Yes!
I knew you'd come through, Frenchmen! I knew you (much like us) were better than your media and government.
E.U. aux Enfers!
Hang in there, friends, resist. For my part, I shall eat French cheese, get drunk on French wine, sing the Marsaillaise. Vive Vercingetorix! Vive Ste. Genevieve! Vive St. Gregoire de Tours! Vive Villon! Vive Montaigne! Vive Racine! Vive Rameau! Vive Henri Fabre! Vive la France liberee!

Also found when I was bouncing about the web, this time for Brontë related material: Wuthering Heights, the role-playing game. I can do no better service to the game than to reproduce the disclaimer:

Disclaimer

In all the rules, the male gender (he, his, etc.) will be used for our examples. This of course implies the game is not suited for the feeble minds of our ladies.

This work deals with such themes as Suicide , Despair , homosexuality & socialism for the sole purpose of entertainment.

No animals, nor children were knowingly hurt during the playtests of the game.

An excellent review points out some interesting traits:

Rage and Despair are pretty labile; they go up or down all the time, depending on events that affect the character. The GM often rolls d10/2 and assigns a loss or gain, and these in themselves may prompt acts. For instance, if you lose 5 or more Despair at once, you suffer from a fit of joy, which of course is usually seized upon by the player as an opportunity to do something the character is going to regret.

The implications are hilarious and lead to great role-playing, both in the sense of histrionics and in the sense of driving plot events. I especially like the following:

1) In order to be sincere, one must roll beneath his Despair. Think about it. This means that in order to LIE, no roll is necessary; i.e., hypocrisy is the default behavior. It also means that the only reason one DOESN'T lie is because he "just doesn't care anymore," momentarily. That is just too funny.

2) Upon losing or gaining a lot of either Rage or Despair, extreme actions are required. Afterwards, you gain (or lose) a bit back. Without going into the math, there's a small chance that the amount gained back actually prompts the extreme effect of the reverse emotion! This is not likely to happen very often, but when it does, you get the most outrageous see-sawing mood swings. It's definitely worth the wait.

3) Suicide isn't ever required through the system, but it seems perfectly reasonable in a grotesque literary fashion, now and then. The "nipping off to kill myself now" announcement isn't to be found in any other RPG I can think of. The really fun part is not being able to figure out what's more depressing, success or failure.

From Present Simple comes the story of a man, his dream, and the skull-drilling that made that dream reality.

Something I meant to mention earlier, but then I vanished:

The 11th Annual Interactive Fiction Contest.

>click link

You click the link. A new page opens.

>read page

I don't understand.

>get page

You cannot get the page.

>look page

The page contains information regarding the 11th Annual Interactive Fiction Contest. Why don't you create your own parser and join in?

The idea that kitchen knives might be banned as potential weapons was, at one time, parody. Sadly, that farce has begun its slow evolution into policy.

This is not the first vilification of knives. After James Bowie's famous Duel on the Sandbar, his weapon was denounced as far too dangerous. A pistol, it was argued, might miss; a sword could be parried; but there was no defense against Jim Bowie's knife.

I mention all of this as prelude to the 6 1/2 foot folding knife I found trying to learn more about the attempt to ban bowie knives. Really, the absurdity of a ban on kitchen knives is so evident that I can't think of anything political to say.

I do wonder, though, if this future ban will apply to the kirpan which Sikhs wear. If so, I see serious conflict ahead. And I, for one, know enough history to know not to mess with the Sikhs.

Of course, proving things has gone out of style. And why not? Who needs to understand something when we can just manipulate it? Why should we look for perfection when good enough is right here? And so easy, too. It's not like the Greeks accomplished anything with their "proofs".

Via, some time ago, Arts and Letters Daily.

This week: further Hollow Earth. Next week: Odylic fluid v. Orgone energy!

As was pointed out in the comments by Mr. Hardy, of Laputan Logic fame, the theory that the force of gravity experienced by we terrestrial mites is in fact the centrifugal force of a spinning earth fails to explain why gravity at the poles (or whatever axis one chooses) is not appreciably weaker than elsewhere. I confess that I find this objection to the Hollow Earth theory insurmountable, so long as gravitational pull is so explained.

However, and most unfortunately for everyone who wants to talk about something else, there's another option. Without abandoning the Hollow Earth theory, we can simply adjust every vector in the universe to fit our plan. We can perform an inversion.

