Log of my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) postings

Len: 219,786  84.

¶ +2023.08.17. What are the qualities of a true hero in your opinion? Who are some real-life heroes that we should all learn from and be inspired by?

Student: "Happy the land that breeds a hero."
Galileo: "No. Unhappy the land that needs a hero." (Bertolt Brecht)

No person should ever have to be a hero. Life should be joy and delight, not suffering. Everything should be done to minimize the need for heroes.

I have in my life known personally one hero. I highly respect him. In no way envy him. It's a long story and I know it in detail because at one time he was my manager at work and then a friend for almost half a century. This person was AN ETHICAL GIANT and he suffered for it. And why did it happen? He himself understood it, just like Jesus Christ apparently understood his situation. He once told me:

"They put me off at the wrong stop when I was born."

No hero inspires me; I feel sorry for them, and angry at and disgusted by the people who made them be heroic.. Great innovators, artists and scientists, inspire me for their creative contributions to civilization. Heraclitus, Giovanni di Dondi, Francois Rabelais, Desiderio Erasmus, Marcel Duchamp, Edmund Husserl. And others whom you have probably never heard about.

I like to learn the back story on "heroes". Recently I read that it has finally been confirmed that Martin Luther King Jr plsgiarized on his doctoral dissertation. I think it is common knowlege the=at he was philanderer. And off camera he wore a Rolex wristwatch. Let's follow his example in those things, right?

Two persons whose stories stick in my mind.

One is almost unknown. There was a Soviet nuclear submarine where the reactor was about to blow up. Somebody had to go into the reactor chamber and shut the damned thing down. One man volunteered. He did the job. Mission accomplished. The submarine and everythng else was vsaved. And no, he did not die from radiation poisoning. They could not get the door back open for him to get out so he died a slow death in there.

The second hero's story has a happier ending: The great Japanese World War II air ace Saburo Sakai. I forget but he had something over 60 "kills". He was also a gentleman. Once when he had put an enemy plane in a death spiral into the sea and the pilot managed to bail out, he circled around and threw the man his life preserver. After the war he did something I really respect: He told The Emporer that he should have prevented the war. Needless to say, Mr. Sakai didn't win points for that. He became a Buddhist and never harmed another living being in the rest of his life.

A highly offensive thing is when people honor dead heroes. They are dead. They are either nowhere or else some place the living cannot affect. The living, instead of getting off on sentimentality about corpses, should get on with preventing the need for any more premature deaths and celebrating the life they still have before they too will die.

Student: "Happy the land that breeds a hero."
Galileo: "No. Unhappy the land that needs a hero." (Bertolt Brecht)

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[ "Sendaman" picture ]

¶ +2023.08.17. How do I make a speech more interesting?

I would suggest make it more informative: **more value added per word**.

Make every sentnce have perceived payoff for your audience, and not just for youself. You are a salesman and if you do not have a captive audience like students or employees who must kowtow to you to get a grade or keep their jobs, they do not have to buy your product.

You tell me something that solves a mission-critical problem I am facing right this moment and you have my laser focussed attention. I don't care if you can hardly speak the language, if you stutter hopelessly, turn red as a beet in the face, wet your pants, or whatever. I will make the effort to help you get your message across to me.

If I want to be amused I write my own jokes to laugh at.

Maybe I am an excepton. I have very low tolerance for meetings or any group activity. Do double arm amputees have to attend "all hands" meetings? What work I have to do am I not getting done because I have to put up with you running your mouth off? I don't want to have to stay late to get my work done and get stuck in a traffic jam because you couldn't boil it down to a short email? I have an idea:

Managers should be paid a certain salary. The TCO of meetings will be deducted from that amount. How many and how long meetings will they hold?

I found one good thing about "the office". When the snack machine restock guy came in, he disposed snack packs past their eat-by date in a garbage can. He never objected to me foraging in the trash for FREE EXPIRED DORITOS! I may add that there was probably only one other person in the whole organization more formally educated than me: He had a Ph.D. from Yale, I had only a B.A. summa cum laude from that institution. And if you really wanted to disgust me whcn you made me come to a meeting, you wuld bring in a "treat" of Dunkin Donuts. What did the dude think? That I was a dog? But I had to sit there until I decided I really, really, really had to go take a piss. Ah! What a relief to get out of that room for a while. Oh to be able to faint without hurting myself! And coworkers would try to "help" me by reminding me that there was a meeting when they were rushing to the thing while I was still working? Did they really think I wanted to hear this? Because then I would have to lie to say I didn't know about or had forgot it. No thank you, Sir!

Well, I did attend one all hands matting that was important: We were all told, unexpectedy, our employment had been terminated (without "cause"), I guess because the company had a surplus of intelligence. I was just a nobody, but also included on the list was the person who had got the patent for inventing the idea that was the basis for our work.

And in school, in college, I didn't like being in classes with other kids but I had to put up with it so I sat in the otherwise empty front row and drew pictures under the lecturer's nose (actually, to his right to be near the door to make a quick exit before anybody else when he would be done).. One fine day when I was just a sophomore (1966) an eminent philosophy professor was lecturing us kids about human freedom. At the end of the session I went up to him and very politely told him that I did not see how I had any freedom since I would have to take an exam at the end of his course. In othe words, I accused him of hypocrisy. Well, I was lucky. He was as big as his job title. He apologized to me, told me he meant no he=arm and let me take his graduate seminar next term for an easy "A". Not all Improtant People are that big, are they?

Why should I listen to you when you can write it down? Well, maybe. I once did hear a man who engaged my attention in a lecture. Once. 1986ish in IBM Research. USAF Colonel John R. Boyd came to lecture a whole day on the theory of war. The most astute person I hve ever encountered. He also had a pile of Xerox copies of his lecture notes at the door so nobody had to take notes: The hand decks were over an inch thick.

I remember one sentence he said: This was shortly after "Vietnam"

"The way to win a guerilla war is to offer the people a better life than the gureillas offer them" → better in THEIR view, not just yours.

Apply that to the next lecture you prepare and you will have a winner.

¶ +2023.08.17. Did your advisor have any impact on your Ph.D.?

I got a 2nd class doctorate, an Ed.D.

My advisor had a great impact on it. First, he helped me appreciate that erudition should be fun: He advised me to read Dr. Francois Rabelais "Gargantua and Pantagruel" and set a personal example of exhibiting joy learning. But that was before I got on with trying to put together a disserttion proposal.

Neither he nor anybody else was much help there although there was a fellow student who himself was dropping out of the program due to alcoholism who saved me by suggesting a topic or my qualitying essay to even get into the docoral part of the program.

It took me several years of frustrating effort to find my topic. One day it happened. I quickly wrote up my proposal which is he only time in my life I ever wrote an "outline" for anything, pace my jerk perp school English teaches who had a thing about "outlies" and I did not.

My spnosor read my proposal and responded that he "thought there might be a disserataion in it". The next thing he or the school saw of me except for tuition payments was when I called him up to make an appointment a year or so after, met him in the hall outside his ofice, handed him my pile of 200 odd sheets of paper with even the page margins to spec and he rifled thru it for a minute of so, looked up ovr his reading glasses and saId: "Make cpies and we go to the orals."

He had "done" nothing for me. He had no idea what I was doing. But I had bitched all my life about bad schooling. He gave me an opportuity to put up or shut up. Sink or swim. And he did do the one thing which was priceless: He ran interference and saw, by the way we framed my dissertation topic, that some busybodies in another discipline who might have caused trouble never got wind of it. What I wrote was highly conroversial but nobody has probably ever read it. And I even had a battle with a publisher about it. That publisher, fortunaely has since gone out of business: International Universities Press.

Anyway, my sponsor did two things: (1) he inspired me, and (2) he respeted me. For my dissertation review committee, he picked another professor (who was apparently alrady emeritus) who was both highly esteemed and also partisan to my way of thinking. In general in school, teachers either really liked me or else felt I should not be in the program at all. My sponsor saw to it that there were none of the latter involved.

But there is more to this story. He had another candidate of whom I as jealous. He met ith this person in his faculty apartment each Friday nite and they worked on his dissertation over good scotch whisky. the reason for my jealousy should be obvious. But I once talked with him about his and we came to the conclusion that I go the better deal: I larned how to teach myelf. The other guy "just" got great teaching. Both of us had really great time of it although I seem to have read that th other guy died before completing his degree.

I am a self-starter. But ex nihilo nihil fit: I was not bright enough to make something out of nothing. My parents were examplars of the clishe hta thte road to hell is paved with good intentions an my school teachers were worse. So I needed to learn that ther was anything in life worth living for. And my sponsor is one of the very few who helped here, as an example as well as by bibliographical recommendations. He believes in persons creatively shaping heir lives, or as I would put it: following his example, not his slime trail (the former being how he lives, the latter being what he believes and writes). And then he trusted me to do it. A lot of the stuff I wrote about he had no familiarity with. I have had many persone in my life who were let me gingerly put it: not helpful.

I have heard of persone who once they get their degree never look back at their disseration: They had no interest in it but had to do it. If it was not literally true it was metaphorically so: Their department had a list of thesis topics on the office wall. you took the topic on th top, scratched it off and the next student got the new top line. They paid their dues.

My sponsor had a dictum:

Here, let's engage work as the work of peers.
Shakespeare lived an ordinary life, just like you.

¶ +2023.08.17. What do you think about the ex-mobster's transformation from a hitman to an author, podcast host, and youth motivational speaker?

This is a hghly speculative question becasuse we do not know anyting abou thte particular mobster.

But we can fantasize.

Of coure it can all be a big fake.

And maybe not all mosters were all that bad to begin with. You are a thief f you steal bread to feed your starving family. You are a thief if you steal bread to resell it on the black market.

But I think, pehaps naively, that some of these transmans(interesting typo?) are for real: a hyena really metamorphoses into a seeing eye dog, or something like that.

The phenomenon I want to talk about here can be summarized very simply: The epidemic of drug addiction cannot be solved by all addicts becoming drug counsellors.

You are an addict. You "hit rock bottom" but you do not die. You get rehabilitated. Somehow or other you beome squeaky clean, but for a very special reason: You become a druc counsellor. Previously you spent all day looking for or selling dope. Today, yes, with help from helpful people and a lot of courage on your part, you are now so addicted to rescuing other people from dying of overdoese that you don't know what time of day it is. You have a new addiction: one which results not in you dying of an overdose of contan=minatef fentany in a filthy alley and being eaten by rats, but in your having a three martini lunch – OK you don't drink alcohol either but you have a 3 bedroom house in a neighorhood where no woman or child is afraid to walk the streets at 3AM.

Your drug problem is solved. It is solved for you: you remain clean for th rest of your now happy (really!) life. You also save others each new day. You get written up in the local newspaper for all the good you do for society. And it's all true.

But it all depends on there being more addicts to save. Run out of addicts to save and you are SOL (Sh*t Out of Luck).

Now, in reality that won't happen because addicts are many and funding for social services is scarce. In other words: society is bad and you won the lottery.

Conclusion #1: I am not personally "impressed" by do-gooders. They do well by doing good. And if there re a few cases where the do-gooder atually does do a St. Francis of Assisi act – well, some people have strange perversions. St. Francis had fun giving away his [i.e., his father's] wealth. When hus daddy objected and took him to court, St. Francis stood up, took off his clothes and gave them to his father.

Not everyone can afford voluntary poverty. Voluntary poverty, like being saved from drug addiction by becoming a drug counsellor, is a privilege many do not have. In this category I include such persons as Barrister Mahatma Gandhi and Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. These are privileged people even if they like to spend time in prison.

Conclusion #2: Beware of do-gooders because theyare selfish. The ex-addict turned drug counsellor saves you from dying of fentanyl over=dose for selfish reasons: to keep up his (her, other's) own sobriety. That's fine because COINCIDENTALLY, his selfishness IN FACT helps you. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

But there are other people whose altruistic selfishness is not so consequentally benign: These are LEADERS who have Seen The Light and get off on volunteering YOU to SACRIFICE for their good cause.

I, REBORN LEADER am saving all the poor from poverty: YOU GIVE ME ALL YOUR WEALTH AND IMMISERATE YOURSELF FOR MY GOOD CAUSE! Or even "better": The Pope sands you to die fighting in a Crusade to liberate The Holy City from the Infidel!

Silly? Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy sends thousands of men to die for "freedom" each new day while he flies around the world in his green t-shirt costume being feted by big shots instead of getting down in a trench on the Zero line and dying for freedom himself. Hypocrite! Or Sir Winston Churchill who led Great Britain to victory over the evil Nazis sitting on his two fat couch potatoes and drinknig a bottle osf scotch each day along with some champagne at dinner too....

People talk about "outing" hypocritical public figures for their sex secrets. They they need to be outed for lots of othr things too, starting with their income tax returns and investigation what they do when they get home each nite and are off camera. You never saw Rev King at one of his mass motivational rallies roll up his shirt sleeve, raise you his arm and flash the Rolex wristwatch he probably kept safely at home, did you? That was not in the script fot the hundreds of thouseands who would never own a Rolex like him.

Motivatinal speakers are often motivating two kinds of peopl: the members of the audience ("Stop ruining your life by taking drugs!"), but also themselves: If they suddenly lost their "day job" of messiah, what would they then do with their lives? Gotta keep finding new speaking dates! (I digress: People like Dr King generally have somebody to pick them up at the airport. One of the great humanists of the 20th century who was nobody's motivional speaker: he was an architect, Louis Kahn, died like a stray dog in New York's Pennsynvania Train Station because America was too cheap to provide him with a ride home from a site visit to a client in Bam=ngaladesh. He was tentativey identified at the publid morgue from his passport.)

It has been confirmed that "Dr." King plagiarized on his doctoral disseratation but also that nothing should be done about it because he is a moral example for others. Another person who apparently plagiarized on his dissertation had an arrest warrant over his head because some people like The President of The United States do NOT like him: Dr. vladimir Putin. People do nnot even call him by his honrifi but treat his nme like a George Carlin word. Same crime, different outcomes. I reently asked he Bing AI if Reverend ing had sex with women other than his lawfully wedded wife whilt married to her and the AI responded to ask a different question.

––––

"Chuchill believed the only way Britain could win the war [with Germany in 1940] was by inspiring the people with a vision of Britain's greatness.

