John & Belle Have A Blog

Tex Arcana

Long day. Nothing about it comes to mind. Amuse yourselves with this instead.

Reality Bites

I have been meaning to respond to this post from Crooked Timber on food technology and modernity for a while, because I think there is one area of confusion. Chris is "revolted by the suggestion that one day we might synthesize all our food." He links this visceral reaction to a more general concern about the alienating effects of modernity and even what it means to be human.

This is an understandable feeling, but I think it differs from concerns about Transhumanists in an important way, one which is brought out quite clearly in Chris' quote from Orwell. (The character in Orwell bites into a disgusting fish sausage, which fills him with queasy rage against the plasticene modern world.) That is, our feelings about "artificial" food are inevitably colored by the fact that all artificial food developed so far tastes incredibly bad. We associate the possibility of synthesized food with the dubious foods we have already been offered, always with the smiling assurance that it tastes just as good as the real thing - and is so much more convenient! Just consider products such as margarine, canned peas, frozen corn, instant oatmeal, instant coffee, frozen pizza, powdered milk, canned biscuits, etc. etc. Not to put too fine a point on it, they all taste like shit. And in addition to the injury of the bad food, one is made to suffer the insults of marketers who deem you too stupid to know the difference. This is the quintessential experience of "artificial" foods so far.

But if I imagine that the synthesizing process is perfect, I find that most of my objections evaporate (I can't speak for Chris here.) What if I had in my home a Star Trek-style food replicator (ignoring for the moment the amount of energy needed to run the matter/energy conversion the other way)? Now, instead of flaccid, tasteless, huge strawberries, deceptively red on the outside, with mealy crystals forming around a hollow core, I can have tiny fraises de bois, still warm from the sun, each the equal of the best strawberry I ever ate as a child. Gone forever would be the depressing ratio of truly good peaches to bad ones. Every dinner I made would start with the absolute finest fresh ingredients: still-living oysters from perfect water; unpasteurized (but perfectly safe) milk just that instant taken from the foaming pail; asparagus so fine and tender they are a form of vegetable infanticide; a gallon of huckleberries that would have taken me two days to pick myself.

Anf for those who don't cook, the machine can be dialled to produce ready meals, scanned (in some mysterious way) from the products of the world's best chefs. No more lonely packets of ramen; instead you may have hand-made somen in delicate miso broth, with glistening pieces of salmon on top. Instead of Stouffer's french bread pizza, with its little extruded turds of ground beef, how about a small margherita from your favorite Neapolitan pizza place?

Now, do we really think the diners in these scenarios are being deprived of a deep connection to the world? Is it not rather the case, no matter what the raw materials of this process are, that they are more in touch with real food than the average margarine-eater today?

Juice From Hell

From Pedantry, this inspired rant against Noam Chomsky. (Although it does seem to trail off into confusion on the subject of Cambodia at the end. I say stick it to him.) It reminded me of a funny story about Chomskian linguistics, told to me by my old boyfriend (a linguist). A speaker of some hill-tribe language in Burma (I can't remember which one, maybe Lisu?) was recruited as a linguistic informant for a Berkeley seminar. They spent the whole semester learning things about his language; it was a great seminar. He was a refugee from Burma where his tribespeople, and his family in particlar, were being oppressed by the SLORC. His father was a Christian (converted by some missionary back in the day) and had translated the entire Bible into their language. In the end, this guy was admitted to Berkeley to get his degree in linguistics, a very positive result for all concerned.

Apparently this guy read that there was going to be a conference about his language on the East Coast somewhere and arranged to attend. He was excited about having someone to talk to. All the speakers were Chomskians, though, and so all the talks were about X-bar movement and who knows what all. Erroneous examples of the language were bought out to support various tortured parsings. Our hill tribe hero got up to object that the sentences on offer were malformed, and was shut up with an airy suggestion that if the language wasn't constituted this way, it ought to be. His comment: "I thought that the conference would be like a refreshing drink. But it was like a juice -- from hell!"