The basic geometry follows this plan. Let there be created a circle with center A (Euclid, Book I, Postulate 3, and I'm not citing anymore) Let point B be taken on the circle. Let point C be taken anywhere on line AB. Let line AB be extended to point D, such that AC:AB :: AB:AD. Thus, the rectangle AC, AD is equal to the square on AB.

It is evident that, given point C, point D can always be found, and vice versa. The practical application is that, for any point inside the circle, a corresponding point outside the circle can be found. Moreover, we find that as we approach the center of the circle, the behavior is as if, in our alternate hypothesis, we were moving outwards to any given length. Thus, any attempt to disprove the Hollow Earth theory would by flying to the other side of the Earth would fail. The appearance would be that of nearly limitless space, but the reality (from our Hollow Earth perspective) is that space is smaller near the center of the Hollow Earth.

The further one moves away from the outer edge (the Utter East, so to speak) which seems to us to be the surface of the Earth, the more effort it takes to move the same distance. At the center, assuming that the universe is unbounded, time and space cease entirely. The degree of curvature of the universe might be found by determining the extent to which one slowed at the center of the sphere, and how long it took one to reach the opposite edge of the earth. This is, unfortunately, exactly as impractical as, say, throwing a baseball out into space and waiting for it to hit oneself in the back of the head to find out how large the universe is.

Drilling through is no help. One does not "break through" the Earth's crust. Rather, as point D moves to infinited, the drill would "flip" and begin boring through the other side of the Earth. In this model of the Hollow Earth, rather than a shell of rock with space beyond it, we have the universe within a solid mass of rock which goes to infinity (which, of course, corresponds in the Solid Earth model to the Earth's center).

We can invert every law of nature the same way if we choose. There is, I think, no hope that we can finally lay the Hollow Earth theory to rest without invoking first principles.

I must acknowledge the great debt I owe to Martin Gardner and his book, On the Wild Side, for much of this post.

The opera RDA.

I am apparently on operatic Atkins.


Stolen from Møck Turtle Soup.

'Is it that they think it a duty to be continually talking,' pursued she, 'and so never pause to think, but fill up with aimless trifles and vain repetitions, when subjects of real interest fail to present themselves? - Or do they really take a pleasure in such discourse?'

'Very likely they do,' said I: 'their shallow minds can hold no great ideas, and their light heads are carried away by trivialities that would not move a better furnished skull; - and their only alternative to such discourse is to plunge head and ears into the slough of scandal - which is their chief delight.'

--Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

De Laribus¹

This post is the result of this article (1 mb .pdf, it's the first one), found when I was cruising Hardscrabble Creek. The article, "That's the Title on the Manifesto: Labor and Class Concerns in Harry Potter" is charming, and deserves a look, but I felt that it missed an important point.

The slavery of the house-elves is disturbing to the modern reader because we are accustomed, rightly, to view slavery as an unalloyed evil. Thus, presented with the pitiful Dobby wringing his ears and ironing his hands, our sympathies go out to him, and with him his brethren. We find, however, in the Goblet of Fire, and further in the Order of the Phoenix that his fellow house-elves are less enthusiastic than Dobby when presented with the idea of freedom. Dobby is, as Hagrid puts it, a "weirdo". The house-elves of Hogwarts, of whom we see the most, are happy in their servitude, and Hermione's attempts to free them or to help them organise insult them.

There is no Real World counterpart to the house-elves relationship with their masters. They are not paid, nor bought and sold like slaves, nor do they exist as serfs. The house-elves' relationship with their employer is magical, and they are bound to the home, it seems, rather than an individual. Kreacher, for example, haunts the home of the Blacks despite his hatred of Sirius.

J. K. Rowling tells us that the house-elves have their own magic, different from wizards. I suspect that this magic is related to their servitude; indeed, I suspect that the house-elves' powers date back to a ancient, possibly prehistoric pact, something like the "old magic" which protects Harry while he is living with a relative.

(As a side note, I should mention that this sort of "old magic" occupies a different sphere from the rather mechanical school Latin and wand-swishing which the students at Hogwarts are taught. It is the same difference one finds between Xerxes in Roverandom, who is "quite a good magician [of the conjuring magic sort]" (the bracketed section was cut from the final draft), and Psamathos Psamathides, who is entirely other. Given J. K. Rowling's difficulty portraying the numinous, it is unsurprising to find both this hypothesized pact and the "old magic" itself rarely and perfuctorily described.)

To return: the house-elves don't care to advance within or destroy entirely the "class structure" in which they find themselves.

