Friday, April 24, 2020
The Sunday Philosophy Club
Finished The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith. I very much enjoyed his The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency when it came out in 1998 and subsequent books in the series.
I have purchased a reasonable number of his other books but none of them took. The Sunday Philosophy Club I have probably begun three times in the past five years. Just didn't engage me.
This time - straight from start to finish and enjoyed it a great deal. Sometimes the moment has to be right for the reading to be magic.
From the blurb:
The writing has the culture and sophistication of P.D. James in her Dalgliesh series but graced with a lightness of touch and good humor that makes it erudite, intriguing, artful, and entertaining.
I particularly enjoy the many digressions and ruminations along the way. Little nuggets of observations with pertinence to the reader but not necessarily to the story.
Samples to follow.
I have purchased a reasonable number of his other books but none of them took. The Sunday Philosophy Club I have probably begun three times in the past five years. Just didn't engage me.
This time - straight from start to finish and enjoyed it a great deal. Sometimes the moment has to be right for the reading to be magic.
From the blurb:
Nothing captures the charm of Edinburgh like the bestselling Isabel Dalhousie series of novels featuring the insatiably curious philosopher and woman detective. Whether investigating a case or a problem of philosophy, the indefatigable Isabel Dalhousie, one of fiction’s most richly developed amateur detectives, is always ready to pursue the answers to all of life’s questions, large and small.Well, yes. And more.
In this first installment, Isabel is attending a concert in the Usher Hall when she witnesses a man fall from the upper balcony. Isabel can’t help wondering whether it was the result of mischance or mischief. Against the best advice of her no-nonsense housekeeper Grace, her bassoon playing friend Jamie, and even her romantically challenged niece Cat, she is morally bound to solve this case. Complete with wonderful Edinburgh atmosphere and characters straight out of a Robert Burns poem,
The Sunday Philosophy Club is a delightful treat from one of our most beloved authors.
The writing has the culture and sophistication of P.D. James in her Dalgliesh series but graced with a lightness of touch and good humor that makes it erudite, intriguing, artful, and entertaining.
I particularly enjoy the many digressions and ruminations along the way. Little nuggets of observations with pertinence to the reader but not necessarily to the story.
Samples to follow.
Most of the barracks elected committees and ran their own courts to punish offenders
From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 308.
The Americans were left almost completely to themselves to organize the prison, maintain discipline, and fill their time as they chose. Most of the barracks elected committees, ran their own courts to punish offenders, and carried out merciless floggings on fellow prisoners caught stealing, skimming the fat off the mess’s soup for their own use (“the grand Vizier’s office at Constantinople is not more dangerous than a cook’s at this prison,” opined Waterhouse), or letting themselves become too filthy. Every day the local farmers and tradesmen were allowed to hold a market on the parade ground from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and vegetables, milk, meat, butter, tea, sugar, clothes, shoes, tobacco, soap, trinkets, and books were sold to supplement the prison-issued diet of beef, bread, barley, cabbage, onions, potatoes, and herring. In January 1814 the American government began supplying a small allowance to the prisoners through the American prisoners’ agent in London, initially one and a half pence a day, raised in April to two and a half pence, doled out in the form of two 1-pound notes a month to each six-man mess; and many of the men also spent their time making ship models with beef bones for the spars and hulls and twisted human hair for the rigging, weaving baskets, fashioning tinware and shoes, even building violins. Others set up shops to resell in small quantities consignments of tobacco and dry goods they purchased from the town’s grocers, or peddle ersatz coffee boiled up from burnt bread, or fried codfish and potato cakes known as plumgudgeon at a penny a piece, or a stew called freco whose predominant ingredient “by an almost infinite degree” was water, at two pennies a pint. George Little earned a shilling a day washing his fellow prisoners’ clothes, at sixpence per dozen.40 Adding to their surreal circumstances, many of the two thousand Americans thrown into British prisons after being released from impressment in the Royal Navy at the start of the war started receiving the pay and prize money they had been owed. In all, probably at least $10,000 a month was coming into the pockets of the Dartmoor prisoners and promptly placed into circulation in the flourishing prison economy.
One can hope
OK. When it happens in threes, its time to post.
Yesterday I drove to get groceries. Listening to NPR for ten minutes and it is an interview with a husband and wife psychotherapist couple discoursing on how to deal with the stresses they conjure in their minds about being cooped up with family and friends.
What struck me was how tone deaf both they and the NPR interviewer was. "Take this time to talk about those difficult subjects you have been putting off." Sounds like an invitation for domestic violence rather than an effective coping mechanism. "Rekindle that old spark." Back when you were young and healthy and before being parents with young children, and before unpaid bills and before caring for elder parents, and before Covid-19 job losses, etc.