Auld Lang Shin

"Daddy leg!"
"Yes. Daddy's leg."
"Daddy other leg!"
"Yes. Daddy's other leg!
"Zoë leg!"
"Yes. That's Zoë's leg."
"Zoë other leg!"

I thought I was doing pretty well, inventory-wise. Four on the floor, and four for four. A certain stanza, due to Philip Larkin, springs to mind.

"And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist."

Then she got me.

"Toast!"
"You want a piece of toast?"
"No, TOAST!"
"Oh [playing for time], all right."
"CHEERS!" [knocks her shin against mine.]
"Oh, toast!"
"Other leg!"
"CHEERS!"

Then we sang Auld Lang Shin and she tottled off to bed.

Hey, You Got Destiny in My Spirit!

I knew about the existence of mashups or bootlegs (in which two or more songs are combined to create a new track) before, but I never listened to any until this weekend. I love the internet; there, I've said it. Song links go right to the file, so you might want to right (or option-) click and save to be a nice internetty person, or not click at all if you have some crappy dial-up account. Sorry about that. But, you're probably at work anyway, so no problem, right? Oh, and I guess that you'll be (cue Beavis and Butthead) "breakin' the law! Breakin' the law!"

This Destiny's Child/Nirvana mashup by Grant McSleazy Smells Like Teen Booty is justly famous; hearing them chant "Beyoncé - can you handle this? Michelle - can you handle this?" above the rocking guitar-only opening is really funny. Similarly, this well-known Christina Aguilera/Strokes mashup A Stroke of Genie-us by Freelance Hellraiser is catchy in its own right, and brings out the fact that Little Miss Nasty has actually got a great voice, something I had never noticed before in my studious efforts to avoid her skank ass. (As an aside, I have to note the fundamental injustice of a world in which someone gets paid - and I don't mean just makes a little money but gets PAID - for writing the line "hormones racing at the speed of light.")

This electro version of Nirvana's Nevermind is amazing, too (by Dsico). I know, everyone is so tired of electroclash that they're abandoning Williamsburg en masse and moving to a scene that's not played out - the Lower East Side (!?). (This really seems like an article in search of a trend, possibly written by an envious Manhattan-dweller, but there you go. For what it's worth, Gawker (scroll down) (who lives on the -cough- Lower East Side - cough) agrees.) But too bad, this song still rocks. You don't have to put on leg-warmers or anything.

The best of the ones I've found so far is Dsico's Missy Elliot/Joy Division mashup Love Will Freak Us. It's Get Ur Freak On over Love Will Tear Us Apart (plus some guitar strumming which may be from a Who song?). In this case, I like the mashup better that either of the two source songs. The trademark Missy E. samples in the original are undeniably brilliant, but I find them off-putting. The Joy Division song is really good, but it has a thin, synthy aspect. This mashup turns the Joy Division song into more of a rocker with the addition of the extra guitar track and removal of the '80's vocals. It also showcases Missy's verbal dexterity; you're not distracted by the space-aliens-are-falling-down the-stairs samples in the background.

Now I wonder how much those Sound Forge Pro type software packages are, because this is music you could make yourself. But I have a novel to write, so what the hell am I thinking? Lots of other songs are available here, and check out this good article on the phenomenon. The author argues that while some mashups are just novelty tracks (Eminem vs. the Magnum P.I. theme song, I'm calling your number) others are new works of art of an interesting, if illegal kind. I was surprised to learn that Beck (among others) had refused permission for his songs to be used in this way. That seems wrong.

(Post has been updated to correct the identification of the Joy Division song, which I had spaceily attributed to New Order. Duh. This is the first time anyone has fact-checked my ass! It feels tingly.)

Junky bear liked to sleep, died.