"It could be argued that it was a con trick, that there were sophisticated people who said this was all hot air. But to the mass of the people it was an extreordinary experience." (Adam Curtis, "The Living Dead")

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The revisionist psychoanalyst Alice Miller wrote a book about "helpful" parents who mess up their kids heads, with the telling title: "For your own good."

¶ +2023.08.16. Various serious adults in the media landscape are reassuring the public that AI is incapable of stealing their jobs-yet, as though the tech is not in it's infancy and will improve exponentially. Are they sincere, or doing so at corporation's behest?

I ma not an expert.

I hav ebeen playing with th Bing AI and I am impressed tht it sometimes or even often (not always!) answers questions far better than aan average college freshman.

Anybody who tells you that AI cannot do a lot of things whit collar workers have been paid to do to date either doesn't know what htey are talking about or very well knows what htey are talking about and trying to lead you astray.

Some things AI will nver be able to do, bu tthose tho=ings not many humans can do, either. You know the famous "I LOVE NEW YORK" bumper sticker and ad logo with the heart in the lace of LOVE? That was invented by a grahic design gei=niue: Miltin Glaser. AI will not replace Milton Glasers. But how many graphic design geniuses are there? Not many. How many people work in graphic design? Many.

And he is something else AI cannot replace but cost conscious anagers just want to save monty, like wit hth eBoeing 737-Max. AI needs to b monitored and what it produces checked by knowldgeable humans because AI doesn't really understand anything: It jsut shuffles character strings. I hink it was Amazon tha twas grossly humiliatd the first time thry shoe=wed heir AI to a big conference It gave a totally rediculous answer to the firs tquestion they asked it.

Aristotle, 2500 years ago, said that if machines could do all th scut work of life we wouldn't need slaves. AI + industrial robots can fill the bill. All the wage-slaves can be handed pink slips.

ALternatively th economy could be reorganized to provide leisure for everybody to be freed from doing scut work. Bu freed for what? Tocreate in the arts and sciences? To go fishing? To go phishing?To watch HBO and Monday nite NFL? To be gameboys? to snort coke? To fight each othe rin useless wars?

¶ +2023.08.16. Suggest a manager you know or have worked with. How would you describe their usual style of communication? Do they fit into one of Clampitt's categories? How well did this style work for them?

This sounds like a school assignment.

If yes, isn't the assignment asking for the person answerng the question to dscuss a manager they themself had, not somebody else describing some manager this other person had?

"You can run but you can't hide"?

¶ +2023.08.16. What strategies can millennials use to work smarter and live better in the housing market?

I don't know.

graduated college back in 1968 when things were very different. Decent qhite collar jobs were easy to find. I got a job as a computer programmer trainee. Well, os what? It started with full time classroom training (in COBOL) fo 6 weeks at full pay. Can you find THAT today? Well, I was earning maybe $8,000 per year. But guess what? An efficiency apartment in an upscale high-rise aparemtne house was $90per month. (I was on the 6th floor, facing front)

[ Picture of 100 W. Cold Spring Lane ]

And I had a VW Beetle n the garrage.

And I graduated Yale debt free (Tuition plus room and board was $4,000 per year).

Not like that today, is it?

Well, I am cynical and do not have any respect for social niceties or fashion.'

So my suffggestion s that if your parents are decent and can cope with you having an intmate partner in the house, stay home. Don't waste your paycheck on domicilage. Remember that your EFFECTIVE income is incomd minus outgo. Make $60,000 per yearand pay nothing for shelter is a lt more than $100,000 and $4,000 per month to have a place to sleep. And tha tbigger paycheck before taxes may come with longer hours and more stress and a longer commute, too? How much do you enjoy commuting? I envied Japanese World War II kamikaze pilots who had to make their commute only once.

Do not fall for "THe American Dream". The word "mortgage" derivesd from "mort" which means death. Why have 3 bedrooms? Jus don't nhave kids (the planet os hyperoverpopulated already). If you do itch to have chldren, have one and adopt. If I wa a woman, no way would I want to subjet my sexy young body to pregnancy.

Now, what is really worthwhile in life? The arts and sciences. OI, you can't afford a Rembrandr (forget about crap like War Holes that may cost even more than an l=old master becasuse tulips were expensive in The Netherlands in 1636). I have a coffee cup I paid $30 for 30 years ago. ig migh b e$200 tody. If I don't drop and break it, it will last fo centuries and is or is clost to museula quality. Anybody with any kind of decent job can buy that if they don't buy a lot of crap like fashionable clothes.

Cable is a log more expensive than scholarly and even many art books. I don't remember exactly but for maybe $12 I got a really lovely art book of Titian's "Profeane and Sacred Love" painting. It's a real delight, even printed in Italy not China. How far would $12 take you on your cble bill> Snd why do you need a tv anyway? THere is top notch art and scholarshipe free on Youtube: Prof. Jeffrey Scahe, JohnMearsheimer, Noam Chomsky, William LeMessurier.... There's ephemeral crap on HBO. OK, There is "Air Disasters" on The Smithsonian Channel.

Now for a tough one: A pet cat of dog can be really gret but forst think about you vet bills and pet health insureance may run you upwards of $150 per month. Meow!

But back to housing. Unless you have intrusive parents (or no parents), follow Nancy Reagan's sage advice (albeit out of context): "Just say: "No!'" to throwing away your hard earned money on walls and roofing and worse: lawn mowing.

And if you have well to do parents with a big house, why not even if you do start a family, turn it into a family compound. Granma will love babysitting and you will love for free child care. Win-win.

¶ +2023.08.16. Do you find any subject difficult that your PhD advisor finds easy?

I did not get a PhD. I got a 2nd Class doctorate, en EdD. (unlike the Reverend Mrtin Luther King Jr, however, I did not plagiarize).

Ther never was any real comparison between me and my sponsor. He was an eminently erudite person. Once I visited his faculty apartment which had 3 bedrooms. In one there was a raised platform with a computer atop it, almost like an altar. in one corner of one of the bedrooms was a small mattress on the floor. the whole place was wall to wall floor to ceiling books and I have little doubt that he had read and absorbed everything in each and every one of them. He also had two faulty offices full of books.

But nobody can know everything today. My dissertation was based in psychoanalysis and german idealist (actually, existentialist phenomenological) philosophy, which were not his specialties. He could judge my work largely by "smell", but he had not mastered th material [if I was clever and malign enough, I might have been able to fake it?] There was no "competition". Later in life I found out that the most important book in his life (or so it looked to me) was one I too had studied. But, guess what? He apparently interprets it differently than me.

Now this is surely an exception case. In most cases the question is right on target: The advisor has mastered what the candidate is masstering. But there is something else important here: How hard something need have little relation to how valuable it is. Great achievements are often made apart from or even despite effort, although to master a subject is generally a preconditon for making new contributions to the field.

The following may or may not be true; I can't verify it. The artist Wassily Kandinsky started out as a law student. He had an "eidetic memory". In taking exams, he could look up pages in law books in his head. To do this of course, most other students would have to either cheat or endure painful struggle to memorize the material. Piece of cake for him. He could ace exams with no effort. What good did it do the other students to have to bust their asses to do what came easy to him? Same or even better result with far less effort on his part.

Another story I do not have the details of. German chemist August Kekulé discovered the benzene ring in a dream. How much blood, sweat and tears did that highly important discovery cost him?

If you have to work hard at something, that is a misfortune. End of that subject.

Working smart generally beats working hard. What matters is the product, not how much or how little suffering it entailed to make it. If you have cancer and the doctor cures you, does it matter if he worked hard to do it or not? If he worked hard and failed to cure you, what good would that be?

When I was working in IBM, I knew a person who was a far superior computer programmer than I was and I was pretty good at it (1980).One nght, "after hours", the two of us stopped by an office whre there was a third fellow whom my friend immensely admired, this third person was that superior. The man had "earned" it by taking computer chip design programs that ran for days and cutting them down to run in a few hours. He was a genius or close to it. He wore jeans, came to work sometimes when he felt like it, had never been to college and grew houseplants in his basement. And when I met him he had his feet up on the dsk not doing much of anything except shooting the breeze with my friend.

Effort is probably largely overrated by people who do not have smarts, speaking of which I once worked for a startup whose name was SMARTS

[ SMARTS logo, thinking man ]

¶ +2023.08.16. How valuable is "grit" (the emotional skill) in career vs home life? How can it help both?

People differ in their opinions here. Some people like to flex their muscles (or just puff up their jowls) and bark out platituedes like: "No pain no gain"!, "You gotta pay your dues!", "Respet your elders", etcetera and so forth. You may guess I find such people repulsive and avoid them because they might harm me. As a chld you would not have a boy as wimpy as me except in the funnies page of your local newspaper. But I had a brilliant mind which nobody around me understaood.

[ Picture of Minotaur ]

One of the easiest ways to destroy precision machinery is to throw some grit into its bearings, for example, a hand full of sand. GRRRRRR.... Pffut!~ O, dear, Mr. Customer, your Ferrari's V-12 -DOHC direct ininjection twin supercharger engine is beyond repair.Why the shit did you throw a hand full of sand into the crankcase? "To make it stronger, Mechanic, Sir"

"Grit" is helpful in extreme crcumstances, for instnce if you are an infantry soldier on the Zerro line in Ukkraine today with the corpses of your dead buddies next to you because there is nobody to remove them. Me? I would have left that wretched country before 24 February 2022 if there was any way I could. And I would remember Lot's wife in the bible.

Even in war, the highest leverage in defeating the enemy is not brave grunts, alshough they certainly deserve both the highest respect but also pity for having been stuck there. The persons who accomplish the most, to borrow a phrase from sometime Alabama Governor George Wallace, probably can't even ride a bicycle straight. Example: Alan Turing, who helped break the German Enigma code, shortening the war by years. Their minds transformed the battlespace not just got mired down in it. So even in war grit is not the most important quality. How muh grit did Sir, repeat: Sir Winston Cunrehill, fat and soused and puffing on a stogie, have?

At lesat some real heroes wish they had never had to be heroes. The Japanese Air Ace, Saburo Sakai, did not win any points for criticizing the Emperor for not having prevented the war, and after the war he became a Buddhist pacifist and never again harmed another living creature. Also, he showed his grit by, when he had sent an enemy's plane into a death spiral and the pilot bailed out over water, he circled around and threw the man his life preserver.

Grit is just that: brutality. But, of source, the "brutes" are not always brutal like some humans. I forget the latin but it translates as: Man is wolf to man.

Different persons value different things in living. Some value suffering anddying. I have a different opinion. take it or leave it, but if you disagree with me, please do not volunteer me to share it with you.

[ Matisse Pink Nude ]

Paining by Henri Matisse, in The Cone Collection, the Baltimore Museum of Art. Rrose Sélavy.

¶ +2023.08.16. What innovative pedagogical approaches can educators employ to foster deep critical thinking and multidisciplinary problem-solving skills in students, preparing them for the complex challenges of an increasingly interconnected world?"?

Many big words in this question.

"Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works" (Matt 5:16). In other words, the teacher needs to set a good example not just mouth good words.

The physicist Niels Bohr instruted his students: "Take every statment I make as a question not as an assertion." There you go!

The teacher need to encourage his (her, other's) students to question not just abstract propositions like "What is the meaning of life?" or: "Was slavery bad?" etc., but to question their in vivo, here-and-now situation., namely: being students in his classroom who will have homework assignments, a final exam and get a grade, etc. The teacher can use Mr. Plato's dialogues here, not for their content which is not always useful, but to compre the life ituations: Did Mr. Socates have to publish to not parish like you the teacher may have to do? Did Mr. Socrates's acolytes have homework assignments and final exams and get graded. Etc.? Does the following picture look like your classroom (please add females and others):

[ w/images/e/e3/PlatonicEducation.jpg ]

I do not just run my mouth off. When I was a sophomore in college (1966, Yale), after an eminent professor had delivered a lecture to us kids on human freedom, I went up to the podium and politely said to him thta I saw no freedom in my seituation since iwould have to take a final exam at the end of his course. In other words, I politely accused him of hypocrisy. What heppened?

Well, he was as big as his job title, and apologized to me, told me he meant no harm and let me take his graduate seminar the next term. John Wild. Obviously it would not have gone so well for me with some other [self-]Important People.

What should happen is that, as toddlers, young persons should be encouraged to criticize their parents not to obligatorily obey, love and honor them. That is worse than physically abusing them (short of the physical abuse requiring a trip to the hospital emergency room), becuse minor wounds heal but when a child's innate faculty of judgment is destroyed, it's game over. My parents only partly succeeded, so I am an intelletual cripple.

But do not listen to me. I end here with a quote from the great psychoanalyst whom Dr. Sigmund Freud excommunicated from The Church OF Freudian Therapy (aka The Freudian Mafia), Dr. Sandor Ferenczi:

Example of appropriate treatment of a young person by an adult: Sandor Ferenczi wrote, in an essay evocatively titled "The Adaptation of the Family to the Child": I am reminded of an incident with a little nephew of my own, whom I treated as leniently as, in my view, a psycho-analyst should. He took advantage of this and began to tease me, then wanted to beat me, and then to tease and beat me all the time. Psycho-analysis did not teach me to let him beat me ad infinitum, so I took him in my arms, holding him so that he was powerless to move, and said: "Now beat me if you can!" He tried, could not, called me names, said that he hated me; I replied: "All right, go on, you may feel these things and say these things against me, but you must not beat me." In the end he realized my advantage in strength and his equality in fantasy, and we became good friends. (Sandor Ferenczi, "Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis", 1955, p. 75)

¶ +2023.08.15. I'm an adult, mentally healthy person. A significant portion of sentences I utter in my native language are gramatically plain wrong or very untidy, so I tend to correct myself immediately. What exercises can help me deal with this grammar issue?

Have you been away for a long time from situations where only your native language is spoken and read? If yes, what do you expect? Use it or lose it.

Go back there for a year and then revisit this question. Does that sound plausible to you?

--------

Why care about this anyway? Language is a tool. If you get your message across, it's good enough unless you need fluency in jour job.

¶ +2023.08.15. Do the mathematically gifted have a lower intuitive understanding of emotions and people?

