waste

Porridge

So ends Nancy Cartwright the introduction to The Dappled World:

That, I think, depends entirely on where one finds beauty.  Popper and Allport, it seems, find beauty in "the mastery of the whole world of experience, by subsuming it ultimately under one unified theoretical structure".  I follow Gerard Manley Hopkins in feeling the beauty of Pied Beauty:

Follows the text of "Pied Beauty".  But look: "Pied Beauty" finds in its last two lines the unification of the diversity of the dappled world in one principle, viz., God, whose beauty is past change.

Notes on a Decemberists concert

Is there anything greater than white-haired if not bold old people getting all into a rock concert?  Possibly young people with art deco earrings shaped like airplanes rocking out to a string band.

It had not previously dawned on me how much some of the quieter sections of "The Island" owe to "Thick as a Brick" (those keyboard/guitar bits in particular).

I only saw three songs performed by the openers, one of which was really good and one of which was terrible, but which I could imagine this one performing.

A solution finder for Language, Proof and Logic problems

I wrote it when I was taking the class even though it took much more time than actually doing the two or three problems (I was only taking the second half of the course, in which the sort of problems for which it can provide results have less prominence) for which it works took.  I make it public now because I just remembered it?  The textbook poses certain problems in terms of either finding a model for a bunch of statements or providing a counterexample to a claim, where the world in which one does this is of blocks of various sizes, shapes and positions; predicates are, eg, "is small" or "is to the right of" or "is the same shape as".  Here's the script; a sample input module has a little explanation.  If 15-32.py is in one's import path, then one can do this:

$ python /path/to/board.py 15-32
a: Cube(2,1,small)
b: Tetrahedron(0,1,small)
c: Cube(2,1,small)
$

The output being, of course, the names and natures of the blocks constituting a solution (in this case a counterexample to a claim about a relation's transitivity, with one object having two names).  Since for any problem it's the case that either a model can be constructed to do the right thing (whatever that might be) or a proof can be constructed showing that the right thing can't be done, if one attempts to find a solution with this script and none is generated (assuming it's got no bugs, that is), that constitutes, at least pragmatically, a proof that none can be generated.  Unfortunately, the program used to grade these things is an intuitionist and demands a postive proof.

Bait

At a coffee shop on campus were flyers informing people that "CASTING FOR THE FORTH SEASON OF BEAUTY AND THE GEEK" and inviting those who'd like to try out to do just that.  I assume that "FORTH" was not a mistake at all, but rather attempted trolling for a different sort of geek than has been featured on the show thus far.  (Programming language geeks or grammar geeks?  Well, you may say either.)

Trout that swim

They say that all the lines of the excellent Eno/Cale song "Cordoba" were taken by Eno from a Spanish textbook.  (An odd textbook, no doubt.)  If Kotsko can make multiple posts consisting only of links to his own posts, why can't I?  Here is a list of things I've written relying on various constraints or artificialities:

• A thing written using only lines from the International Code of Signals.
• Monovocalic.
• Left-handed plot description (in comments).
• Li Po gram.
• Lipogram.
• Nondecreasing cyclical gapless vowel thing 1.
• 2 (much worse).
• Shape-based text reordering thing.
• Two sonnets put into one.
• Ninja thing.
• [such was the list at the time of the post's composition; there are more below.]

The ninja thing shouldn't really count, but I did write it with the thought that I should incorporate as many Hopkins lines as possible.  I thought there were more than the above (I'm deliberately omitting some stuff, admittedly), but perhaps I'm wrong, or have merely forgotten.  I'm not really sure if this counts.

Later: a villanelle about Jonah Goldberg (with German rendition in comments).

Later still: a double lipogram, in i and u.  And a stylistic exercise, with bonus in-jokes and allusions, that partly succeeded. This too was not a great success though I think it has some good lines. But this Russified Lichtenberg aphorism came off pretty well, I think.

A cento, more or less, drawn from the OED.

Two happy ones

Truly, despite his youth, this person knows how to improvise life and amazes even the keenest observer—for he never seems to make a mistake even though he constantly plays the riskiest game.  It reminds one of those masters of musical improvisation to whose hands the listener would also like to ascribe a divine infallibility even though, like every mortal, they make a mistake here and there.  But they are practised and inventive and always ready at any moment to incorporate into the thematic order the most accidental note to which the stroke of a finger or a mood drives them, breathing a beautiful meaning and a soul into an accident.

One wonders what sort of musical improvisations Nietzsche is thinking of, and what they sounded like.

Now, I admit that I am incapable of producing a decent translation of a whole work

But even I can tell that it's a bad idea to translate "qualis artifex pereo!" and "qualis spectator pereo!", occuring within the same paragraph, as, respectively, "I die, what a loss to art!" and "I die, but what a good observer I was!"—not only is neither translation terribly accurate (though the second is better), but it's hard to imagine what principle that underwrote the one could possibly also have underwritten the other.  (Someone who didn't have any Latin would probably be led to think that it was a remarkably flexible language.)  Also that translating "Ausnahme-Denker" as "exceptional thinkers" is, if not outright wrong, at best extremely misleading.

The original conception of this post had me going on to make a completely unrelated point about an argument of Bilgrami's but I think I'll just leave that out.

'Tis a blessing to be simple

Thesis: virtue is impossible these days; the most one can hope for is continence or vice.

Slend

Remember this?  Probably not, but I've just come up with a brilliant throwaway line for the early part of the as yet unwritten column, when the narrator is still uncomfortable with the subject matter of his paramour's poetry, to wit:

Even disregarding the subject matter, I couldn't shake the feeling that the poems, well, weren't especially good.  Not that I'd call it "doggerel", exactly—more like "cockerel".  Only I didn't feel like crowing.

I figure if I can write 2000 words maintaining that level of quality there's no way the result will be turned down.

White Dream (To K. Miwa In Hagi)

Two bands deserving of popularity (the one with less, the more, alas) interpret an oft-covered pseudo-folk song: Maher Shalal Hash Baz and A Hawk and a Hacksaw.

In other news I recently went so far as to cut my thumb while slicing shallots in my quest to make what I thought would be sui generis, namely, a dessert risotto (milk in place of broth, no cheese at the end, cinnamon), only to discover that it's common as dirt.  Though as far as I know I'm the only person who thought to include a sulfurous bulb in his, even though it's a good idea.