philosopher-hero nominees

Just cleaning up my inbox, and noticed that Cameron made the following suitable nomination a full month ago…

“Another nominee for the admirable philosopher list, while certainly not a major figure is the up-and-coming-philosopher turned war-hero Jean Cavaillès

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Cavailles

I like the quote from Canguilhem at the end of that article:

‘A philosopher-mathematician loaded with explosives, lucid and reckless, resolute without optimism. If that’s not a hero, what is a hero?'”

Zamalek by dusk

View from the bedroom terrace just now, 7:40 PM on Thursday (the first one I posted a few minutes ago was flipped horizontally, and for some reason that really bugged me):

indexing

Today, it’s book indexing work.

I’ve never found this as horrible as some people do. To me it always feels like the chance to spend 3 or 4 days reminiscing with a good friend before he leaves town for good.

classics

Enjoyable reading on the bus back from campus… There are very few things in political history more interesting than the Caesar/Pompey/Crassus/Cicero/Cato the Younger dynamics just before the Republic implodes. Roman history is one of those things that it’s never a waste of time to read about (even though I always find almost every figure slightly less admirable than I remember them).

a dense ANTHEM post

Peter Erdélyi resurfaces with a multifaceted post referring to Latour, Prince of Networks, speculative realism, and parody.

Includes a link to BYU’s “Rush Latour Show” parody.

http://www.anthem-group.net/2009/04/27/bruno-latour-as-rush-limbaugh/

lots of catching up

Sorry, bad blogger today. But there’s been so much to catch up on during my first full day back inside my own home.

more on internet financial scams

Broke new ground last night by receiving my first known scam in a language other than English.

But here’s a standard English one of the kind you’ve all seen thousands of times, just come in:

“Attention Beneficiary, This is to bring to your notice that, I have paid the re-activation fee and the delivery of your Trunk Box to you. I paid it because your TRUNK BOX OF $2.5 MILLION has few days to expire and when it expires will go into Government purse of this Country, then I decided to help you pay the money so that the Trunk Box will be transport to you in *RAW CASH BUT I DISGUISE IT AS A FAMILY TREASUR I DID NOT DISCLOSE THE CONTENT AS RAW CASH OF $2.5 MILLION IN A SILVER METALIC TRUNK BOX WRAPED WITH DHL LOGO* They will transport it via customs diplomatic means, because I know when you get your Trunk Box definitely you must pay me back the money I have spent and even reward me for good work thereafter.”

And here I have a simple question… Why is it always some utterly outrageous amount of money? If they told you that you had, say, eleven thousand dollars coming (instead of millions) wouldn’t you be more tempted to think it was genuine? This seems to be one of those areas of life where “the big lie” (Goebbels) is less effective than a small one would be.

Carroll parodies Longfellow

Today’s satire is one that I loved as an undergraduate… Lewis Carroll’s parody of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha”. Here are the first two stanzas. Click anywhere on them to see the rest:

Hiawatha’s Photographing
by Lewis Carroll

FROM his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;

But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.

Onion’s auto reality show

This is just brilliant. Hard to remember life before The Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/autoworkers_compete_to_keep_jobs

another sentence surely never uttered before

from the China Daily:

“The pirates could only lament their littleness before the vast number of dolphins.”