"Normal" people like to find things they do not like about persons who are superior to them so they do not have to feel bad about themselves: "Oh, mathematical geniuses are emotionally retarded." Instead they could raise themselves up.

Well, some of mathematicians probably are emotionally limited, but many normal people are emotionally shallow and even sentimental (sentimentality is imitations of real emotions). They buy their mother dead flowers for Mothers Day because advertsing told them to show how much they love her by giving her dead flowers on Mother's day even if she is not yet dead herself too.

A poster child for an emotionally limited philosopher might be Ludwig Wittgenstein who was high functioning autistic ("Aspergers"). But his emotional limitations enabled him to have ideas that normal people almost surely never could imagine bacause thay are cognitively limited. He "saw" things even other philosophers could not imagine but they at least were able to respect him and learn from him. I have read that when they wanted him to teach at it was either Oxford or Cambridge, they had a problem: He did not have a doctorate degree. They solved the problem by having him lecture to them for a few hours and problem solved. What"normal" person could do that?

I'll tell you where to find a lot of "lower intuitive understanding of emotions and people" persons: among computer programmers. I worked as one for almost half a century. If I had my way, to get a degree in computer science, the student would be required to do a precticum as an orderly in a hosipce to get the bodily fluids of dying persons on their hands to maybe get some sense that humn beings (including themselves) are not just silicon based computers.

And don't forget about gameboys. Then there are NFL and soccer fans. Indeed all non-HVAC fans of sublunary stars. There are always exceptions to every rule, of course, but every caricature that works expresses truth → jsut exaggerrated. Back in 1980 I coined a phrase: persons whose imaginative horizon is limited by neo-feudalism in flying fortresses which are not real B-17 heavy bombers, and who shoot down pixelated death stars on their two couch potatoes drinking red bull and stuffing their faces with nacho chips on their bleeding edge personal computers &91;in many cases bought with their hard-commuting daddies' credit cards...] but they would never suit up and fly through Luftwaffe strafing and triple-a to bomb the ball bearing factories at Schweinfurt-Regensburg with 30% casualties. Wimps!

So where will you find real emotions? Not in the executive suite. MBAs need hospice practicums, too – maybe practicums as minimum wage workers instead: cleaning office building toilets on 3rd shift.

But don't forget about sociopaths and conmen. They have acute understanding of emotions and people, to be able to rip them off.

For real emotions, how about nurses? Of course, however they pay the bills or fail to, a person can be emotionally deep – even hanging on a cross.

¶ +2023.08.15. Am I biased to think that I don't need a full-time job, and I will write full time? I'm 20 and a beginner. I feel like anything other than writing is a waste of time.

Simple answer: If you can pay your bills, go for it! Do the minimum necessary to "reproduce individual and species life", or what I call "pragmatic agenda" which is anyting that is beneath your aspirations in life. And if you do have to work, try to get the highest possible effetive hourly wage and spend as little of it as possible, so you will have to do as little of it apossible.

If you feel like anything other than writing is a waste of your time, and that sounds entirely plausible to me, waste as little of your time as possible. Remember: If you don't mess it up, you will not need to clean it up.

The fewer your "material" needs, the less money you will need to maintain the all important bottom line in the black. And you don't need to be a hermit: Live in an efficiency apaertment not in a MacMansion. If you like fine things which are expensive, have few of them. Buy one knife, one fork and one spoon: maybe genuine Bauhaus design of Georg Jensen silver (or even better: individually crafted by as master independent silver or goldsmith). Own one coffee cup and don't drop it and if it cost you $100 it will be cheaper in the long run. Wear clothes until they wear out and do not care at all about fashion which costs unnecessary money. A person can live well on not much money if they follow the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's dictum:

"Less is more." (He also said: "God is in the details.")

¶ +2023.08.15. What are some things that graduation speech speakers tend to avoid saying so as not to sound cliché or trite?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick
Bradford McCormick
Knows English

I don't know.

I was forbidden to attend my high school graduation because I had tried to sabotage the school's yearbook by captioning a picture of their worshipped football team charging up the field: "We are the hollow men."

I chose to not attend my Yale graduation 4 years later (1968) and instead in my cap and gown costume stood at the gate and collected donations for Quaker Vietnam War Relief from people (including my father) who did attend ($130 in th can by the end of the morning).

I cannot tolerate being a member of an audience. People should keep social distance even if they are not infectious.

[ Pissture(good typo!) of Martin Luther King's "March onWashington" audience ]

The more there are, the lesss each is worth.

The is one commencement address which I have listened to on YouTube which favoraly impressed me:

[ Admiral William McRaven's Univ. of Texas commencement address YouTube video ]

Keep it short and sweet. Send it out as an email deck of powerpoint slides and ask for comments by return email

When I worked in an offce I wondered if double arm amputees got a pass from attending "all hands" meetings.

But a lot of people seem to like being 2-legged sheep in a herd, and, needless to say, the "Leaders" get off on being adulated by large numbers of people who are less than themselves so their opinions are not worth very much, are they?

¶ +2023.08.15. How would you demonstrate your exceptional intelligence without relying on verbal or written communication?

There are many knids of inelligence and, of course, it is not polite to assert oneself is more intelligent than others.

I recently watched a YouTube video about the mathematical genius John von Neumann. Somebody asked him some mathematical question or other. According to Dr. Edward Teller, another highly brilliant physicist, von Neumenn looked up toward the ceiling and Dr. Teller said his head literally looked like a very poserful computer was running in his head, and after a minute von Neumann gave the answer to the problem. Nobody else in the whole world could have done it. Teller himself was brilliant. What struck him was the nonverbal "communication" of what vonNeumann's physical movement, facial expression, whatever, conveyed in tht minute. Does this make sense – I haven't really captured it. But what conveyed von Neumann's genius was not words either verbal or written, but his gestures.

Now people don't like it when I come across as thinking I am more intelligent in some way than they are, and I am no Teller or von Neumann. Ii did not even make "National Merit Semifinalist" on my SATs. But I think I hve an exceptional intelligence in esthetic sensitivity. My special inerest is a certain kind of pottery. And it's not even all pottery. I wouldn't try to judge the ceramics in The Palace of Versailles or Wedgewood. B

ut in his one narrow area i have an ability to judge the quality of a potter's work better than anybody else I have ever met and probably they wouldn't care either. It's a mstter of touch and it can't really be put into words. My mother was an idiot savant artist but I did not inherit any of her freehand drawing ability. But maybe she also had an esthetic sensibility. She had only a 5.5th grade education, and she was high functioning schizophrenic (nd highly intrusive) so one will never know.

But this intelligence I claim – and which offends peple because nobody is supposed to think they are superior – also shows in other ways. Ther is an extremely erudite university professor with whom I can in no way compete bibliographically. But he put together a website that looks – to my sensibility – klutzy. He does not seem to see the difference or care. I would occasionally rework some of his web pages because they seemed esthetically poor quality to me. He seemed to like this some times but also to not really care much about it. He could probably "run rings around me" talking about Max Weber but I htink he would be clueless if I tried to share my experienceof a piece of pottery with him (maybe I am wrong"). So I do think that while in very important ways he is more intelligent than me, I think in anothe way I am more intelligent than him.

Then there is intelligence in action. It can be a football quarterbck who wins the game despite his team being down by 10 points with one minute left on the clock (Johnny Unitas). Or a military officer who comes up with what people even csll "brilliant" battle plans (George S Patton or Wlliam Tecumseh Sherman).

Somebody recently asked a question here on Quora about art criticism, whether one can describe in words what makes a certain work of art good or not or whatever. I think much art criticism is not worth much. "The golden mean" does not impress me, especially since I once Iread that The Parthenon's steps are actually slightly "bowed" to LOOK flat. So much for that paragon of "The golden mean".

But I thought about it and came up with the answer. I think verbal description, criticism etc fails at a certain point, just like if one asks anybody why they are doing something and you "drill down" far enough they will run out of answers. Somebody said, and I;ve lost the reference:

"**Where words fail, music speaks.**"

That is the answer to music criticiam., and by extension art criticism and the present question.

That is my answer to this question. And as a clue, ( consider myself to be "poetry blind" as well as seeing in certain inds of ceramics things nobody else apparently does. OK, I just remember ed the old Schlitz beer advertising slogan which I think does not apply to their product:

"When it's right, you know it. When it's good you feel it."

¶ +2023.08.14. Why are those prescription medication commercials on TV so annoying?

I do not like capitalism. I am not a dupe. I was a student and later personal friend of one of Marshall McLuhan's close friends, the professor who introduced him to American academia. So much for credentials.

I do not find "those prescription medication commercials on TV so annoying". Actualy I do not watch television but I do see a lot of these ads on Youtube. There is no free lunch except for CEOs so I accept the ads as the price for listening to professors criticize them.

But I also have another angle: Back in 1983 I ws working in IBM Reseearch. I knew a young man who was a coworker who was pretty messed up. He had a PhD from Yale but was a sci fi simpleton. He had ulcerative colitis. It was so bad that he had surgery and has had to wear an ostomy bag for the rest of his life. Do you understnd that?

So when I see an ad for an ulcerative colitis drug, I wonder if it might have enabled this young man to defecate normally like me and probably also thee instead of having to put up with an ostomy bag all day every day. Would you like that?

¶ +2023.08.14. What is the reason for the decline in enrollment for Computer Science majors and what can be done to reverse this trend?

I worked for half a century as a computer programmer (including in IBM Reseearch) among persons who often had masters degrees in computer science.

I have no idea about current enrollment figures.

But two very important things:

(1) Studying the social implications (aka "ethics") of computer technology needs to be part of the curriculum, starting with MIT Prof. of Computer Science Joseph Weizenbaum's classic book: "Computer Power and human Reason: From judgment to calculation" (WH Freeman, 1976), and

(2) A practicum workng as an orderly in a hospice needs also to be required so that these persons will have some sense of what it means to be a mortal person living on earth by getting the bodily fluids of dying people on their hands as well as writing algorithms.

––––

The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done. (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

¶ +2023.08.13. Have you ever used the Internet Archive's Great 78 Project website to listen to digitized recordings? What was your experience like?

No.

But I have been archiving my personal website with them since before 2000 and by accident I was listening a few months ago to some of their BBC radio recordings and I came across one of the very most important things I have ever heard or seen or read in my life, which I transcribed and appaers below. I apply it to the current shame in Ukraine bur also generally. Also appended one of their very old logo images

....it was in Bosnia, the biggest single act of ethnic cleaning I had witnessed to date.... and there was an old man who stopped to talk to us.... and he was 80 years old and he looked as though he had already died.... and I asked him do you mind if I ask you Are you a Croat or a muslim? And he said, "I'm a musician".... (BBC World Service, June 26, 2022 03:00AM-06:00AM BST, Internet Archive)

[ Old Internet Archive logo gid ]

¶ +2023.08.13. Will you describe an experiment you've taking part in?

I don't want to be part of anybody's experiment but I will welcome an opportunity to talk with them as peers. That said, of course if I had cancer I might want to be part of a medical test but that would be my body, not my mind, not my soul, not my spirit, not me. I had too much enough being a child of parents, a pupil of teschers and an employee of bosses – to borrow a phrase from Sen. Joseph McCarthy: one of them is one too many. Are all men created equal and endowed by their creator with the right to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness or are some animals more equal than others?

Finally, in invasive psychology or other tests, unless it is for something like "shut in syndrome", the testers should first test on themselves, their mothers, their intimate partners and their bosses. This would especially apply to the people who want to implant networked computer chips in people's brains but they may be so foolish as actually to try in on themselves, so. like with The Marquis de Sade, one man's golden rule may be torture for another. etc.

¶ +2023.08.13. What is the word for someone who is neither an optimist or pessimist, but just realistically sees things as they are without getting worked up about them?

There may not be "a" word.

Level headed

Unflappable

Disinterested (which is NOT the same as "uninterested"!)

Non-partisan

Keeps cool under pressure

Clear-sighted

Teflon(?)

The "poster child" for this is the pro football quarterback who is behind by 10 with one minute left on the clock and he wins the game with "Hail Mary" passes. Or the place kicker who comes in with only one play left before the clock runs out and his team is behind by 2 and he kicks a field goal from his own 40 yard line. And probably Harry Houdini, too.

--------

"A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel." (Robert Frost, cited by Barak Obama)

¶ +2023.08.13. The larger the number of employees, the more mechanistic the organization will tend to become. Can this problem be overcome?

Yes it can but it's not easy.

First have a project that is worth doing and is doable. In other words, inspire the people to want to do it.

Then organize the people into small enough groups that nobody feels like a nobody, lead by example and encourage initiative.

I don't know the details, but IBM must have had a very large number of people working to produce System 360, and ditto Boeing and the 747. I had no experience with either of those things. By the time I worked in IBM, System 360 had become System 370 and that was mutating in ways I did not like. I did hear that apparently there was still enthusiasm among the hardware engineers. They named their 3031 test machine "PKGOBABY" (PK for Poughkeepsie). Obviously they were still excited about their work.

In the software area things had changed. It had become more "mechanistic". But I became involved in an exception situation: The company had a must-fix problem big time. It had to be done right and fast. Most of the fix was hardware but there was a small change needed to the software. Again, it had to be done right. It was in an area I had previously worked and mangerment knew them and I did not get along with each other. So they threw procedures to the wind. They asked me to do the fix and they promised me the regular people in the area would have no say in what I did. I produced the fix. The people did not like it. But it was important enough to management that they kept their side of the deal.

So yes, the larger the organization the more depersonalization there tends to be. But when push comes to shove sometimes that becomes a luxury they can't afford.

Look at politics. America is not a democracy. It is a representativocracy: A democracy of representatives. The ancient greek polis (city state) was a real democracy: small enough that the people governed, not that they appointed representatives to govern for them, which really means: govern them. I do not have any say in America's government but it has a lot of say in me (I do not like it but I can't do anything about it).

There are too many people in the world; The humanistic way to reduce the population would be by discouraging people from having children but provide rich social support for everybody currently living. The four horsemen (war, famine, psetilence and plague) may have a different idea if we don't do the right thing. But people will give up just about anything except for reproducing.

