waste

We bieð all siker of godes behate

This is shocking and amazing.  Somewhat confusingly, the OED's first definition for "yes" explicitly concerns questions "not involving a negative", which will be extremely perplexing to anyone who reads Brewer and fails to get down to definition two in the OED, which is concerns questions that do involve a negative. (One wonders why the first definition comes first, and whether the first definition really is limited only to questions that don't involve a negative. I'm not sure how to discriminate cases here, but then, I'm not a lexicographer.) Evidently the "yes"/"yea" distinction has been inactive a while:

2. a. In answer to a question involving a negative.
Formerly regularly used thus (and as in b) in distinction from yea (see YEA 1); the distinction became obsolete soon after 1600, and since then yes has been the ordinary affirmative particle in reply to any question positive or negative, and yea has become archaic. The distinction was still observed in the Bible of 1611, in which yes occurs four times (all in N.T.), always after a negative question or statement; the Revisers of 1881, apparently in ignorance of the usage, altered it in all these instances to yea.

If you look up "yea", you're instructed to see both "nay" and "yes" if interested in "the distinction formerly observed between 'yea' and 'yes'"; in the "nay" entry there's more, or different, information, and the rebuke by More of Tyndale to which Brewer refers:

In older usage nay was usually considered to be the proper negative reply to a question framed in the affirmative (yea would be the correct expression of a positive reply to the same). If the question was framed in the negative, then the proper negative reply would be no (with yes for a positive answer). This usage preserves the sense of nay as stemming from ne ay ‘not yes’. The distinction is explained by Thomas More: 1532 T. MORE Confutacyon Tyndales Answere III. p. clxxxi, No answereth the questyon framede by the affyrmatyue..yf a man sholde aske..is an heretyke mete to translate holy scrypture into englyshe..he muste answere nay and not no. But and yf the questyon be asked..Is not an heretyque mete to translate holy scripture into englysh. To this questyon..he muste answere no & not nay.

I assume the fact that "heretic" and "english" are spelled differently in the different questions is just an artifact of the crazy orthographical ways of olden times, and not of grammaticastish significance. It's also a little confusing to me that one answers a question without a negative with a word stemming from "not yes", when "yes" is used for questions that do have a negative, unless "not" not only negates the sense but also the circumstances of applicability of a word, so that you could also say "not no" for "yea". (And "not yea" for yes, and all the others.) Which is clearly just silly.

The interactions are apparently more complex than that: the probable etymology of "yes" is evidently "yea + sí 3 sing. pres. subj. of bēon to be". So "nay" is "not no" and "yes" is "yea, it [something]". (What might be the sense of "sí" there? There are many ways that subjunctives can be main verbs, but different ways in different languages, and no gloss is provided.) So we can hypothesize that the primitive terms are "yea" and "no", which means that it must have been very difficult, or at least prolix, negatively to answer positive questions, or positively to answer negative questions, until their companions were developed.

I'm also interested to see that the heterogeneity of "to be" is of respectable vintage.

If our minds were occupied, surely so many things would not enter them

What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.

A trip to a bookstore, on the thought that they might, by some chance, have available the second volume of The Man without Qualities (the need for which has suddenly become pressing), even though I believe I have it in socal, has instead finally brought me, at long last, a copy of Kenkō's Essays in Idleness, in the Keene translation. I had it out at Chicago for a year and a half or so, and I think the whole year my first year here. It hadn't really occurred to me that I might buy it until I saw the shelf of Asian texts at the store.

Are you going to keep alive the spirit of cricket

Never again will a ghostly walrus sing as good a version of "Minnie the Moocher" while Betty Boop looks on in fright.

How should you throw it on other occasions

Why does adding salt to a liquid increase the buoyancy of objects in it?

