2010 « The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Thursday, April 15, 2010

History ... Science ...

There’s a pretty good article in the April, 2010 Atlantic Magazine about US Army General Stanley McChrystal and the war in Afghanistan (“Man Versus Afghanistan” by Robert Kaplan). In this article, Kaplan talks about an ancient philosophical debate regarding the nature of world history. This big question is whether impersonal environmental forces and uncontrollable social dynamics determine the fate of nations and societies, or is there a “social will” developed by our great leaders that transcends the influence of “guns, germs and steel” (recalling the book with that name by Jared Diamond, which expounds the environmental-determinism viewpoint so as to debunk the alleged glories of Western Civilization; how politically correct!).

This is an interesting question, one that too few Americans think about. I took several history classes while in high school and college, and heard various historical discussions while studying for my masters in economics. And yet, I do not ever remember this question being framed out and dealt with.

However, being an eternal student dedicated to keeping my mind growing » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:06 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Monday, April 12, 2010

◊ JAZZ AND THE INEFFABLE WISDOM

Socrates Cafe ...

Last week the local Socrates Café group decided to tackle the question “what is wisdom”. There was a good turnout that night (about 12 people, including myself), and a lively discussion ensued. Just about everyone had a different take on the idea of “wisdom” and how it differed from facts, knowledge, art, scientific beliefs, technique, etc. Some people said it was all about love and relationships (the long-term versions of those things, anyway). Others cited the great spiritual avatars, including Jesus and the Buddha. I interjected that wisdom in the greater sense would even encompass economics and politics (e.g., Warren Buffet and Abraham Lincoln).

In the end, we were all “chasing a butterfly” with an intellectual net, and coming up empty. Unlike something like a lump of coal or an apple, which succumb quite readily to the taxonomic guidelines provided by science, wisdom is something that refuses to be nailed down. I cited two examples. First, I brought back memories of Robert Pirsig and his quest for the notion of “quality” in his first book, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. I proposed that Pirsig’s high-level concept of “quality” and our sought-after notion of “wisdom” were about the same thing. And that we both had about the same success; Pirsig went on in his second book (“Lila”) to derive a formal specification for quality, i.e.his “MOQ” or “metaphysics of quality”.

Lila was not nearly as successful as Zen and the Art, and Pirsig » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:53 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

◊ PRESSED BY WORDPRESS

Web Site/Blog ...

It looks like my blog has survived the Blogger FTP shutdown and is now safely in the hands of WordPress.org. The proof is in the pudding, so grab a spoon and dig in. There may be a few additional changes, maybe even improvements. But what you see right now is pretty much what you will be getting.

All I can say is that WordPress is tough to hack around with. Blogger required a general level of familiarity with computer programming, but WordPress.org with its PHP and “themes” and “widgets” and “plug-ins” is up there on a whole ‘nuther level. It’s wonderful that so many techie kids today are willing to fiddle around and offer a wide variety of pre-packaged site designs and add-ons for free to the public. It’s one of those nice things that the Internet has brought about, another instance of “digital community building” (a virtual version of an old-fashioned barn-raising, perhaps).

But despite the thousands of themes and adjuncts available for a » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:41 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

◊ CH-CH-CH-CH-CHANGES

Web Site/Blog ...

The day of reckoning has finally come for this blog. Hopefully it will survive, and come back slightly the better for it. The bottom line is that I started writing this thing back in late 2002 using Blogger as my “engine” and a Yahoo Geocities account as my host. To get the updated blog files from Blogger to Geocities, I made use of Blogger’s FTP file transfer mechanism. This arrangement worked quite well for the past seven and a half years. But things change, and Blogger has decided to ditch the FTP service. They claim that almost all of their users chose to have their blogs “reside” on the Blogger server, subject to their formatting rules. There are only a few wack-o’s like me left who wanted to keep control of their blog’s formatting and content, by arranging for their own hosting once Blogger creates / updates the blog page for them.

So, despite some discontent out there in the “blog-o-sphere” about Blogger’s cold-hearted decision, Blogger is standing its ground (although they did give a one-month stay of execution, extending the deadline from March 31 to April 30). And why not, since Blogger owns the proverbial ground, lock stock and barrel. I mean, Blogger is a free service; those of us who took advantage of its offer to process our blogs and then send them to the server of our choice have no legal or moral standing to complain. In announcing the end of FTP, Blogger has graciously offered to transfer our blog files to its own free hosting service. I had thought about going along with that, but as noted, that would require some compromise with blog design (but relatively minor). My bigger concern is a haunting suspicion that this will put Blogger (owned by Google) in a better position to eventually demand payment for its services, or require ads on the free blog pages. There has to be some sort of long-run business plan encompassing this change.

Unfortunately, the available alternatives to Blogger are quite limited. » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:40 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Sunday, April 4, 2010

◊ CITY OF NIGHT

Photo ...

It’s Spring here in New Jersey, and everything has gone from yucky and mostly dark shades of gray and brown, to green and yellow and purple and pink. On a nice sunny day, it’s not hard to get a nice outdoor photo. And hopefully I will soon get some of those and post them here. But right now I’m still coming out of an “after-dark” mood, so I took advantage of the warming temperatures and calm skies (finally, no more cold gusty winds!), and got a night shot from up on the hill in Wallington. In another month or so the trees will block the view. So here are Wallington and Passaic, two cities side by side in the Passaic River valley, cities of night.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 10:59 am No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

◊ PIZZA CAPITALISM

Economics/Business ... Public Policy ...