[ Where's Waldo picture here ]

-––––

I expect to be skewered on a stick for posting this comment, but here it goes. I never wanted children for a lot of reasons, never had them, and never regretted my decision for one minute and I'm decades past menopause. When I was a teenager, I saw my mother's pendulous breasts, flabby belly and my grandmother's prolapsed uterus, quickly figured out the reason, and decided I wanted no part of that. Humans are in no danger of dying out. There will always be women who, for some unfathomable reason, lust after the idea of getting pregnant and giving birth – I'm just not one of them. And if humanity doesn't succeed in doing self in, within a few decades the artificial womb will have been perfected, and articles like this one will be a historical curiosity and a moot point. (Letter to the Editor, NYT, "Opinion: After Birth: How Motherhood Changed My Relationship With My Body", +2019.01.19)

¶ +2023.08.13. What are some benefits of creating a PowerPoint presentation with automatic timed slides?

What an interesting idea! When I worked in an office, managers like to hear themselves speak by holding intermniable, logorrheic meetings.

If the dude had said up front: "My powerpoint slides are timed to change every minute and there are 20 of them so you will not have to put up wtih me for over 20 minutes, I promise.", then at least I would have known how much wasted time I had to endure. Do double arm amputees get a pass from attending all hands meetings?

I thnk it's a great idea. Give the presenter an incentive to keep it short and sweet. Better, of course, to not have any meeting but just send out the powerpoint presentation as an email attachment to each person and ask them to reply again by email with any issues or other comments.

Less is more. (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architect)

¶ +2023.08.13. What does it mean to admire someone? Like what do you feel when you feel admiration specifically?

"Admiration" sounds sentimental to me, and sentimentality is the cause of much trouble in this world such as people like critic of the Saudi Arabian government Jamal Khsahoggi who went into the Saudi Istanbul Emabssy one fine day to get an early Valentine's Day card for his true love and came out in body parts when he could have safely lived in sin with her on New York's upper east side and eveybody feels sorry for him.

Admiration, like being offended says more about the person who puts on the act than about the object of their judgment.

I have actually known one person in my life whom I respet and if I was a sentimental sop I guess I would admire: I knew him for half a century, and he even was my boss at work for some time, so I really know who and what he was. He was AN ETHICAL GIANT. I have never met anyone else like him (and I hope never to have to again!). All his life he suffered for it. All he needed to finish the job would have been to be tied to a pole atop a pile of firesood and burnt like Giordan Bruno. In no way do I "admire" him. I pity him.

The United Stes of America is a defective country and it showed its true colors in how it treated this person. The Federal Government even persecuted him. As a person with many disabilities (but I very keen mind; he wa a computer programer and IBM Field Engineers highly respected him) he thought he could find safety working for a Federal Agency invloved with social services. Among othe shings, he was totally color blind, a condition so rare that Johns Hopkins Hospoital did reserach on him. So The Federal Governmen assigned him a job task that required color discrimination in order to fire him from his job for nonperformance. It was a race to the finish line and he beat them by being able to take early retirement the day before they were going to fire him. Besides being an ethical giant, if I was an employer I would have paid anything to get this man on my tam –- that;s how excellent a worker he was and he got fired from another job for doing such good work that the people above him who were toddies feared he was building a power base in the company against them

So I do not in any way admire this man. I do, however, highly respet him and each day I pray to not hav eto be ethical,. I still hope to live before I die and I do not consider suffering to be living.. (Rrose Sélavy)

Recently I learned something Ive been looking for and hoping for for a long time: A board of inuiry has confirmed tht everybody's favorite person to admire, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. did plagiarize on his doctoral dissertation. Now let us out famous men and our fathers who wer before us – not out them just sexually, but all the drity laundry in their lives tha lets people "admire" them, like plagiarizing on ther doctoral dissertation.

There are pwerons who seem credible to me who argue that Mahatma Gandhi, everybody's favorite peaceul protestor incited others to do violence while hs sat cross legged and cheswd his gums. Put your dentures in, man.

But what's in a word? So I'll say I admired Malcolm X, who urged people to take individual iniiative in their lives, not believe in a pie in the sky. The promised land, the light a tthe end of the tunnel, is a Vietcong with a flashlight.

I will no cite the source but it's a principle I try to live:

Here, let's engage work as the work of peers.

Shakespeare lived an ordinary life, just like you.

Let those who wish to be 2-legged sheep follow their Judas goat. I prefer to follow the audit trail, and the physicist Niels Bohr's advice to his students:

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion."

How can you go wrong if you treat everything anybody (including your mother and you boss and youreligious leader) wants you to believe that way? Honor thy father and moher? Study them and yourself as anthropological specimens.

All known cultures have in one way or another depersonalized as well as personalized, so that no human culture has been worth preserving the way it was – although all have been worth improving. (Walter Ong, "Fighting for life", p. 201

¶ +2023.08.13. What is the difference between rationality and intelligence versus feelings and intuition when it comes to decision making processes in life?

THis is a false dichotomy that helps perpetuate most people's meaningless lives.

Every fact has an emotional motivation. Every emotion asserts something about the world. find an exception. I once too a class from one of the founders of modern philosophy of science, Norwood Russell Hanson. He had also been a fighter pilot in World War II. He said that once in his life he had experienced "sense data", i.e., the exception to my rule above: when his plane had crashed and one of his eyeballs was dislocaed in its socket.

So the question becomes: What are your emotions asserting about the world, and what are the emotions underlying your denotative discourse? Not where most people want to go, right?

"The cat is on the mat" What could be less emotional than that? It's during the Black Death and you see this agent of the devil and you kill it. Contrast somebody petting their little furry friend. One may call both perceived and cathected objects "cats" but that does not address the issue.

Professor Hanson argued that many things are duckrabbits:

[ Duckrabbit here ]

What you see depends onthe theoretical and ideological background you bring to it.

Well, where does it all end? People say that modern intellectualized life is meaningless so we should all worship God. If you don't buy that, as Fiedrich Nietzsche argued: Man would arther have the void for his purpose than be devoid of purpose.

But if you see that all facts are assertions of values and all values are assertions of facts, then the issue becomes to investigate you rbeliefs since "wherever you go, here you are". If life truly was without value, you would have sunk into such a deep depression that only you rautonomic nervous system would keep you breathing (seals hav eto will to breathe or else they die, unlike huan who, if you hold you breath until you pass out your autonomic breathing reflex should kick in and if don't you didn't are anyway).

I do no wan to hav eany "values" in my life because genrally what "values" mean is somebody ants me to give them unpaid labor for what they want and evento die for their wants.

Nobody needs anything. You c=do no need to brethe. You wan tto breathe. You may want very stongly tobreathe. Bu nobody needs anything.

In making decisions one should rty as clearly as possible to thematize what they feel and that they believe is hte case. Apply comparative ethnography, and realize what you are doing. Ah, but he 2 epreceding sentences were not honest: I want you or at leat me to "In making decisions one should ry as clearly as possible to thematize what they feel and that they believe is hte case. Apply comparative ethnography," I could jsut as well believe in the Koran and sever a Parisian public school teacher's hed from his torso for insulting the prophet by showing Charlie Hebdo cartoons in a middle school class room per official French educaional policy and even afte he asked anyone who might be offended to leave the room. Do you know about Samueal Paty?

Living is emotional cogntive volition. Take it or leave it. Nothing means anything, including your government's foeign policy and whatever you parents told you. Meaning does not exist: only facts exist and they have no meaning in themselves: meaning becomes and then eegrades into more of the same old same old. Having a creative idea (of petting you cat or dog) is the only place where meaning can be found: in the act, but as soon as the act is over it just becomes more of the vast semiotic smorgasbord of humanity. What do you like to eat? "The past is a bucket of ashes." (Carl Sandberg?) This posting is self-referential.

¶ +2023.08.13. Why is imagination ridiculed so much?

In the land of hte blind, the one-eyes man is surgically operated on at birth to remove hie eye and make him healthy, whole and most important: normal like everybody else.

America has always been largely an anti-intellectual country. George Wallace and Spiro Agnew: Ingellectuals have pointy heads and can't even ride a bicycle straight.

Ordinary people are close to the edge of hopelessness rrying to live "he American Dream" (I wa born in 1946 and was childreaeed in split-level America where I seem to recall our nextdoor neighbor died in he line of duty of a haert attack n his ride-on lawn mower.) If you have an hour commute each day to offie cubicle work and back in traffic jams, are you cgoing to be enthusiastic about "imagination"?

I never bought it and I paid the price. In school I had a brilliant mind and go invlunutary celibacy. My 8th grade teacher even THREATENED me for showing intellectual initiative. I will end here with that. Normal people don't like wha tthey can't understand because they are "subconsciously" afraid that what they are doing might no tbe so great. They don't wnt to hear that thir lives are empty. If a man can' have a meaningful life, he can cook the burgers on the grill on The 4th of July:

[ Daddy grilling for family ]

Compare this with:

[ Duchamp Fountain and Kandinsky painting here ]

"Come down of your high horse! What do you think you are? Speak normal words! You just live in your hdad! What's wrong with you? ...."

"Help keep America beauiful. get a haircut!"

[ Mike Renko document here ]

¶ +2023.08.13. Do you have any advice on preparing yourself mentally and emotionally for teaching jobs in Korea?

I do not know but I have read that Americans are no always welcome. Example of Cold War ally South Korea sentiment about U.S. 2002 foreign policy (NYT, 22Dec02, p.WK4. Reuters photo). Sign from a restaurant window: Not everybody feels his way and he sign is from 2002 but be careful to not be "an ugly American".

[ c9/jpg/ANW-SK021222.jpg ]

Be respectful.

¶ +2023.08.12. How does one become an expert on human behaviour? Is it possible to do so by only completing an undergraduate course in psychology,

Some persons with little or no formal education are more expert on human behavior then some perosns with Ph.D. or Psy.D degrees. Especially in a field like psychology as opposed o physics, there is a lot of pseudo science which is not helpful except for some people to collect a paycheck. Phrenology, anyone?

There ar different kinds of experts. One kind is con-artists, sociopaths, fhishers, you name its. Another kind is the old peasant woman who is full of earthy wisdom. Some people with degrees are really smart. I can name maybe two of three out of many I've come across. But it's not their formal education. That just allows them to collect patient fees from insurance companies (conversely, for the patient to not have to pay for therapy out of pocket). Also, one size does no fit all. A therapist who is greaat for person X may be harmful to person Y or "not do anything one way of hte other" for person Z.

Just because a man wears the right suit does not mean he has the right stuff. Women and other, ditto. And you can't always judge a book by its cover and sometimes you can but it means something different from what it looks like.

¶ +2023.08.12. Is it possible to explain great works of art? Or is there an nth degree that simply is not explainable?

I think this is a very good question. In part because so much is written about art. Blah, blah, blah....

Let's take every art theorist's poster child: "The goldan mean". Does it really matter if a building's facade can somehow be drawn with lines connecting whatever with whatever or not to show it's got the golden mean? I am an art connoisseur [a very few carefully delimited areas, not "general"]. Been there, done that. Some of the most highly prized artworks in the world are old japanese tea bowls that were irregular to start with and then got broken and somebody glued them back together (albeit with gold for adhesive) and all the scars are still showing like a man whose face had been visited by the mafia. And on top of that, some of the bowls wer not made by master potters but by child forced labor illiterate peasant boys in Korea. have read that the Parthenon's stairs are all bowed to look flat – got that? where does the golden mean fit in there? Can you warp it?. Then there is psychological research that if you take a picture of a pretty face and split it down to middle and flip one side so that you have a PERFECTLY symmetrical face, people will not like it as much as the slightly irrecgular original.

Some things in art can be explained. And the more you know the more you see. But I do not think beauty can be explained. And I do not aways set myelf up as the arbiter: I am pretty much "poetry deaf" I "just don'tget" most poems. I have no interest in poetry, in part because I get very little out of it. It should be obvious that there are other people who are connoisseurs of poetry but might find my priceless broken teabowls of no real interest.

My guess is that a large part of appreciation of beauty and having a passion for art is "innate". Then part of it is environmental. My parents and school teachers were the most banal middle class 1950s full-wheel-hubcaps and tailfins Americans. My parents seemed so clueless that when as a teenager I found out where babies came from I wondered how I ever got here. And yet a moment's contact with fine art and hand craft as a young adult was like coming home from lifeliong internment in a prisoner of war camp. It did not take time to recognize the difference even though I had on reason to even think there might be something better than Wonter Bread (which it's a wonder they can get away with calling it bread...) and the first time I ever saw a lettuce leaf and then it was iceberg lettuce, was after college.

But I think I can say some things about art. I think music is an even more difficult thing to, let me use a better word: explicate. Of course some things seem obvious, like slow, low pitch solemn music trying to evoke respect and awe. Maybe music is like touches which vary between fist blows andd gentle caresses. So I will end with a little quote (ref. lost):

"Where words fail, music speaks."

¶ +2023.08.12. Can you share some pictures of your cat's eyes? [Pawsome Cats]

[ w/images/b/ba/MisuEyes.jpg ]

118 upvotes

¶ +2023.08.12. How does reducing the number of regular meetings impact productivity and employee morale?

Does it always? Some people get off on harming themselves. Others like to schmooze around the office water cooler instead of doing something.

When I worked in a white collar office as a computer programmer I HATED meetings and I also HATED commuting.

Why did we have meeetings? So the manager could get off on hearing himself speak. And adding insult to injury he would sometimes bring in Duncecap Donuts like dog treats and the people ate them while drinking watery coffee from styrofoam cups

Most meetings are unnecessary. They are a waste of everybody's time but managers need to do something to pretend they deserve their paychecks. Here is how I think it should work: Pay the manager a certain salary. Deduct from the manager's paycheck the TCO of every meeting he has: The hourly wages, the benefits, the loss of productivity, the whole cost to the company of the meeting. How many and how long meetings do you think that manager would hold?

I once had a young lady manager who held few meetings and hey were very short. Once she brought in almond croissants from La Petite Patisserie, Larchmont New York for the team and we could then take them back to our desks while we continued to work.

I would doze off during meetings sometimes (that was the best!). Sometimes I would need to go to the toilet to relieve mmyself both physiologically but more important to get away from the logorrhea. Do double arm amputees get a pass from having to attent all hands meetings?

Anybody who calls a meeting should approach it as if their audience was going to be only one person: The chief exectuive officer of their organization, who has no time to waste on putting up with them running their mouth off. Just because you have power to temporararily corral people with less power than you doesn't men you should. Show respect! Send out an email and ask for comments.