When should you throw the ball at top speed

1. I will never succeed at philosophy because, whenever I read about Twin Earth and its fascinating fluids, what I mostly want to know is how this water_T* stuff works, and how similar it could really be to water. It's not very hard to imagine a substance liquid at room temperature that meets the senses similarly to water (eg, is translucent; has a neutralish pH (isn't soapy/doesn't burn); not very viscous, etc), but it is pretty difficult to imagine that there might be a planet exactly like Earth, except that for water_E there's been substituted a different but extremely similar liquid. Water_E has a number of notable properties: it has the second-highest specific heat of, according to Wikipedia, any known chemical compound; it's an extremely powerful solvent; it is less dense as a solid than as a liquid; it has an extremely high surface tension, and other properties deriving from its promiscuous hydrogen-bonding antics, et the rest. It is fairly safe to say that many of these properties (specific heat in temperature regulation, eg) have been rather important in the Earth's history and in the history of the things living on the Earth, and I presume that its eccentric chemical properties have some sort of role to play in the specific biological economy in my body; at any rate, there are any number of translucent liquid-at-room-temperature substances which I would rather avoid ingesting at all, and even more that I'd rather not have replace water_E wholesale in my diet. My Twin Earth counterpart, being a physical duplicate of me (this part doesn't bug me … yet), must have similar requirements regarding what goes in his body. So what's this water_T he can so freely drink like? What explains the climate conditions on Twin Earth that here on good old Twin of Twin Earth are explained by water_E's properties?

This is the shittiest science fiction story ever.

2. I hear that Davidson's Swampman example has occasioned much ink's being spilled? Therefore I was surprised to discover that's super short—two brief paragraphs. That won't stop me from spouting off, though! (This post is an experiment in attracting the attention of internet Davidson fans.) If the Swampman can't be said to speak English (it only "appears" to), or mean anything by the sounds it makes, or have any thoughts, because, for instance, the sound house Swampman makes was not learned in a context that would give it the right meaning, I'm not sure why we oughtn't endorse some kind of skepticism about whether anyone with whom we converse has thoughts, is speaking the language they appear to be speaking, etc., not because they might, like mushrooms and Dionysus, actually have been created from lightning, but because, in most cases, we really haven't the foggiest what the context was in which, say, a waiter learned to make the sound /glæ:s/ or /haʊs/, nor do we care (to someone who makes sounds in what appear to us to be highly incongruous or inappropriate situations one might say something like "where did you learn that word?", but unless one is a linguist of some sort one is likely to mean by this "you're doing it wrong"). If you make important the causal history of a sound's production, well, how much more fucked are you? And there's likely to be no way to figure out if someone is speaking English to you, or means house when he or she (or it?) makes the sound /haʊs/. Anything that Davidson could say about the circumstances in which he learned to make that sound, Swampman will also say (except Swampman wouldn't really be saying those things, but, of course, you couldn't tell that).

If Davidson, while alive, had ever met Swampwoman (like Swampman, except with Marcia Cavell), I can't imagine that he would be able not to say it meant things by the sounds it made, just as I can't help but assume that a question in English is being posed to me when (here I omit the IPA) I hear coming from the barista's mouth the sounds "for here or to go", with a rising tone, with no thoughts of how that person got into the state of making those sounds entering my mind. I really just don't understand how Davidson gets his conclusions out of this example.

(Part of me wants to pose this alternate science fiction scenario: suppose that, over a year or so, a process of combustion carried out with the aid of now-sinister symbiotes gradually replaces me with plant matter. At the end of the year, I don't have any thoughts.)

3.

Neither speaker nor hearer knows in a special or mysterious way what the speaker's words mean; and both can be wrong. But there is a difference. The speaker, after bending whatever knowledge and craft he can to the task of saying what his words mean, cannot improve on the following sort of statement: My utterance of Wagner died happy is true if and only if Wagner died happy.