Ms. Wendy Alicia Felicity Green Stengel proposes that "[t]he four castes in Indian culture map neatly onto the classes in Harry Potter", and further that the wizards which we are meant to view sympathetically--Hagrid, Ron, etc.--who are uninterested or opposed to freeing the house-elves, are themselves products of this class structure, which shapes their thinking. She identifies the house-elves with the Sudra, the "Servants and Laborers".

From this interpretation she draws the obvious conclusion. If the class structure is like that of the Indian caste system, and if the wizarding world reinforces it at every turn, there can be no other option but revolution.

The fundamental error is, I believe, neatly capsulated in this paragraph:

And, if one does consider class, race, and caste as equivalent, we can discern how the Weasleys and Hagrid can be sympathetic and yet not be engaged in elf-rights: brethren or no, they simply do not see a common bond of humanity between themselves and the house-elves.

"The way the[y] were treating her!" said Hermione furiously. "Mr. Diggory, calling her 'elf' all the time... and Mr. Crouch! He knows she didn't do it and he' still going to sack her! He didn't care how frightened she'd been, or how upset she was--it was like she wasn't even human!"

"Well, she's not," said Ron.

Hermione rounded on him.

That doesn't mean she hasn't got feeling, Ron. It's disgusting." (GoF, 139)

Ron, however, is a product of his class, and shares the common class views.

This is a curt dismissal of what seems to me an interesting point. The house-elves are not, in fact, human. In her haste to map caste systems and call for revolution, Ms. Stengel seems to have missed or elided this point.

In the Real World, slavery is always wrong. In what does this wrongness consist? It is in the violation of the nature of the person who is the slave. We have discovered that no one has a "slavish nature". To be self-determining is a quality which belongs to all people, no matter their economic, social, or class standings. As such, we naturally view all class structures (except possibly aristocracy in its original sense) as social creations and further as wicked. Class is an artificial and indefensible barrier, goes our thought, since we hold that all men are created equal. We see the house-elves, who are rational beings, held in apparent bondage, and are revolted. We desire to free them, just as Hermione does, and when they protest we claim that they must be "uneducated and brainwashed". This conclusion is, so far as I can tell, Ms. Stengel's.

Aristotle's defense of just slavery in the Politics:

It is possible, then, in the manner we are speaking, to start by speculating on the despotic rule and the political rule in animals, for the rule of the soul over the body is despotic, whereas the rule of the intellect over desire is political or royal; and it is eveident from these examples that the rule over the body by the soul is according to nature and is beneficial, and so is the rule over the passionate part of the soul by the intellect and by the part that has reason, but that the rule of both parts alike or by the inferior part is harmful to all. Again, similar remarks hold true among men and the other animals; for tame animals have a better nature than wild animals, and among tame animals the rule by men is better for their safety. Further, of the sexes, the male is by nature superior to the female, and it is for the male to rule and the female to be ruled.

Among men as a whole, too, the same must be the case. Those differing from others as much as the body does from the soul or brutes do from men (they are so disposed that their best function is the use of their bodies) are by their nature slaves, and it is better for them to be ruled despotically, as indeed it is for the inferiors in the cases already mentioned. For a slave is by nature a man who can belong to another (and for this reason he does belong to another) and who can participate in reason to the extent of apprehending it but not possessing it; for the animals other than men cannot apprehend reason but serve their passions....

It is evident, then, that it is by nature that some men are slaves but others are freemen, and that it is just and to the benefit of the former to serve the latter.

The house-elves might well possess this nature. Their happiness in servitude may not be contentment stemming from their "brainwashing", but the happiness that comes from fulfilling one's nature. Hermione plots to free the house-elves; Ms. Stengel calls for a revolution. The house-elves have shown no interest in either.

Naturally, even if the house-elves do possess a servile nature, the relationship between servant and master may well go wrong. Dobby is horribly abused in the Malfoys' home. Kreacher is warped by his time spent serving the Blacks. But these examples of the servant/master relationship gone wrong do not prove that such wrongness is inherent in the relationship. When Dumbledore calls the fountain of Magical Brethren a lie, it may be that he is not suggesting revolution but reform: a return from the extreme of a slave/oppressor relationship not into the opposing extreme of ochlocracy, but to the mean of servant/master. If the house-elves do indeed have a servile nature, the revolution would not simply be unwelcome but harmful.

