Deux fois n’est pas coutume

(1)  Ever happen to you?

The noted Catholic philosopher and ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre, writes in  After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  152:

Although someone who possesses the virtues to a high degree will be far less apt than others  to commit grave offences, a brave and modest man  may  on occasion  commit murder…

(2)  An actual case from France

Swann la regardait, avec ce regard paisible et poli mais clair d’un médecin qui jauge un malade.

— Odette, lui dit-il, mon chéri, je sais bien que je suis odieux, mais il faut que je te demande des choses. Tu te souviens de l’idée que j’avais eue que tu aurais, jadis, dans le temps,  assassiné un certain gentleman?  Dis-moi si c’était vrai, lui ou bien un autre.

Elle secoua la tête en fronçant la bouche.

Dis-donc, chérie, n’aurais-tu pas par hasard,

ou par mégarde, tué  juste un petit homme ?

--Tu as bien tort de te figurer que je t'en voudrais le moins du monde, Odette, lui dit-il avec une douceur persuasive et menteuse.  Je ne te parle jamais que de ce que je sais, et j'en sais toujours bien plus long que je ne dis.  Mais toi seule peux adoucir par ton aveu ce qui me fait te haïr tant que cela ne m'a été dénoncée que par d'autres.  Ma colère contre toi ne vient pas de tes actions, je te pardonne tout puisque je t'aime, mais de ta fausseté, de ta fausseté absurde qui te fait persévérer à nier des choses que je sais.  Mais comment veux-tu que je puisse continuer à t'aimer, quand je te vois me soutenir, me jurer une chose que je sais fausse.  Odette, ne prolonge pas cet instant  qui est une torture pour nous deux.  Si tu le veux, ce sera fini dans une seconde, tu seras pour toujours délivrée.  Dis-moi sur ta médaille, si oui ou non, tu as jamais fais ces choses.

--Mais je n'en sais rien, moi, s'ecria-t-elle avec colère, peut-etre il y a tres longtemps, sans me rendre compte de ce que je faisais, peut-etre deux ou trois fois.

Du coup  il sentit un grand soulagement.

-- Tiens! se dit-il, « deux ou trois fois » :  ce n’est quand-même pas un massacre !

~

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~

Welcome to Kashmir

At the Line of Control:

I peered through binoculars

at men peering through binoculars
at me …

-- Isabel Hilton, “Between the Mountains”, 11 Mar 2002 The New Yorker

Enjoy your stay in Srinagar !

In the deserted lobby,

Muzak was playing

to empty armchairs.

-- Isabel Hilton, “Between the Mountains”, 11 Mar 2002 The New Yorker

Aturdido Tableau

In the brilliance of the noonday sun,

with the many-colored flags  over the shops
waving it on,

the crowd looked as if it had closed ranks around itself,

and could never admit another soul.

[--Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), p. 79

Magister magistri

Eugene Wigner, himself no dummyhead (or, to use the phrase that Pauli grudgingly conceded to Einstein, “not so stupid), a Nobel Prize physicist, said, concerning the mathematician/physicist/you-name-it John von Neumann,

“Whenever I talked with the sharpest intellect whom I have known -- with von Neumann -- I always had the impression  that only hé was fully awake, that I was halfway in a dream.”

(quoted in George Dyson, Darwin among the Machines (1997), p. 77.)

For an overview of the abjectly humble outlook  among many of those who would generally be considered quite gifted, see

  http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/03/de-stultitia-updated.html

The Beasts: a post-Benthamite assessment (Take Two)

The Beasts:  a post-Benthamite  assessment (Take Two  Three)

[The Sage of Houndsditch, updated]

The question about animals is not, “Can they reason?”,

but  “Can they handle algebraic geometry  Hodge theory  motivic cohomology?”

[Note:  We have further updated this post, in an attempt to outpace the rise in cleverness  among the squirrels, which has been growing at an alarming pace. Already they have laid waste to algrebraic topology]

A Hilbertian take on the riddle of Agency

“Who put the bomp in the bomp ba-bomp ba-bomp?
Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong?”

Wir müssen wissen!  Wir werden wissen!!

[Brouwer dagegen:   Immo  ignorabimus.]

A Puzzler

As you ponder your personal relation to Appearance and Reality,

ask yourself  this simple yet probing question:

“Am I in a German  book ??”

Cf. an online comment by a reader, during the 2015 Merkelmanic Flüchtlingsfiasko:

Ich habe das Gefühl  im falschen Film zu sein

.

w-w-w-w-W-AK-ing

(Saturday morning,  late-lying abed,
 head full of cobwebs…)

Logy  like a   pot of  honey

slowly  seek  release

from        layer upon   layer   of

dream - drenched     sleep …

mournful monostich

the cheese

stands

a-lone  . .    .      .      .

