Digested Words

"… everything has a reason … which justifies us in everywhere asking why, this why may be..."

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 08:38:29 -0500

“… everything has a reason … which justifies us in everywhere asking why, this why may be called the mother of all sciences.”

- Arthur Schopenhauer - On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason

"La clarté est la bonne foi des philosophes. Tr: Lucidity is the good faith of the philosophers."

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 08:34:00 -0500

“

La clarté est la bonne foi des philosophes.

Tr: Lucidity is the good faith of the philosophers.

”

- Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues

Software Patents

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:33:21 -0400

Software Patents:

Seth Godin on Software Patents:

Are patents (particularly software patents) being used to encourage new inventions, or have they turned into a [corporate] tax that all of us have to pay whenever we use a computer or a phone?

fuckyeahexistentialism: In some remote corner of the universe,...

Mon, 16 May 2011 11:57:17 -0400

fuckyeahexistentialism:

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of “world history”—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

The Nietzsche Reader.

Pardon my French...

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 07:06:01 -0400

fuckyeahexistentialism:

Uncompromising German film director Werner Herzog reads the...

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 09:52:46 -0400

Uncompromising German film director Werner Herzog reads the children’s classic Where’s Waldo?

"Rational knowledge, as presented by the learned and wise, negates the meaning of life, yet the vast..."

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 07:13:04 -0400

“Rational knowledge, as presented by the learned and wise, negates the meaning of life, yet the vast masses - humanity as a whole - recognise that this meaning lies in irrational knowledge. And this irrational knowledge is faith, the very thing that I could not help rejecting. This God, one in three, the creation in six days, the devils and angels and all the rest that I could not accept without going mad. My position was terrible.
I knew that I could find nothing along the path of rational knowledge, other than negation of life. While in faith I found nothing other than a negation of reason, which was even more impossible than denial of life. According to rational knowledge life is an evil and people know it. They have the choice of ending their lives and yet they have always carried on living, just as I myself have done, despite having known for a long time that life is meaningless and evil. According to faith it follows that in order to comprehend the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which meaning was necessary.”

- Leo Tolstoy. A Confession, The Gospel In Brief, and What I Believe, transl. with an Introduction by Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1961)

Bible dam by Jacek Yerka (2006 in acrylic)

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:58:00 -0500

Bible dam by Jacek Yerka (2006 in acrylic)

"People say that what we’re seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s..."

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 20:46:43 -0500

“People say that what we’re seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. What we seek is an experience of being alive.”

- Joseph Campbell via The Art of Non-Confrmity

In Wikipedia, We Trust

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 10:19:00 -0500

I’m tired of the Wikipedia bashing that comes from some circles. There is less now than a couple years ago when everyone in the media discovered that anyone at all could edit a Wikipedia entry and were aghast, but there is still a regular drumbeat of journalists, academics, teachers, librarians and others writing pieces like Lance Ulanoff’s "Wikipedia: You Still Can’t Trust It" in PC Magazine.

Let’s extract Ulanoff’s “argument" against Wikipedia:

He starts with an ad hominem attack by analogy: 10 year old humans are not reliable sources of truth, so 10 year old Wikipedia isn’t either. Ulanoff opens with this, just to let this pointless analogy simmer in the back of the readers mind I suppose.
People can deface Wikipedia entries, either as a political statement or as a joke.
Ulanoff uses Wikipedia, but only when he can find a second verifying source.
Ulanoff doesn’t think he could find a mistake in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Microsoft’s entry in Wikipedia might show some bias against the company.
The real reason people like Wikipedia is because it’s free.

It’s not a logical argument we get from Ulanoff as much as a scattered list of reasons that are meant to add up to supporting his thesis that you still can’t trust Wikipedia. The problem is, these reasons don’t even come close to supporting his thesis.

Skipping #1, which doesn’t justify a response, we come to #2. This is a legitimate complaint, people can deface Wikipedia, but it’s truly a minor one. Defacing is an inevitable side effect of the open and optionally anonymous process Wikipedia uses to create their encyclopedia. The process is a critical feature of the encyclopedia, not something Wikipedia could change without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There is an editorial process in place to catch overtly political or jokey edits. Wikipedia has active, dedicated editors that review all the revisions and reject these. These type of grossly obvious edits don’t stay in place for very long. Here’s the most interesting bit though, the more nuanced and even unintentional biases that slip into a traditional encyclopedia entry are there forever, stamped onto a dead tree bought by a library at great cost, or just not reviewed by enough trained eyes online to catch it because the entry is behind a pay-wall.

