waste

Lonely women

Ornette Coleman; Kyle Bruckmann's Wrack; Naked City.

These are all .ogg files, so them as can't play them are, as ye ken, unable to play them.

Grapefruit, salt, dark chocolate

How might these three ingredients best be combined to yield a tantalizing dessert?  I thought to make a kind of grapefruit juice reduction and add some sugar to make some brittle hard caramel-like things (it would have to be past the point of caramelizing), dunk those in melted chocolate with salt dissolved, and use them to garnish grapefruit sorbet.  But this character voted for "grapefruit sorbet, dark chocolate syrup, and sea salt." (Dark chocolate … syrup?)  A further suggestion has run to "dehydrating the sections and maybe pouring the chocolate over them.  Might be really good with a super ripe ruby grapefruit."

Of course, I don't have the means to make a sorbet, whereas I do have the means to dehydrate pieces of grapefruit.

This line of thought brought to you by a bar of Domori Puro.

A method of ensuring further sight by means of capitistation

When, in order to see further, one elevates oneself, there are three metrics by which to measure the increase in sight:

1. How far one can now see, considered by itself.
2. How far one can now see, compared to how far one could see before the elevation.
3. How far one can now see, compared to how far that on which one stands can see (should one stand on a sighted entity).

It will easily be seen that any method of increasing the penetration of one's sight by standing will increase 1 and 2.  However, the most popular current method, that of humerostation, can fail to increase 3—and, in so far as 3 is the metric most people consider important, this flaw is fatal.

Consider the common expression, "if I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants".  This is meant, of course, to compare oneself to one's ordinary abilities (that is, 1) and to one's peers of lesser status (that is, 2), but primarily in so stating one is explaining how one has managed to do better than those who came before, that is to say, the giants.  "I am no giant", one says, "but nevertheless I have managed to see further than those giants".

But in fact more is said than just that!  If one wishes to see further by this method, the giants cannot be too giant.  The distance from my shoulders to eye level is about 8.5 inches, or 11.8% of my total height, and my eyes are about 68 inches high.  Now, consider a giant, with my proportions, who stands 49 feet tall.  The distance from his shoulders to his eyes would be about 69.4 inches—in other words, even if I stood on his shoulders, he would still see further than I would.  The situation would worsen if the giant got taller (preserving proportions).  Thus humerostation is not a fully-general solution to the problem of far sight!  I propose, therefore, that we scrap it altogether and replace it with the practice of standing on heads, which should suffice until such time as people begin growing eye stalks.

And forget, for once and for a while, that other curious question "is it true?" May we?

The danger of reading two different people in both of whom one has an interest [1] is that one will naturally see affinities between the two which are perhaps not legitimate, and the likelihood of this happening increases as the amount of time spent on one, or the other, increases.  At least, there exists a one for whom that is true, and one such one is: me.

So, for instance, reading section 44(a) of Being and Time, I thought, hey, this is reminding me of Austin's theory as put forward in section 3 of "Truth"!  Perhaps this is illegitimate, but I do think it's true that fairly few changes are necessary to change this statement from 44(b):

Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as as source of pseudo-problems.

into a bit of Austinian programmatics.  (Maybe few textual changes, unless you want to read "common understanding" as meaning "common philosophical understanding".)

[1] sentence structured especially for standpipe.

Stalagmite

Just what is a "druther", anyway?  People are always talking about how things would be different if they had theirs, but what I want to know is—ok, you don't have yours, so who does?  Or does no one have your druthers?  Maybe your druthers are out there somewhere, like an ore, that you have to locate?  But what, then, makes it your druther?

People say things like, "if I had my druthers, I wouldn't even be dressed before 10:30 every day.".  But what if I had that person's druthers—would I then be in that person's state?  (Or what if I only had some of that person's druthers?  For that matter, what if that person only had some?  Would h/s only be partially dressed by 10:30?  But partial dress is a mode of "not being dressed".  Maybe the effect of a druther on a life is like that of a photon on an electron, with multiplicity substituted for energy: there needs to be a certain amount, or there's no effect at all.) Would my possession of h/h druthers mean that I don't get dressed before the appointed hour, or what?

then worms shall try that long preserved virginity

Someone please confirm for me my suspicion that there's a paper out there dealing with Baudelaire's "A Carrion" and the episode of Sprockets featuring the body of a tramp (in itself, not so disturbing).

Radical typography

This is from the reprinting of Rorty's "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth" in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy volume on truth:

As Devitt rightly says, Dummett tries to infer from 'X knows the meaning of S' and 'The meaning of S=the truth-conditions of X' to 'S knows that the truth-conditions of X are TC', an inference which only goes through if we construe 'S knows the meaning of S' as 'there exists an entity which is the meaning of S and X is acquainted with it'.

So, in addition to inconsistency about whether or not to capitalize the initial letter of a quoted sentence, we have S, a meaning-bearing entity (maybe a sentence or statement?) capable of knowledge (self-knowledge, even, or at least knowledge of its own meaning) and X, a knower (and aquaintance of) meanings (such as, perhaps, a Xhosan person?) who has truth-conditions.  What?

Very different from the one you are in now

It seems that if you wanted an example of a work of art that really exemplified Schopenhauer's belief that artworks exhibit Ideas, it would be something like I Am Sitting In A Room or Music on a Long Thin Wire—except he thinks music doesn't do that.