For the 20% with savings and secure jobs and family support networks and trust funds and sterling credentials, Covid-19 is an irritating nuisance with menaces. For everyone else, it is perilous, dangerous, and destructive. And the Mandarin Class seem entirely unaware of the difference.
The two therapists went on to recommend using the quarantine to focus on the future. "Talk about where you want to travel after the quarantine is lifted." Half of Americans don't take a vacation in a year. A third have had no vacation in two years. I listened to these nice privileged orchids chattering on, and a subtract of "Let them eat cake" kept running through my mind.
These are the Marie Antoinettes of the Mandarin Class. No clue about the real, hard, healthy, wonderful, messy, holy, disappointing, and joyful lives of their fellow Americans getting by.
The reporter asked what they had been doing during the quarantine. They had taken up Tai Chi. That's it. Let's celebrate an ancient Chinese martial art while we are quarantined from a plague originating in China and made far worse in its spread due to the intransigence and silence of the Chinese Government.
MARIE friggin' ANTOINETTE levels of Mandarin Class narcissism, self-absorption and bubblehood. Whatever happened to the Public in National Public Radio. National Privileged Radio more like it.
But puerile complaining about the idiocy of NPR and the Mandarin class is not much fodder for deep thinking. Canaries in the coal mine at best.
Then, this morning, I see this news article. The Cuomos’ Corona Protocol, Week 3 by Christina Cuomo. Wife of media personality Chris Cuomo. Sister-in-law of the Governor of the State of New York. Mandarin Class hanger-on.
It is truly not possible to post any portion of this column without appearing cruel to the author. It is Marianne Williamson without the logical gravitas. It is Gwyneth Paltrow without the grounding in hard sciences. It is Joy Reid without the grounding in knowledge. It is Hillary Clinton without the self-awareness. It is Nancy Pelosi without the salt-of-the-earth homeliness.
Click through if you must for an intense exposure to grade A cognitive pollution used as a means of demonstrating luxury beliefs affordable only by the financially secure or sinecured Mandarins.
Impossible to believe there is a cognitive or social environment where these people not only survive but appear to thrive.
Then there was this:
OK, a cheery Australian way of making the point - you tall poppies; get stuffed.
Three strikes and there is a post.
And even as I am writing this post, I see 2 different ways of being an American; 2 different ways of being a human being by Adam Ford.
Rejection of the Mandarin Class, reinforced skepticism of self-nominated experts; reinvigorated opposition to anti-democratic authoritarians; rejection of the nudgers, fake news and press release journalism of the mainstream media; defunding of the arrogant, ignorant, intolerant PoMo, critical theory, Marxists of the faculty lounge. Perhaps these will be beneficial side-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Yesterday I drove to get groceries. Listening to NPR for ten minutes and it is an interview with a husband and wife psychotherapist couple discoursing on how to deal with the stresses they conjure in their minds about being cooped up with family and friends.
What struck me was how tone deaf both they and the NPR interviewer was. "Take this time to talk about those difficult subjects you have been putting off." Sounds like an invitation for domestic violence rather than an effective coping mechanism. "Rekindle that old spark." Back when you were young and healthy and before being parents with young children, and before unpaid bills and before caring for elder parents, and before Covid-19 job losses, etc.
For the 20% with savings and secure jobs and family support networks and trust funds and sterling credentials, Covid-19 is an irritating nuisance with menaces. For everyone else, it is perilous, dangerous, and destructive. And the Mandarin Class seem entirely unaware of the difference.
The two therapists went on to recommend using the quarantine to focus on the future. "Talk about where you want to travel after the quarantine is lifted." Half of Americans don't take a vacation in a year. A third have had no vacation in two years. I listened to these nice privileged orchids chattering on, and a subtract of "Let them eat cake" kept running through my mind.
These are the Marie Antoinettes of the Mandarin Class. No clue about the real, hard, healthy, wonderful, messy, holy, disappointing, and joyful lives of their fellow Americans getting by.
The reporter asked what they had been doing during the quarantine. They had taken up Tai Chi. That's it. Let's celebrate an ancient Chinese martial art while we are quarantined from a plague originating in China and made far worse in its spread due to the intransigence and silence of the Chinese Government.
MARIE friggin' ANTOINETTE levels of Mandarin Class narcissism, self-absorption and bubblehood. Whatever happened to the Public in National Public Radio. National Privileged Radio more like it.
But puerile complaining about the idiocy of NPR and the Mandarin class is not much fodder for deep thinking. Canaries in the coal mine at best.