As a journalist, I hope #3, verifying with a second source, is true of all sources Ulanoff uses, not just Wikipedia.

Ulanoff is simply wrong on #4, I’m sure he could find a mistake in the Encyclopedia Britannica if he looked at entries where he has expertise. More importantly, I’m sure a word class particle physicist at Cal-Tech could find lots of mistakes in the Encyclopedia Britannica. And here is the real difference, what could Ulanoff or the physicist do about it. He could write Encyclopedia Britannica a note, and hope that they make edits for the next edition. If he found those same errors in Wikipedia entries, he can fix them right then and there.

Setting aside factual errors for a moment, what about fields that are inherently subjective such as the softer sciences, art, literature and philosophy? A traditional encyclopedia reaches out to a researcher or scholar that they feel can be both broad and objective and asks them to write an entry on a topic. We can assume that researcher takes their job very seriously and remains as objective as possible and researches different schools of thought on the topic. Yet, they are human, they are fallible, they have limited time and resources to work with, and no one knows everything, so many perspectives are inevitably going to be omitted. Let’s take an encyclopedia entry on “truth" for example. Was the existentialist perspective accounted for? The African perspective? The nihilist perspective? These types of oversights are trivially easy to address on Wikipedia. The African Philosophy expert simply edits the article and creates a new section or paragraph. In so many fields knowledge itself consists of knowledge of the existing perspectives on the topic. Wikipedia is by its very nature a better way to curate knowledge on these fields than the process used by traditional encyclopedias.

One last point about errors in a traditional encyclopedia, what is considered “true" in many fields today won’t be considered true in 6 months. What the fastest supercomputer in the world? Should you check Encyclopedia Britannica or Wikipedia? Which source is going to provide the correct answer? Even fields that are less rapidly moving than technology have new developments on old, “settled" questions all the time. Wikipedia is going to reflect these new developments at a pace that most traditional reference sources will not. I distinctly remember including information about countries that no longer existed in my youthful social studies reports because the encyclopedia’s information was 2, 5 or even 10 years old.

On #5, maybe Microsoft’s entry does show bias. If you think so, fix it. Or start a conversation about it to see if others share that opinion (every Wikipedia page has a discussion page about the page).

I suggest that the dry tone of #6 is a failing of other encyclopedias, not a failing of Wikipedia. I’d rather each entry represent the best writing the authors are capable of, rather than some dumbed down, robotic, research voice. You don’t read encyclopedias end to end, so consistency of writing style and voice is not important. Good, interesting, engaging and illuminating writing is. I don’t find enough of the latter when I read World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica.

On #7, Wikipedia being free is very important. But I don’t consider access to even the poorest a negative trait, and it’s not germane to his thesis that Wikipedia shouldn’t be trusted. I can pay $5 at the news stand for all sorts of drivel. I can buy a 2011 horoscope book for $10. Did not being free make them anymore reliable? To me, and to many other people, Wikipedia’s breadth (more than could ever be achieved using paid labor) and Wikipedia’s currentness are its most valuable attributes, not its lack of cost. To others, it’s free cost is a critical factor.

When I was in K-12, I had teachers that insisted we write our papers in long hand or type them on a typewriter, but not use a word processor. Why? I’m sure they had some pseudo-logical rationale that I can’t recall, but the real reason was that it was a technology that didn’t exist when they were assigned papers to write, therefore they weren’t going to permit its use in papers that they assigned to be written. Wikipedia is a victim of the same thinking. My kids regularly come home with assignments that include the admonishment not to use Wikipedia.

Teachers and Professors should be encouraging the use of multiple sources. They should be teaching research methodology and the differences between primary and secondary sources, and the role of references and citations. They should not be banning Wikipedia, anymore than they should be banning the use of transistors in creating reports like my teachers did. Wikipedia is a fantastic new resource of our species. A true wonder of our world.

"The train will be on time, say the screens at the station, and the accountant walks to the end of..."

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 13:26:44 -0500

“The train will be on time, say the screens at the station, and the accountant walks to the end of the platform under Victorian arches spongy with the paint of decades…”

- Alain de Botton in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Ben & Me

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 12:50:02 -0500

Cameron Gunn’s Ben & Me: From Temperance to Humility — Stumbling Through Ben Franklin’s Thirteen Virtues, One Virtuous Day at a Time would seems to have everything going for it except for a short title. I love the particular sub-genre of the participatory author, I have a real interest in the founding fathers, and I have a strong connection to the material because I also tried out Ben Franklin’s self improvement plan after reading his biography a decade or so ago. With such promise though came big disappointment.