My brother and I had dinner the other night at a local restaurant, as we usually do on Fridays. My brother was meeting up with his girlfriend later on, and needed to bring an offering. And what better offering is there than pizza, especially since he expected her two daughters to be at her house. So he got on his cell phone with a local joint and sent in an order for a large pie with mushrooms. They said it would be about 45 minutes. So after we finished dinner, since I wasn’t busy, I tagged along with him for the pizza pickup. When we got to the place, they told us it would still be another 20 minutes. So we found an unobtrusive spot along the back side of the counter where we could wait it out.

Actually, it was an interesting wait. The place was fairly large for an independent pizza joint, about twice as wide as the usual Jersey pizza dive (which is maybe 15 to 20 feet). And it was busy! All of the tables were taken, and people were double and triple stacked around the counter waiting for their orders. We could feel the heat from the ovens and the smell was wonderful; that old-time mix of tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and yeast that you just don’t get in Pizza Hut.

And the staff behind the counter were putting on a show. It was » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 10:52 am No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Thursday, April 1, 2010

◊ BULLYING: IT’S GETTING BAD OUT THERE

Current Affairs ... Personal Reflections ...

When I was a kid, I was a frequent victim of bullying. You could say that I graduated from the school of bullying (on the wrong end of the lessons). That’s not too surprising, given that I was a a skinny runt (still am, only weigh 130 lbs.), the town was a working-class blue-collar suburb, and I was (and still am) a bit of an “Aspie” (a person with a certain lack of human relationship facility). I had to endure a goodly amount of scoffing and even some physical abuse from the guys who were bigger, cooler and meaner, right through junior year of high school. It got to the point where I couldn’t ride the bus to high school; I walked the mile and a half each way, whatever the weather. For whatever reason, I had a pretty good senior year (and I had a car too; no more walking in the snow).

As an aside, I remember that the bullying ran in cycles. I could go three, four or even five months and be left alone, then it would start up for a string of days, sometimes weeks or even months (on-and-off). It sort-of reminds me of what I had read about the Roman Empire’s persecution of the early Christian communities in the Second and Third Centuries CE. For whatever reason, the Emperors would give the Christians a streak of martyrdom years, and then ignore them for awhile. But in the long run, the Christians survived. I’m not saying that my cause as a young student was quite as noble, but like the early Christians, I also survived my own little persecutions.

However, a female high school student in the white affluent suburb of South Hadley, Massachusetts was not so lucky. » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:53 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

◊ ONE MORE SILLY THOUGHT

Current Affairs ... Politics ...

After President Obama announced yesterday that off-shore oil and gas drilling can now happen across a larger area in the Atlantic and Arctic Seas, I was reminded of Sarah Palin and her “drill, baby, drill” mantra. Given that Obama’s declaration had its limits and restrictions, it occurred to me that perhaps the Obama oil exploration motto should be “drill, maybe drill”.

I came up with that all on my own. But I had a hunch that I was not alone. And I was right. I did a Google search today on that quoted phrase, and I came up with 12 pages of listing. Interestingly, the first one to come up was an editorial from the Washington Post from October, 2008. Then Mother Jones used it on March 25, five days before the announcement. The Economist reacted to Obama’s announcement by shortening the phrase, dropping off the last “drill” word; ah, how British. But some news sites and bloggers saw it my way.

So, it’s still pretty silly; but I’m glad to see that I wasn’t the only almost-April fool out there.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 5:59 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Sunday, March 28, 2010

◊ FRANK TIPLER: GENIUS OR MADMAN?

Religion ... Science ...

I’m always on the lookout for non-fiction books with a new or off-beat approach to a topic that interests me. The problem is that I’m not a fast reader; I like to plod and think things over as I read. So, I have an inventory of books waiting to be read, and they can sit around for years until I get to them. One of the books in my current inventory is Frank Tipler’s “The Physics of Immortality”. I’ve had it for about 2 years now, but I don’t see myself getting to it until maybe later this year. However, I opened it up and started to peruse it the other day in a spare moment, and it got me interested. Not interested enough to start reading it (I’m now trying to slog my way through Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works”, a 500+ page tome written in a breezy, chatty style that just begs for a ‘skip-around’ approach). But interested enough to do a Web search for a summary and some opinions on Tipler’s ideas. Enough to hit the ground running when I do finally get to his book.

Tipler is a 64 year old mathematical cosmologist, a legitimate physicist who teaches at Tulane University. Like many modern physicists, he was an atheist most of his life. However, he had a “road to Damacus” experience and decided to affirm God and Christianity, supposedly as a result of his theoretical research. He became noted (perhaps not really “famous”) for his Omega Point Theory, which is explained in “Physics of Immortality” (yes, shades of Teilhard de Chardin).

In a nutshell, Tipler set out » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 11:27 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Monday, March 22, 2010

◊ TAKING CARE OF PARENTS

Personal Reflections ...

There’s a good article in the April Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch about the struggles of caring for an aging parent (i.e., what Rauch went through with his father, who died this past December). Having been involved since 2001 in a somewhat similar situation (my mother, who died this past October), I wanted to make note of Mr. Rauch’s reflections. He concludes that senior caregivers are still mostly a “silent, invisible army” amidst millions of Americans in their fourties and fifties, most of whom are trying to get by in their own working lives while simultaneously working hard to raise their own children.

Given the experience he had over the past 12 months with his father, Mr. Rauch, a successful political affairs writer from the Washington DC area, now understands something of the sacrifices that a whole lot of unseen, uncelebrated people “out there” in the cities, towns and villages of America are making in order to comfort their parents in their decline. Now that he’s had a taste of what all these good folk silently bear, Mr. Rauch wants to put them “on the radar” of the movers and shakers of our political, cultural and economic institutions. He wants the news and entertainment media to give them more recognition, wants the government and other do-good establishments to give them more information and support, and wants employers to give them a break when their commitments call them away from the daily grind.

Well OK, Mr. Rauch, thanks. Having been a member » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:12 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

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