Then, this morning, I see this news article. The Cuomos’ Corona Protocol, Week 3 by Christina Cuomo. Wife of media personality Chris Cuomo. Sister-in-law of the Governor of the State of New York. Mandarin Class hanger-on.
It is truly not possible to post any portion of this column without appearing cruel to the author. It is Marianne Williamson without the logical gravitas. It is Gwyneth Paltrow without the grounding in hard sciences. It is Joy Reid without the grounding in knowledge. It is Hillary Clinton without the self-awareness. It is Nancy Pelosi without the salt-of-the-earth homeliness.
Click through if you must for an intense exposure to grade A cognitive pollution used as a means of demonstrating luxury beliefs affordable only by the financially secure or sinecured Mandarins.
Impossible to believe there is a cognitive or social environment where these people not only survive but appear to thrive.
Then there was this:
Holy shit this is brilliant!!! pic.twitter.com/lZ8PNQy51D
— Zara-Blue Exotic 🐅 (@FitnessByBlue) April 24, 2020
OK, a cheery Australian way of making the point - you tall poppies; get stuffed.
Three strikes and there is a post.
And even as I am writing this post, I see 2 different ways of being an American; 2 different ways of being a human being by Adam Ford.
Rejection of the Mandarin Class, reinforced skepticism of self-nominated experts; reinvigorated opposition to anti-democratic authoritarians; rejection of the nudgers, fake news and press release journalism of the mainstream media; defunding of the arrogant, ignorant, intolerant PoMo, critical theory, Marxists of the faculty lounge. Perhaps these will be beneficial side-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
We go through the day processing massive volumes of waste data for the occasional skimpy fact or insight or hypothesis.
This is one of Althouse's gifts - her focus on words, language, logic, and coherence in communication. From "Imams Overrule Pakistan’s Coronavirus Lockdown as Ramadan Nears." by Ann Althouse.
We are are blasé about the miracle which is person-to-person communication. It goes way beyond simple word definitions and grammar.
It is a quotidian miracle just how effective we are at communicating across circumstances and regions and cultures and experiences and ages and backgrounds and assumptions and knowledge, etc.
But who should be the most practiced at exactly this magic? Print media of course. It is unfair to expect perfection but certainly, were there professional standards and norms, we would expect the striving for perfection.
But this is a highly nuanced criticism. Fair, but subtle.
It goes beyond evidence or vocabulary or grammar. It is all correct.
Althouse focuses on the logic. She treats, as any constitutional lawyer would be expected to do, each statement as a building block of an argument and therefore immediately alerts to the logical inconsistency of the headlines in a way which most causal readers would not.
Most of us are like whale sharks who filter 1,500 gallons of ocean water an hour for the gleanings of krill. We go through the day processing massive volumes of waste data for the occasional skimpy fact or insight or hypothesis. And in that filtering, we are highly accommodating of error. We fill-in, we make assumptions, we reinterpret to make sense, we extrapolate for partial statements.
We usually don't stop and examine everything equally. We don't insist that loose articulations adhere to a Vulcan standard of logical integrity and consistency. We don't have the time, the patience or the tolerance to do so.
But it is neat to see someone like Althouse catch subtle inconsistencies which, once pointed out, are actually glaring.
Refreshing reminder of infinite subtleties and the wonder of communication.
"The government gave in to clerics’ demands that mosques be allowed to stay open during the Islamic holy month. Now critics are asking who’s in charge."This can be dismissed as pointless pedanticism. I don't think it is.
NYT has a headline and subheadline that don't cohere. If the imams have the power to "overrule," then the government didn't "give in." If the government "gave in," then the imams were only petitioning the government for relief. From the article, it seems that the latter is correct, so it's the subheadline that is accurate.
We are are blasé about the miracle which is person-to-person communication. It goes way beyond simple word definitions and grammar.
I formulate an idea in my mind which I wish to convey.And that is the tip of the iceberg for sources of communication misinterpretation and misunderstanding.
I have a half-framed cogitation which I blurt out without pondering or review.
I misspeak.
I fail to articulate.
I place unintended stress on one word over another.
I use vocabulary unfamiliar to my auditor.
I reference abstract concepts with which my auditor is unaware.
I make allusions I don't realize my auditor will not catch.
I am unaware of his or her circumstances and therefore do not understand whatever filters he or she might be applying to what I am saying.
My auditor is not paying full attention, or there is background noise, and misses part of what I said and supplies her own supposition of what I must have intended.
Whatever she thinks I said then sparks an idea which she wishes to convey and the whole processes begins again in reverse.
