Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Right and Right

Kierkegaard sets existential commitment over moral generality with his famous (infamous) principle of the teleological suspension of the ethical - the ends justifying an unjust act.  In Fear and Trembling, the unjust act is the sacrifice of Isaac on Mt Moria.  Abraham is right to lie to his boy and his servants in the interest of getting there and doing the dreadful deed of loyalty to God, because it is to God.

I think there must be more to it than this - there must be an ethicisation of the practical.  Abraham is right not simply because he obeys God, but because who he obeys happens to be the God of Love, who will always provide himself a lamb. A sincerely mistaken Abraham would be a wrongdoer, if I am right. Jephthah the judge is probably a good example.

Monday, August 29, 2011

Till We Have Faces

In C.S. Lewis' 'Till We Have Faces', the Priest of Ungit confronts the King of Glome, demanding the sacrifice of his daughter.  The kings adviser, a Greek war prisoner made slave known as Fox, speaks up to pick apart the pronouncements of the priest of Ungit, showing them thick with paradox and contradiction.  The priest responds:
 'We are hearing much Greek wisdom this morning, King,' said the Priest. 'And I have heard most of it before. I did not need a slave to teach it to me.  It is very subtle.  But it brings no rain and grows no corn; sacrifice does both. It does not even give them boldness to die. That Greek there is your slave because in some battle he threw down his arms and let them bind his hands and lead him away and sell him, rather than take a spear-thrust in his heart.  Much less does it give them understanding of holy things. They demand to see such things clearly, as if the gods were no more than letters written in a book.  I, King, have dealth with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like the eddies of a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them.  Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.'

An excellent book, but obscure - both little known and hard to understand.  I will post again with some interpretive keys when I finish this re-reading.

Here's something interesting...

It's an application of the Turing Test to whether or not Atheists and Christians have accurate models of each other.  Christians have the edge, but there are a few advantages on their side:
1. Atheism is VERY simple, relatively.  There is no lore, not much argot or arcana.
2. Christians who have a relationship with Unequally Yoked and participate in the discussions are not the mass of christians.  (I'd suggest Atheists who know they are atheists are not the mass of atheists.)

Still, it would be nice if more Atheists realised how easily their views were being comprehended (and rejected).

(H/T The Dish.)

Sunday, August 28, 2011

genghis khan

sfb:What is good in life?
GKA man's greatest work is to break his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all the things that have been theirs, to hear the weeping of those who cherished them.
sfb: You've obviously never nursed your sleeping baby son.
GK: No. But then I probably had over a thousand.
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Saturday, August 27, 2011

Reading Hajime Tanabe’s ‘Philosophy as Metanoetics’


As a preface, I should say that I continue to the first page I read intelligible, and later pages much harder going. This blog post is long, and rambling, and clearer probably because of inaccurate summarising.
I think I have now read enough to begin to try to summarise or restate the thesis.  

Taking Kant as a reasonably adequate treatment of the problem of reality, perception and reason he follows the critique of pure reason up to the antinomies of pure reason, which Kant felt defined the barrier of the soul. Tanabe argues that honesty should have driven Kant to ‘absolute critique’, not trying to preserve the self against the critique of pure reason. Exposure to ‘absolute critique’ throws the soul into ‘absolute disruption.’ It confronts nothingness.  Psychologically, this is experienced as a profound consciousness of ruin.  ‘Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.’  It is awareness that your awareness, so proud of itself, so full of plans and intentions, master of so many abilities, is incoherent, unable to sustain itself in the presence of pure reason.  This moment, squarely confronted, leads the self to see (to become) (its) nothingness. If faced, in the aftermath, there is a silence, and a continuing. I have ruined my life and I am sorry, one says and then stops. This is the end of self-power (jiriki). But something continues, the emptied self, expecting to be rolled up once and for all.  There is only what he calls (from Shin Buddhism I think) the Great Nay-qua-Great Compassion, the silence of nothingness. Encountering this silence transforms the self to other-power.
In the later chapter (3) on historicity, he gives the example of science under this pattern.  Confronted with inexplicable phenomena, science sees its own incoherence.  Everything is up for grabs.  The new ‘world’ is not made until the old ‘world’ is given up.  Until you abandon the geocentric model, the heliocentric model appears as a terrible sword of judgment, the very fire of hell – incomprehensibly alien and opposed implacably to everything familiar. Go through that fire, let the old world die, and the new world is bright and limpid and perspicuous.