I think something like the opposite is the case: absolutely anything else would be an improvement on that statement, which outside a limited set of circumstances can only be construed as a passive-aggressive way of telling one's interlocutor to fuck off. Outright saying "fuck off", or changing the subject, would be an improvement, since neither is as condescending and neither purports to be informative, which is whence the insultingness of Davidson's recommendation comes.  An instantiation of the schema My utterance of ,φ is true iff φ might be useful as a weird and prolix way of assuring one's interlocutor that one has not misspoken. After all, if you have misspoken, you will probably not—anyway, shouldn't—say that. (I recently said "I saw it on the movie", meaning, "I saw it on the plane". Having realized that I said what I had said, I would certainly not, if asked what I meant, say My utterance of I saw it on the movie is true iff I saw it on the movie. For that matter, I wouldn't even say My utterance of I saw it on the movie is true iff I saw it on the plane (I don't like that present tense in there, among other things); if I really wanted to be explicit about what I was correcting, I'd say When I said I saw it on the movie I meant that I had seen it on the plane.) Maybe one suspects that one's interlocutor hasn't heard, or has misheard, one (and since this happens frequently one is rather short about it.) Offhand I can't think of any less-contrived circumstances in which saying something along those lines might be called for. Certainly if I actually didn't know what you meant by "Wagner died happy" I won't be helped by your repeating it like an incantation, or like a tourist who thinks that if he just talks louder, he'll be understood. What would help would be something like By died happy I meant that he was content in the months leading up to his death, not that (as a Greek moralist might think) his entire life had been a good one or I mean Cosima Wagner—I thought that was clear from the context, sorry; the question then is, how one knows that. Again, I might ask you what you mean by something not because I don't understand you, but because I want to know if you understand what you're talking about: suppose the discussion concerns an abstruse philosopher given to neologistic excess, and you've just unloaded some jargon at me (which I might understand perfectly, myself). I ask you what you mean; you stiffen, blush, and stammer out an instantiation of the Tarskiïsh schema above. I am unlikely to be satisfied.

* I'm aware of the convention of calling Twin-water "twater", but I'm convinced that it was created and has been sustained by philosophers who just want an excuse to giggle. I need no excuses to giggle, and therefore prefer "water_E" and "water_T".

How do you know where to throw the ball

A list of six activities indulged in and two not indulged in:

1. 8/12: Wolves in the Throne Room with Ludicra and The Better to See You With, Slim's. Thinking that the concert would certainly not begin on time, I arrived late, thinking in this way to miss the first opener. In fact, I missed both them and all but the last five or so minutes of Ludicra's act too, and those five minutes made it seem as if the set must have been pretty fucking awesome.  However! Wolves in the Throne Room were good too.
2. 8/13: Zs with Burmese and the Drums at 21 Grand.  Burmese and the Drums both were not very interesting. The trio lineup of Zs played on very long piece with lots of piercing, high, dissonant tones. Good concert.
3. 8/14: Ellen Weller, Bob Weller, and Marcos Fernandes; Tanja Feichtmar and Damon Smith at the Luggage Store Gallery. I didn't go to this.
4. 8/15: Weasel Walter showed concert footage of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Ornette Coleman's Prime Time, the AEC again with Cecil Taylor, Last Exit, Sun Ra, a quartet with Paul Lovens, Peter Brötzmann, Peter Kowald, and ... I think Alexander von Schlippenbach, and a segment from a Japanese New Wave movie whose title I've forgotten with a free jazz trio whose name I've forgotten, and maybe something else; then Sam Hillmer (sax. in Zs) and John Dwyer (perc + flute) improvise; then Ben Greenberg (g. in Zs), Weasel Walter, and Tanja Feichtmar improvise; high point of this was when Greenberg played some really ugly-sounding scratchy guitar noise followed by an absolutely immense bass note from a severely downtuned string.
5. 8/16: Monsters of Accordion at 12 Galaxies. This sucked almost without exception. There would have been another exception had I stayed for Jason Webley's set, but I've already seen him and I was suffering enough.
6. 8/17: Memorial concert for Toyoji Tomita at the Meridians Arts Gallery. I didn't go to this either.
7. 8/18: Sam Amidon, Nico Muhly, and Doveman at the Swedish-American Music Hall. I've enthused about this concert already multiple times and have neither the will nor the energy to repeat myself; suffice to say it was fantastic.
8. 8/19: Chris Brown/Tim Perkis duo; Devin Hoff Platform (didn't catch names of other performers); Free Jazz Alto Summit (= Tanja Feichtmar, James Fei, Jorrit Dijkstra, Steve Adams: alto sax; Weasel Walter, drums; Damon Smith, bass; Kjell Nordeson, vibes & drums) at the Uptown). Opening duo made a lot of sounds but was totally boring (I could have gone for some onkyo-style stuff, though). DHP I liked a good deal while they were playing, but were totally blown out of the water by the main act, which was nearly perfect, if too short. While they were setting up there was some discussion about how they'd be going about their business, as one person wanted to have the rhythm section play alone for a bit, then the saxes play as a quartet, and then have the free-for-all begin; that didn't happen, and they just went straight into playing (actually things did begin with just bass and WW's drums, but), though, and no doubt this was partly guided by the initial discussion, there did emerge a bass/drums/vibes trio and two (or three?) sax quartet bits, but these all seemed to arise very nicely within the context of the music as it happened; they played really well together (though Dijkstra and Adams were perhaps especially simpatico), and even Fei, who was annoyingly trick-oriented the last time I saw him, was on form.