It is a quotidian miracle just how effective we are at communicating across circumstances and regions and cultures and experiences and ages and backgrounds and assumptions and knowledge, etc.
But who should be the most practiced at exactly this magic? Print media of course. It is unfair to expect perfection but certainly, were there professional standards and norms, we would expect the striving for perfection.
But this is a highly nuanced criticism. Fair, but subtle.
It goes beyond evidence or vocabulary or grammar. It is all correct.
Althouse focuses on the logic. She treats, as any constitutional lawyer would be expected to do, each statement as a building block of an argument and therefore immediately alerts to the logical inconsistency of the headlines in a way which most causal readers would not.
Most of us are like whale sharks who filter 1,500 gallons of ocean water an hour for the gleanings of krill. We go through the day processing massive volumes of waste data for the occasional skimpy fact or insight or hypothesis. And in that filtering, we are highly accommodating of error. We fill-in, we make assumptions, we reinterpret to make sense, we extrapolate for partial statements.
We usually don't stop and examine everything equally. We don't insist that loose articulations adhere to a Vulcan standard of logical integrity and consistency. We don't have the time, the patience or the tolerance to do so.
But it is neat to see someone like Althouse catch subtle inconsistencies which, once pointed out, are actually glaring.
Refreshing reminder of infinite subtleties and the wonder of communication.
You speak unskillfully
From Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare.
Therefore you speak unskillfully: or if yourOn all policy arguments driven by motivated reasoning; which is most of them.
knowledge be more it is much darkened in your malice.
Take A Pair Of Sparkling Eyes
Double click to enlarge.
Take A Pair Of Sparkling Eyes
by Gilbert And Sullivan
Take a pair of sparkling eyes,
Hidden, ever and anon,
In a merciful eclipse--
Do not heed their mild surprise--
Having passed the Rubicon,
Take a pair of rosy lips;
Take a figure trimly planned,
Such as admiration whets
(Be particular in this);
Take a tender little hand,
Fringed with dainty fingerettes,
Press it, press it in parenthesis
Ah! Take all these, you lucky man--
Take and keep them, if you can, if you can!
Take all these, you lucky man--
Take and keep them, if you can, if you can!
Take a pretty little cot--
Quite a miniature affair--
Hung about with trellised vine,
Furnish it upon the spot
With the treasures rich and rare
I've endeavoured to define.
Live to love and love to live--
You will ripen at your ease,
Growing on the sunny side--
Fate has nothing more to give.
You're a dainty man to please
If you're are not satisfied, not satisfied.
Ah! Take my counsel, happy man;
Act upon it, if you can, if you can!
Take my counsel, happy man;
Act upon it, if you can, if you can!
Take my counsel, happy man!
Act upon it, if you can, if you can, if you can,
Act upon it, if you can, happy man, if you can!
Thursday, April 23, 2020
March (from the series “City”) 1989 by Ruzin Vladimir Ivanovich
March (from the series “City”) 1989 by Ruzin Vladimir Ivanovich
Click to enlarge.
I see wonderful things
Wow! "Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and random motion." https://t.co/rKe434JlJA pic.twitter.com/wbFIk2Zl6c
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) March 18, 2020
He did not strike me as a man of eminent ability
From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 179.
' He was far from good-looking,' added an Englishman who saw him at Bithur. 'The forehead was low, the nose rather broad at the nostrils, and his teeth irregular and discoloured. His eyes were expressive and full of cunning, like those of most Asiatics; but he did not strike me as a man of eminent ability.' In this the Englishman was wrong. Tatya Tope was to distinguish himself as one of the most talented of all the rebel leaders.
Once the rebel army was reorganized, order was imposed upon the city by the appointment of Nana Sahib's adoptive brother, Baba Bhat, as chief of the judiciary. Baba Bhat, described as 'a dirty-looking fellow, wearing green spectacles across his nose, with an unwieldy turban on his head', dispensed justice perched on the corner of a billiard-table in a small house near the Post Office, surrounded by 'a host of scribes, smartly dressed . . . ready to catch a word that might fall from his "Excellency's" lips'. Despite his eccentric appearance Baba Bhat was a shrewd judge and an extremely severe one, passing sentences much more harsh than those which would have been delivered in the time of the Company's rule, reviving Hindu criminal law and punishing prisoners with mutilation. He was assisted in his work by an efficient kotwal who had previously worked for the Company's police and had replaced two less capable appointees, one of whom had been dismissed after being seen mounted on a horse with a famous courtesan. A Superintendent of Supplies was also appointed and given authority to imprison those unwilling to do business with him.
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