So much for the first little bit.

The question I know you’re all asking is ‘what kind of nothingness is it? Big? Little? Partial?’ He is glad you asked, he has a lot to say about that, and you will not be surprised to learn the answer: it is ‘absolute nothingness’.  But I am going too fast and skipping over vital steps like absolute mediation, absolute disruption and absolute transformation.

The point of absolute nothingness is that it is not just the denial or absence of something, or even of everything.  It is absolute nothingness, the nothingness against which God maintains existence. But for Tanabe, the encounter with absolute nothingness, or the realisation of absolute nothingness, causes absolute disruption in the process of understanding the real. Absolute disruption seems to mean fundamental and complete disconnection.  Absolute transformation to ‘other-power’ is the only way to get over the gap of the disruption.

He takes up Heidegger’s account of being a ‘thrown-project’, of having come into existence with a position and also a trajectory, a direction, and hence an expected future.  Heidegger’s resoluteness sees the highest good of a person as responding authentically to who they are and exactly the present situation.  Tanabe believes that unless you are a great sage or genius, your authentic response has to begin with metanoetics, with repentance acknowledging that nothing in you can answer the reality of the situation.  And if once begun with repentance, with a transformative encounter with absolute nothingness, there are more possibilities.  Heidegger sees ‘dying’ as a way of life that responds to the anxiety of the uncanniness of being what we are, and of death looming as a possibility not to be out-stripped. Dying means acting authentically and surrendering all the benefits of inauthenticity, moment by moment by moment.  Tanabe wants to confront the ungroundedness of even authenticity with the challenge of absolute nothingness, grounding the self not in self-power, but in ‘other-power’. Confronted not just by its own nothingness, but by absolute nothingness, the self is transformed to no-self, and in the negation of the negation of the finite self, the possibilities are endless.  He (Tanabe) is not shy of calling this a ‘death and resurrection’.

As I read Nietzsche, something similar is going on.  The self, with its tricks and pandering and manipulation, is to be reduced to its legitimate function, as an engine of will-to-power that is contiguous with the will-to-power of life in you.  Nietzsche might therefore recognize other-power in the work of life in the body of an individual.

Tanabe though, seems to be able to find the classic, straightforward virtues in other-power.  The life of dependence on other-power sees through the nothingness of self, and of others, and yet this initiates compassion.  Nothingness is the Great Nay-qua-Great Compassion. I don’t know how this is to be justified philosophically, and I suspect Tanabe is OK with the religious ascription of this character to absolute nothingness.  To me, this would make more sense as revealing a deep innate character that was obscured by ego.  But for him, the move into religious understandings is necessary to gives room to understand the given world, the present real.

In the course of chapter 3, he gives a reading of important philosophers (Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) through his new system of metanoetics.  The last of them all is Nietzsche, who, in affirming will-to-power, the commanding, in-control individual over and against weakness, falseness and ressentiment.  He admits to difficulty reconciling this with metanoetics, and yet a great enjoyment of the temper and truth in Nietzsche.  He concludes, in the end, that Nietzsche is probably a great sage, but one who points out the all important truth that Dionysian life exists only against a background of tragedy and self-emptying in death. From end of ch3:

“Nietzsche’s view [of time and historicity] has close affinities with the Kierkegaardian “moment,” the point where eternity touches time, in the sense that it forms the ground of a death-and-resurrection.  The fact that Heidegger’s notion of the “present,” which takes a stance close to both of these, establishes the existence of free self-consciousness in the nothingness of Nietzsche rather than in the eternal faith of Kierkegaard is an expression of the German people’s worship of the sage and the hero, which stems from a convergence of his character with the spirit of the age.  Conversely, the fact that my metanoetics coincides with Kierkegaard’s faith may be said to be an inevitable consequence of the standpoint of the ordinary, ignorant individual, which also is ordained by individual character and the spirit of the age.  That metanoetics, despite its opposing orientation, should be able to open a way to the understanding of Nietzsche is hardly surprising when considered from the standpoint of absolute transformation.  It shows us the dialectic of paradox.  It would not be going to far to say that the only way for old fools like me to become disciples of Nietzsche is to walk the way of metanoetics."

