waste

Red sky at night, enjoy the sunset

Here is Someone Braun saying something:

Some Russellians attempt to do so by saying that speakers may fail to distinguish correctly between the semantic content of an utterance and its pragmatic "implications".  Let's consider an analogous example.  Many semanticists maintain that utterances of (12) and (13) express the same, or logically equivalent, propositions.

(12) Mary turned the ignition key and the car's engine started.

(13) The car's engine started and Mary turned the ignition key.

Yet many ordinary speakers of English would judge that utterances of (12) and (13) can differ in truth value.  To explain away these common intuitions, many semanticists say that utterances of sentences of the form P and Q typically pragmatically convey ("suggest", "implicate", or "insinuate") the proposition that P and then Q.  Thus utterances of (12) and (13) usually pragmatically convey different propositions.  A hearer may (reasonably) believe that one of those conveyed propositions is true and that the other is false.  So a hearer who fails to distinguish correctly between what the utterances semantically express, and what the speaker is "getting across," may mistakenly judge that the two utterances themselves differ in truth value.

Here's what I don't get: (12) and (13) are being offered out of any particular context.  In the context of no context!  Braun isn't asserting them, nor is he presenting a situation in which they're being asserted by hypothetical persons, none of that.  He's just displaying the sentences.  So why is it, given that there's no particular context, and nothing that any particular utterer (since they're not presented as utterances) might mean to do with them, that we still get the supposedly "pragmatic" reading of "and" as "and then" or "and so"?  Isn't this kind of a problem?  And if we're just used to giving sentences like (12) and (13) their supposedly pragmatically-derived readings, then how do we account for our not giving "and" that kind of reading to sentences like "John ordered steak and Susan ordered salmon"?  The answer can't (can it?) be something about the sort of sentences involved, because if that sort could be specified noncircularly, one could deny that it's pragmatic at all, and just say that in that sort of sentence "and" has this sort of meaning.  (Though many would probably find that distasteful anyway.)

Nature gives the rule

Without that I've read the whole Compendium, not even the rich entries for the various editions of the Bibliotheque Oulipienne, I begin to think that the subtlest Oulipian restriction is that known as "Canada Dry":

The name of this procedure is taken from the soft drink marketed as "the champagne of ginger ales". The drink may have bubbles, but it isn't champagne; in the words of Paul Fournel, who coined the term, a Canada Dry text "has the taste and colour of a restriction but does not follow a restriction".

Not a determinate restriction, anyway (or rather, not one visible from the resulting text), but it clearly is a restriction: appear to follow a determinate rule, but actually follow none (other than this very rule).  As GC Lichtenberg would say, this is a Kantian idea (except not really really).  Examples:

Wand-escape ether evil draws.

"Crack legions apprehend undue assaults," said conductor of lead tank, staccato.

Franz of black fiacre aspires to Luke's matches.

Is that a beetle in your box, or are you just happy to see me?

Someone on egullet just referred to Spanish Fly as being an actual aphrodisiac, and not a horrible poison.

Worst development in history?

I think in the past I've identified the advent of conceptual thought as the worst development in history, but even before doing that I had decided that it was really the invention of writing (obviously I forgot about that decision in the interim and now, actually, I'm not sure how I was reminded of it).  I'm sure some Romantic or other has written about this, possibly with a different valence.  But I got it from thinking on Nelson Goodman, if you can believe that.

Particular instances of sugar highs are also bad developments, but probably of less world-historical significance.

Who is the last man?

Everyone talks about the last man, but no one ever does anything about himknows who he is.  Well, I do.  And I'm going to tell you.

The key, of course, is to start our researches off on the right foot.  The last man—well, how can we determine who that is?  Clearly, we have to look at the latter men and proceed from there.  So, who are the latter men?  We don't really know much about that, either; we sense that they must be closer to us than the last man, whoever he might be, but they're still pretty obscure.  So we bring the problem closer: who are the late men?  Now we've hit upon something solid: the late men are the recently deceased.  Clearly, then, the latter men are the "more late" men.  Those who've been dead longer.  And the last man is the one who's been dead the longest—Abel.

Pretty surprising, huh?  The other interesting thing that comes out of this analysis is that we're always on improving, always on the way up, just getting better and better, for the current generation—always the first—constantly gets closer and closer to the generation after which there shall be no other, the foremost generation.

Baldness is an inertial state

People who are bald tend to stay bald unless an outside force promotes hair growth.  This is why people who merely shave their heads are not bald.