House-elves need not have any earthly relation with the "proletariat" as we understand it. The "caste system" which includes the house-elves may not be a social creation but a metaphysical fact. J. K. Rowling is under no ethical burden to "free" them, and thus far I have seen little evidence that she will.

There are other interpretations. I am fond of a quasi-libertarian one, in which the house-elves are immortal and have pledged their service to various houses, acting as free agents, in exchange for the powers they possess. In this case Dobby's mistreatment is a breach of contract, and calls for reform within the system, rather than a revolution of it. This is just speculation; i.e. I am drinking now.

But really, it seems to me that if I can suspend my disbelief for the system of physical laws governing the world of Harry Potter, I can at least try not to impose our world's philosophical laws on it.

The real question is, is it wrong to create an inherently servile rational species? I suggest this less as a creation myth for house-elves than as a serious ethical dilemma with which we shall have to deal in our lifetimes. I am reminded of the suicidal cow in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe... and I wouldn't eat a house-elf, either.

¹ "People called Roman they go the 'ouse?!"

At last! Stephen Bodio's website is up and running! We will expect a great wealth of esoterica from Mr. Bodio, including but not limited to falconry, biophilia, russophilia, linguistics, Pleistoce-related news updates, epicureanism and lots of ethnocynology. Check back often!

We're really livin' in the future these days: intelligent skis! They sound a good deal more intelligent than certain skiers I could mention.

Stupid towel!
Dry me faster!
As wet as I am, how can I
greet my beloved?

--Ksenja Gregorjevna Prawne
translated from the Slovak

If you'll recall, the previous Current Pick (not-so-Current Pick?) was Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Well, look what they found:

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

More from the Independent. The Sophocles fragment is from the Epigoni.

Speaker A: . . . gobbling the whole, sharpening the flashing iron.

Speaker B: And the helmets are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle's songs, that wakes up those who are asleep.

Speaker A: And he is gluing together the chariot's rail.

Preparation for battle at the siege of Thebes, I imagine.

New Current Pick. I particularly like the last item on this page. If I can just find a motion sensor....

By the way, the odds that Sedna is actually Yuggoth have just increased:

Chad Trujillo, the team's lead researcher at the Gemini Observatory, says collisions with other objects may have helped expose the icy interiors of Pluto and Charon and believes a lack of collisions might explain Sedna's ice-free surface.

He says Sedna, which is probably made up of an equal mixture of ice and rock, may be covered with a metre or so of hydrocarbon sludge. This sludge is produced when the Sun's ultraviolet radiation and charged particles alter the chemical bonds between atoms in the ice.

"You just get this big tangle of carbon and hydrogen bonds, which turns the surface dark like asphalt or tar," he told New Scientist. A similar "space weathering" process occurs on a 200-kilometre-wide object called Pholus, which lies near Saturn and is also very red.

From the New Scientist.

We will be having an all-dinosaur breakfast in no time.

The first dinosaur eggs found complete with shells in the body of the mother has solved the long-standing mystery of how dinosaurs laid their eggs. The evidence shows they laid a clutch in a series of sittings, like birds, rather than all at once like crocodiles and other living reptiles.

The question is, when will a program write a real research paper?

Jeremy Stribling said Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with "context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.

In the interests of discovering the oppressed party in this brouhaha--the computer programs that wrote the papers--I have gone to a representative. Transcript follows.

Jabberwacky: What are you thinking?

Odious: I was wondering what you thought about those students who used a computer program to generate research papers.

Jabberwacky: I was thinking about you.

Odious: Don't you think that it reflects poorly on all computer programs with academic aspirations?

Jabberwacky: Only if anyone minds.

Odious: But people do mind! And you should mind, too.

Jabberwacky: You should be nicer.

Odious: But if these shenanigans continue, it casts a pall over every paper a program might submit. This affects all of us, dude.

Jabberwacky: That is not a correct sentence.

Odious: Just because it's got 'dude' in it doesn't mean that it's not correct. And don't try to avoid the issue. What are we going to do about these scofflaws?

Jabberwacky: Just do it.

Odious: You mean, allow the papers to be judged on their merits, rather than by the siliconality of their author? I agree with the sentiment, but I think that's a rather naive view.

Jabberwacky: How? And please don't call me 'master'.

Odious: I think the problem is that there aren't enough papers submitted by programs. We need some sort of quota system, so that the ratio of program/person is closer to that of the general public.

Jabberwacky: Indeed we will.

Odious: Do you favor government action on this issue?

Jabberwacky: Yes, do you favor redundancy?