Those who know that Weasel is a member of Burmese know that he performed in fully half the concerts I attended.

How should you pick up the ball and throw it

This page, which languagehat linked because of the awesome limericks:

There was a young fellow named Cholmondeley,
Whose bride was so mellow and colmondeley
That the best man, Colquhoun,
An inane young bolqufoun,
Could only stand still and stare dolmondeley.

among others, which certainly do win my endorsement, also has a fabulous poem by Robert Graves, which I reproduce for my convenience hereunder:

Why should you watch the striker's bat

I love you, Larousse Gastronomique:

Human kind has used its intelligence to vary the flavour of drinks, which may be sweet, aromatic, fermented or spirit-based.

Awright human kind!

(From the entry on "Drink". Later we read that "family and social life also offer numerous other occasions to consume drinks for pleasure". It's true; I'm reminded of the last time I went home to visit family, and we consumed some drinks for pleasure, and I've met people occasionally specifically to consume drinks for pleasure, and occasionally ostensibly for other purposes but actually to consume drinks for pleasure (no one was fooled). Just the other day I attempted to convene a friend so that we could consume drinks for pleasure, but she could not be hailed, so I consumed a drink for pleasure by myself. One is rather reminded of Nancy Mitford's claim:

Our outlook is totally different from that of our American cousins, who have never had an aristocracy. Americans relate all effort, all work and all of life itself to the dollar. Their talk is of nothing but dollars. The English seldom sit happily chatting for hours on end about pounds.

And of Ogden Nash's reply, which begins:

Dear Cousin Nancy, / You probably never heard of me or Cousin Beauregard or Cousin Yancey, / But since you're claiming kin all the way across the ocean, we figure you must be at least partwise Southern, / So we consider you not only our kith and kin but also our kithin' couthern. / I want to tell you, when Cousin Emmy Lou showed us your piece it stopped the conversation flat, / Because I had twenty dollars I wanted to talk about, and Cousin Beauregard had ten dollars he wanted to talk about, and Cousin Yancey didn't have any dollars at all, and he wanted to talk about that.

)

What movement helps you when you are trying to run out a batsman

I wrote a commandline downloader for emusic's EMX files. It requires Beautiful Soup and seems not to be obviously broken.

