Arthropod Epiphany

Just think !  If we were millipedes,

our trousers would have a thousand legs.

[For more about bugs, click here:

Entomological Autobiography
And here!  Ladybug. ]

Counting Blessings

My honey sewed a button on.

Now there’s a button, where before there was none.

The button’s very happy !

He has a small, round job to do.

My honey sewed a button on.

She does nice things for me.

[Matthew 19:14]

~     ~     ~

[To read more nice things about round things, simply click here:

Round all around.

It’s so easy 2 do !]

False Umbrage

An excellent, non-groveling, non-croweating punchback by Dana Milbank  in this morning’s Post:   

         The chimichanga wars

Excerpt:

The spat over the fried burrito gets at one of the most annoying components of our decaying political culture: false umbrage. Liberals created this form of identity politics, in which an underrepresented group claims persecution, but conservatives have embraced it. One of its most common expressions is the demand for an apology. It’s phony by definition — an apology can’t be sincere if it’s answering a demand — and the reflexive demand (like a demand for a resignation) serves only as an excuse to keep a news story alive. Sorry, but it’s time to put this tired gimmick to rest.

Don’t miss the very funny comments by readers.

There’s still hope.

~

False umbrage is a term which (like “to downromney”)  deserves to enter our everyday vocabulary.   (A reader offered a more child-friendly synonym: mock outrage.)  Having a ready word for a thing  helps us notice that thing when it arises.  (For this insight, consult our chapter "The Stokes Conjecture", in The Semantics of Form in Arabic.)

It is a variety of a general phenomenon, usefully discussed by the Existentialists under the rubric mauvaise foi (“bad faith”).  Another variety is what C.S. Lewis skewered under the label of “delicacy”.

Compare this:

The non-apology apology.

Wissbegierde

We have an infinite desire   to know  all that is.

-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p. 108

My mother  has ever been fond of retailing an anecdote  to the effect that, at some picturesquely tender age (descending  in the retellings from ca. 8 aet. su. to, say, 4 -- and indeed the exemplum would become ridiculous  were the age, instead of say 8, say, 28), I came weeping to her motherly enclasping arms, and made this plaint.

“What ails thee, child?” quoth she.  (Memories grow more Victorian, the farther back you go.)

“I just” (sobbing, sobbing) “realized that I…”  (Yes dear? Yes dear?) “will never know all that there is to be known.”

Now.  How I so præcociously came to such a conclusion, I have no idea.  The self-certain jingles  that children are exposed to  as summaries and storehouses of received wisdom (even back in those days, before education became a matter, not of teaching in the sense of passing-on actual knowledge, but of pumping-up the wretched little pupils’ “self-esteem”) might rather have suggested otherwise:  surely I had not as yet been confronted with the frigid rigors of algebraic topology, the cause of much later despair (the more keenly felt as, by then, no maternal bosom was available  to stanch the tears).  Be that as it may, the lisping infant instinct was quite on-target.  The ancient philosophers had an inkling of their own ignorance:  but so much was then not even on the table (quarks, for instance) that they  of necessity  rather underestimated the same.  Our contemporary despair is fed, not merely by our cognizance of continued ignorance, of that which baffled our ancestors -- the Meaning of Life, the Mind-Body Problem, a proof of the existence of God -- but by our awareness, that some folks  by now  do know  quite a bit  about such things as  QFT, or the topology of three-manifolds, or Topos Theory:  but that we ourselves, for mere lack of time or inwit, have not mastered these, and probably never shall.

~

I have often been guilty of writing maudlin things like “… Category Theory, which I hope to understand before I die”.  But upon reflection, that is a most artificial terminus ad quem.  I may well have much more free time after I die.  (No more dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles!  Free at last, Lord -- Free at last !!!)

Suddenly the prospect of an afterlife (previously quite hazy) gains robust and brilliant definition.  I behold before me, in mine inner eye, an endless shelf, stocked first with the textbooks I began but failed to finish in this earthly life, and proceeding to those (of signal excellence) written by angels;  and advancing, after incalculable time, and far down the line, to some remarkable new treatises penned by … whoever it is  I shall become (der Hlg. Dawud -- precor te, domine).

~

For kindred post-mortem reflections, click here.

Climatological prestidigitation

A well-informed review of an important book occurs in the October 2010 issue of American Scientist:  Robert Proctor (of Stanford U.) on Oreskes & Conway, Merchants of Doubt, about the climate-change deniers.   It focuses in particular on the denialist scientists at the George C Marshall Institute.
Yet neither the review, nor most of what you can read in the press, addresses the following purely logical point (that is, valid whatever the meteorological causality of whatever it is that is going on with the atmosphere of our planet):   The degree to which various trendlines we observe are anthropogenic  may be debated;  but symptomatic treatment can be investigated quasi-independently of that matter of dispute.