And as for commuting, I envied Japanese World War II kamikaze pilots who only had to make their commute once.

¶ +2023.08.12. What are some examples of positive and constructive criticism? How can someone receive this type of criticism without feeling attacked or threatened, and instead respond in a constructive manner?

Childrearing messes up most persons' heads. All they get is criticism from their parents and school teachers unless they perform tricks for them llike a dog or seal. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution did not apply to children who remained chattel, subject to almost absolute dictatorship of the adultariat. No, parents, you cannot waterboard your kids (my mother washed my hair until I was in 7th grade and I was always afraid of dying by drowning. She was a very determined lady.)

But if a child is raised (not just reared) with consistent respect his (her, other's) own judgment and parents make it clrear that hey have the clild's back if he fails at something, why should he fear criticism, whether it's constructive or not, so long as the person doing the criticiaing does not try to materially harm him, say by shutting him in a dark closet as a teacher did to me in Sunday School once?

Children need to be raised (not reared!) to identify with the creative and constructive process of living. They need to be able to look upon everything including their own past as just raw material for new creative endeavor (Exodus 3:14 as humanity's self-alienation in a primitive society). I am not who I was a moment ago unless you define me by my SAT scores or something degrading and disrespectful like that. What can we create together, learning form our past but not "identifying" with it (it would not reflect badly on me if my direct ancestor was King Vlad the Impaler, nor reflect well on me if my direct ancestor was Winston Churchill: "I am that am", and you?)

If you want people to accept criticism make sure they are – One psychoanalyst once told me the big secret for her profession which I propose is applicable to everyone everywhere and at all times:

"To be a good [whatever, in this case: "psychotherapist"] you need to be well paid and well laid."

I once had a teacher in graduate school, not perp(spelling intended) school, who was self-confident enough to accept criticism or at least he said he was: "I am big enough for students to use me as an intellectual punching bag." Me? You?

¶ +2023.08.11. If I start learning new things by force, will it improve my relationship towards studying over time?

Possibly but not likely.

For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction (Newton) If you try to learn things by force you will likely react by hating it. And one of the worst outcomes cam be that you will later take our your resentment on some innocent bystander (kicking the cat).

However! If you are lazy, and the "force" is to make an efffort you don't want to make, then it can work. Instead of kicking the cat, you kick yourself in the butt and it might wake you up. You might soon enough find it's more rewarding and even feels better to make effort than to slouch on your two couch potatoes and waste you time playing video games or drinking cheap beer watching Monday nite NFL.

What fun is there, really, in being a lump? A sheep dog really likes to exert energy herding sheep. But if as a puppy the poor animal had been imprisoned in a small cage it might not have had the will to live, much less to spend a lot of energy herding sheep. Bu try it and it might like it.

So I would suggest, and remember: all advice is cheap and you pay the price for buying it: If you don't much feel like learning anything, find somethng that looks interesting and "force" yourself to make an effort and see how it goes.

But if your teacher tells you to memorize the names of all the characters in some Charles Dickens novel, or 8 Kings of the Sargonid dynasty and you do not give a sh*t about them, memorizing them because you were forced to may make you resent learning anything (needless to say, I was made to memorize the 8 Kings of the Sargonid dynasty by a teach with two big couch pottoes → the result of a childhood wasted by such people making me do and learn things that meant nothing to me was that I resent anybody telling me to do anything and if they ever have to misfortune that the tables are turned they will suffer for it)..

There was an old rule in International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) fo Field Engineers – the dudes that fixed broken electric typewriters and computers.

"If you have to force something to fit, you are doing something wrong."

Of course that assumed what you had to work with had been made right in the first place (unlike my parents and school teachers).

¶ +2023.08.11. What can we learn from writers who have put their creative pursuits on hold to join a cause they believe in?

By strange circumstances I became a friend of the son of one of the great writers of the 20th century. We talked a lot about his father and he said two things to me which are relevant here:

(1) "It is a good thing my father did not now you [i.e., me] because he would have wasted a lot of time on you."

(2) "Other persons could have done the work he did for The United Nations, but nobody can write the books that therefore went unwritten."

You my infer my opinion on this question.

¶ +2023.08.11. Can a bonk on the head cause amnesia?

I am not a medical doctor, but my lay person's answer is: damned right!!!!!

Your mind is the only thing you have. Somehow it depends on the brain in your skull. If you value you mind (and not all humans do!), protect your brain. Do not do stupid things like "playing" football: head butting like some brutes.

But other things can cause amnesia too: I lost much of my memory working at a mind-numbing PTSD stress producing job (I also lost the will to live along with it).

America is currently being governed by a man who himself says he always had trouble with words but was "a kid who could always carry a ball".

[ Picture of Joe Biden in his football outfit here ]

And then he had two brain aneurysms each of which had a high probability of killing him. Contrast with persons who probably cannot even ride a bicycle straight (ref.: Alabama Governor George Wallace), such as Professor Noam Chomsky and Dr. Henry Kissinger. People at lesa tused to callsuch persons "eggheads". Well, I think that is accurate: don't break an egg unless you want to eat it and eating human brain matter riskes getting "mad cow disease" which destroys the consumer's brain. Yum!

If you value your mind, don't hit your head! Duh!

¶ +2023.08.10. To what extent does technology affect communication between spouses, and what proactive measures can couples take to ensure that it enhances, rather than hinders, their connection?

This is a one size does no fit all question.

Of course "tchnology" can degrade human interpersonal communicaiton and surely it ofen does.

But let's try a real tear-jerker: When the AL Qeada suicide bombers were using those commercial jet planes as kamikaze bombs to strike the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon, some passengers got off final cell phone calls to their loved ones.

Another tear jerker, this time not such advanced technology but very clever use of technology: Back in the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese dragged out one of our captured pilots for a Propaganda show. He managed to signal his situation by blinking his eyes in morse code. Somebody in the CIA figured it out.

During the Covid lockdowns there was peobbly a fair amount of [satisfying] phone sex.

All technologies are humanistically "polymorphous perverse". There are edge cases like Zyklon-B but ther is probably some humanly constructive use even for that.

More often, it's the quality of the humans not the quality of the tachnology which is the decisive factor. Not primarily: what communicaiton technology are you using, but how are you using it? Obviously caresses are better than phone calls, IF both are equally sincerely lovingly meant. But we can't always have everything we awnt in this eorld, and smiling face tell lies without any advanced technology. (Listen free to the old soul song free on Youtube: "Smiling faces sometimes" by The Undisputed Truth)

¶ +2023.08.10. What would the 2.0 of human imagination be like? What could it do that ours can't do?

This sounds like the kind of foolishness gmeboys with Ph.D.s in computer science but no sense of what it means to be a mortal human concoct in their benighted hyper-technical skill matched with emotional retardation. Some sort of confused ideation that their conscious life is some kind of computer application tht can be upgraded with a new release or some other nonsense, read: non sense. And this is dangerous because these people produce computer applications that multinational corporations like Alphabet use to jerk the world's ordinary citizens around. Some even lust to implant networked computer chips in everybody's brain to "enhance" them to become zombies. Will they implant these chips in their own, their mother's and their boss's brains before doing unto others (the golden plated rule: Do unto others what you can get funding to do to them)

Human imagination is unsurpassable. Imagination is precisely going beyond everything that exists. Nothing and nobody, including any sort of Supreme Deity can go beyond going beyond everything that exists. Actually, it's a little more complicated than that: Imagination is, metaphorically, a recursive function:

Whatever is imagined becomes existent and therefore becomes just more existing stuff for imagination to go beyond, in a positive feedback loop.

Now, what can our current human imagination do? It cannot DO much. It has no torque. But it can envision things that never were nor otherwise would never not just not be but not be concenved of. This includes everything from subatomic particles to the heat death of the universe to Supreme Deities, the toilet paper you used to wipe your anus the last time you defecated (you do defecate, don't you?) and everything else. And this has a very practical real world payoff: The advertising design genius (i.e., a human with an imagination and who used it) Milton Glaser said: "We were excited by the very idea that we could use anything in the visual history of humankind as influence". You can use your imagination to make an advertising slogan, or anything else. Learn about the artist Marcel Duchamp on Wikipedia, for example. Here's something I imagined:

[ Piccture of Mr. Johnson with pineapple top here ]

What can you imagine?

I am not a mathematician but I think there is a mathematical analogy: Take your "2.0 of human imagination" which you apparently have imagined in your, as you apparently naively would call it 1.0 imagination, as just one more existing thing in the world. Now imagine something beyond that. Imagination 3.0? Fine, Recurse! In imagination 1.0 you can see that that since there is no largest integer you are already beyond counting.

Wake up! Use the imagination you have. Ther can be no other. But that is not correct: You can just turn on the boob tube and watch Star Trek or Monday nite NFL or play a video game. You can radically change the imagination you have if you will get some erudition in the humanities to understand better what you have, [as opposted to just techie-ing and imagining more of the same old same old new relseases of the same old same old....] As I think it was Donald Rumsfeld said: "You go to war with the army you have" i.e., with the army you imagine you have. You have only the imagination you think you have which may just be to imagine more teenage acne pimple grade sci fi, Remember Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem if you ae a computer. –-Unless the muse on your shoulder deigns to clue you in on something "else". If you believe you are a computer you likely won't act as if you were a human being, will you? If so, you will be a ticking semiotic time-bomb: one fine day becoming either inconsistent or incomplete.

The following picture is not a joke, but it is a metaphor:

[ The muse on Edgar Allan Poe's shoulder ]

Meow!

¶ +2023.08.10. Share an observation of curriculum integration application in class or in the school. What life lessons and values have you realized and learned?

The older I get the more disgusted I become with a lot of things, including much schooling (I am now 77 years old). I have written a long, scathing and also "R-rated" document about my own mis-education in a hack perp(spelling intended) school 1958–64 if you want a lot to think about:

[ Nullius in verba | Huang ]

Curriculum: One size fits all. This has to be nonsense because each young person is different or at leat could be if various shaped pegs were not all pounded into one hole.

If I had to do it all over again I do not know what would be beome of me because I would not put up with it knowing what I know now after a lot of life experience and studyig this stuff including a doctoral disertation on how psychoanalysts in training are mistreated by their supervisiors.

When I went back to school at age 40 things were better. I may be an outlier but I feel I have a right to life.

Two examples of what I considered appropriate education, at least for me if no fo thee.

(1) Before the first session of a certain class I went up to the teacher and asked if I could write an essay on a topic tangentially relaed to the course INSTEAD, repeat: INSTEAD of doing the course work. The teacher, who at that point had no idea who i was, immediatedly told me to go do it.

(2) In working on my 2nd class doctorate, it took me years to find a dissertation topic. But when finally I did "see the light" and my sponsor said he thought "there might be disseration in it", literally the next interaction I had with the school except paying tuidion fees was when one fine morning over a year later I made an appointment with him and handed him the finished product with even the pager margins to spec. He rifled thru the some 200 odd pages I had handed him in the hall outside his office for a minute of two and then looked up over his reading glasses and told me: "Make copies and we go to the orals".

All my life I had bitched about people getting in my way. He had given me a chance to sink or swim. If I failed, I would have had no excuses, nobody to blame except myself. The few times I sought consultation from a living person, I paid public experts not associated with the school to talk with me by the hour because, not being associaed with the school, they could not hurt me.

So you can see my opinion about curriculum, at least for myself. I feel that each person – especially each "student" – should be respected and each should have an opportunity to flourish. Going back to 7th grade, I had an experienece which at the time I did not appreciate how important it really was. So I will end here with that. It really happened.

[ Mike Rentko Facebook posting here ]

¶ +2023.08.10. Being a seminarian, how do we see the connection between "mathematics" and your seminary studies?

Can you deal with some harmless humor?

Question: What gave the monk his edge as a geometer?

Answer: He had a guardian angle.

Good luck! Now many years ago, I ran an art museum gife shop. A young man appeared one day somehow looking for parttime work as a salsesclerk. He was a student at the local seminary. He was a really wonderful worker. This was 1970.

Finally, not math, but someone to study: I personally am a heretic, but one of my favorite authors, a truly great intellectual, is Walter Ong, SJ. Anything he wrote is very much worth studying.

¶ +2023.08.09. My college is far from my home, so it takes time to reach college. What should I think at that time?

It sounds like the asker has a problem. Maybe like me, they resent wasting time and just want to get the goddamned commute over and done with, but this as not Star Tre and we don't have Transporters so we have to waste our time, the precious time we have on this side of the topsoil wasting our effort getting from here to there instead of just being there always already. In a better social world, your ideal college would be within walking distance of your home. If wishes wer horses then beggars would ride.' I've been told that)

So what to do about it? (Advice is cheap but it does help sometimes.)

Maybe one size does not fit all. Suppose you have a really important term paper to write and you aren't sure what you want to say. Keep you eyes on the road ahead, but the trip may go really fast if you spend it arguing with yourself and plannign what you wan to write in that essay. What's the big difference between extended cogitation about a topic at home or on the road? Of course the bathroom is closer at home. But in this case you can make the journey fly, but do keep your eyes on the road. If taking public transportation you don't have even that problem.

But suppose you don't have anything really really really importan to think about? Can you think of something worth spending the time thinking about? If not, if it's me I think about how defective the world I live in is and how it needs to shape up and never asked me for help etcetera and so forth. But Even that is not likely to occupy 8 hours.

So you are all by yourself? Having somebody to talk with will make the time fly. Nothing on the radio you want to listen to, Ditto? You can't meditate while you drive. I'm not the kind of person who can sleep on a plane flight (if you are on public transpotation and can sleep, your problem is solved, isn't it? And you don't need to waste time sleeping at your destination then, either. I think the CIA teaches operatives how to sleep anywhere, anytime for however long. Sign me up....).

Does this help? It did take some of your time to read it if you are on your way. Next trick?

¶ +2023.08.09. Can AI essay writers replace human writers completely in the future?

Two pronged answer: (A) Can or should it?, And: (B) To what extent can it?

Anent A: AI essay writers CAN replace all human essay writers. It's easy Only have AI write essays and never human persons. Done.