On Connoisseurship

This post will have been kind of lame, since I'm writing it in the aftermath of the deadly one-two punch of having read the foreword and conclusion of the Tractatus L-P (surprisingly easy in German!) and having walked past the part of campus where, only at night, people are engaged in various crafty activities involving wood (the rending apart and putting together thereof) and metal (molten!).  Ah, crafty activities, how I wish I were practiced in your pursuit!

BUT the basic point is this, or at least, is to be found in or reconstructed out of the following text: it really isn't very surprising that common ingredients raised or found in very different environments or parts of the world should have different flavors or be susceptible to exacting differentiations among their instances.  I think the languagelog people have referred on occasion to viticultural terminology like "terroir" spreading to other culinary realms (coffee, chocolate), which is kind of funny, but shows only that people have been attending to and making purportedly fine discriminations regarding wine longer than they have regarding other things (or, at least, that the wine-vocabulary is more widespread and is easily recognized, since an appreciation for winey things is expected of the culturally aspiratious who might well be ignorant of specialized vocabulary deployed in other circumstances).

It would almost be beyond belief if chocolate, for example, grown from different strains in different climates, processed minimally, ended up tasting more or less the same.  Similarly coffee.  I wouldn't be surprised if, if one could get a lot of now-rare but once-common different breeds of chicken, and marshalled a suitably refined palate, one could delectate differences in scrambled eggs made from their would-be offspring.  But, of course, one must keep in mind what we might call The Fallacy of Sancho's Kinsmen, based on its occurrence (and apparent endorsement) in Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste": Sancho's kinsmen are able to distinguish and pick out flavors in wine with great keenness, and this is taken to demonstrate that they have great taste (not in the merely gastronomical sense, but judgmental).  But that simply isn't true.

Of course I'm nominally someone who actually cares about such shit.  I suppose the real point of my story is twofold: first, people shouldn't really be surprised when people who're good at detecting spreads of flavors turn out to do exactly that in something that hadn't previously had that sort of thing thematized, but which one could really have expected to manifest such a range; second, given that one can expect this range in just about anything, and that its existence, and even the ability to detect its existence, and "quality" (whatever that means) aren't necessarily related, the demands of connoisseurship are correspondingly reduced.

I reserve the right to claim that I don't believe any of this for any number of reasons, like for instance because it doesn't really make sense.         

Ox-tongue arrack

The titular variety of arrack was on display (amid more comprehensible varieties such as chicory, licorice, and garlic) at the Iranian market I went to today to get some goat (success! also, they had calf hearts!).  I'll assume for the sake of my sanity that "ox-tongue" is the name of some tonguey flower or something.

Having determined how to complete the costume-components I have already in my possession for an upcoming halloween party, I face the challenge that the missing item will likely prove hard to locate.  Therefore, I offer the following applicatory prayer:

I want you, a sickle or a scythe
A sickle or a scythe for a human sacrifice
A human sacrifice to the dieties above
The dieties above so they'll shower us with love.

If anyone has a lead on sickles or scythes (and not some pusillanimous plastic piece o' shit, either; I'm not going to take half measures—ganz oder gar nicht), pls to let me know.

Did you know?

Glucose (pronouced "glose") isn't actually any different from ordinary sucrose.  It's just what they call it in England, where for a long time the only one allowed to refine sugar (not personally, you understand, but in an extended sense) was the Duke of Gloucester.

Wand-escape ether evil draws

I just purchased the (revised! updated!) Oulipo Compendium, having seen it in the display window of a bookstore (guess they work).  It was an inevitable purchase, I suppose, but I also think that I'll regret it.  But my current main reaction is: can we get Ryan North elected to Oubapo (Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée Potentielle; workshop for potential comic strips)?  Or is it too similar to David Lynch's Angriest Dog in the World?

There was something else I wanted to put in this post, but now I've completely forgotten it.

Arundhati Roy

Bruce Wayne is, as everyone knows, a general-purpose Scientist, the kind that practices not chemistry or biology but Science.  But even he must occasionally clean and even sterilize his equipment.  Where does he do that?

A: In the Bat-Clave.

Ah, yes, of course.  But tell me this: where does he dirty his equipment?

A: In Robin.

"I have outwalked the furthest city light"

Yeah, so?  How fast does a city light walk, exactly?

I've wasted about four hours already

I just had a very odd conversation with someone I don't know but who seems to believe that he or she knows me.  Even though it's not that interesting I have posted it below.