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11:34:05 PM, Friday 18 January 2008
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11:32:55 PM, Friday 18 January 2008
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animal: elephant
vegetable: tree
mineral: quartz
magical: gnome
pop: take on me
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07:39:01 PM,
Wednesday 16 January 2008
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07:48:18 PM, Tuesday 15 January 2008
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06:13:44 PM, Tuesday 15 January 2008
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09:34:50 AM, Monday 14 January 2008
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06:11:13 PM, Sunday 13 January 2008
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At Nansen's temple one day, the monks of both the east and west halls were arguing about a cat. Nansen came in to the room, held up the cat, and said, "If you can say something, I won't kill it. If you can't say anything, I'll kill it."This seems to happen when I pick up books on Zen. People get hit over the head with sticks, and cats get killed. _No one in the assembly could understand Nansen's mind, so he killed the cat.
The next evening the master returned from somewhere and,while they were exchanging greetings, Nansen told him what happened and said, "What would you have done to save the cat?"
The master took off one of his sandals, put it on his head, and left.
Nansen said, "If you had been there, the cat would have been saved."
from the Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu, tr. James Green
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08:55:45 PM, Saturday 12 January 2008
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12:17:27 PM, Saturday 12 January 2008
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02:09:57 PM, Friday 11 January 2008
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Take a normal bran muffin recipe. Replace cinnamon with freshly ground cardamom. Replace vanilla with almond extract. Replace raisins with chopped dried apricots. Voila! Disaster muffins.
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(6)
11:37:05 AM,
Thursday 10 January 2008
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12:48:05 PM, Tuesday 8 January 2008
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June 3. Showers, but mostly bright and hot. Clouds growing in beauty at the end of the day. In the afternoon a white rack of two parallel spines, vertebrated as so often. At sunset, when the sky had charm and beauty, very level clouds, long pelletted sticks of shade-softened grey in the West, with gold-colour splashed sunset-spot, then more to the S. grey rows rather thicker and their oblique flake or thread better marked, above them on a ground of indistincter grey a drift of spotty tufts or drops, a 'dirty' looking kind of clouds, scud-like, rising._
-Gerard Manley Hopkins
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07:27:56 PM, Monday 7 January 2008
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10:23:05 PM, Sunday 6 January 2008
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These pictures get stored on a micro-SD chip in my cell phone. The thing is the size of my thumbnail and carries 2 gigs. I'm not even sure how to conceive of that.
Computers, they're not like minds. They're like cities, or ecosystems, or something. Teeming and churning. One can get control of bits of them, take a limited environment, a process or two, and tap out a shape in it. But the system as a whole? I don't have the start of a handle on it. There are 74 processes running on my computer right now. And that's not even beginning to bring the internet into it.
I am reflecting on this because I spent too much time today on my computer. Trying to get iTunes to work again (I've now been without electronic music for months). Trying to get Photoshop to download. Futzing. Fiddling. It is so magic when it works, and when it doesn't it is so overwhelming. Because of when it's magic, it's tempting to spend a lot of time getting it right (that's my job, after all). But other interfaces are inherently easier and often more rewarding, like books, like pen and paper, like making soup. Interfaces-- I mean activities. Arg.
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(7)
08:13:26 PM,
Saturday 5 January 2008
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07:22:00 PM, Saturday 5 January 2008
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06:42:42 PM, Saturday 5 January 2008
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Hundreds of mice, running around in spiral patterns. Eight or so meet in the center of a spiral, touch noses, and then spin round and continue.
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09:19:13 AM,
Saturday 5 January 2008
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I picked up this book called The Experience of Nothingness by Michael Novak at a nifty used bookstore in Pennsylvania. I had no idea what to expect, and was pleasantly surprised. It's existentialist, of course. The book was supported by some religious foundation and the man is apparently Catholic, but there wasn't anything to indicate that in the content of the book, other than its using an introductory quote from The Ascent of Mount Carmel (which is going on my must-read list). In keeping with my general tendency I will quote the most amusing bit:
Few of us often see the chair as a wet winged leather flesh with bended legs swimming in chaotic space, coincidence in a billion-year sequence of colliding particles, while we, audience like grasshoppers, sit docilely an entire evening and words drone emptily into our ears.Another bit I liked, this one somewhat more pedestrian:
A man reveals himself in the things that please and displease him. If you know what sorts of achievements satisfy a knower, you can discern the story he is acting out, trace his odyssey, and gauge the temper of his spirit.I think what I liked about this book was that it managed to be both completely supportive of radical anti-authoritarianism and very calm and sober (grasshoppers aside). I'm not sure why the idea of a morality based on self-knowledge rather than authority seems novel and refreshing to me (he leans mainly on Aristotle), I suppose it's that, while in theory I do believe that self-knowledge is the route to morality, in practice I depend on (and fear) a semi-internalized authority, and it's good to be reminded. _
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10:04:01 PM, Friday 4 January 2008
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08:03:11 PM, Friday 4 January 2008
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07:55:05 PM, Friday 4 January 2008
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Went through Tim's old books from childhood. Squirrels on rafts! That is all.