It turns out Cameron Gunn has nothing much to say and has no business writing this book. Each chapter, ostensibly about one of Ben’s 13 virtues, seems instead to be a painful exercise in reaching a sufficient page count. This is achieved, but only through much boredom, repetition and a grating amount of self deprecation. In the end I had to put it down unfinished. Stay away from this clunker.

Ben & Me on Amazon.

"It is early December and in a central aisle, twelve thousand blood-red strawberries wait in the..."

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:49:11 -0400

“It is early December and in a central aisle, twelve thousand blood-red strawberries wait in the semi-darkness. They flew in from California yesterday, crossing the Arctic Circle by moonlight, writing a trail of nitrogen oxide across a black and gold sky. The supermarket will never again let the shifting axis of the earth delay its audience’s dietary satisfactions: strawberries journey in from Israel in midwinter, from Morocco in February, from Spain in spring, from Holland in early summer, from England in August, and from the groves behind San Diego between September and Christmas.”

- The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain de Botton

Songbook

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 07:23:35 -0400

A collection of Nick Hornby’s thoughts on 31 pop songs, Songbook is not very funny or interesting. I was attracted to read itt because of Nick Hornby’s collaboration with Ben Folds. Their recent album, Lonely Avenue, with all the lyrics by Hornby is brilliant! I figured this meant Nick’s musings on pop songs would be equally brilliant. It’s not so. I didn’t get very far before I took some of the best advice of my life, from Mr. Hornby no less, “Don’t keep reading bad books you start."

Like with books and Hornby’s Housekeeping and the Dirt, I’m ready to admit that maybe Nick and I just don’t have the same taste in music, and someone else with more similar tastes would get a lot out of Songbook. There were only 2 songs here that I knew (both are good) and listening to a random selection of others on iTunes told me I’m not sure what Nick sees in them.

If Songbook was not by Nick Hornby, it never gets published. I’m torn between giving up on Nick or giving his fiction a try. How is it that I ended up reading 2 bad non-fiction books from one of the most heralded novelists of our day?

Songbook on Amazon.

The Know-It-All

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 07:03:23 -0400

I bought this book a couple of years ago and its sat on the shelf in the library ever since. Since I seem to be reading a bunch of participatory or “project" journalism books, I decided now was the time for this one. Boy was I wrong. It wasn’t. I didn’t get very far at all in A.J. Jacob’s The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. I again took Nick Hornby’s great advice and stopped reading it when I realized I wasn’t getting any enjoyment out of it.

The premise of the book is that A.J. reads the entirety of the Encyclopedia Britannica in one year and writes about it. It’s a project his dad tried but stopped in the B’s. Too bad A.J. didn’t follow his lead.

I love the premise, but the execution is fairly lame. Rather than write the story of this project, A.J. mostly just writes summaries of encyclopedia entries (which are themselves summaries of course). AJ’s own story is so thin that in the end you are left with just the alphabetical entries. It amounts to one of those Essential Book of Useless Information bookswhere odd, obscure facts are doled out one after the other with no connective tissue or framework to make any sense of the information. The problem with those books and with The Know-It-All is that information is insanely interesting, and you are deceived into thinking you are learning something. But with such little depth, there is no true understanding or retention of information that is delivered this way.

If all you know is trivia, then everything you know is trivial.

The Know-It-All on Amazon.

House Keeping vs. the Dirt

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 19:30:04 -0400

I have a friend that’s a big Nick Hornby fan, so I picked up a couple used Nick Hornby paperbacks from Amazon. The first one that arrived was House-Keeping vs. the Dirt, a collection of 14 columns from Believermagazine where Nick Hornby writes about the books he bought and the books he read that month. Since I have this blog with a somewhat similar purpose, it seemed like this would be interesting.

Ironically, Nick Hornby’s forward is all about how you shouldn’t waste time reading books that you aren’t enjoying and getting anything out of. I got through 3 of these essays before, inspired by Nick’s own words, I gave up on this book. The books Nick is reading are just not interesting to me and his comments, while sometimes humorous, are only superficially about the books.

I’m sure lots of people enjoy these columns, but they aren’t for me. It makes me wonder what both my readers are getting out of this blog frankly.

House-Keeping vs. the Dirt on Amazon.

An Unlikely Disciple

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 19:16:00 -0400

Kevin Roose, only 19 at the time, decided to follow in his mentor, A.J. Jacobs’ footsteps and perform some participatory journalism in book form. The result was a semester at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and a book, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University, describing the experience.