Friday, August 26, 2011

A patchy survey of some Windows laptops making an effort

The Samsung Series 9 is a lovely thing - $1499 now for the 11inch.  The main weakness of this unit is the price. Lacking the confidence of Apple to say 'We reckon we can sell millions of these' the cost seems high.

The ASUS U36 - thin, with a full voltage cpu.  The screen is apparently a bit patchy, less luminous in some quadrants than others (can't find that review now).

The ASUS UX31 - thin, shiny. Too shiny?  I also expect it to be hot. You could fry an egg on my last Asus laptop, and it was plenty bulky.

But unless you hate OS/X, these are all not beating the Air in the things you want (size, weight, screen, keyboard, touchpad, battery life) by enough. Screens are small, or low-res, or patchy with less of the Apple secret sauce (I suspect it is their attentiveness).

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Good and Good

As I walked toward the office today, I was thinking about how I believe I can do anything, but often find that I can't, or at least, not in a useful amount of time. The big problem is shying away from difficulty, from not knowing. There is a skill in thoroughness, in discipline, in becoming good at a job.

I was thinking about the defecting lieutenants of Libya, and I was thinking about the great art and engineering produced under Stalin. There is sometimes as much or more benefit in being a skilled worker, doing a job good, as in doing a good job. Apparently Aristotle's phronemos (creatively skilled 'genius'?) could find 'the Good' in creating the best products or doing the best work. Somehow this idea is new to me every time. I always want knowing 'the Good' to entitle me to be hopeless.

He who is slack in his work is brother to him who destroys.
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Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Emergency Room

We are waiting in the emergency room as Abel has had a fever and is only 4 weeks old. He seems to be a bit better now, and we are wondering about going.

Emergency rooms are very levelling. Triage is an explicit levelling, but just waiting together an unknown time, in public, with pain and sickness and tears is also good for the soul. I would recommend starting here at the Childrens, but for advanced practitioners, after midnight Friday or Saturday at Footscray emergency. It's a spiritual discipline. The worl may offer a lot of good things, but there's a lot of waiting for improvement to be done, and the waiting room is a good place to be reminded.

UPDATE:  He's fine.  No measurable fever and demonstrated remarkable forbearance in the ER.  Staff were very kind and thorough, and managed to ask 'Is this your first child?' as a medical history question. But you don't want to fool around with newborns, and they were also very thorough about encouraging us to bring him back any time.
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Macbook Air vs Pro vs future Pro

As mentioned, one of the things I'd like to pay triple for by owning it now instead of paying off my mortgage, is a new laptop. At the moment, I would probably like a basic 13" MBP, with a hdd upgrade to 500Gb. Alternatively, for the same price, I could get a 13" MB Air, with lots less stuff in it, but that SSD goodness (128GB). Both are similar cpu pace, battery life, OS. The Air has no optical drive and a few less ports, but it weighs almost nothing and looks awesome. I can live with the small HDD, by keeping my huge and growing iTunes podcast library externally.

Complicating the scene, macrumours estimates that macbooks are due for an update in the next few months. So I have to compare both present options against my fantasy macbook:
- onboard SSD (say 40Gb) for OS and Apps in addition to conventional HDD. This would need to be integrated with the OS though (ability to manage finite space for frequently executed executables), and if it was in Lion, I think someone would have noticed. I'd guess once full, you'd manage it as a cache of most-used executables with a clever defrag routine.
- more everything, and cheaper.
- blu-ray capable super-drive?
- longer battery life. 7 hrs is great, but you know what's even better? 8 hrs.
- smart management of iTunes library would be nice.
- displayport-to-something-useful adapters cost less. (I think displayport is now Thunderbolt).

Any readers want to speak up for a Wintel option that has very long battery life, looks as good etc?
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Happy Birthday, readership!

The readership is celebrating a birthday today - I hope it's a delightful one.
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Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Ohh, those christians...

