislead them of my location when other henchmen rushed into the building. My plan was to ambush them from the stairwell as they looked for me (they knew the grappling hook had been fired accurately by the henchmen I later killed). I woke up thinking, "But wouldn't they just rush up the staircase and outgun me?" I realized, grimly, that I'd just have to take them on with my bolt gun.

The Internets is self-affirmed…

According to this peculiar website, the Internet has a 65% positive attitude towards… "the Internet".

Then again, it apparently has an 89.2% positive attitude towards… "death"!

I'm sure he'll be glad to know that the Internet has a 74.9% positive attitude towards "Richard Dawkins" and 66.9% positivity about "the New Atheism", while it scours with a 52.4% negative attitude towards "the pope" and 59.8% negativity towards "the Catholic Church".

Good thing truth ain't a beauty contest.

On a similar front, "natural selection" gets 86.1% positivity while "intelligent design" only gets 63.1% love.

Results may vary from region to region and time to time.

"…why the above is funny."

"The Average Person's Axioms of First Order Predicate Logic:

(A -> B) -> (B -> A)
(There exists) x A(x) -> (For all) x A(x)
(A -> C) AND (B -> C) -> (A -> B)

--Warren Vonroeschlaub

Predicate logic is the study of why the above is funny."
[LINK]

Or, in English:

If a duck is an animal, then an animal is a duck.

There is a toy that is red, therefore all toys are red.

If it rains the ground will be wet, and if the sprinklers turn on the ground will be wet, therefore if it rains the sprinklers will turn on.

Well, no, you can't get there from *here*, but…

Dennett starts from cognitivism and thereby disproves introspective rationalism (á la the beer taster scenario, or my own recent "how heavy is this dumbbell now versus last time" scenario). This is like a man starting from a store-bought roadmap and 'thereby' disproving that you can reach San Francisco in seven inches.

+ + +
"I have heard when my gay friends first had consciousness of their gay attractions, and it was pretty young, as young as my consciousness of heterosexual attractions, therefore it is morally acceptable."

"I have heard when my audited friends first had consciousness of their attractions to laundering, and it was pretty young, as young as my consciousness of the obligation not to steal, therefore it is morally acceptable."

+ + +
We all know drunk guys fight the best and have the most power on tap, therefore, train drunk and you will be immune to the pains that prevent you from breaking through into the powers of Drunkdom.

+ + +
I am a philosopher by trade. You are a not-philosopher by trade. I make X dollars per year. You invariably make X+ dollars per year. Yet, I surpass you existentially since my occupation is to dwell on what you dwell upon during your drive home and those moments when you wife and children and boss are not commmandeeeeering your cognitive capacities. I lose, yet I I win. That's philosophical alchemy for you.

And you may find yourself...

"…you will encounter words like 'encairned', 'decensive', 'quotha', 'perforce', 'wroth', 'guerdon', and 'aye '(used like pepper throughout the text), all of which may be summed up in Haines' funniest quote, 'Man, what art thou at?'"
-- from a review of Aurelius' Meditations at Amazom.com

It reminded me of this song, though I don't know why:



Which song reminded me of these fellows, though I have a slightly clearer reason why:

In other news, tonight as I ate my dinner I realized arguments/writings for free will before the advent of quantum indeterminacy and stochastic processes would be much more entertaining. The recent deluge of evidence for indeterminism has made things almost too easy, don't you think? Granted, elite indeterminists like Peter Van Inwagen and Robert Kane, et al.,––did Van Inwagen really coin "indeterminism"?––avoid relying on quantum indeterminacy for their accounts of freewill, which is why I respect them so much. Someone like Stanley Jaki, by contrast, entirely rejects the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and yet still defends freewill in a deterministic universe. That's my mentor, them's balls! (For the record, Jaki and I both did crew in high school.)

Determinism is held, despite the evidence, based only on the cognitive limits of our current understanding of science. "Even though a coin toss is spoken of as proabiistic, in fact, each specific coin toss has a deterministic outcome. If only we could know enough about its initial conditions, we could know its outcome exactly. We're just waiting for science to catch up with man's deepest, deterministic intuitions." The problem is that, even aside from the quantum indeterminacy we would face at the (…admittedly only currently…) lowest level of analysis, this Laplacian insight would still be subject to human finitude, since a skeptic could just as reasonably argue, "Even though a coin toss is spoken of as deterministic, in fact, each specific coin toss has a stochastic outcome. If only we could know enough about its initial conditions, we could know its outcome is probabilistic, like all of physical nature. We're just waiting for science to catch up with man's deepest, indeterministic intuitions."

RECURSION.0

No means no, no?

東北有三寶。。。

東北有三寶，人蔘，貂皮，烏拉草。

台灣有三寶，檳榔，辣妹，無患子。

美國有三寶，麥粉，當鋪，墨外勞。 （麥當勞？）

The first paragraph of this page contains an explanation for the first line in this post, but the other two lines are whimsical paraphrases, arguably very un-PC, of my own making.

By hook or by crook…

From "When Booze Was Banned But Pot Was Not" by Jacob Sullum, Reason
Posted on January 14, 2011, Printed on January 23, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/149535/

Entrepreneurs taking advantage of legal loopholes included operators of “booze cruises” to international waters, travel agents selling trips to Cuba (which became a popular tourist destination on the strength of its proximity and wetness), “medicinal” alcohol distributors whose brochures (“for physician permittees only”) resembled bar menus, priests and rabbis who obtained allegedly sacramental wine for their congregations (which grew dramatically after Prohibition was enacted), breweries that turned to selling “malt syrup” for home beer production, vintners who delivered fermentable juice directly into San Francisco cellars through chutes connected to grape-crushing trucks, and the marketers of the Vino-Sano Grape Brick, which “came in a printed wrapper instructing the purchaser to add water to make grape juice, but to be sure not to add yeast or sugar, or leave it in a dark place, or let it sit too long before drinking it because ‘it might ferment and become wine.’ ”

An open letter to my cat…

Dear Cheetoh,

Sometimes you remind me of the Warren Zevon song "Excitable Boy". That's not a compliment. For one thing, you're not a boy. If you must keep whining, please learn to speak Spanish, Chinese, German or English, so I can undestand what you keep going on about. I might like to sleep, you know?

But… it is impressive that you like to sleep on top of my boxed set of Feynman's Lectures on Physics. You can stay.

Sincerely,

E.

This post does not exist…

This sentence is only six words long.

This is the first seven-word sentence here.

You have to laugh…

I did.

Besides, laughter is better than getting all wee wee'd up!

"Sarah Palin Defends 'Refudiate'."

Is philosophy a waist of time?

Dr. Stephen Hicks provides a regular florilegium of highly amusing "insights" about philosophy from his undergrad students over the years. A choice excerpt:

The existence of God is questionable since evil does have some good points to make. The greatest gift is to be in God’s presents, but when we are in God’s presents we should not think about ourselves. John Hick rebukes the concept that God would not allow suffering if he existed in the third paragraph of his essay. Because of evil there is said to be another force in the universe—a dark force. His name is Satin.

Viel Spaß beim Lesen!

Gut-busting…

I just guffawed for about three minutes non-stop reading the reviews of this $6,400 Kindle book at Amazon. Brace yourself.

HT to Brandon.