But even if AI CAN replace all human essay writers, even if it could hve written Moby Dick and The Iliad, etc., the humans CHOOSE whether to LET it or instead to themselves continue to write essays, and, where THE HUMANS FEEL Ai can help, they use it as a tool, like you use toilet paper or an automobile or a scalpel. Humans will CHOOSE whether they will let AI rulle the world or whether they will deploy it a humans were deployed before 1863 in USA as slaves, or rtoday as employees ("wage-slaves").

And why might humans CHOOSE to continue to write essays? Why do I talke to my pet cat? Meow.

Anent B: AI can surely replace HACK essay writers. Humans who produce more of the same old same old. AI is better at that then humans are, so it should replace them, to free up the humans for other avtivities or for leisure (or, yes, to waste their lives watching the television ir something else useless like playing video games).

But AI is compuational. All it can do is shuffle around what is known. It cannot have a genuinely new idea. That said, since we make many carbon based objects each day which an have new ideas by copulation and artificial insemination, why not silocon based new idea capable objects in an industrial or university reserch lab not a bedroon or back alley? Then something Alan Turing once wroe to his mothe will apply:

"If we ever make a machine that really thinks, we shan't ndersatnd hos it does it."

AI can be like the proverbial monkeys on typewriters: given enough time they will generate all possble character strings and therby have created eery possible new idea. The problem is that they won't be able to recognize Moby Dick from a useless piece of word saled that is 99.99% Moby Dick and dthe rest irrelevant dictionary words that are syntactically acceptable.

Could AI have invented "the readymade", the human artist Marcel Duchamp's new idea of taking a standard issue male urinal like you can buy at your local plnmming supply store and making it a highly important work of art just by saying it was? To the best of my knowledge nobody ever had such an idea before him. Or, if you are into the sciences, could ai have producedThe Theory of General Relativity, or in math – ready for this one: Could AI have peoduced and proved Godel's Incompleness heorem? I am not smart enough to have followed his proof but my guess is that the AI would fail.\ for stictly "logical" reasons inherent in the Theorem itself.

But I am willing to admit that since I, nor any othe rhuman, created the world, so we can never really understand it, anything is possible epecially if its not good for me (or for thee?). So who knows, one day an AI in a brown shirt may conquer the world: "Heil Hal!"

¶ +2023.08.08. When our perceptions of bias, become biased too, how is (AI) to sort it all out?

What AI should do is as far as possible report facts and also "wihout fear or favor" (an old New York Times newspaper mantra that is), describe all the different biases and thus give the human the best possible background for making an informed decision. The AI also needs to give citation information for what it presents, to enable the human to dig deeper.

Everybody is biased all the time ("one man's trash is another man's treasure",etc.), but the flavor of the biases can range from bigoted to open-minded, From woke or MAGA to wide-awake, from partisan to ethnographer. AI needs to restrain from choosing sides, including in contested areas such as the current Ukraine war.

"A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel." (Robert Frost, cited by Barak Obama)

"You shoud take every statement I make as a question not an assertion." (Niels Bohr; instruction to his students)

Those are good advice for both humans and AIs to practice (or not).

¶ +2023.08.08. Who can help me understand all my problems and try to solve them?

A public forum is not likely a very good place to ask this quesion. Also the asker has not given any details. Can you find someone you can really trust? Some not all parents. Some but not all teachers. Some but not all priests. Some but not all mental health professionals....

Advice is cheap but sometimes it helps. Always critically evealuate advice from anybody: your mother, your teachers, your boss, your government and even yourself because what you think are your own opinions may be things you were socially conditioned by others to think were your own thoughts and feelings but really are theirs. You may think you have more problems than you have because somebody made you think badly of yourself (I had an intrusive mother). Not necssaruly, but maybe?

But a couple things to maybe do:

Write a list of all your problems. It doesn't have to be pretty and you need to keep anybody else from seeing it. It's none of their business (there are a lot of busybodies in this world, who like to mind other people's business, including some but not all parents). Then prioritize: What do you feel is the most important problem? 2nd most iportant. What problems are not really worth doing anything about even if it "hurts somebody's feelings" or they will "judge" you for it → unless they will materially harm you and then it's an important problem.

Don't do anything foolish, but do something that seems like it might accomplish something. We learn by doing. We improve with practice. Doing nothing accomplishes nothing unless what you aren't doing wasn't worth doing anyway.

Rarely but sometimes problems do go away if you don't do anything about them. Rarely but it happens. This does not apply to physical ailments or unpaid bills, obviously. But people's birthdays do pass even if you don't give them the obligatory gift which is supposed to make you happy but is just another annoyance for you.

¶ +2023.08.08. If you lost your ability to speak, would training a parot to talk for you be an effective form of communication?

I'd recruit my pet cat to Meow for me.

¶ +2023.08.07. How does storytelling impact memory retention and learning?

Memorize this:

"kittens lost mittens Three their little"

Having fun?

Now memorize this:

"Three little kittens lost their mittens"

Easier?

Humans think in terms of stories, or causal chains, or explanatory chains. We connect things and that makes them easier to remember (because they make sense). But also notice the rhetorical trick in the little story: "kittens" rhymes with "mittens?. Remember one but you forget the other but you remember it rhymes so you might get it back.

Bards were the Encyclopedia Brittanica of pre-literate oral tribal societies. They told the tribe's story and they rememberred it because it was a story.

Is this better than what ChatGPT gives you?

1 viewAnswer requested by

Tommy Kes

¶ +2023.08.07. Isn't peer reviewing not a very good idea? I mean, it makes sense when scientists do it since they don't have anyone who knows better, but the students in schools have teachers.

One very good way to help students become critical thinkers not 2-legged sheep is to assign them to critique each other's wotk. Then the teacher can critique their criticques:

"Are you sure that paper isn't worse than you have written it is? Go back and review it again, please. I do not believe in grades but I have to grade you. Flattery will get you an "F". You get an "A+" for totally destroying bad work, unless the person is mentally retarded, and then of course you should be gentle with them and I will understand that and give you a good grade. Otherwiese, you get the appropriate grade for appropriately judging the other person's work. If it deserves an "A+" and you do not recognize its brilliance, you get a "C". If it's rubbish and you don't rip it apart, you get a "D". But if you try to kiss up to anybody, including me your teacher, you get n "F", because few things are worse than being a brown-noser. Hurting somebody's feeling is not doing material harm; it's helping them be true to themselves because hurt feelings are not real emotions just manpulative social games. Nobody can insult you. But you can be so lacking in self-esteem as to feel insulted. Now, plese review that paper again. And have the courage to accept honest criticism of your own work, too. Remember, you get two ratings: A grade for achievement and also a rating for effort: If you don't welcome honest criticism you get an unsatisfactory for effort."

¶ +2023.08.07. What impact do STEM-focused developmental toys have on a child's interest and proficiency in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics?

This should be obvious.

Other than chance encounters,
We can only encounter in reality
What we have reviously encounered in fantasy.
(–Gordon Hirshhorn, 1929–2012)

But I feel an important question is what KIND of STEM-focused developmental toys? Does becoming one of the greatest architects in history count? If yes, Frank Lloyd Wright played with Froebel blocks. And he had something else going for him: A mother who always told him and treated him as somebody special.

Some kids probably thrive on things like being given an old clock to take apart (watch the mainspring!!!!), and, mirabile visu, maybe even put back together again.

Some kids might thrive on computer programming: especially if the computer programming language makes sense (not waking nightmares like C++; and Pascal is no fun, either.). Ken Iverson invented APL (A Programming Language) specifically for education. I like to describe all the wierd special characters as like friendly little animals that want to play with you [APL requires a special keyboard, see below].

Both Froebel blocks and APL (or SIBM ystem 360 Assembly language), albeit in different ways, have an important virtue: The child can make something of his (her, other's) OWN out of it. Star Wars toys are probably far, far worse then Raggedy Ann dolls, because they tell the child what to do not the child tell them what to BECOME.

There is an old story about nomadic pre-literate tribes: Kids learned self-confidence by riding a horse: They told the horse what to do, not the other way around. I had an intrusive mother: "Do this, Bradford! Do that, Bradford! What are you doing, Bradford?" ...." In the "prep" school I attended, I was probably the brightest kid (a teacher THREATENED me in 7th grade for showing intellectual initiative). Number 2 was also very intelligent (he went to MIT). His father used to take him to work sometimes: He played in the hospital morgue.

Anything that is ADVERTISED as a "STEM-focused developmental toy", be suspicious of it. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. Even more important: Don't tell your kid what to think or feel. Don't tell him (her, other) to love or respect you. Respect his judgment. That is the root of self-cofiddnce to explore the world: the child's own autochthonous faculty of judgment. I will leave you with two pictures. My childrearing, and Jesus Christ's childrearing. He did not grow up to be a great scientist but something else great. I grew up arriad of everything, so I accomplished little.

[ Pictures of Foie gras goose and Object presenting here ]

And if you have any questions about "discipline", here's something from the great psychoanalyst Dr. Sandor Ferenczi:

Example of appropriate treatment of a young person by an adult: Sandor Ferenczi wrote, in an essay evocatively titled "The Adaptation of the Family to the Child": I am reminded of an incident with a little nephew of my own, whom I treated as leniently as, in my view, a psycho-analyst should. He took advantage of this and began to tease me, then wanted to beat me, and then to tease and beat me all the time. Psycho-analysis did not teach me to let him beat me ad infinitum, so I took him in my arms, holding him so that he was powerless to move, and said: "Now beat me if you can!" He tried, could not, called me names, said that he hated me; I replied: "All right, go on, you may feel these things and say these things against me, but you must not beat me." In the end he realized my advantage in strength and his equality in fantasy, and we became good friends. (Sandor Ferenczi, "Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis", 1955, p. 75)

&&91; Pictures of SApL keyboard and "prime number" program here ]

1 viewAnswer requested by

Ikram Yameen

¶ +2023.08.07. What is healthy communication?

My opinion which is not universally shared: "Healthy" communication is where two self-accountable individuals freely meet – in mutually respectful peer discourse. If one party is older and/or has more social power than the other, the former needs to leave their "clout" (parent, teacher, boss...) in the parking lot. "Influence" only by, to quote Jurgen Habermas, "the unforced force of the better argument." Enjoy a leisurely meal together with good bread and good wine. "All men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" Question mark.

¶ +2023.08.07. What makes a university relevant in the 21st century?

What DOES or what WOULD BE DESIRABLE TO make a university relevant in the 21st century. I know little about this because I try to avoid living in the present age of Wokisn and MAGAism, both of which I find both (a)threatening and (b) making life not worth living. So what DOES make a university relavant may be furtheriing sectarian agendas, either dissing dead white males (the "left") or pushing premarital chastity (the "right"). I will end this posting with a news article from The Ne York Times newspaper that, when I read it, I imagined I had picked up an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) off the ground and it had exploded in my face, but fortunately that was only a fantasy.

What would I as one individual mortal who does not matter, LIKE to see universities doing today: (1) Relieving the suffering of those who suffer, and (2) enhancing th joy in life of those who are not currently suffering, perferably by doing both at once, i.e., by wise older persons graciously mentoring young persons in joyous learning, some in the sciences who may desiere to cure diseases or save the planet from global overheating, others in the humanities which show how life can be savored when persons are not suffering. No tests, no grades, at least in the humanities. (In a field like surgery, obviously apprentices need to pass reality tests [not paper "exams"] to qualify as journey men (women, others) to actually make incisions in to the living bodies of their fellow mortals.) And the "atmosphere" needs to be gracious leasure, not "paying your dues". Whether study is in the arts or the sciences, everybody should enjoy leisuredly meals with good wine, good bread and good conversation. And gentle intimacy and loving pets (cats and dogs). "Luxe, calme et volupte" (Henri Matisse)

I studied what is called "philosophy" but is really mostly; sophology, i.e., the study of words people wrote about big issues, not self-reflection on what I was experiencing in vivo. I did once actually have a philosophical moment as an undergraduate (Yale, 1965). I was a sophomore taking a class on existentialism (remember that?). The teach was a full professor, and one day he lectured to us kids about human freedom. All I could think about duting his lecture was that at the end ofthe course I would have to take a final exam and be graded and I saw no freedom in that. After the class I went up to Professor Wild and very respectfully called him out for an existential self-contradiction: teaching about freedom in an unfree situation. In other words, I very politely accused him of hypocrisy. Philosophy is action. Well, what happened? He apologized to me, told me he meant no harm and let me take his graduate seminar next term.

Back to reality: We read a lot of Mr. Plato's dalogs and we talked about the content words which I found generally uninteresting but i was just a kid. In later life I figured it out: As Marshall McLuhan famously urged:

"The medium is hte message"

The message of Mr. Plato's dialogs is not the verbiage but the context: Young persons having leisuredly discussion with an older person about topics of mutual interest. Mr. Socrates did not have to publish to not perish. The "students" had no homework, no term papers, no exams, no grades: they just discussed on a take it or leave it basis. [Of course they may also have enjoyed each others' bodies on the side since we know the classical Greeks liked boys more than females who were considered partof the "oikos" [household] not the agora [the political space], so that "Platonic love" is a misnomer.)

So there you have my ideal of what I would like to see a university be in the 21st Century: Master craftspersons (aka "professors") collegially engaging with eager learners in free leisure of mutually respectful discourse, and, in some cases, getting their hands dirty in praxis. Learning brain surgery is in some important ways not like art history. But religious fundamentalism and so-called "leftist" sectarian agendas are all bad and need to be consigned to the anthropology department where all beliefs and behavioral pattersn can be studied like biochemists study microorganisms in petri dishes: both how savages dance in rare bird feather costumes around totem poes, and also senior managers in Armansi suits dance around the CEO's desks.

"All social customs are shared hallucinoses aka social psychoses." (Wilfred Bion)

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion." (Niels Bohr0

"What men are willing to put up with depends on what they are able to look forward to. " (Arnold Hauser)

Rrose Sélavy!

--------

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far – and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.08.05. Why is sending an email on a Sunday afternoon more likely to get a response?

Is this true?

If it is true, one reason my be that some people are taking an early look at what they are going to have to deal with on Monday morning. An even more likely hypothesis is that they will get your email Monday morning before they get jaded and/or overbooked.

So here is a corollary that should also be tested: Is sending an email on Friday afternoon less likely to get a response? TGIF!