I have treated the matter here:  Climate Change.

Herewith a shorter, more satirical treatment, that may stick better in memory:

Thesis (anthropogenicist hardliner):  There’s snow all over our front walks!  Some human vandal must have dumped it there!

Antithesis-1 (climate deniers):  What snow?  I don’t see any snow!

Antithesis-2 (the kept scientists of the Marshall Institute):  Hmm-myes.  Snow, possibly.   But of undetermined upper-atmospheric, possibly extra-terrestrial origin; apparently some sort of cryogenic precipitation. -- Oh quick look over there, a pretty bird!

Synthesis (engineer, pragmatist):  Get out your shovels and clear the d*mn walks!

*

For further musings from this pen,

check here:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

.

Winter fund drive

We earlier lamented, in lugubrious tones, our utter yachtlessness:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/02/we-interrupt-this-blogcast.html

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/01/help-dr-justice-get-his-yacht.html

Eheu !  Vae misero mihi !!

Many of you kind hearts, taking pity,  mailed in these little...  miniature ......  ships-in-a-bottle,
the bottles in question being unfortunately
not  one of those  venerable  green-glass housings for single malt,
but those winky-twinky  plastic  shot-of-gin thingies   you get on budget airlines, totally tacky,
with this little like, quasi  
ship thingie inside, -- only it wasn’t like “O my goodness how did the craftsman manage to assemble such a treasure in so tiny a space?”, because the plastic bottles had been visibly sliced open and stuffed with these rinky-dinky crackly-plastic party-favors or Jack-in-the-Box prizes  and then re-sealed, not very expertly, with Scotch tape, or in one case with masking tape, which really defeats the whole purpose.

We mentioned our strategy for acquiring said yaught -- I mean yocht -- I mean yacht (dang that’s a tough word to spell!), to wit:  just sell tonsandtonsandtonsandtons of books.  But so far, we have only managed to sell ounceandounce of books (to which the underpriced weightless Nook and Kindle thingies contribute nary a mite or a mote).

We earlier presented an alternative path to fame and fortune:  auctioning off a brand-new, virgin (never used)(youronner I SWEAR  I never touched her)  word of our own devisement,  (to wit:)

metasilience

with bidding to begin at one million (euros or pounds sterling, to taste;  no dollars or pesos please).  So far  the auction action has been, shall we say, disappointing.

So, think about it:  All you have to do is get a second mortgage on your house, and maybe sell off a superfluous child or two (which is the Romney Road to Riches, documented here),  and YOU could be the owner of your Very Own Word !!!

(Please, no food stamps or second-party checks.)

Or in lieu of which ...
BUY

OUR

FRIG-GING ......

BOOKS !!!!!!

Heavyweight Updates

Substantial additions have been made to the following essays.  Click on the links.

* Alethiology

This is a fifty-dollar word for ‘the study of the nature of Truth’;  and since it doesn’t show up in the essay itself, I wanted to post it here, since WDJ is fond of words costing fifty dollars.  (Sesquipedalian and callipygian come to mind …)

Now with more on the Parable of the Supersheaves, and much more about Michael Dummett.

* Diving to depths

Diving now additionally to the non-mathematical benthos as well..

* Professor Andrew Gleason

Now with an aside on the academic sociopolitics of the Vietman-era mess.

* Theologia Arithmetica

Here we retrieve the honor of the sadly-maligned Diderot.

* Morality and its (mis)representation

Additional material from Kitcher and Blackburn.

Incidentally -- a word in this place  about an essay I have not (yet) written.

For long, the principal point of this blog  was to champion Platonism -- Realism about mathematics.   Were I ever to pen an essay on the subject of ethics per se (as opposed to rants about the political events of the day, which presuppose  but do not argue  a certain moral background), I would wish to title it Moral Realism.  (I have actually made a cautious baby-step in the direction of Aesthetic Realism here.)   This would require evidence and argument, in an area where I have no special training   and (so far) no insights.    I want such Realism to be true;  but in the absence of anything telling, I shall remain mum.    

* A miscellany of linguistics  (and, relatedly, semantics and rhetorical analysis)

Though I have deliberately avoided posting much from within the field of my graduate training and current employment, linguistics,  one way or another   enough asides have managed to slip into other essays, that if you lay these end to end, there are about enough scattered nuggets to make a meal.  So here you go.

Demonic Possession

An instance (of Marie Warner) is remarkably depicted in the final episode of Season 2 of “24”.

For Murphy’s experience of such things, click here.