[For additional  minimalist glimpses
 into scenes of desolation,
 click
 here .]

3 x 3 monostich

a     *   west    *   wind

blew  *  fine  *  rain

into   *  their *  faces

-- John le Carré, A Delicate Truth (2013)

(  A monostich      in  matrix  form  )

With this formalism, we can produce the dual monostich, reading by column-vectors  rather than rows.

Linearized, the result reads:

   “a blew into  west fine their  wind rain faces”

Admittedly, somewhat disappointing;  but even Homer nods.

Assignment:   Now form the conjugate transpose of this matrix, and read the result aloud  to anyone who’ll listen.

Note:  Historically-minded readers will be reminded of the découpé techniques of the Dadaists and their Stateside imitators.  But our method is vastly more scientific.

For the mathematics of all this, consult

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/duality_of_monostichs

(article under construction).

Eilenberg and Steenrod Walk Into a Bar

[Note:  The following, extremely funny joke,  requires   as a prerequisite  a sound knowledge of Category Theory.    For readers who lack this qualification, the punchline will appear blank.]

Set-Up: Eilenberg and Steenrod   walk into a bar;  one of them has had a few already, the other is dressed as a Scotsman. 

The bartender, looking from the one to the other with some concern, says,

“Why the long face?”

Punchline:  Steenrod glances at Eilenberg and wisecracks back,  

“                                ?                          !! ”

Encrypted Monostich

jfjR(77)^K^^L<pfpf>ⁿ22- _b23 ##2O2O₂MPG917

African sun-sky monostich

sunlight   clearer than daylight;

there is something of a moon about it.

[Evelyn Waugh, reporting from Kenya, 1931;

you probably had to be there.]

Disjecta membra

Scraps  from a single paragraph  of The Green Hat (1924):

Her eyes were stronger than mine,

even as wind  is stronger than air.

… silk the colour of daylight …

I took hold of the sword in my mind  with both hands,

but was not strong enough to lift it.

Something to hum in the summer

Time-slices

Lemon ices.

Slices of time

with a wedge of lime.

[Those verses occurred to me  while reading a text on Special Relativity.

They do not constitute a substantive contribution to the subject,

but they were the best I could do at the … time.]

Age-old questions, answered at last

Q:  Is it the heat?

A:  No!  It’s the humidity !!

Q: When is a door … not … a door ???

A: When it’s a-roving / (athwart) (agley) …

Q: Où sont les neiges  d’antan ??

A:  Dans les égouts  d’aujourd’hui.

Aturdido Epigram

(From the prattle of a fashionable young Edwardian: )

“I do so want to see what Corsica’s like;

 it looks so silly on the map.”

(Here, it is the speaker who is étourdie;  yet later, out of context, the reader is … aturdido …)

[Source:  a 1914 sketch by Saki.]

Thomas Hardy pep cheer / rebel yell

Far from the Madding

Far from the Madding

Far from the Madding

Crowd !

Lemmata monostich

Sufficiency:  Trivial.

.

.

.

Proof:  Immediate.

(Source: Michael Potter, Set Theory and its Philosophy (2004) , p. 142)

Mathematical Epigrams

Last Man Standing:  a firefight implementation of the Euclidean Algorithm.

The Gunslinger's Dilemma

~

Hotel California:  an ergodic set.

Checkout time:  Doomsday

~

A person wearing a T-shirt that says “I’m with Stupid” is termed co-stupid.

A co-stupid person who is himself stupid  is termed bi-stupid.

Example of a non-stupid module showing
Universal Co-Stupidity

Just as there is a universal element in the Category of Co-stupidity, so too the dual category of Bi-stupidity has a universal element;  his name is Donald Trump.

Note that this does not imply that Trump himself is maximally stupid, nor even that he is especially stupid at all.  All that is required is that he qualify (marginally) as stupid (which isn’t hard to do, since stupidity appears to be nearly universal these days, a fact not lost on the Republican Presidential candidates, who have learned specifically to target that demographic).  Indeed, as it happens, he seems to be cleverer than most.

Note:  The Boolean inverse of stupidity is smartness.  A detailed proposal for developing this  can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/opinion/the-smartness-act-of-2015.html?_r=0

For more on the mathematical theory of stupidity, try this:

     De Stultitiâ

For the concept "pseudo-stupid", here:

     Difficulty is Hard.

For more on the pataphysical theory of categories, this:

     Categories for the Working Mom

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