June 2009
96 posts
May 2009
105 posts
Solvitur ambulando - The pretense to reason →
The logic books define two words that ought to cause more trouble than they do. The words are “sound” and “valid.” They are qualities of argument. An argument begins by assuming premises, a few statements of fact taken for granted—the argument needs to start somewhere. From the premises it draws intermediate statements that proceed in logic, concluding finally with the...
Death at the Ballpark: a compendium of all the... →
Death at the Ballpark: A Comprehensive Study of Game-Related Fatalities, 1862-2007 is an impeccably sourced compendium of the men, women, and children who have died or been fatally injured while playing, officiating, or watching baseball in the United States. Its authors, Robert M. Gorman and David Weeks, two librarians and baseball historians at Winthrop University in South Carolina, have...
Gamasutra - From The Past To The Future: Tim... →
Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Mega-Games, talks about running his own shareware business back in the early 90’s and the transition to the Epic Games of today. It really takes me back to the days of dialing up a BBS with a 2400 baud modem.
Gamasutra: How many copies of ZZT did you sell?
Tim Sweeny: Several thousand. I’d say four or five thousand by now. I was selling three...
Freedom and Responsibility in Confucianism and... →
Essay for my Confucianism class. The intro and outro are literally ripped from the headlines.
Truth and Beauty in Whitehead’s Cosmos →
Paper from my Whitehead class. In retrospect, for Whitehead, Beauty is Creativity, not God.
Watchvia Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Ubiquitous Wes Anderson →
A slideshow from Slate charting the rise of Anderson imitators.
I like The Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited because they don’t entirely work. Life Aquatic is about how fathers and sons have trouble communicating with each other and dealing with failures. The movie itself has trouble communicating and sort of fails. In that sense, it’s a big success.
In Darjeeling, India is used...
Heidegger and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -... →
The ideal, when working on a bike, is to keep the customer in mind, to realize that messing with the bike (satisfying our curiosity) ultimately needs to be curtailed by consideration of the wider world—i.e., the customer, who doesn’t want to overpay. As Crawford points out, much “knowledge work” lacks this element of practical wisdom, of opening out into the experience of...
Paul Campos - The atheist's dilemma →
Why is Stanley Fish so much smarter than Richard Dawkins? That question occurred to me last week, while attending a lecture at which Fish, the well-known literary and legal theorist, did the thing he always does, which is to make the following point over and over again:
“No believer will find his faith shaken by evidence that is evidence only in the light of assumptions he does not...
Watchvia Language Log: Something is ___ in Denmark
I can only imagine that my great-grandparents left Swedish Finland for similar reasons. Also, the first guy in the video looks just like a guy from Alaska I know.
Overqualified - Nintendo, make an equation of love →
An amusing cover letter from Joey of A Softer World:
Dear Nintendo,
I am writing to apply for the position of game designer with your company. We have a chance here to help children experience games that are more true to life than any game before them. Computer graphics have improved and improved and improved, and some day soon we’re going to have to ask ourselves where we can go...
WatchThis video about the making of A Softer World is interesting, not only because it features Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics, but also because it sells us on the idea of the Softer-crew as a bunch of cool kids in Toronto hanging out and being cool together.
I once read a piece on Stan Lee that argued that Lee’s greatest fictional creation was the vision he made of him and Jack Kirby and the...
Disturbances of Peace →
No translator of Chinese verse attempts to follow the original in meter or rhyme, for the simple reason that, if such fidelity is difficult even in translating a kindred language such as French or German, it is utterly impossible when dealing with a language like Chinese. That is why it is so appropriate that Pound, who knew no Chinese, should be the inventor of Chinese poetry in English. When...
