2013 — 23 August: Friday
Warm, dry, sunny1 and an upcoming Bank Holiday weekend. Shall I have a Shakespeare fest, I wonder?
How's this for...
... a nice, cheerful, early-morning, thought experiment?
To those who nonetheless profess faith in the essential logic of nuclear deterrence, a simple question: are you prepared to prove your faith by supporting the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran in order to contribute to the peace and stability of the Middle East, which presently has only one nuclear-armed state? ... Compared to the sophistication and reliability of the command and control systems of the two Cold War rivals, those of some of the contemporary nuclear-armed states are dangerously frail and brittle.
I don't find it easy to accept that second point, either! (Evidence here and after watching the Lucy Walker documentary I mentioned here.)
Has there ever...
... been any credible evidence, anywhere, at any time,...
...that high pay ever delivers even partly-competent senior management? Has any senior manager ever complained about being paid too much? Is that arboreal ursine carrying a roll of toilet paper?
My "bedside" reading...
... pile still contains that set of essays A Truth Universally Acknowledged and, last night, I was tackling the (quite lengthy) excerpt from Lionel Trilling's essay in the TLS (published posthumously). I admit I found it heavy-enough going (some might say soporific) to have to pause for sleep :-)
Humanism does not in the least question the good effect of reading about the conduct of other people of one's own time, but it does put a special value upon ranging backward in time to find in a past culture the paradigms by which our own moral lives are put to test. In its predeliction for the moral instructiveness of past cultures, humanism is resolute in the belief that there is very little in this transaction that is problematic; it is confident that the paradigms will be properly derived2 and that the judgments (sic) made on the basis they offer will be valid. Humanism takes for granted that any culture of the past out of which has come a work of art that commands our interest must be the product, and also, of course, the shaping condition, of minds which are essentially the same as our own.
Quite why moral instruction can only be properly derived from the past puzzles me every bit as much as the way "ancient wisdom" always seemed to have to come from the mysterious Orient. Although not necessarily via that charlatan T Lobsang Rampa, of course.
It's too easy...
... to crash the Win8 desktop even though the applications stay up and running. What a truly awesome system it is, to be sure. But will Win8.1 be any better? Meanwhile, my determinedly-techno-tinkering neophiliac chum Brian — keen to get me to dip more than one inch of an occasional toe into the choppy waters of the Raspberry Pi — draws this "New, Improved" multiple OS front-end build (NOOBS) to my attention:
Though "New Out Of Box Software" is no reason to saddle something with such a silly acronym. Still, at least it reminded me to refresh the level of the Debian Raspbian build in my dinky little web server before I forget how to.
Had I an inclination...
... to worry about modern education, then this little thrown-away factoid might well send me — screaming — in search of a set of worry beads:
And here is yet another example: why do so many people believe that we see by means of rays that come out of the eyes? The optical principle of vision is well understood and is taught in elementary school. Nevertheless, developmental psychologists have known for decades that children have a predisposition to the opposite idea, the so-called 'extramission theory' of vision. And not only children: a study by the psychologist Gerald Winer and colleagues at the University of Ohio in 2002 found that about half of American college students also think that we see because of rays that come out of the eyes.
From just one (of the many) comments:
Me: How can I be sure that I exist? Rabbi: Who wants to know?
Now why would MicroSpit shares rise 9% after Mr Ballmer announces his intention to retire within the next 12 months? Just askin'.