It does sane things as is but the behavior can be altered with a ~/.emxdownloader file, which should have lines of the form "optionname = optionvalue" (comments can begin with a "#", and actually anything unrecognized is ignored). Options are either boolean (which can have a value of "t", "f", "true", or "false", case insensitively), or string options, which can be any string. The current options are "replace_underscores", "replace_apostrophe_identity", and "get_art", which are all boolean, the first replacing '_' with ' ', the second replacing "'" with an apostrophe, and the third either downloading or not downloading album art, and "dlfmt", "dlfmt_multidisc", and "dldir", which are string options. "dldir" is the directory relative to which files will be downloaded and should be absolute lest undesired things happen; "dlfmt" and "dlfmt_multidisc" are used in conjunction with "dldir" to determine the final download location. "dlfmt_multidisc" is just like "dlfmt", except it will be used (if it is defined, which it needn't be) if the track being downloaded is part of a multi-disc set. Each of "dlfmt" and "dlfmt_multidisc" can have any of the following format codes embedded within it:

• "%(a)" expands to the artist.
• "%(A)" expands to the album name.
• "%(n)" expands to the track number.
• "%(e)" expands to the file's extension. (NB: if the calculated download location does not end with the file's extension, it will be added anyway.)
• "%(t)" expands to the track title.
• "%(l)" expands to the label (which might not be what you think, since it depends on who the real label's gotten to work with emusic for them; eg, stuff downloaded from Clean Feed will have a label field of "Clean Feed / IODA").
• "%(d)" expands to the disc number.
• "%(D)" expands to the total number of discs.

So, for instance, my dotfile looks like this:

dldir = /home/wolfson/mp3/new
dlfmt = %(a)/%(A)/%(a) - %(A) - %(n) - %(t)
dlfmt_multidisc = %(a)/%(A): %(d)/%(a) - %(A): %(d) - %(n) - %(t)
get_art = false

Note that I haven't ended the download format options with "%(e)" since the extension is added automatically. It is an error to include anything of the form "%(...)" other than what's listed above. All of the boolean options default to being true, dldir defaults to being whatever directory the script is run in, and dlfmt defaults to being what it is above (except the forward slashes will be replaced with whatever the local directory separation character is, though I should say I've only actually used this on linux), and dlfmt_multidisc defaults to being undefined.  (When dlfmt_multidisc is undefined, multidisc sets are treated the same as single discs.)

While it would be possible to make these things also be configurable from the commandline, I haven't done that, because it seems unlikely that you'd want to download this album to some other location, say.

What is the correct way to stop a ball

Compare:

What people are evidently keeps changing as rapidly as What people are wearing, and both have in common the fact that no one, not even those in the fashion business, knows the real secret of who these people are. (TMwQ, p 494)

If we cannot discern the common processes that underlie paintings only a limited number of years apart, then we should ask ourselves, first, whether we have not confused what is not style with style, and, secondly, whether we have not identified stylistic characteristics in ways that are too superficial or too narrow to reveal their roots in underlying processes. Surely an artist's style should be no more thought of as susceptible to fragmentation or fission than his personality. (Painting as an Art, p 36)

Surely an artist's personality would never do that! Naturally I find Wollheim's views about style bizarre and repellent. Not that I am moved to deny the idea that style is "something real"; only that I don't think nearly as much follows from this postulate as he does. Elsewhere in the lectures Wollheim evinces a view that, as far as I can tell, boils down to commitment to something like the following: Just as "sad", said of an expanse, cannot be literal without succumbing to anthropomorphism (for the expanse is not literally on the verge of tears, say), so too "depressed", said of a person, cannot be literal without succumbing to what you might call geomorphism (for the person is not literally a valley). I am also extremely suspicious of all the talk of causal relationships encountered so far, and am halfway prepared to make it a principle that, whenever a philosopher asserts that there is, or must be, a causal link between two things, he or she is engaging in handwaving.

How may your parents and your employer help you in your cricket career

Nico Muhly (also; also) seems like a cool guy:

I had this idea like a million years ago to turn those Susan Cooper books, the The Dark Is Rising books, into an opera of some sort. First of all, I would get to learn Welsh. And second of all, those books completely rocked my world when I was younger.

