mixed feelings about gmail

I’ve rarely felt more ambivalent about any product than I do about gmail. Since a few days ago I’ve been forced to use it full-time, since a flaw with my mail program (which no one can figure out how to fix) repeatedly downloads “ghost” copies of already-downloaded mail, leading to a couple of outrageous internet bills for me in recent months.

On the one hand, Google is a privacy menace and a corporate behemoth quickly approaching monopoly status in areas that no one has any right to monopolize. (On privacy issues they may be just as bad as Facebook, though the Google owners are more mature people and so don’t blurt out insulting remarks about their customers the way those Facebook punks do.) I also don’t like the way the messages in the inbox are displayed, though perhaps there are better ways to customize it. And it’s undeniably creepy to read advertisements that are obviously based on the content of my personal messages.

On the other hand, I used to waste too much time sorting messages in my mail program; now I don’t have to bother. And the ads are actually helpful, just as Amazon’s personalized ads are. Often those ads have solved practical problems for me that I had just been wondering how to solve.

I hate Google chat, by the way, and have made myself permanently invisible. If you’re a correspondent of mine but never see me on gmail, don’t worry, it’s not just you— I’ve closed myself off chat for everyone. I find it just about the least enjoyable medium of communication there is: all the physical hassle of typing, with none of the direct togetherness of voice communication.

a different Nobel theory

A reader writes:

“You might be interested in Richard Hamming’s suggestion (based on his
experience at Bell Labs) that the problem is exactly the opposite, that
this kind of recognition resulted in people only wanting to spend time
working on ‘great problems’, and miss out on smaller problems that might
develop. There’s a copy of Hamming’s talk on this at
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html.”

I won’t have time to check the link for a little while, but Einstein comes to mind as a possible illustration for this. Once you’ve already done as much as Einstein did in 1905 and then general relativity, you’re probably not going to want to play pitty-pat with tiny scientific puzzles. You’re going to want to shoot for the moon. (Of course, I doubt the Nobel Prize itself has much to do with that in Einstein’s case. In a sense Einstein was one of those people who was much bigger than the prize, and knew it.)

another high-profile author retracts articles

But at first glance this one doesn’t look like an especially big deal (I would assume that the investigation is routine). Still, it would be very embarrassing to be of that stature and have to go through a process of RETRACTING RESEARCH FINDINGS. Especially after you already have a Nobel in the bag and probably don’t expect to be under intense scrutiny in your remaining career.

Incidentally, how many people actually did better work after a Nobel Prize than before it?

No, I’m not inclined to agree with the theory that receiving the Prize deaden’s peoples ambitions. I tend more to think that no one, of no matter what level of brilliance, has an especially long window of creative innovation (it’s hard to escape your first maturity, as Clement Greenberg puts it), and that by the time the Prizes catch up to you it’s likely that the window is already closed.

Yeats is often held up as the best example of a Nobel Literature winner who did his best writing afterwards. I’d have to think a minute about whether there are any obvious cases in the sciences, though since Marie Curie won twice she’d be an obvious example to look into.

Bogost in Playboy

But NOT WHAT YOU THINK.

aphorisms, proverbs, and clichés

In the previous post I expressed hope that Emerson’s sentence might turn into a piece of popular wisdom: “His two is not the real two, his four is not the real four.”

Part of the lunch hour today was spent trying to imagine the sort of civilization that could give rise to such a saying. It would be an odd one. (A good friend of mine was once dating a woman from a Central Asian country, I won’t say which country, and she told us that a common line in family quarrels there is: “The earth should swallow you.”)

Once before I cited La Rochefoucauld’s pungent maxim: “It is to be doubted whether a traveller will find anywhere in the world regions uglier than the human face.”

And again, try to imagine a culture in which that statement were no longer the high-flying aphorism of a prominent literary figure, but rather a dusty old proverb expressing the wisdom of an established people. (“As the old Venetian proverb says, there is no region on earth uglier than the human face.”)

Of course, this sort of thing happens all the time. Consider Nietzsche’s “what does not kill me makes me stronger,” which had some surprise and bite the first time I read it in high school, but now turns out to appear (often without attribution) on coffee mugs and other corny memorabilia.

From the same essay, in a passage on conformists that I wish I had written myself:

“Their two is not the real two, their four is not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.”

I almost wish that would become a popular harsh saying: “His two is not the real two, his four is not the real four.”

the devil’s child

Emerson, in his classic “Self-Reliance”:

“I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested – ‘But these impulses may be from below, not from above.’ I replied, They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil’s child, I will live then from the devil. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”

the question of the online course

A few people have written in recent weeks saying that they had a vague memory of my saying on this blog that my Fall Semester course would be available as a recording online. They are remember correctly: I did say that. It was going to be part of a university-wide program to post a number of class recordings on the web. But I must have forgotten to say later that some logistical problems arose, and for now it is not happening.

Meillassoux/Schopenhauer

Over at Speculative Heresy, Matthew Ray has post some THOUGHTS ON THE MEILLASSOUX/SCHOPENHAUER RELATION.

another Meillassoux quote

Here’s another nice line from L’Inexistence divine:

“The atheist stands outside the field of battle, and confuses the philosopher and the priest just as one confuses two combatants in a hand-to-hand struggle viewed from afar.”