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has a piece at the Atlantic that tries to critique Rick Perry's christianity with recourse to some fairly simple bible reading. The comments are terrible. It has immediately degenerated into reasonable atheists vs absurd christians apparently hoping to establish forever which is the one true faith.

Her point, which would be my point, is that their are ample resources from within the Christian tradition to critique attempts to identify with Christ to win votes.

For a very long time in parts of the US, the church teacher has had the biggest opportunity to educate regular christian people, but they themselves don't have to know tooo much or be too intelligent. Their higher education is conducted at seminaries and specialised education institutes - of widely varying quality. The great universities of the world started out to train people for ministry, so its not essentially undignified.

Somewhere, I feel the theological colleges confused politics and theology. Theological liberals don't stand on the bible text and may give very little credit to the articles of the traditional faith. Theological conservatives stick to what the bible texts say and the traditional way they have been understood. Fundamentalism started as a reaction to 19th century theological liberalism, which has now been so far improved upon as to show the 19th century biblical criticism as invalid. These days though, fundamentalists are crazy people who insist on the King James Version and the Schofield bible, neither of which are good scholarship any more. So the reasonable rage of an internal schism among christians has somehow been powering a debate between economic conservatives and social liberals, and committing christians to interpretations of the bible that don't stand up.

Finally, i will just note that the cheerful demolition of God by rationalists is quite different from the abdicating God Zizek would prefer. The absence of God, his nothingness, still leaves all humans equal. Without that absence, the same self-comparing narcissim will have to attach to other people, or social superstructures. I seriously think Neitzsche called it and Nazism and Stalinism bore him out.
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Cadel Evans, Hero

There is ongoing debate about whether Cadel Evans is a Hero. There are those who say his great courage on a bicycle and the massive commitment of his life to competing, and the courage it takes to narrowly lose le Tour many times to work out how to win it, make for a hero, without qualification. Others might accept him as a sporting hero, but want to keep sport at arms' length, and achievements in sport as fundamentally self-indulgent rather than sacrificial and beneficial.

I lean toward classing him a Hero. Our way of life is one of passivity, of storylessness, aimlessness, impulsiveness - of lacks made flesh. Anyone who can push desire far past its breaking point and continue opposes our nullity of choice with a choice of significance, and it does our hearts good to see it.
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Sunday, August 14, 2011

that's good! that's bad! (mostly bad)

My sister generously order Final Draft for me which is more than enough to compensate me for what follows.

She could only get it from the Apple store and my laptop is windows/linux.

They didn't deliver it successfully (seriously, couriers are so much worse than the post office it's a mystery people use them) and will be back Tuesday.

My vista laptop (made in the era when Nvidia was shipping dodgy GeForce8400m chips) has lost all graphics over the last few days and is now totally unusable. (Other possibility is that something important broke when i dropped it several weeks ago.)

Not having it has made me stop and think. I may see how life goes without it, and learn about myself.

The mythtv machine has win7 for emergencies (this being such).

At worst, Apple just keep knocking it out of the park with their machines, which I can buy now and pay later.
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Friday, August 12, 2011

I am an infinite regress

I was thinking about Kant’s transcendental logic of experience grounding pure reason and I was reminded that (infinitely) many numbers, such as pi (3.14159...) are classed as ‘transcendental’ numbers because they cannot be expressed rationally (as a fraction) or calculated as a polynomial.  There are, however, a lot of ways to calculate pi, and many of them are sums of infinite series of terms.  My favourite was discovered by Bailey, Borwein and Plouffe and is a sum of series of terms that converge because each is less than the last by a factor of 16.  This means that, if you work in hexadecimal notation, you can work out one place at a time the 250th place of pi, or the 25,000th place are equally accessible.  You could use this formula to search for the million-digit section of pi that is closest to encoding a Shakespeare play.

I think Kant wanted to show that the reasoning person was no more real and no less real than the faculties by which the manifold realities of the world cohere and are perceived – time and causality; space and number and so on.  The faculties (which Nietzsche mocked, you will recall) have to have this transcendental quality, bootstrapping themselves into contact with things in themselves.  I sit in something of a Cartesian theatre of experience, which sits in a Cartesian theatre of experience, which sits in a Cartesian theatre of experience, and so on out to the very edge of my skin and into the non-me media (air, space).  From our end of the relationship to the world, the faculties have to be self-justifying.