My last job I was working remote with a team in Israel. I forget, but I think people in Israel have off Friday and Saturday and people here in USA of course have off Saturday and Sunday. So my favorite work day of the week was: Saturday, when almost everybody else was out. If you would have sent me an email at USA time 8AM on Saturday, you would have more likely got my attention than "during the week" – whoever's "week".

¶ +2023.08.05. What is the best way to write about your experiences? Can AI write it with you?

Well, sort of.

I think a person is well advised to treat an AI writing assistant like, if they were wealthy, they would treat a secretary.

How much do you want to write "your experiences", and how much do you just want to "supervise" like a Big Shot? 'Siri, please write my personal autobiography and send it to Random House. Thank you, Siri."

It's up to you.

¶ +2023.08.05. What is good journalism, and what are the impacts of good journalism on society?

One size does not fit all.

There are various kinds of good journalism. A lot of it, however, fits some words from Bertolt Brecht:

Student: "Happy the land tha reeds a hero."

Galileo: "No. Unhappy the land that needs a hero."

A lot of good journalism saves us from destroying ourselves. No reporter should ever need to do that but when we are in the process of destroying ourselves, we need heroes.

One example was Edward R. Murrow and Joe McCarthy. Mr. Murrow decided he had to do something to stop the destruction of the American democracy by "The Junior Senator from Wisconsin". So he huddled with his team and they went into action. Fortunately (I don't have the details but...) Willima Paley must have OK'd it.

[ Video here of Mccarthy and Murrrow ]

Then there were Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposing "Watergate".

Who will be the Edward R. Murrow to blow the cover off Mr. Biden's proxy war aginst Russia in Ukraine today?

One can go on and on about good reporters who expose the truth "nobody" wants to hear.

Conversely ther are all the reporters who are witting or unwitting agents of their government's or some other powerful institutional structure's propaganda. The New York Times today is full of them "reporting" on Ukraine when almost every sentence is a propaganda pitch. Instead of reporting that a Russian missile hit a building in the war zone, they editorialize in news stores, not the OpEd page, that a missile by the Russian aggressors was an unprovoked attack on an innocent city. And they consistently omit to report anyting bad about the Zelensky regime in Kiev, or the backstory of the United States having lied to Russia in the early 1990s that we would not push NATO "one inch east of Germany". Etc.

Many reporters are running dogs of the people in power. Some ohers are brave and tell what the people in power do not want anybody to find out about. Seymour Hersh, today. But there is often a point to b made here: Ther are real heroes who risk not being able to make hteir mortgage payment for telling the truth, an dthe are other honest reporters who know that no matter what happens they will be able to pay their bills. Mr. Hersh is probably in the latter category. The bravest reporters in war zones often sleep more safely than the soldiers in the trenches and the reporters of famines generally have enough to eat. This does not make them bad but it is always impotant to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even if it makes YOU look less "heroic".

It's sad, but if it's good news, ther eis a danger in reporting it. One runs the danger that people will extrapolate and think everyting is hunky-dory which they always want to think, i.e., not think, but which it almost never is. Maybe the best name for a good journalism newspaper would not be "The New York Times" or "Le Monde" or something like that, but: "Cassandra" And, in wartime, all governments censor the news for their selfish interest in mobilizing the populace, not having the people think objectively about what they are doing to them.

--------

"Chuchill believed the only way Britain could win the war [with Germany in 1940] was by inspiring the people with a vision of Britain's greatness.

"It could be argued that it was a con trick, that there were sophisticated people who said this was all hot air. But to the mass of the people it was an extreordinary experience. (Adam Curtis, "The Living Dead")

¶ +2023.08.05. What are some extremely funny comics/screenshots?

Funny to whom? It takes two to tango.

Also, "funny", what exactly is that?

As a young person I always found the 3 Stooges funny on the television. Larrry, Moe and Curly (?) sometimes following each other in a row in their various antics.

Then one fine day I saw something I found extremely funny but nobody else peobably saw it that way. I was an entirely unfuny situation: My Selective Service classification physical examination to see if I was fit to be killed in Vietnam.

Well, I forget much of it (it was grossly disrespectful to me), but one thing: There were 3 doctors in their white coats. I handed somebody a small envelope containing a letter from the psychiatrist for the city's criminal courts attesting that if Induced I would have mental breakdown. Soon enough I saw the 3 white coats go in a row across the stage in front of me looking fo all the world like The 3 Stooges, and I was out. For all the world they looked like Larry, Curly and Moe and I found them immensely funny. So I had a context for finding them funny.

I can't think of an example at the moment but it's a cliched scene: Somebody tells their friend a joke. Usually it's a middle-aged white male (They're generally funny, aren't they?) and he is laughing heartily at his own joke, The perosn he Tells it to just looks at him like "I don't get it". "Oh, come on, Joe, Don't you see"? No, Joe doesn't find it amusing at all.

But you want a funny comic / sceenshot. Well, what about Great Britain's recent Prime Miniater who was their Clown Prince, Mr. Boorish Johnson? A real live joke on 2 feet.

Mr. Johnson stood up in Parliament and declaimed with a straight face "I am fit to govern." MP Ian Blackfort then stood up and replied:

"A fish rots from the head"

Cool, eh?

[ pictures of Mr. Johnson with a pineapple top on top his head. and riding a bicycle down a corridor in an administrative building here ]

Enjoy!

¶ +2023.08.04. Which should be trusted more, biased survey estimates or unsupported optimistic speculations about on-ground progress?

Obviously, neither.

But if a survey is biased but was conducted scrupulously, one sometimes can "reverse engineer" the results to get some genuine information out of it.

A pedagogue who gets off on ferreting out "cheating" and honor code violations by students, if he (she, other) is conscientious, may come up with results he uses to prove that students need to be monitored more closely to detect misbehavior and punished more severely for it.

But a person interested in finding schools that stifle learning might use that data to hone in on repressive schools, figuring that the more cheating teachers find the more persecutory the teachers probably are, as opposed, which was the purpose of the survey, to show how bad students are. Same survey just differnt use.

But "upsupported optimistic speculations" have no value at all except to tell you that any person who promulates them is worthless and needs to be watched to prevent them hurting you.

Associate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who as we all know is of the black race, has said he would rather deal with an honest racist then a hypocritical liberal.

¶ +2023.08.04. What are some examples of new technologies, tools, and business best practices that can help recent graduates become experts quickly?

It is folly to try to find a trick to become an expert quickly. And "best practices" are made for mediocre people to follow and for experts to know when and why to break.

Expertise can only come with long experience based on solid knowledge.

Writing documentation is very difficult work aad documentation specialists are unsung heroes. The more something requires to be documented, the more difficult is generally is to document it. This is certainly true in computer progarmming where a super-smart-super-clever programmer can write a piece of code that works wonders but nobody can underatnd how it does it. The information superhighway is littered with production computer programs that nobody understands how they work but they are required for important ongoing functions.

So if you want to be come an expert, you need to do the work. While I do not believe the rubbish of "no pain no gain", a person generally does need to get burned to fully appreciate fire. There is no substitute for "been there, done that". But if a person can't have the right stuff they can wear the right clothes and smile.

So the first thing is to stop wanting o be an expert. Eant to become skilled at SOMETHING, something you passionately WANT to do. That's step number one. If you don't care you will never become an expert but you might be promoted to senior management anyway. Old joke in International Business Machines Corporation:

"IBM means: Idiots Become Managers"

Not all managers are idiots but wanting to be an manger as opposed to wanting to make a quality product helps you to become one.

So find something you really WANT to do an dto master, and start doing it. Put your soul and your body into it. Then the day may come when somebody is stumped on a problem or you are stumped and you think, but you don't know how: "Oh, yeah, I've got an idea what that migh be...."

Expertise is often something you only realize after you have been working on things for a long time and not giving any thought to "becoming an expert". "How do you know, boy?" "Well ,Sir, I've done it. Any problem?" "Uhhh...."

¶ +2023.08.04. As grown-ups, do you learn/admire something from children that you once knew yourself, but now forgotten due to mind's conditionings ?

I did not have a childhood. Those years of my life were wasted by my parents and school teachers. A highly intrusive mother (as a teenager she forbade me to squeeze my acne pimples because she reserved that for herself to do each evening when I came home form school, etc.), a clueless father, and –well, this is an exaggerration but so what – Gestapo teachers, or as they called themseves after 1863 in USA: my masters.

The School was associated with The Episcopal Church but one good thing I had wa religous freedom because the faculdy did not care about spirituality: they worshipped graven images: varsity lacrosses and tackle football team shiny plated victory trophies. they eventually built a large locked glass front reliquary for these sacred treasures.

[ Picture of trophy cup here ]

But in my adult life I have studied pleasure: Francois Rabelais. Marcel Duchamp, Donale Winnicott. I've brought heaby inellectual artillery to bear of what I never had. So at age 76 years I at least know what I was denied. The older I get, my body degrades by my spirit rises. Rrose Sélavy! (Look that up on Wikipedia if you do not understand it)

I think youth is generally wasted on the young. If the adolts treated alimentation like rhey treat young persons' sexuality, all the kids would die very young of malnutrition. People talk about LGBQWERTY whatever today. I had antisexual parents in a Dark Age (the 1950s) of "in loco parentis" which I translate as: parents are insane.

As a child I found fun boring. I was denied what I needed: connoisseurship. Th make a riff on the old Unied Negro College Fund slogan: Both a mind and a body are terrible things to waste: The American Dream.

¶ +2023.08.03. Can you really get in contact with Elon Musk?

Sorry, I can't resist this one:

"This is ground control to Major Tom. ... Come in, Tom. ... Tom? ... Hello? ... Please reply if you receive this message, Tom .... Repeat: this is ground control...."

¶ +2023.08.03. How can leaders strike a balance between blind trust and micromanagement?

Any manager who has to face this choice must have incompetent and/or unreliable employees. Poor guy!

Both blind trust and micromanagement are bad and should never need to be deployed..

An alternative is: competent, self-accounable staff ("self starters") who can realistically be trusted, and managers who serve them by doing two very important things: (1) running interfercnce to protect them from being jerked around by upper managment, and (2) sign purchase orders for capital expenditures. And please remember that Jesus Christ washed his disciples' feet.

¶ +2023.08.03. Which lesser-known philosopher or thinker do you believe deserves more recognition for their unique contributions to the field?

I never learned about Digenes of sinope in school. Maybe this was convenient for the philosophy teachers since Diogenes encouraged persons to quesion their here-and-now living situation not 3rd party ideas. In philosophy class we never reflected on what we are doing in the classroom, icluding such things as that the techer hd to publish or perish, and that we had to do homework assignments and were going to be graded and on it goes. As Marshall McLunah said:

"The medium is the message."

A highly original first rank thinker whom I am not sure is as well known as he deserves is Emmanuel Levinas.

Then thers are important thinkers who are not well known but who have done serious work. I took courses form John Wild whom I underatnd introduced existential phenolenology to Awermca academia. Also a professor at the University of Kentucky, Ronald Bruzina, wrote an important book on Edmund Husserl and Eigen Fink: ""Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and endings on phenomenology 1928–1938: (Yale University Press, 2004).

As for postmodernism (POMO), I find it discouraging, since I feel philosophy should have built on Edumnd Husserl's work and not jus be intellectual masturbation in print. I agree with Noam Chomsky that generally POMO is either high-school level trivialities dressed up in obscurantist jargon or nonsense. But I know more about postmodernist architecture than postmodernist philosophy which I do not consider worth the effort to try to make sense of. The founding father of postmodernist architecture wrote a disgusting book in which he mocks a client and argues it is bad for architects to try to raise clients' cultural level, so I consider Mt. Robert Venturi to be one of the great Culture Criminals of the 20th Century along with Educational testing Service and The Franklin Mint. There is a fine fook about POMO:

Signs of the Times; Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul De Man , by David Lehman.

Jacques Derriduh and Jacques Laconman (the latter being the inventor of the short psychanalysis session for full price). I wonder if these people deconstruct their paychecks and cancer tumors as floating signifiers (or whatever they do with anything but how can they do anything with anything if nothing havs any meaning?), or do they cash the paycheckand seek medical treatment for the tumor? The emperor's new clothes are always in fashion, about which Diogenes of Sinope said something: He physically not intellectually masturbraed in public in the agora in the middle of a bright sunny day to tell his fellow citizens what social customs mean. He should have met the POMOs.

On the other hand, I think Mr. Socrates is overrated. He didn't even pay his bar tab for his special aperitif that afternoon when he publicly staged his suicide instead of decently leaving town and going to live with rich friends in a differnt polis, which is what Athens really wanted their arrogant public nuisance to do.

¶ +2023.08.03. Can Wikipedia or other similar sites be used as a source in academic papers and assignments?

I am not an expert; I am not a principal.

But my guess is: NO! Wikipedia is a just a bunch of volunteers, however well meaning and in general doing useful work for general information. I had a thoroughly disgusting runin with one of their volunteers. Wikipedia is just a collection of stuff.

You can certainly cite it in an academic paper as presenting opinions to be INVESTIGATED. You can go to the sources cited in many articles and if they seem defensible, use those sources, properly cited.

But saying "X is the case because Wikipedia says so." is not defensible. You can say: "In Wikipedia they say....", just like you can say any person or institution says anything.... And what are you going to do with it?

I tried to post first hand documentation for a historically important story and also first hand documentation for a biogaphy and an ARROGANT VOLUNTEER told me I was trying to get publicity for myself. He was either a fool or something worse, but I have never tried again to offer anything to Wikipedia. And furthermore, different topic: Wikipedia, if I understnd correctly, is built on MediaWiki. I was stuck fo 2 years using MediaWiki on a big educational research project. MediaWiki was frequently obstructing me. A good tool facilitates one's creative achievement, not causes one to hate it for getting one's way. I highly recommend MediaWiki for people who want to be mediocre and to do mediocre work. Or for persons who want nothing to do with technology but want to get information on the Internet and are acceptable to the WIKIPEDIA TROLLS.

I have found the information in Wikipedia generally prima facie reliable but I also worked for Encyclopedia Americana at one time. I think teenagers in high school can often do worse than looking up subjects on Wikipedia, for instance: believing what their parents, teachers, government and religous leaders tell them. To make a slight modification to Niels Bohr's advice to his students:

Take every statement anybody makes as a question not as an assertion. (But don't tell them because then they may try to harm you.)