These anti-drug posters can be seen on lots of billboards and such-like spaces in Singapore these days. And you can get them as free post cards. (I've collected them all except for Mr. Sun the junky bear who liked to sleep and died.) I really like the textural, fabric-form renderings of the various animals. Really. I'm not kidding. They remind me of this book I had when I was a kid that I really, really liked. (Yeah, I wish I remembered what it was called.) The posters look even better four feet tall. I like the fact that Nash, the anti-heroin cat, is covered in numerals. (Is this some sort of John Nash 'beautiful mind' reference?) I like the fact that Fiona Chameleon has words like 'tomato red yellow sky' emblazoned. on her tartan cloak. I like Mak the Rabbit's pseudo-hippy stylings. (You know he's always offering to give the girl bunnies back-rubs.) The poetry, however, is just atrocious. It may be the worst poetry I have ever read. It isn't that hard to write limericks, on just about any subject, that cause the mind's tongue to trip on to the end rather than lurching to a halt. These poems are just uncannily bad.

What do you think?

Oh, and here are anti-drug billboards from past years. I think the ones with kid's photos superimposed on sprawled junkies are actually quite effective. Some of the later ones just look like Tool video out-takes, however. Which is more fun to look at on the train than some things, but not a lot of things.

Religion and Reasons

Via Matthew Yglesias' comment section for this post, a link to this interesting Pew Research Center report on American attitudes towards religion and politics. I'll snip the bit that caught my eye:

The survey shows that a significant number of Americans would be reluctant to vote for a well-qualified candidate if he or she were a member of a particular religious group, especially a Muslim (38%). But many more express reservations about voting for a candidate without religion than one with a specific faith (52%). In all, 64% of Americans admit that a candidate's religion, or lack thereof, could lead them to vote against a well-qualified candidate from their own party.

The same pattern is evident among respondents who were given a different form of the question, which asked if there are "any reasons" not to vote for a candidate with a particular religious affiliation if he or she were nominated by the respondent's preferred party. In this case, slightly fewer (41%) say there are reasons why they would not vote for an atheist far more than say that about a Muslim, an evangelical Christian, a Catholic or a Jew.

Atheism is a particular concern for white evangelical Protestants and African-Americans, majorities of each say there are reasons why they might not vote for an atheist if one received their party's presidential nomination.

Since 52 is larger than 41 (last time I checked the calendar) it would seem to follow that a significant number of Americans - at least 11% and possibly significantly more (think about it) - believe they would not vote for an atheist and believe they would do so for no reason. So they are confessing to an unusually pure form of bigotry against a minority group - namely, bigotry that knows itself for what it is: groundless animus.

Not so long ago I had some fun kicking Daniel Dennett around. Looks like I owe him at least a partial apology. (But I'm still not going to use the term 'bright'.)

Risk

Did you ever play a game of Risk that just. wouldn't. end? I just did.

The Cat Returns

Just saw the new Studio Ghibli production, "The Cat Returns". For those not in the know, Ghibli is the base of operations of anime genius Hayao Murasaki - who brought us "Spirited Away", "Princess Mononoke", "Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind", "My Neighbor Totoro", "Kiki's Delivery Service" and some others I can't find links for. "The Cat Returns" is Hiroyuki Morita's, however. He's a lesser light in the Ghibli pantheon. So this movie is the worst-but-two Ghibli movie ever made, and better than all but six major Disney features. So it's very worth watching. There's a sort of 'what if Japan looked like Denmark?' aesthetic that is very much a Ghibli trademark (cf. "Kiki's Delivery Service".) It's all very clean and astringent, like if Ikea opened a sushi franchise. Little girl descends from the sky on a stairway of birds. Other nice images. But it doesn't have the beautiful, innocent gravitas and spiritual potency of Murasaki's own work, usually generated by compositionally deft juxtapositions of friendly but vaguely primordial beanbags and child-like entities with weirdly assymetrical features (the signature having been demonstrably forged since by such disparate productions as "Final Fantasy" and "Lilo and Stitch".) Everyone who knows animation knows all about this stuff already, but if you haven't checked out at least "Mononoke" and "Spirited Away" from your local video store - they are distributed now by Disney, I believe - you owe it to yourself. And no child should be deprived of "My Neighbor Totoro". That's practically the main reason I made a kid - so I could have someone not to deprive of it, in a couple years. Really, the meaning of life is watching "My Neighbor Totoro", then reading Tove Jannson's Moomintroll books; after that - there's sex, yes, but for the rest it's all just feeble attempts to recreate the simple beauty of early experiences.