And so I wonder about the disproving power of the infinite regress.  There are a lot of proofs that rely on it, but how many check whether that is an infinite series converging on some definite goal?

* This blog may be a good example of the value of an undergrad philosophy degree.  I will be arguing by analogy, and from word association, about a book which I have only heard read via librivox and listened to some lectures on once and on which I have never had my understanding examined.

Above and Below

'The Tree of Life', directed by Terence Malick (a former Heidegger scholar apparently) apparently tries to commmunicate an understanding of the human condition as participation in two worlds according to the law of each. The law of Nature, which is of scarcity, conflict, predation and death; and the law of Grace, of unlooked for forgiveness, riches, gifts and love.*

The contrast seems to map onto matter and mind, that physical things are scarce, vulnerable to destruction, while ideas and intentions are free, durable, and infinitely shareable (possibly with the exception of things like 'The Secret', which include in their content the fact that they are not widely known - past a certain point of sharedness, there is no longer a secret and the advantageousness might arguably be lost). On the basis of these properties of information, Richard Stallman (GNU) has been prophesying a Hegelian synthesis of communism and libertarianism through open source software. For him, the future could be mythtv for everything - labour freely and cheerfully given in the exercise of a skill, use shared across a global community, functions available to all.

What I find interesting is the way the world below seems to naturally meet the world above, and the way the law of grace bears much fruit in the world of nature. The law of nature relentlessly drives species and group level altruism, and the transcendence of instinct in strategy. The law of grace teaches the groups to go beyond altruism and make the Other the center, and community is made of strangers, and the USA becomes a superpower.

* I haven't seen it.
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Thursday, August 11, 2011

commendable News

News Inc's News.com.au right now features a commendable slapdown to western anxiety: famine in Sudan Somalia will kill a tenth of all children by November.
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A non-laugh Riot

Why should I be the last person on earth to pass interpretative judgment on the rioting youth of Britain? There are two judgments, quite well united in Theodore Dalrymple's item in the Australian - the Youth are Revolting, and have been for a very long time, because the leaders in Britain have led mainly for themselves and not for the led. The home and family and place of employment have all been decimated to economics, and these are the results.

The only other notable observation is the pathetic empty materialism of the rioters, mirroring the pathetic empty materialism of their (our) society.

Being poor in England is oppressive. When we lived their briefly, we rented a modest 3br house in the middle of the toxic wasteland that is bedfordshire, and paid about £7500 pa. I would regularly see advertisements about bus driving, hair-dressing or receptioning that offered barely £10,000 pa, and sometimes less. Meanwhile, sectors of society are ostentatiously rich.
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Tuesday, August 9, 2011

American Religion

Slate carried an article on the fervour which greeted Texas Govenor Rick Perry's prayer meeting for the nation. I don't know much about him except that in fine Texas fashion, he presides over a lot executions, a lot of money being made, and not much social support.


It makes me think of Isaiah 1:12ff (ESV translation):
“When you come to appear before me,  who has required of you  this trampling of my courts?  [...]  1:15 "When you spread out your hands,  I will hide my eyes from you;  even though you make many prayers,  I will not listen;  your hands are full of blood."  Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;  remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;  cease to do evil,  17 learn to do good;  seek justice,  correct oppression;  bring justice to the fatherless,  plead the widow’s cause.
Other great reads on God in politics at ABC Religion Online:

Stanley Hauerwas
Slavoj Zizek 

Monday, August 8, 2011

Wishlisting

I've got a hankering, but its so multifarious its hard to describe it as anything more than a hankering to spend money.  On the list at the moment:

  • More 3.5" hard disk space for MythTV.  This is in competition with getting mythtranscode to work conveniently and reliably, but is currently winning.
  • More 2.5" hard disk space for my laptop, which has a large collection of podcasts, lecture series and Librivox - a 500GB or even a 750GB would be great (although terrible for the already terrible battery life).
  • Final Draft, a screenplay drafting and editing software package. I have downloaded the free demo and it seems to be very helpful in building your plot, designing your scenes, writing them, re-ordering them, re-writing them, filtering by each character etc.  It will also do a reading of the screenplay in the voice of Stephen Hawking (who gets a suprising amount of voice over work).
  • Allen Palmer's (he of Cracking Yarns) course at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.
  • Books: The Island of Dr Death, The Death of Dr Island and the Doctor of Death Island, and everything else of Gene Wolfe's that I have yet to read.
  • And so on...