Edit: look here. Third or fourth picture down. I defy anyone to find something cuter.
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09:07:46 PM,
Tuesday 1 January 2008
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Testing. --The Mgt.
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07:12:26 PM,
Tuesday 1 January 2008
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11:53:56 AM, Monday 31 December 2008
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Fancy Japanese weebles!
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11:27:32 AM,
Sunday 30 December 2007
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11:10:03 AM, Sunday 30 December 2007
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10:52:53 AM, Sunday 30 December 2007
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If, further, The Soul is thus changeable while there must be somehow somehting unchangeable-- else time would wear all away-- this something must be prior to The Soul. Again, there must be something prior to The Soul since The Soul is in the world; there has to be something outside a world that, all body and matter, has nothing enduring about it. Were there not, neither mankind nor the seminal reasons would know either survival or identity
-Plotinus (tr. Elmer O'Brien)
Reading Plotinus and Berkeley in series is interesting. For some reason I thought platonic idealism and immaterialism had something to do with each other. It turns out they are more or less opposite: Berkeley denies the existence of abstraction of any sort, much less eternal Forms. Berkeley is down-to-earth and too clever for his own good. Plotinus is aiming at something more grand and ethereal and becomes tongue-tied in trying to speak about it.
The thing I find interesting about the quote above isn't exactly what it's arguing for. I have no idea what The Soul is (as opposed to The Intelligence and The One and individual souls), and I don't much care. Really what I'm after is what it more or less assumes, which is that there must be something-or-other that is eternal. Presumably he's getting this from Plato or Aristotle (please excuse the bad memory and lack of having read these books for many years). In any case I like this thought. I like arguing this point. It gets my mind going. I mean of course one cannot compare two things without being able to bring them together somehow (in the mind, traditionally). When comparing things separated by time, there is some one thing that contains things or information from the separate moments. That doesn't quite make it to there being something eternal, since some moments might not be knowable to some minds, and the mind which compares may itself change. Words have a semblance of eternity, and so do ideas, since they are precisely that which we use to mark a unity over time and space between many different things or circumstances. I don't believe that any particular word or idea is likely to be (or even could possibly be) eternal, not even Circle or Justice or the Good (drat, does that make me not a Platonist?), but what I mean by something being eternal is like what happens with words and ideas, where a limited unity is perceived across time. I suppose one way of putting it is that to the extent that time is connected in any way, to the extent that different times can be compared with one another, there is something timeless that connects them, that allows them to be compared.
In any case, laying aside argument and just assuming that there is something eternal, why does this fascinate me? What does my imagination make of this timeless whatsit? I like it, I very much like it, because of the idea that through all the ups and downs of my life, there is this something-or-other. It is absolutely nothing, it doesn't help in the slightest, in some way-- it is not a concrete constant, it's not something you can ever ever point a finger at, it's not something to hold on to. But still the idea that though there is nothing one can hold on to, there is something all this is happening within: I like it. The bare-bones idea of "something eternal" doesn't give you any substantive security against, really, anything. I like to think there are further limits. I like to think this is a coherent universe where only some of all conceivable experiences are explored, that is to say, I like to think there are limits to suffering.
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08:55:52 PM,
Friday 28 December 2007
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I just wrote a very short great books personality quiz. Let me know if it's accurate!
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(19)
11:36:43 PM,
Friday 21 December 2007
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It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. [...] and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived?
--George Berkeley
Strange indeed. Inexplicable really. What an odd man.
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(34)
12:10:37 PM,
Sunday 16 December 2007
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So sending a package to Germany yesterday, I found an interesting customs regulation. There were about five things banned from sending through customs, such as weapons, toxic substances... and decks of playing cards which were incomplete, mangled, or in any state other than brand new. Muh?
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12:06:03 PM,
Sunday 16 December 2007
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Has anyone else noticed that google has gotten worse in the past year or so? Where it used to get you lots of different quirky sites for a search for, say, toffee recipes, now you have to wade through lots of horrible sites with pop-under ads for netflix. I just get this sense that the bad is making its way to the top.
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09:19:47 PM,
Friday 7 December 2007
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In case you were wondering how to obtain a regular pentagon, all you have to do is tie a knot in a strip of paper, and flatten it out. Nifty. Proof here, instructions for making paper stars here.
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12:54:51 PM,
Sunday 2 December 2007
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There is a loud beeping noise coming from outside. Groups of three beeps, at irregular intervals. This is why I am awake.
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(1)
12:09:16 AM,
Tuesday 27 November 2007
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I was just reminded of the Tufts Gravity Stone. "It is to remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents". I'm not making this up. It's right by the library.
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08:05:52 PM,
Saturday 24 November 2007
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iTunes got unhappy when it upgraded to 7.5. So unhappy that it wouldn't play anything. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, nothing seemed to cheer it up. For a week my iPod contained little other than Harry Potter and the Boban Markovic Orkestar. Finally, desperate, I tried removing the library. It worked, my iTunes is back, cheerfully chirrupping a-ha at me. Sadly its playlists are lost.
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(1)
11:53:37 AM,
Saturday 24 November 2007
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site & script courtesy of Moss