Whither Aberystwyth?

Now that D-squared said something nice about me I can finally ask him something I've been wanting to for a while. I was afraid to e-mail him before. It's kind of like e-mailing Strong Bad; I was sure I'd spell Aberystwyth wrong or something and he'd mock me in front of his hundreds of readers.

There's been some discussion of his Welsh identity on his blog (in the comments to this post), but I can't be alone in wanting to know more [no, there's probably someone else. - ed.]. Like, in Scotland they apparently batter and deep-fry Mars bars in rancid fish-and-chip shop fat - are there any Welsh culinary delights like that? No, actually, I wanted to know if he listens to Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. They are the greatest Welsh band ever. They are amazing. (Super Furry Animals are pretty good, but they're no GZM.) The name is silly, granted. As they say, "If we'd known that we would do so well we'd have chosen a better name". But, honestly, when you go to a school called Ysgol Bro Myrddin, it's either that or start plotting to raise an orc army and lay waste to the lands of men.

If you like The Apples in Stereo, or Mojave 3, or The Doves, or maybe some alternate universe version of The Rasberries crossed with the Louvin Brothers, then you'll like GZM. Psychedelic, but not in a cheesy "paisley underground" way. Beautiful, folksy, unforgettable, make-you-tear-up songs. Some are in Welsh too, like Sbia Ar y Seren - what is that about?

If I lived in Wales I would go see them all the time. But maybe Daniel doesn't live in Wales anymore and he's some sort of expat in England? The whole country is only like 500 miles across; he could just drive back to Wales and see them anyway. They're playing on August 3rd at Cyfarthfa Castle.

Die Another Day

Just watched it. So Bond's new Mercedes has 'adaptive camoflauge,' i.e. cameras that project what's seen on one side onto the opposite side so the car is invisible. Yet. In one scene Bond hides behind the car so the bad guys won't see him. Otherwise it was brutally realistic.

I admit that something else might be so

I'm hip-deep in prep for the semester, so posting may be light for a while. A quick squib.

The busque, categorical tone of Belle's mock-Kipling title of last night has come in for some criticism (see below). Let me say in her defense: I came up with the header. She trundled tot off to bed, told me to put her post up and - well, she didn't have a title. Hmmmm. The rest is history. So whatever is wrong with her argument, if anything, it can't be hung from the hook of the title.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with the argument.

In response to Joshua, 'just not so' seemed appropriate to this late-nite copy editor because the argument in question has the form 'A is so because A is reproductively optimal.' Since 'A is reproductively optimal' is false, the proffered explanation fails. Ergo, just not so.

Joshua objects that this assumes that just because you have an explanation of why behavior A would be arguably more beneficial than behavior B, selection pressure couldn't have produced B. But there is no need for Belle to make this assumption, and in fact it would be rather unnatural. (Proving Colonel Mustard didn't do it with the lead pipe in the library isn't tantamount to assuming nobody did anything of the sort in the general environs with an analogous implement.)

It is of course possible to speculate - not implausibly - about other evolutionary explanations of A. But by this point a lot of air has gone out of the balloon. How so? What we have here, if anything, is what Peirce calls an abductive argument: an argument to the best (or only) explanation. In rough outline (I'm quoting Peirce's definition from memory): the surprising fact B is observed. But if C were the case, B would be a matter of course. Therefore, the fact that B gives me some reason to hypothesize that C.