Saturday, August 6, 2011

The Fifth Head of Cerberus

I re-read the Fifth Head of Cerberus.  That is the only way to read it, and in truth, the only way to read a lot of what Gene Wolfe has given us.  The first reading gives you the overall shape, but leaves a lot of strangeness. As you re-read, the strangeness becomes familiar and eventually the myriad of hints and allusions begin to take on an overall shape.  The laws of perspective appropriate to this reality become clear.

M.T. Anderson

I can't recommend M.T. 'Tobin' Anderson highly enough. Young adults seem to be a readership that hold on to literary quality well into the pleasures of 'genre' fiction, and Anderson is a very fine example of the type.  I first read his dyad 'The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation', the narrative of a boy growing up through the American War of Independence, and seeing the moral hollowness behind the great declarations of independence and equality.

More recently I have been reading his book 'Feed', a stylish science fiction, perhaps best-shorthanded as an update to 'Brave New World' for the internet age.  The 'Feed' is the whispering of advertising, augmenting reality all day, every day, everywhere you go.  The protagonist is a young man, Titus (like the biblical Titus, in a gluttonous world & like Titus Groan, in a world that wants you for a component not a whole), who is mentally alive in ways that his friends are not, in a culture which is not. The language is mostly the ugly, lazy, slangy language you can hear on the train or anywhere young people are typical.

Having gone to the moon for kicks, Titus and his friends Link and Marty have gone to a zero-grav funhouse, failed to have fun and are now preparing to eat.  Titus has been watching, attracted, a blond girl in grey who has watchful eyes. His friends arrive:
... they came in and immediately Link and Marty started doing these gymnastics, and they got in trouble, so I could stay watching her without them being a mob on me.  This guy, he was from the club, he was yelling at them because they wouldn't stay out of the snack bar, which was off-bounds for still bouncing.
  Behind the girl in grey was a big window and you could see we were in a bubble way high up over the moon.  Down on the ground, tourists were riding big proteins across the craters.  All the stars were out.
  The guy was still yelling at the others over by the valve. He was all 'da da da be removed from the premises, da da da express instructions, da da.'  I lowered my head and turned it toward the girl in gray.
  When she thought no one was looking, she opened her mouth. Something trembled there.  Juice.  She had filled her mouth with juice.
  Da da da, liability, da da da, think you're doing.  I shifted. I watched the juice. For her own amusement she was letting it go, gentle and sexy.
 
She just opened her mouth and pushed it out gently with her tongue.  The juice came out of her lips as if it was being extracted real careful by a rock-star dentist who she loved.
The contrast between the way Titus thinks and narrates what his life is about when with his friends and the feed, and the way he is when with the girl in grey, Violet, is the engine of the story.

I can't think of many writers who I regard as highly for being both writerly and real.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

PhD

So there is an opportunity to undertake a PhD on very favourable terms by doing it as professional work.  I should want to do it very much, but I think I might just be a dilettante. The topic would be something like developing a framework for Intelligence (as in Mind) for technological organisations that would be founded counter to the cognitivist systems, in something more like a Brookesian subsumption architecture.  I can choose to apply, but can I choose to do it?  Or will I end up faffing around for years before finally running away to become a furniture removalist?

Feb 14

This is a nice article on the internet dating services, mainly looking at Match.com.  The description of how people don't know and don't find their ideal partner until a computer gets involved reminded me of Gene Wolfe's 'Book of Days' short story for Valentine's Day. It is the story of a law suit by the wedding industry which was losing business as more and more people found true love and no one was following fashions in second, third, fourth and fifth weddings, against the programmer who set up the matchmaker program. Is widespread true love a threat to the economy?  Will people work as hard once wedded to an ideal partner? In a book of fairly dark stories, this one is remarkably sweet.