Getting to learn Welsh seems like a good reason to take on a project, and describing the learning of Welsh as something one would get, rather than have, to do, is a sign of good character.  Plus I liked those books too. Also the response he gives to this question:

MS: I've realized that in all of the reading I've done about you, everyone has been very careful to say "classical composer who has worked with artists such as Björk , Antony of Antony and the Johnsons, and Will Oldham." And I was really uncomfortable about how to talk about that, because it's not something that I compartmentalize. But do you, for working purposes, need to? Is there value in that?

strikes me as pretty sensible—I had a kind of brief conversation about this sort of thing with the drummer in Zs last night about a nearby sort of thing (brevity induced at least in part by the fact that we were interrupted by the onset of, you know, the actual concert, and then the momentum seemed to have been lost at the intermission, and then I left basically right after it ended)—more to do with who critics notice: e.g., Alarm Will Sound gets a lot of attention for reasons that also apply to Normal Love, but no one who mentions the former ever mentions the latter; the representatives of overtly popular music that play at the Wordless Music series, or the Bang on a Can marathon, often seem bafflingly chosen, and whatnot: it was  at this point that things broke off, unfortunately. I think the only conclusion that was reached was that for the most part it doesn't matter, or something.  (I still get annoyed, but that's because I'm a scold.)

Sam Amidon, who's touring with Muhly, evidently has much more musical history than I knew of: Irish fiddle tunes! (and in a trio!) More bands than you can shake a stick at! (See.) The tour seems to involve him performing with Muhly. I am excited and predict that I will buy an unfortunate quantity of CDs.

How do you know that you have taken your eyes of the ball when you attempt to catch it

I am generally a partisan of all things porcine, but I have to admit, lamb heart is way better than pig heart.

If you want to succeed at cricket what attitude should you adopt towards the game

One is sometimes overtaken with a sudden realization or conclusion, as if the all the premises had been stewing in one's brain but have only recently been able, as the collagen of old ways of thinking or simple oversight breaks down, to combine themselves in the proper way and thicken and set into a new idea, which has a certain kind of inexpressibility to it: not the inexpressibility of the mystic or esoteric, which can be intimated but never communicated, that is, can never be shared with another, though one can say where one has got it, but rather the inexpressibility of the simultaneously banal and profound—as if, having walked before the Mona Lisa for the first time, and, despite the throng of tourists (despite one's thronging along with them), one has been beguiled by that famous half grin, and, returning from the Louvre, tells one's travelling companions (who for their parts have occupied themselves more sensibly, standing in line, perhaps, at Pierre Hermé's shop, or pissing in the Seine), that her smile is beguiling, in the manner of a breathless discoverer of truths hidden.

What is to be said to this? And can one even say it without simultaneously feeling foolish, as one would who felt compelled to reveal to his friends that on a fine day, the sky takes on a distinctive blue shade, lighter than the blue of the sea or a deep lake, but without that preciosity one finds in the shells of a robin's egg? Such a person, if he became aware of what he was saying midway through speaking, would surely trail off lamely rather than finish his surprising report. Everyone knows this fact about the Mona Lisa; everyone, anyway, who would be able to attach any definite sense to the claim in the first place; if it is not quite imbibed with mother's milk, it is at any rate a component of the formula whereby one learns what the Mona Lisa is. And so the only way to convey what one has experienced before the painting is identical with a textbook's lesson, and insofar as that experience comes from a human capacity, we might say that if intelligence makes us human, then education diminishes humanity; as a pessimistic writer of our day puts it, that the litterae humaniores are nothing more than the litter on which the humanist's body shall one day be borne out.