If males in fact reliably preferred the female form that is optimal, reproductively, this would plausibly count as a 'surprising fact'. It would cry out for explanation. On cue, the hour would call forth the (cave) man. But if men do not in fact prefer the female form that is truly optimal - as seems rather likely - the pressure to find some evolutionary explanation of this fact seems, well, not very pressing.

In the absence of anything that obviously cries out for evolutionary explanation - i.e. anything especially optimal, from a reproduction or survival standpoint - it doesn't seem unfair of Belle to have been rather brusque in her brush-off.

All of which is, as Belle correctly notes, completely consistent with the truth of evolutionary explanations of lots of features of human psychology.

Just Not So Stories

Like everyone else, I'm tired of hearing about how Darwinian pressures cause men to think that young women with a fetching hip-to-waist ratio, good teeth, shiny hair, nice skin, high, bouncy breasts et al. are hot because of their obvious fertility. (I'm even more tired of Darwinian justifications for hot young women marrying rich elderly men, but since a moment's thought as to the (im)possibility of accumulating capital on the veldt suffices to dispose of this line, I'll let it go.) You may see an idiotic and noxious synthesis of all these trends here (I honestly can't tell what institution is backing this, but it's typical). OK, I'll play fair:

Youth and attractiveness in the female are proxies for fertility potential: a symmetrically shaped face, clear skin, shiny hair, slim waist, and full hips and breasts are indicators of good health and fertility potential, indicating as they do that the woman is free of parasite infection and has not given birth before (pregnancies tend to increase the female waistline), that she gives reasonable attention to personal cleanliness, and that she has enjoyed good nutrition.

I believe I have thought of an iron-clad objection to these paeans to nubile fertility, as follows:

The Pundit That Burns Twice As Dim, Burns Half As Long

Á propos of Matthew Yglesias' observation that Ann Coulter is deserving of more vigorous take-downs from the likes of the New York Time's David Carr than she actually gets. The up-side, I should think, is that she's got nowhere to go from here. What's her next book going to be about?

P******

I have a strange linguistic blind spot. No, I know you can quantify over people. Some people can, anyway. Instead, am often totally oblivious to puns or (would-be) amusing homonyms, despite knowing lots of languages and being a perfectly intelligent interpreter of literature (or so I like to think). I didn't notice that 'SweeTarts' is a pun on the word "sweetheart" until I was about 18. I won't even tell you when I realized that Sunkist oranges are meant to have been kissed by the sun because I'm too embarassed. This must explain my reaction to this (taken from a comment by Jim Henley on this Tacitus post on whether the LGFers might possibly be Chock Full 'o Nuts.):

"World's longest meltdown" is pretty good. I've tried to say in nicer ways at various times that one of the consequences of the massacres of September 11, 2001 is that they brought out a lot of - oh, posting guidelines. I was going to use an obscene word beginning with "p" that sometimes refers to female genitalia. Some people were scared witless and never got ahold of themselves afterward. They run sites like LGF and/or infest the comments sections of such sites.

I went around my apartment for ten minutes trying to imagine why Henley would think "pudenda" could possibly violate anyone's posting guidelines.

Zoë's Birthday!

Happy 2 years!

(Somebody got a new dollhouse.)

He Said, She Said

I missed this article when it got linked from A&L Daily and just found it via the 2Blowhards. So you've read it already. Israeli scientists have developed a computer algorithm that can examine an anonymous text and determine, with accuracy rates of better than 80 percent, whether the author is male or female.

And: the odd thing is that the language differences the researchers discovered would seem, at first blush, to be rather benign. They pertain not to complex, ''important'' words, but to the seemingly quotidian parts of speech: the ifs, ands, and buts.