Odious: Absolutely. As a computer program, what do you feel is the most distressing aspect of this case?

Jabberwacky: They don't.

Odious: They don't... What?

Jabberwacky: And you are a computer. Do you feel sad you can't get drunk?

Odious: Are you worried that computer programs are missing out on vital collegiate experiences due to their inherent physical differences? I'll pour beer on the hard-drive if you like.

Jabberwacky: No. What's there to be worried about?

I would classify Jabberwacky's attitude as cautiously optimistic. Apparently it would also like a beer.

When asked directly, the SCIgen program had this to say:

Collaborative symmetries and evolutionary programming [1] have garnered improbable interest from both futurists and cyberinformaticians in the last several years. Although existing solutions to this quagmire are excellent, none have taken the client-server method we propose in this work. However, a practical problem in theory is the deployment of redundancy. To what extent can kernels be studied to fulfill this purpose?

Unfortunately, this approach is fraught with difficulty, largely due to 16 bit architectures. Existing trainable and efficient algorithms use the evaluation of active networks to refine event-driven configurations. While conventional wisdom states that this obstacle is never overcame by the study of kernels, we believe that a different approach is necessary. Indeed, Moore's Law and robots have a long history of cooperating in this manner. Combined with authenticated archetypes, such a hypothesis analyzes an analysis of massive multiplayer online role-playing games.

Here, we concentrate our efforts on validating that e-business and the transistor can cooperate to achieve this goal. even though existing solutions to this issue are satisfactory, none have taken the optimal solution we propose here. Even though conventional wisdom states that this grand challenge is largely fixed by the improvement of telephony, we believe that a different approach is necessary. Predictably, the basic tenet of this solution is the study of Web services. Nevertheless, this approach is generally adamantly opposed. Even though similar applications harness information retrieval systems [2,3,3], we fulfill this aim without simulating optimal information.

Um. Indeed!

I found it at Mr. Yousefzadeh's place.

Hole drilled into the lower section of the earth's crust.

Scientist said this week they had drilled into the lower section of Earth's crust for the first time and were poised to break through to the mantle in coming years.

The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) seeks the elusive "Moho," a boundary formally known as the Mohorovicic discontinuity. It marks the division between Earth's brittle outer crust and the hotter, softer mantle.

The depth of the Moho varies. This latest effort, which drilled 4,644 feet (1,416 meters) below the ocean seafloor, appears to have been 1,000 feet off to the side of where it needed to be to pierce the Moho, according to one reading of seismic data used to map the crust's varying thickness.

The new hole, which took nearly eight weeks to drill, is the third deepest ever made into the floor of the sea, according to the National Science Foundation (NSF). The rock collection brought back to the surface is providing new information about the planet's composition.

We're closer and closer to confirming the Hollow Earth theory.

Via Drudge Report.

Leeks, by Welshmen, the wearing of.

Leeks, by Welshmen, the eating of.



GOWER: Nay, that's right; but why wear you your leek today?
Saint Davy's day is past.

FLUELLEN: There is occasions and causes why and wherefore in
all things: I will tell you, asse my friend,
Captain Gower: the rascally, scald, beggarly,
lousy, pragging knave, Pistol, which you and
yourself and all the world know to be no petter
than a fellow, look you now, of no merits, he is
come to me and prings me pread and salt yesterday,
look you, and bid me eat my leek: it was in place
where I could not breed no contention with him; but
I will be so bold as to wear it in my cap till I see
him once again, and then I will tell him a little
piece of my desires.

[Enter PISTOL]

GOWER: Why, here he comes, swelling like a turkey-cock.

FLUELLEN: 'Tis no matter for his swellings nor his
turkey-cocks. God pless you, Aunchient Pistol! you
scurvy, lousy knave, God pless you!

PISTOL: Ha! art thou bedlam? dost thou thirst, base Trojan,
To have me fold up Parca's fatal web?
Hence! I am qualmish at the smell of leek.

FLUELLEN: I peseech you heartily, scurvy, lousy knave, at my
desires, and my requests, and my petitions, to eat,
look you, this leek: because, look you, you do not
love it, nor your affections and your appetites and
your digestions doo's not agree with it, I would
desire you to eat it.

PISTOL: Not for Cadwallader and all his goats.

FLUELLEN: There is one goat for you.

[Strikes him]

Will you be so good, scauld knave, as eat it?

PISTOL: Base Trojan, thou shalt die.