Reflections of this or an allied nature may well have been going through my head as I sat one afternoon at a small neighborhood café and bakery, reading a novel; the space buzzed with conversation and, even if no one could quite make out what anyone else was saying, that did not diminish the atmospheric conviction that great intellectual work was being done; discoveries were being made or at least rediscovered, and ideas traded by earnest young people in crowded banquettes according as the value of various schools of thought were projected to rise or fall, succeed or fail before the shocks that everyone was sure would shortly arrive, even if no one had a very certain idea what they would be like or, for that matter, whether they had not happened already and no one had noticed. It's called Sausagefest '08, one of them was saying, who proceeded to describe this year's encased meats, while from another corner came the claim Under capitalism, no one need ever be ashamed any more of who he is, though whether this was approbation or otherwise could not quite be discerned. I sat off to one side at a mostly unoccupied bench and took no notice of this, captivated, in that confusion of bread, black coffee, and Apples, by my book, and after reading a particularly well done stretch of dialogue (really, a monologue) found the thought impossible to avoid or exclude, but equally impossible to express (not just for considerations such as the preceding; in addition, there was no one there whom I knew), that The Man without Qualities is brilliant.

What do we get from cricket that we don't get from other games

It would be nice if Nice Pete turned his attention to one of the vexing ettiquete problems of the age, namely, how, if at all, is one supposed to respond to the news, transmitted through the kind medium of Facebook, that one of one's friends or acquaintances is newly single? On the one hand, it's not as if the person (or persons!), once having made the choice to list h/hself as in a relationship, could really persist in that listing once it ended, without basically perpetrating a dishonesty (nor would s/h likely want the listing to continue, of course), so it's not as if s/h is going out of h/h way to inform you, or anyone else, of the news—this far, there seems to be no reason to be disposed to respond differentially at all. Of course were one told in person a response would certainly be called for, but in such a case, effort has obviously been made to inform one specifically.

These "updates", though, seem to call for a response anyway; a breakup seems much more momentous, and personal, than the formation of a relationship: all the more reason not to note the formation of one in the first place, unless one is extremely optimistic.

What do people mean when they say ‘he played cricket’

The paper linked here—in the upper left, the one by Don Loeb—ought to have been called something like "The Metaethicist in the Kitchen". More than that, about that paper, I will not say.

How will you learn more successfully from your coach than by just looking and listening

"A new-born child has no teeth."—"A goose has no teeth."—"A rose has no teeth."—This last at any rate—one would like to say—is obviously true! It is even surer than that a goose has none.—And yet it is none so clear. For where should a rose's teeth have been? … [O]ne has no notion in advance where to look for teeth in a rose. (Emily Dickinson, Philosophical Investigations pt. 2, §xi, pp 188–9)

What enables philosophical progress is hard, if not impossible, to make out in advance; prior to the various international and virtual social and commercial, and along with commercial, pornographic (or perhaps one should say, along with pornographic, commercial) arrangements that the internet and globalization made possible, one might have been tempted into making metaphysical claims that at the time seemed, let's admit, plausible, for all the author or anyone else knew—only for them to be shown up rather drastically. It should be obvious that I'm not referring to the sort of namby-pamby "forms of life" that might lend or deny a simple sense to questions like "the whole thing?" as applied to the statement that one has played the violin ("if this is what their music is like, what do they wear when they make pot roasts?", is a question which I don't particularly feel like posing here)—"that thing with the cup" was already something that could be done, even in the late 90s.  Similarly with the Dickinson quotation above: have we got no notion in advance of where to look for teeth in a rose? Well, perhaps Dickinson and his philosophical compatriots, who lived before the true heyday of campy horror movies, had no such notion. But we have—haven't we? (Yes, Audrey II looks more like an artichoke than like a rose; the point is, she points the way to toothy roses—this would come as no surprise to Dickinson, who after all stressed "the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases" (§122).)

How different things would have been, if only mean green mamas from outer space had been more common either in Vienna or in Cambridge!—I don't simply mean with regard to philosophy.

Ironically, Dickinson himself does at one point come close to anticipating the above point—I mean the specific point about flores dentati—in this underappreciated passage from the first part of the Investigations (here I've emended Anscombe's translation to better accord with the consensus that has since emerged among reputable critics):

281. …It comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.

282. "But in a fairy tale the plant too can talk and listen!" (Certainly; but it can also gobble you up.)