This is a great book for a first attempt by a very young author. I’m looking forward to spending the next 20 or 30 years reading more from Kevin Roose. That being said, this book has a serious flaw, a flaw so deep it almost stopped me from finishing it. Kevin is a Quaker, not an Evangelical, and he’s politically liberal. He doesn’t share the views of the Liberty students and faculty on young earth creationism, biblical infallibility, abortion, gay rights, converting unbelievers or on who is saved and destined for heaven and who will spend an eternity in hell. Yet… infuriatingly, Kevin decides to lie about all of this and pass himself off as a middle of the road Liberty student.

I do have some ethical qualms about all this white lying, and I think there are even academic integrity issues as Kevin simply regurgitated what he knew his professors and classmates wanted to hear in all his classes rather than representing his true thoughts and beliefs. But more than these concerns, I was upset about the phenomenally wasted opportunity. Kevin did not need to misrepresent himself to get into Liberty, but once there, he took the least interesting route and just blended into the milieu. So rather than a fascinating tale about how Liberty would react to a true free thinker in their midst, instead we get countless and very repetitive looks into Kevin’s inner anguish as he bites his tongue while experiencing racism, homophobia and psuedo-scientific nonsense.

In the end I’m glad I pushed past this issue and continued reading because the end of Kevin’s semester at Liberty was eventful. First the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech occurred and then Jerry Falwell passed away on Kevin’s final day at Liberty, just a week after Kevin interviewed Falwell for the school newspaper. This sad ending proved fortunate for The Unlikely Disciple, allowing it to end with a big bang. Kevin’s recounting of the Liberty students and faculty’s reaction to these events was fascinating. Recommended.

The Unlikely Disciple on Amazon.

"I came to Liberty [University] to humanize people. Because humanizing people is good, right? But..."

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 18:58:00 -0400

“I came to Liberty [University] to humanize people. Because humanizing people is good, right? But what about people with reprehensible views? Do they deserve to be humanized? By giving Jerry Falwell’s moral universe a fair look, am I putting myself in his shoes? Or am I really just validating his worldview?”

- Kevin Roose in The Unlikely Disciple

Look at the Birdie

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Look at the Birdie is a collection of early and previously unpublished short stories by Kurt Vonnegut. Later in his career, anything Vonnegut wrote would have been published, but as a young writer, these stories were rejected.

Are they missing miniature classics or were they worthy of their rejection? It is surprising that a couple of these didn’t get published, but for the most part, Kurt the younger missed the mark with these short stories.

I’m not sure how the stories were arranged, chronological or reverse chronological or just to the editors preference, but there is a very clear downward trajectory to these 14 stories. I was excited by the first two stories, the excellent, sci-fi’ish Confido and the witty parable F U B A R, but by the end of the collection, the reproductive tales like Hello, Red and The Good Explainer and the rest lacked any evidence of the mature Vonnegut’s master wit.

A good read for a Vonnegut completionist or a hard core fan of short fiction, but most everyone else would be better served by spending their time with one of Vonnegut’s novels or his excellent essay collection, A Man Without a Country.

Look at the Birdie on Amazon.

A Few Seconds of Panic

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 10:02:00 -0400

In A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL, Stefan Fatsis attends 2006 off-season workouts, training camp and the pre-season with the Denver Broncos as a place kicker. Fatsis and the reader are lucky in that it was an eventful year for Denver with a QB controversy between Jake Plummer and Jay Cutler, a suspension for drugs and eventually cutting of elite Punter Todd Sauerbrun, and then the tragic shooting death of cornerback Darrent Williams.

Fatsis provides a nice update to the formula Plimpton pioneered in the 1960’s playing Quaterback/writer in Paper Lion. If you’ve never read Paper Lion, you should read these two back-to-back to contrast how the NFL changed in the 40 years between these two books.

Erudite to a fault, probably from his time on the professional Scrabble circuit, Fatsis is at his best in his pure journalist mode, when he simply interviews players and they open up beyond the sports cliches and sound bites because they’ve grown to know and trust him given all the time he spends with them. Unfortunately, these moments are spread between Fatsis’ over-infatuation with his own role in camp and his own performance as a kicker. Place kicker is just too specialized a position, and the day-to-day of a kicker in camp doesn’t provide any real insight into the life of an NFL player.

Because of this, In the pantheon of participatory football books, A Few Seconds of Panic comes up 3rd behind Plimpton’s original and Jeff Foley’s excellent book about his time as a journalist in the Arena Football league. Unlike Fatsis, Plimpton gets hit, and unlike Plimpton, Foley actually played in a game.

1. Paper Lion

2. War on the Floor

3. A Few Seconds of Panic

A Few Seconds of Panic on Amazon.