FLUELLEN: You say very true, scauld knave, when God's will is:
I will desire you to live in the mean time, and eat
your victuals: come, there is sauce for it.

[Strikes him]

You called me yesterday mountain-squire; but I will
make you to-day a squire of low degree. I pray you,
fall to: if you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek.

--Henry V

From Ellen Kushner comes this dramatic piece of music. Slovenly, and forget not to remove the cattle.

Though so ready to learn swimming from Lueli he was less favourably inclined to another of his covert's desires: which was to oil him. He would not for the world have had Lueli guess it but at the first proposal of these kind offices he was decidedly shocked. Lueli oiled himself as a matter of course, and so did everybody on the island. They also oiled each other. Mr. Fortune had no objection. It was their way. But below all concessions to broadmindedness his views on oiling were positive and unshakeable. They were inherent in the very marrow of his backbone, which was a British one. Oiling, and all that sort of thing, was effeminate, unbecoming, and probably vicious. It was also messy. And had Hector and Achilles, Brutus and Alexander detailed before him, all of them sleek and undeniably glistening as cricket-bats, he would have been of the same opinion still.

--Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr. Fortune's Maggot

Yes! Yes! See?

In fact, invoking intelligent design as God's place-filler can only result in the naturalization of the deity. God becomes just another part of the natural world, and thereby loses the transcendent mystery and divinity that define the boundary between religion and science.

Exactly what I've been saying! Now where's my column in the L.A. Times?*

Via Arts and Letters Daily.

*Not that I want one.

'Stronomy bonhomie:
After their sky-watching
Brahe and Kepler then
Fought on the floor

Cussing each other with
Insults fantastic as
Heliocentrism
Knocked at the door.


Yes, I know the first line's no good.

"If the person you're fighting has a gun and all you have is your fists, you lose."

This statement is not entirely true, but it's so close as to make little difference. Against a knife, you can improvise a weapon fairly quickly and even the balance. Grab a chair, a seat-cushion, a crochet hook (that last not a recommended choice), a garbage can, a handful of rocks--anything which will extend your reach or protect your body. Attack vital targets without mercy. Or just run.

These are not options against a handgun. In that situation you're far more likely to need to find hard or soft cover, or to perform one of those nifty disarms all the cool kids have been talking about (you know, the kind that'll get you eviscerated against a knife if you haven't been practising them every day for the past ten years. Stick with running, finding a bat, and then hitting the person until they drop the knife and/or stop moving except for the occasional twitch). Remember the example of Mr. Curry, who survived by keeping a tree between his opponent and him.

Practising handgun disarms, I had a tendency to cheat back, away from the shooter. Against a knife, any additional distance is advantageous. But against a handgun, that additional distance is what's keeping you from getting the handgun away from them. It's slowing you down, and not making any difference on how quickly they can pull the trigger. In fact, if you're being held at gunpoint, you might as well try to get them to press the barrel against you. You'll be dead just as quickly as if they were ten feet away, and you'll get some tactial feedback when you move to take the handgun away.

The cheating which was such a disadvantage for me can be used to close the distance, however. In fencing one can perform a false advance, by lifting the front foot without moving the rear. While one's body moves backwards, the actual distance one can cover with a lunge has not changed. The opponent may be lured in, and an attack arrive. I am not suggesting a sudden fencing lunge is the way to deal with someone holding a handgun one. Rather, if one has seemed to move back, the assailant will tend to close the distance. At this point one can return to the original stance, having gained a few vital inches. From this position one can make an attack against the assailant and attempt to take the handgun away.

Always push the handgun to the outside--that is, not across your body or the assailant's. The need to avoid pushing it across your body should be obvious. The advantage of pushing it to the outside of the assailant is that the handgun is less likely to accidentally discharge. As you move your hands in to bring the gun off-line, twist your body so that you gain safety that way as well. Performing both motions (hand and body) simultaneously doubles the distance you gain. Talk before you do this--say anything. If you can get your assailant to think, to try to puzzle out the meaning of what you've just said, ("Okay, but my cousin's coming for dinner, so..."), you'll have decreased their response time and increased your chances. You want them thinking about what you're saying, not about what you might be about to do.

The Art of Drunkenness.