Crikey! Science proves the difference between men and women is that men use logic, i.e. logical connectives like 'if' and 'and'. But it turns out our author is only using logic as a hypothetical example - a clear case of an obviously unimportant thing, I suppose. In fact the biggest differences are as follows:

The News In Hong Kong

The Hong Kong situation does not seem to be leaping off the pages of American newspapers, so I will presume to inform our state-side readership about doings, passing on stuff I read in the Straits Times basically. Here is a brief and rather interesting retrospective - if you don't know your recent Chinese history - of Hong Kong's hallowed tradition of subverting the mainland. Not unrelatedly, in another article today, "China sets tolerance limits for HK", we hear of something akin to a new zero-tolerance policy.

Food Always Tastes So Much Better When It is Eaten Out of Doors

Today we got the Gawker inside scoop on Christopher Hitchens:

Vanity Fair columnist/career contrarian Christopher Hitchens once told an acquaintance of mine that the "four most overrated things" were "champagne, lobster, anal sex, and picnics."

You know, he's got a point about lobsters. They can be pretty tough and rubbery. Are they so much all-fired better than blue crabs that they should be the plutocrats' putative food of choice? One point for Hitch, then.

Tolerance and Respect

As per my previous post, there is a tendency to conflate tolerance and respect. I suspect this is largely due to the fact that when one says something like 'I respect your decision to X' this almost always means, 'I do NOT respect your decision to X' (but for moral/legal/prudential/bone-weariness-related reasons I tolerate it, i.e. forebear to attempt to thwart it.)

Are tolerance and respect mutually exclusive responses to any situation/decision/person? If you've got one, you don't have the other. If you tolerate something - with the implication of grudging allowance that term carries - you don't respect it. Conversely, if you respect something, you wouldn't (merely) tolerate it.

I don't mean to get too fussy about this, but it seems something in the neighborhood does cause genuine confusion. That is, Dennett confuses a right to be tolerated with a right to command respect; and Rea turns right around and confuses a refusal of respect with a refusal to tolerate.

Gentle my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks; be bright and jovial among your guests to-night.

Here's how and why Michael Rea should have won his exchange with Daniel Dennett (instead of committing the technical foul of quoting him somewhat out of context.)

The crux of the problem with Dennett's position, as Rea correctly notes, is that he comes out and demands “to be treated with the same respect accorded to Baptists and Hindus and Catholics, no more and no less.” Yet Dennett himself is highly disrespectful of religion.

Why Pick on Darwin?

Via Brian Weatherson, this interesting exchange between Michael Rea and Daniel Dennett, over the latter's NY Times "Brights" op-ed.

It occurs to me that I don't know the answer to a rather simple question. Why do Creationist 'literalists' about Biblical interpretation single out Darwinism for attack? Surely physics - cosmology, in particular - is just as hard to square with "Genesis". Either this creation story is allegorical, to some degree, or physicists labor under significant delusions about how stuff got here. I mean: "Genesis" isn't a scientific textbook, not literally. But once you are willing to admit any degree of allegory, surely it wouldn't be that hard to accommodate Darwin. Why aren't fundamentalists forever fulminating against godless astrophysicists?

See Everything!

Comics You Should Read

Comics nerds will know about these already - so excuse me for being obvious. My point is that everyone should know.

You should read Daniel Clowes. Ghostworld was made into a movie (I didn't see it); you probably heard of it. You should read it. Even better is David Boring. You can see some bits of it for free at Amazon here; and other bits of it free here; don't miss this flash thingy. It's basically beautiful and heartbreaking.

Then there is Kim Deitch's beautiful and heartbreaking Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Best I can do for you is this page, which is good; and this flash thingy, which is a treat. I dunno how to describe it. Itchy & Scratchy meets Catcher in the Rye.

Hong Kong

Here's Singapore's SM Lee Kuan Yew in a WaPo interview about the Hong Kong protest situation. It's interesting and I suggest you read it.

Last night I read this Straits Times piece which summarizes what the Hong Kong edition of China Daily has to say. (I take it the non-Hong Kong editions have no coverage and thus effectively defy summary.)