"But the fairy tale only invents what is not the case: it does not talk nonsense."—It is not as simple as that. Is it false or nonsensical to say that a plant chews? Have we a clear picture of the circumstances in which we should say of a plant that it chewed?

(One wonders what fairy tale he has in mind.) Well, have we? More to the point: had Dickinson? Based on the continuation of §282, I'm inclined to answer yes; the point is merely to emphasize that the contexts of this chewing, this tooth-having, are derivative on a more primary dentition in other creatures. But from the quotation at the head of this post, one would certainly answer no.

Why are some cricket coaches better than others

What follows is a list of some things I found objectionable in chapter four of Wandering Significance. I actually found more things objectionable than appear in this list: for instance, the use of "variegated" on p. 177, or of "ersatz" on p 159. But the former is, I suppose, not really out of line even if my preference is to reserve the word for contexts involving color, and, well, and I'm also omitting the latter and generally other word-choice thingumbobs.

149: "their" should be "its" following "a body". 154: "affected" should be "effected". 155: the period should be outside the parenthesis. 155: "context" should be "content". 156: strike the comma in "Hertz,". 157: "acumulation" should be "accumulation". 164: "equations to the left" should be "equations to the right". 172: "2!" should be "n!". 172: "5.3.2" should be "5.4.3.2". 172: "1!" should be "n!". 173: "1/2!" should be "/n!" (this isn't even consistently mistaken!). 177: "lacuna" should be either "lacunae" or "lacunas" (Wilson would probably take the former). 178: "they support" should be "it supports" (or perhaps "scientific theorizing" should be "scientific theories"). 178: "make believe" should be "make-believe". 178: "filagree" should be "filigree".  (The former spelling seems to be catching on, but I don't care LA LA LA.) 181: insert a comma after "demonstrates". 194: "incidently" should be "incidentally". 197: "trouble making" should be "trouble-making". 198: "Niels Bohr-like" would please me more with an en dash than with a hyphen. 199: "even handedly" should be "even-handedly". 200: "language twisting" should be "language-twisting". 203: "discrete" should be "discreet". 209: "filagree" again. 211: "incidently" again. 218: THE REASON ISN'T FUCKING BECAUSE.

Here, to balance things out, is something that caused me extreme pleasure: there is a pointless allusion to Omar Khayyam on p 211: This complicated story represents a proper description of our fluid's condition, because it takes a period of time before the pressures on each side of the rejoined surfaces can equalize, despite the fact that the knife, having sliced, has moved on.

What Do We Mean By Coaching

This cartoon is actually kind of amusing—and yet I suspect its like will never be seen between the pages of the New Yorker.

Similarly, I'm not sure the caption I just submitted for the present caption contest—scilicet, Actually, the submission form ought to read "25 words or fewer". So much for that famed New Yorker editing, huh?—will make it into the final three, even though I'm willing to bet good money that none of the ones that do will be any better.  (I also tried to suggest something like "You probably can't see from where you're sitting, but I'm wearing women's shoes", a masterpiece of subtle understatement that, no doubt, would have freaked the squares too much to get the consideration it deserves, but one can only submit once per, alas.)

Life, my friends, is difficult!

The act of being about (now) to become (hereafter) a constant kicker

An old Norwichian Christmas Cracker excerpted a Turkish grammar's example conjugation of a verb involving kicking, to amusing effect; the bit excerpted dealt with habitual aspect and there was an imperative which I remembered as "be thou a habitual kicker".  This turns out not to have been quite right, but I'm pleased enough at having discovered the full text that the little improving tricks memory pulls don't bother me that much. I see that there is "be thou one who has kicked".

What economy of expression such verb forms allow! I can imagine starting off a sorrowful memoir with the confession: I had been or become a constant kicker, or: I was about to become a constant kicker (that is, I was in the future state of having previously kicked). (Though actually these appear even in the Turkish to be compounded of multiple words.)

Since — became one who had kicked, I am often on the point of kicking.