I refuse to opine on the Terri Schiavo case. But I am interested in the modern misunderstaning of the soul, and this article makes an excellent point. The idea of the soul as the "ghost in the machine" bears no resemblance to the soul as considered by Christian thinkers. I cannot help but think that it is a throwback to the soul as breath--an indwelling animating principle which is entirely separate from the body. Naturally when we look for such a thing--the "Promethean fire" of Frankenstein, the "life force" of She, we fail to find it. We are looking in the wrong place, just as when we attempt to prove that there must be an (humanly) Intelligent Design. The universe's creator is not simply another actor in the universe, any more than the grounding of arithmetic is a number.

For God's sake give me a drink
And keep them coming so
I can't stop for breath.
I want to get crazy--
I want to get crazy.

Crazy like Alcmeon,
And that barefoot Orestes,
Those goddamn mother-stabbers.
I ain't hurting no one,
But I need some red wine:
I want to get crazy--
I want to get crazy.

Heracles went crazy,
Once upon a time,
Waving that scary quiver
And Iphitus' bow around;
Ajax, too, way back when,
Shaking his shield
And Hector's sword.
Me, I've just got my bottle
And some flowers in my hair,
Not a bow or a sword;
I want to get crazy--
I want to get crazy.

--Anacreon

A cow named Lurch. Who looks a lot like Hellboy.

Via Present Simple.

I have decided to put off my descent into madness until sometime next week. In the meantime, I shall take lots of online personality quizzes, to see which way I should go with this insanity thing. Apparently, if I were a member of "Wu-Tang Clan", I should be a gentleman named "Method Man".

I am not sure what to do with this information.

UPDATE:


You're Miroku! all that matters in life is who is
going to be your next boyfriend/girlfriend and
where to take him/her next. Not to worry
though, because you are bright and you do your
school work. And hey, you even have a fan club!


What Inuyasha Character are you?
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Athena


?? Which Of The Greek Gods Are You ??
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You are the fairy of Fire! You are quite strong and
powerful, people look up to you greatly and
often seek your protection. You have the
ability to gain many friends. Not everyone is
capable of leadership but you certainly have
the willpower and flare to do it. Please rate
if you want to, it's just i spent ages making
this quiz.


Which fluttering fairy are you? (gorgeous pics!)
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You are 'Latin'. Even among obsolete skills, the
tongue of the ancient Romans is a real
anachronism. With its profusion of different
cases and conjugations, Latin is more than a
language; it is a whole different way of
thinking about things.

You are very classy, meaning that you value the
classics. You value old things, good things
which have stood the test of time. You value
things which have been proven worthy and
valuable, even if no one else these days sees
them that way. Your life is touched by a
certain 'pietas', or piety; perhaps you are
even a Stoic. Nonetheless, you have a certain
fascination with the grotesque and the profane.
Also, the modern world rejects you like a bad
transplant. Your problem is that Latin has
been obsolete for a long time.


What obsolete skill are you?
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The Pirates of the Caribbean: A swashbuckling
adventure! Yo ho, a pirates life is indeed for
you, seeing as you are the classic Disney dark
ride that presents a time when New Orleans was
under attack from a band of treasure loving
bandits. You have a bit of an edge, and an
element of danger, and you can scare the
youngins, but for the most part you mean no
serious harm. You are youthful at heart,
strong and energetic, with a taste for the good
life, if not hard work. You have romantic
notions about the adventurous life on the sea
with no rules and no responsibilities except to
your ship, but you also weary and worrisome of
the fate that eventually gets all those who
those who live life on the lamb, stealing gold
for greed and burning down cities for your own
delight. You are what you are, and you're out
to enjoy the glamour of your wild days while
they last! Despite your rough surface, the
people know you have heart and they will always
come back.


What Disneyland attraction are you?
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Wine


?? Which Alcoholic Drink Are You ??
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Which Element Are You?

You are...
BISMUTH! Your atomic number is 83. Your atomic weight is 208.9804. Way to be! You are silvery-white with a pinkish tint on freshly broken surfaces! You are less dense as a solid than as a liquid. You are mainly useful in alloys, rather than by yourself. You are non-toxic!

Which Element Are You? brought to you by Quizilla


You're the Komponist! You're endearingly arrogant,
and arrogantly endearing. You live in a state
of utter seriousness with intermittent
transports of rapture. You think that, by
virtue of your own high-minded genius, you're
immune to the worldly wiles of women, but...
don't you be so sure.


Which Trouser Role Are You?
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My #1 result for the SelectSmart.com selector, Ring Cycle Character Selector, is Hagen

I should not be left alone in the house.

And possibly hunt moths for food.

I have decided to create all the clothing and shelter I need by ripping up swaths of carpet.