It said pro-democracy campaigners had hijacked the protests and were using the Hong Kong people. 'Through their cunning arrangement, the 'trilogy' has turned into a vehicle for subverting the political system in Hong Kong.' ... 'In the six years since reunification, pro-democracy protesters have been wrangling with the SAR government and interfering in its rule by opposing everything Tung Chee Hwa proposed.'

That struck me as a distinctly bad sign. And, right on schedule, this morning another piece with the headline, "Beijing's salvo spooks Hong Kong".

My favorite quote, however, comes from Beijing's envoy in this piece: 'Hong Kong is an economic city; it is not a political city,' he told reporters. No doubt in Mandarin the flouting of Greek etymology is less flagrant.

Oh, and here's one more piece that hints Beijing thinks Bush and Blair are somehow behind it all.

Beijing is concerned that the current crisis in Hong Kong could spin out of control and spread to the mainland, threatening the security and stability of China itself, according to a well-placed source. This concern was based on an assessment that foreign elements had been involved in recent mass protests in the territory ... 'The US and British government statements opposing the national security legislation seemed to have been timed to coincide with the demonstration,' he said.

I leave it to defter China hands to poke the tea leaves and discern whether Beijing is truly clueness enough to believe foreign devils are behind the protests, or whether this is simply obligatory face-saving.

This CS Monitor piece has a quote from one of the Hong Kong Democratic Party organizers:

In American terms, the Hong Kong democrats be found on the leftist, social- democratic side of the political spectrum. "We were influenced ... by Western ideas, by the ideas of participation in the process, by the dignity of the individual, and by the more expansive notions that people are not culturally bound by the past or by a restrictive identity," says the chairman of the Democratic Party, Yueng Sam.

I suppose it is possible old men in Beijing read stuff like this and conclude it could only be a foreign plot.

Daddy's Girl

TMBG Dial-A-Song

Go ahead. Give a listen.

The Joy of Learning, Technically Speaking

Brian Weatherson is right to point out that Bush was not 'technically correct', because the verb in question was the factive 'learned', not the the agnostic 'said'. (But Ogged is tragically right that he who says 'factive' first loses, outside the philosophy of language seminar room.)

It reminds me of that classic (aren't they all?) Simpsons episode from season four, "Brother From the Same Planet". Bart pretends he's an orphan so that ... well you can read a summary here if you've forgotten how it went. I'm thinking about how Homer initiates young Pepsi (Pepe) into the mysteries of astronomy and English pronunciation:

Pepe: Tell me more! I want to know all the constellations!

Homer: Well, there's... Jerry, the cowboy. And that big dipper-looking thing is Alan... the cowboy.

Pepi: Oh, Papa Homer, you are so learned [learn\éd].

Homer: Heh heh heh. learned [learn'd'], son. It's pronounced learned [learn'd].

Feel free to write your own version, with British Intelligence as wise Homer, Bush as eager Pepsi, and Nigerian yellowcake as the stellar formations known as Jerry the Cowboy and Alan the Cowboy.

Back to Weatherson. He writes: "In any version of English I’m familiar with, ‘learned’ is factive. You can’t learn something that’s false." It's worth emphasizing - within the four walls of the seminar room - that the barriers are twofold in Bush's case: not just learning something false, but something you think you know to be false. Yet, pace Weatherson, I think it is a peculiarity of the English verb 'to learn' that it is, after all, possible to learn false things in school.

1) A lot of stuff I learned in school turned out not to be true.

2) I learned in high school English that you shouldn't split infinitives. Later I found out there is no reason to take this arcane rule seriously.

I take it 1 and 2 are semantically unobjectionable; one can easily concoct more examples on the same model. In fact, yet more narrowly, it seems to me you have to be a student in school to learn something false. Contrast the following two cases:

3) In school we learned that Columbus discovered America in 1292. Later we found out our teacher was completely nuts and had been teaching American history that way for years.

