Month: August 2006

Here at Alma Books, with a new photo of Pirsig. [Link via Ant McWatt]

The Positively Pirsig post below referred to an upcoming book by David A Granger of SUNY. David Harding posted a link on MoQ-Discuss to a David Granger paper on Dewey and Pirsig published on the scholarly journal site “Project Muse”.

Turns out to be an excellent paper. Right to the point about Pirsig’s indirect teaching approach to Quality in his Bozeman days being a real example of Dewey’s later ideas on aesthetics leading science. Shared the link with Friends of Wisdom too.

Art, [Dewey] tells us, is best seen more liberally as “a quality that permeates an experience,” whereby, in any number of life contexts, the meanings of objects and events become “the matter of a clarified, coherent, and intensified or ‘impassioned’ experience” …

Modern preoccupation with science and with industry based on science has been disastrous; our education has followed the model that they have set. It has been concerned with intellectual analysis and formularized information …

It is disastrous because it has fixed attention upon competition for control and possession of a fixed environment rather than upon what art can do to create an environment …

It is disastrous because civilization built upon these principles cannot supply the demand of the soul for joy, or freshness of experience; only attention through art to the vivid but transient values of things can effect such refreshment.

Very promising stuff. Look out the re-release publicity for Pirsig’s “Lila”, and the later publication of the Granger book.

Saw Muse on Sunday night at the Tabernacle in Atlanta. (Was due to see them last weekend in Chicago too, but Tornado weather meant our 500 mile flight to O’Hare was delayed, cancelled, re-routed and re-scheduled via Dallas and Des Moines took 32 hours and an overnight stoppover, so I missed the gig.)

Their Atlanta set was

Take a Bow
Hysteria
Supermassive Black Hole
Butterfies and Hurricanes
Starlight
Forced In (?)
Bliss
Feeling Good
Soldier’s Poem
Invincible
Plug In Baby
New Born
Stockholm Syndrome
____________________
Map of the Problematique
Time Is Running Out
Knights of Cydonia

Significantly different from the Chicago playlist. Great final six, all anthemic for maximum audience participation with projected chorus lyrics for Cydonia. Not my favourite of the new numbers, but it worked. The highlight had to be Map and TIRO. Map is firmly my current favourite, can’t stop hitting the repeat button, particularly as the next number on the CD is the low key Soldier’s Poem.

Sound not too good, plenty loud and plenty of gut-curdling sub-bass, but the lead guitar and synth / keyboard voices and vocals too indistinct in the mix. Pretty static audience until the final six. Another excellent performance though.

Even the simplest games have strategy, but they are nevertheless psychological, about guessing the level of your opponents imperfect knowledge of the strategy. Via the BBC’s 100 Things page [via Rivets]

Aha, and here is the Scoville Chilli Scale. Didn’t that story originally indicate the hottest natural Chilli’s were grown on a farm in the UK ?

A riveting read, the recordings and transcripts from the Norad Tapes (North-East US Air Defence) during the 9/11 attacks, annotated by Michael Bronner producer of the movie “United 93”.

Truth is so much better than fiction or spin in this case. Should leave conspiracy-theorists with little doubt about cock-up-realities. Restores your faith in humanity, all except Cheney’s “dark bravado” that is. BTW where is he right now ? 

Vanity Fair via Robot Wisdom

Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.5 yesterday and installed Akismet comment-spam-killer today. And it all seems to be working. Long overdue, I was running at 70 odd per day, and it was getting very tiresome to filter by hand before allowing comments through.

One observation on the arrangement, I use WordPress s/w from WordPress.ORG hosted at Dreamhost.COM, but Akismet requires registration with services from WordPress.COM ? Anyway, as I say it seems to be working.

Following links in no particular order …

I noted Pirsig location links in Chicago at the weekend (Navy Pier etc.) and also noticed the Adler connection – the Adler Planetarium specifically, and wondered at the Robert Maynard Hutchins / Mortimer (Jerome) Adler “great books” and classical philosophy connection behind Pirsig’s nemesis at that Chicago University location, “chairman” Richard McKeon. Anyway, no direct connection between Mortimer and Max (Adler) other than a common name, common amongst Jewish immigrant fathers of their generation.

Anyway given that that was a dead end …. the interesting point was another cross-link to J S Mill – very influential on Adler (Mortimer) – and ahead of his time I suggested recently.

Couldn’t resist a cross-link to Intellectual Whores. Plenty of irony and humour in the site, but I daren’t stick my neck out and suggest this piece is a spoof. Serious or spoof it highlights the excluded middle.

Evolutionary psychology may explain how all real life (above and beyond theoretical physics and repeatable laboratory experiments) actually works and how it came to be that way, but that does not suggest how any individual or class of human(s) can “exonerate” itself from responsibilities. Understanding how and why those responsibilities evolved can indeed re-inforce why they are important and what makes some more important than others.

This is the usual explanation vs causality confusion IMHO.

This just in … a quote from Steven Pinker “An evolutionary understanding of the human condition, far from being incompatible with a moral sense, can explain why we have one.” … Even if it cannot reliably predict causal outcomes – but who can ? [Quote from John Brockman’s “Intelligent Thought” reviewed in Nature and publicised via his “Edge” site.]