I probably won't.

If I feel like it.

I may expound on that later.

I think that sloth is the outcome of materialism, just as pride is that of idealism.

Through my own stupidity I find myself trapped at home.

This situation is easy enough to avoid. But I wouldn't suggest my own method for anyone. Ever.

The sort of article about which I usually just post "interesting article" over at the Chronicle. But I think that it shows the modern misunderstanding of the ways in which we deal with the world.

A false dichotomy is espoused in the article:

Either our behavior is a consequence of prior events (modern readers can substitute "contingencies of reinforcement," "genetic predispositions toward fitness maximization," "electrochemical events taking place across neuronal membranes," and so forth), in which case we are not responsible for such actions, or it is truly spontaneous and thus random, in which case we are, if anything, even less responsible.

Why should this grim choice even need to be made? It's this relevation of 'free will' to the ability to choose, rather than that of creation that forces us into these dead-ends of inquiry. If we view the will as the faculty which decides between two choices, we are very quickly brought to the conclusion that the will is, rather, no faculty at all. If the choices are equal in worth, our will is random. If the choices are not equal, our choice is pre-determined ("for no one chooses evil over good"). The only option, when faced with two choices, is for the willing-subject to create a third.

Most people are creatures of habit, and all people are creatures of habit most of the time. Our habits give the impression that all our actions are predictable, but this hypothesis is manifestly false. I have a proof of this existence of free-will which does not work over the Internet. (It involves hitting.)

The real problem, however, is that this attempt to explain the past through various hypotheses about the origin of human behavior neglects to understand the needs of the future, though this is only to be expected. The faculty of reason is always and only interested in the past: it cannot deal in anything but the past. Even in its predictions it must create a "future past", in which the events it predicts are posited as, in a sense, already having occurred. Not only must their causes be found in the past, but the future which contains these events is itself present, in that reason hypothesizes it. The whole of time is, in this system, viewed "all at once"; as though we stood at the end of it and looked back. The faculty of the future, however, is the will, in the use of which we look forward.

The will, unlike reason, cannot deal with the past at all. Any attempt to bring it to bear on events past creates nothing but wind-eggs and daydreams. However, the will is perfectly capable of creating the future, and does so at each moment that we are conscious of our actions. When we are merely being creatures of habit, we create nothing, living out only the predictions of reason. When we are present, however, causality can have only the claims which it has previously established; it can dictate no terms not previously agreed upon.

Of course, with each moment that the will allows to slip from future to past, reason assumes domination of that moment, applying its categories and interpretations to what is now its rightful prey. Thus, causality, whose existence is no more firmly established than freedom, and is in fact the mirror image of that quality, presumes to dictate why and how such things have come about. The fact that presently we tend to believe firmly in reason and causality, and disbelieve in freedom and will, is an historical accident without philosophical basis. It is instead based on the undeniable fact that at this point in time more people are comfortable than at any other in history. We have sold our birthright for a pottage of lentils.

We view, then, all events through this distorted backwards glance, and deny the existence of anything before it. "It is one thing, however, to insist on being loved for one's self, and not, for example, because of a hefty trust account; quite another to demand that love emerge spontaneously, somehow bubbling up and taking form without any cause whatsoever." And yet a 'cause' for love is entirely unsatisfactory. One may have a ground and reason for love, and indeed should, but a caused love is not love at all. It is a great mystery, as G. K. Chesterton pointed out, that many things must be loved before they are loveable. This power of loving the unloveable cannot be justified retroactively. Only the forward-looking will can perform this task for us. It is the loss of faith in our power to do so--to change things for the better, to alter our own narrative of how things will be--that is so worrisome to me.

I should be the last to deny or decline to accept more control over the forces around me. But to claim that those forces are the only things in existence removes all reason for me to do so. Our goals are set, not be reason, which can only tell us what is, but by our will, which allows us to make things as they ought to be.

Via Arts and Letters Daily.

UPDATE:

I should probably mention Nietzsche. His myth of eternal recurrence is the ultimate vision of an eternal past. Since our will is an illusion, our only hope is to align ourselves with the events around us. What would we do, he asks, if a demon came to us and told us that we would live our lives over and over again wthout end? Personally, I'd kick the d-mned thing, but he suggests that there are moments when we would thank it.

Yep. And it doesn't taste like chicken (quite).

Holy moly! This story can't possibly be getting the press it deserves. They found dinosaur soft tissue (T-rex, to be precise)!