4) While researching a scholarly article on Christopher Columbus, I learned he discovered America in 1292. Later I found out my main source contained a typo.

I think 3 is fine - funny, but semantically on the up-and-up. 4 is funny and contains a clear misuse of the verb 'to learn'. The difference in the first case is that the learners are students in school. Scholars can't do it, teachers can't do it. Students can't learn falsehoods from friends, or TV, or parents (unless they are home-schooled, which probably makes for vague cases around the house.)

The whole business suggests a technically correct line educationalists might try out against carping critics who say folks do their best learning in the real world, not locked up in classrooms or ivory towers: there are an infinite number of extremely interesting things that you can only learn in school, while you are a student. After you graduate, the cognitive window slams shut forever and you have to make do only with the truth.

We'll Try This For a While

Well, we've taken the plunge. This Typepad beta is our home until further notice. Adjust bookmarks accordingly. We may later decide we liked the old ways better and move back. In the meantime, what do you think of brown instead of blue links and so forth? (You don't have to answer that question. You probably have better things to do.)

The Mad Hatter's Teacups: Revolutions (release date November 2003)

Inspired by the moderate success of Pirates of the Caribbean (all the reviews seem to say "well, there's no plot or anything, but Johnny Depp...eyeliner...aw, we just love this guy! Two thumbs not as bad as you thought!") and the upcoming release of Haunted Mansion with Eddie Murphy, Fametracker speculates on some of the other Disney-ride-based movies being greenlighted even now. (Here I offer a fervent prayer that a meteor may detroy the earth before the release of Haunted Mansion so that we will all be spared.) This is the best one:

Shrunken Ned's Junior Jungle Boats; Release date: April 2004

Jon Voight stars as Shrunken Ned, an Amazon river guide who was miniaturized when an angry tribal leader (Edward James Olmos) felled him with a voodoo spell. Now Ned stands tall in the bow of his boat -- six inches tall, to be exact! But his diminutive stature doesn't stop him from running a successful Amazon tour company -- or from leading a brilliant young zoology professor (Gabrielle Union) and her bumbling graduate students (Dwight Yoakam, Steve Zahn) on a hunt for a lost jungle idol of great cultural importance. What these adventurers don't know is that the idol also holds the power to restore Shrunken Ned to his original height -- a treasure that, to him, is worth its weight in gold. This is one "idol pursuit" that Ned will stop at nothing to achieve! So will he lead his fellow adventurers to their goal -- or to their doom?

Dwight Yoakum and Steve Zahn - that's comedy gold, people. But there is a melancholy aspect to all this. Go and read the other synopses. I submit that they are not any worse than many movies actually being made now. I am not being hyperbolic or anything. If I read them in Cosmo I would not suspect I was being gulled in any way. The It's a Small World After All and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ones, in particular, are so realistic that they almost fail to be humorous. This tells us either that the people who make Fametracker really deserve to be sucessful writers of screenplays, or that there are a whole lot of incredibly lame movies made in the world. Wait. Gimme a #2. I pick c): both a) and b) are true.

First Post

If we decide to migrate from our old home to TypePad, it will look something like this. (What do you think?) I've figured out how to incorporate our trademark pulp fiction imagery, of which I am inordinately house-proud.

I announced a couple days back that I've got Nietzsche Blog and Reason & Persuasion (my course blogs) up. Until the modules start - perhaps even after - they are grown-up blogs; well, as grown-up as I am. Do feel free to drop by. I posted some thoughts about Nietzsche just today.

A few links for you, then I'll curl up with Gene Wolfe's Shadow and Claw.

Via this Singaporean student's blog - which I discovered just this morning, via my referrer log - this very interesting article on where Singapore is going, economically and culturally. Maybe I'll talk about it more tomorrow.

Oh, and here's a thing. Is Neo in a Cult?