¶ +2023.08.03. What is a good way/plan for an average person to become very knowledgeable in multiple areas?

Why not attempt to not be average? Do you matter to you? Or not?

Do you choose to be just a consumer of consumer products? A lawn mower? A "black"? (Or a "white" or "yellow" or polka dot or whatever)? A this or a that? Yawn....

It's either true or just a joke. Once there was a very cute little toddler girl, so cute that her father named his donut buciness after her and put her picture on every package of donuts he sold: "Debbie's Donuts".

When she grew up, Debbie said: "First of all, I'm Debbie the person!"

A person does not have to be brilliant to not be average. What it takes is questioning what goes on around you not just accept it.

[ Picrure of Homer Simpson eating a donut here ]

I worked as a computer programmer. Everybody had to be well above average in "IQ". But I had managers who loved to hold long meetings and hear themselves talk, and one with a PHD from New York University whose attained cultural level was being a Yankees baseball fan. But back to the meetings. These managers would being in free Dunkin Donuts like dog treats and everybody apparently happily stuffed their faces with them. A high IQ didn't keep them from being average.

Being average is to not try to shape you own life..I once had a coworker who was wasting his life watching Star Trek on the television each nite in his dsingy basement apartment. One day he figured out he was going to get older no matter how he spent his nites, so he enrolled in his local low preseige night law school (If America's current President could get through law school, almost anybody can). So he started wasting his nites studying the law. About 6 years later he passed the bar and got a much higher preseige, better paying and far more ineresting job running a college's data processing department, and a nice house in a good neighborhood not the dingy basement apartment....

Do you choose to be average? I do not want to suggest anyone become a martyr althoug but that is one way to not be average. But think about the two following pictures. The one person who is not average may have just been any white collar clerk in an office, not some whiz-kid either in school or on the athletic field.

[ Pictures of D.C mass rally and one man facing tanks in Tiananmen Square China here]

¶ +2023.08.02. What are some effective self-care practices for purpose-driven leaders to manage emotional wear and tear?

I once had a "purpose driven" third line manager in a mid-size FDIC bank. One night his whole application computer programming team were working after hours to give him something he very much wanted. He barged into their work room and barked at them:

"I want to see asses and elbows"

He had about 100% annual attrition rate in his application programming group.

He had one employee who was both AN ETHICAL GIANT and HIGHLY RESPECTED BY IBM FIELD ENGINEERS, his manager of technical support. This person had been promoted from "Senior systems programmer" to AVP. He asked this perosn of they would go down to write the critical and very difficult piece of computer code for a VERY IMPORTANT PROJECT he wanted.

This person, of course, volunteered to do this. When the project was finished the person (whom I knew well) told me that it was the best piece of work they had ever done in their life, which, for this person who always did superlative work, "was saying something". Then the person went on to tell me the reward he got for this service:

"They fired me"

"Purpose driven leader"'s cardiologist had told him he had to reduce his stress level. His 2nd line managers had given him an ultimatum: either the stellar performer or them. They felt threatened that he might be trying to build a power base in the company against them. And they had reason to fear because he had told them that if they had an employee who was not performing and they didn't have the courage to fire the person, to transfer the person to his group. One did this and this person transformed the non-performer from an unhappy waste of space into a productive worker with a positive attitude. This scared the 2nd lines.

The "purpose driven leader" had explained to the stellar employee the latter was being fired to reduce his, the ."purpose driven leader"'s stress level, or as the present question has it, to "manage emotional wear and tear".

SO: If you are a "purpose-driven leader" "managing emotional wear and tear", an effective self-care practice just might be: (1) Summarily fire all toadies so they are no longer around to stress you, and (2) Show genuine human warmth and appreciation for those who are both competent and want to make your life stress free."

I personally saw some but not all of this.

¶ +2023.08.01. What are some potential consequences of continuing to fund research labs in Wuhan and other foreign countries?

Funding research in Wuhan? Well, maybe: What research and why and what will we get out of it and what will they get out of it, etcetera and so forth?

But COOPERATING with research labs in every country irregardless of its "politics", absolutely! Let 's consider the very worst imaginable case: Cooperating with Nazi research labs. What could be worse than that? Answer: Not eooperating with Nazi research labs. Then we wouldn't even know what bad things they were up to nor have eany way to try to influence them [not every Nazi was a bad person; a few even saved jews]. Better to know your enemy than to try to repress your enemy. just like prigs and prudes, by trying to enfore teen sexual abstinence only cause kids to get venereal diseases. Now, obviously, cooperating with Nazi laboratories would be a very "delicate" thing. You would not want to help them develop death camp extermination gases. But if Covid-19 came around, the two or you might indeed cooperate to help prevent Germans and Americans and maybe even jews in concentration camps form dying of Covid-19 (or worse, The Plague).

Idealogy needs to be kept in its place. Science is universal. If you are a medical doctor, do you only treat wounded soldiers on your side and if a wounded enemy soldier is brought in say: I don't aid the enemy, and let the person die under your eyes when you could easily save him (her, other)?

Again, one needs to be careful in "edge cases". Maybe you would let your military people send the enemy soldier to a stalag for the rest of the war after you cure him, or even pack him off to The Hague for War Crimes. But would you, as a medical doctor, refuse to TREAT even Dr. Joseph Mengele?

But let's get back to reality. There is no 3rd Reich today. Russia nd China are pretty much like us, so we can cooperate more. Maybe still not about thermonuclear bombs, but, again, if we put ideology before sanity we may just make ourselves ignorant and the price of ignorance is weakness. If you don't j=know what your enemy is doing you cannot effectively either defend against or attack what you do not know about. Sun-Tzu: The best way to defeat your enemy is to cause him to peceive what you want him to think is there not what is really there. Then you attack him from "nowhere" and he psychologically collapses and you win without fighting.

But, again, getting back to reality. Russia and China want to cooperate with us but we lie and try to bully everybody. It don't work although it can make us feel "patriotic": Gott mit uns. But guess what? If you had been born over there you would feel the reverse.

Everybody needs to rise above petty ideological partisanship. Everybody needs to protet themself which, of course, the United States is not doing: We are self destructing in "culture wars", not to mention stunts like sending Ms. NAncy Pelosi to Formosa to "moon" Mr. Xi. People who bait bears get mauled sometimes, don't they?

All skills transcend partisansip. A medical doctor can treat a Nazi or a Commie or a MAGA or a Wokie or an enlightened India Indian Guru or an enlightened USA university professor or Homer Simpson or anybory else: everybody looks the same once you make an incision and look inside, don't they?. Here's a dilemma for the physician: You have one respirator. Professor Noam Chomsky, the most valuable intellectual of our time comes in dying from Covid. if you cure him and you are pretty sure you can, he may life another 5 years or likely more like 2. But also a 20 year old gameboy who has no redeeming social value and doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground and does on care about anybody or any thing except guzzling red bull and eating Big Macs, also comes in in as bad physical condition but if you cure him he may live to waste space and time and oxygen and other resources for 80 more years. Which one gets the respirator?

I end with something that means a lot ot me. Take it or leave it for what it may be worth or not worth to you:

....it was in Bosnia, the biggest single act of ethnic cleaning I had witnessed to date.... and there was an old man who stopped to talk to us.... and he was 80 years old and he looked as though he had already died.... and I asked him do you mind if I ask you Are you a Croat or a muslim? And he said, "I'm a musician".... (BBC World Service, June 26, 2022 03:00AM-06:00AM BST, Internet Archive)

I'm a musician and I do not play any musical instrument. What or who are you?

¶ +2023.08.01. Which ancient Greek philosopher would you like to meet, and why?

(1) Mr. Socrates, to give him a piece of my mind and tell him I think he's overrated and that he didn't even pay the bar tab for his final special aperitif which he ordered from the polis. He thought he was hot stuff, and people have fallen for it, but not me. I would not have fallen for his cheap mind games. Can you kindly show me the way to Mr. Protagoras's house, Mr. Socrates, I'd like to meet him. "Man is the measurer of all things."

(2) Diogenes of Sinope. Far preferable as a human being than Mr. Socrates. I especially like that he showed the people what he though of "politeness" (hypocrisy) by masturbating in public in tehe agora in the middle of a normal business day. I also like that he did not toady up to Alexander the Great but when Al asked him what he could do for him, he asked him to move aside a bit bbecause he was blocking his sunlight. Supposedly Alexander the Great said that if he was not Alexander the Great he would want to be Diogenes of Sinope.

(3) Heraclitus. His thinking seems the best of the bunch. "The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice but that some things stay the same only by changing."

But there is another figure from about the same time albeit a different place whom I would also much like to meet: Sun-Tzu. "The great general wins without fighting."

I had a lot of philosophy courses and even one really good philosophy teacher: John Wild. He was a gentle man and was intersted in philosophy for enriching daily living. I miss him. But, as the title of Milton Erickson(sp?)'s book has it: "My voice will go with you." I once called him out for what I considered an existential self-contradiction, aka hypocrisy. I was asophomoer at Yale in 1965. He had given us kids a lecture on himan freedom. After class I went up to him and very respectfully said to him that I saw no freedom in being a stuednt who would be required to take a final exam in his course. How did he respond? He apologized to me and told me that he meant no harm (and let me take his graduate seminar the net term where he, literally, once pleaded with the students to please do the reading for the next session.) John Wild: a gentle giant.

Philosphy course sare generally something else: Sophology. Neither rthe students nor the teachers reflect on the event they are in the happening of the class. They talk about pbjects: philosophy books. Sophology, i.e., the study of statements which are about "big" topics. "The medium is the message" (Marshall McLuhan)

¶ +2023.08.01. Should coaches refrain from publicly criticizing their colleagues in the same profession?

There are two old sayings:

(1) People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

(2) If you see something, say something..

I know nothing about "coaches" in particular because I avoided competitive athletics in school. No, actually I had a runin with one coach at a prep school where teachers had to work multiple tasks to earn a single paycheck. This man was apparently a fine athletics coach but he tried to break my [intellectual, not muscular] spirit in 7th grade.

Be that as it may, in any field, it is not wise to run one's mouth off. Petty criticism or calling people out for political incorrectness says more about the person doing the criticizing than about the person they are trying to harm.

If you see authentic malfeasance, you should first try to deal with it with the person themself. Give thm a chance to rectify the situation. But if they prove to be recalcitrant and they are doing material harm to persons other than themself, what choice to you have?

But if you do criticize a colleague, be prepared for any skeletons in YOUR closet to be exxposed. Critizize Charlie for something bad he did and Charlie will tell the whole world something you did somewhere in your past that you don't want found out, like maybe that you smoked grass in school but wrote on your employment application for your current job that you naver took drugs....

I know of two public instances of something similar. There was a very famous psychoanalyst, Masud Khan, who rubbed some people the wrong way, as the saying goes. He did not have credential. They harassed him to commit suicide by alcoholism. He lived in a glass house and threw stones.

Then there was Marshall McLuhan. He too rubbed people the wrong way, but they couldn't destroy him because he had tenure. He lived in a fortress.

Or look in the news. Seymour Hersh can do investigative reporting and get away with telling the truth. The govewrnment and the New YorkTimes may shun him but he is an old man with a very long career and endless "connections" and he probably saved some money for his old age, so what can they do to him? But if he was fresh out of school and reporting the kind of things he does, he might have trouble paying his bills.

Another admonitory story. Sometimes there are ways to do things that avoid trouble. The scientist Galileo is famous for being a victim of The Holy Office of the Inquisition. Well, not exactly: Had he framed his heretical scientific ideas as "hypotheses" and not written a book in the vulgar tongue that mocked the Pope, the Inquisituion might never have bothered him, but he wanted to be a Big Shot and when he got shot down he was a coward.

Discretion is the better part of valor. Ticks and fleas can kill you. But you don't want to be an Adolf Eichmann, either. Think about the consequences in all possible directions before you open your mouth or fail to.

¶ +2023.07.31. What are 12 multiple choice questions on the effectiveness of the communications and life skills course on students?

This sounds to me like a student wanting somebody else to do an ass–-ignment for him that he (she, other) either does not want to do or has not been properly prepared to do by the teacher. The student wants to get a monkey off his back when what should happen is that the teacher needs to be confrnted with the consequences of the interpersonal communication ("life") situation he (she, other) has caused, and both eacher and student, together, deal with, i.e., communcate about, THAT communication situation.

All multiple choice questions need a last choice:

(?) Other, please specify: ____________________________

First question:

Have you thought about the communication skills needsd to naswer multiple choice questions and compared them to the communication skills needed for collegial, one-to-one, personal, mutally respectful conversation?

(a) Yes

(b) No

(c) Other, please specify: ____________________________

[ picture w/images/2/2f/ETS-SAT.jpg here ]

¶ +2023.07.31. What creative storytelling techniques do virtual reality (VR) content creators employ to enhance user immersion and engagement in VR experiences?

Every person involved in the creation of VR content needs to be aware of the dangers and assume ethical responsibility. People are gullible (watch the old fun but also profound movie: "The Truman Show"), and virtual reality can kill you (i.e., them):

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror – no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.

--------

Remember Adolf Eichmann, who just followed orders.

¶ +2023.08.00. How can I create a positive and supportive study environment at home?

It depends. What kind of study environment is positive and supportive for you, and what can you actually get?

Do you have a strong need or desire to be around other people? Then a home study space may not work well for you no matter what it is like otherwise.

Are there small screaming children in the house or do you have a nagging mother (I had an intrusive mother)? Then it may not work no matter what you like.

I figured out something that worked for me as an adult in a white collar office and in graduate school but which would not have been attainable in the "prep" shcool I was consigned to because they did not provide privcy for students. I was not into:

[ Picture of two males communally urinating ]

I do not like being around other people except for very close friends or an intimae partner.I never voluntarily attend any group activity, be it a mass marchfor a good cause or a rock concert or church. Sothe "reading room" in the library was not for me.

You know that males, unlike females, do not like to spend a lot of time in the "rest room". So whenever I found a toilet salll that was reaonably clean with a door that bolted, preferaby "andicapped" because they are bigger, I had a very good study space for me, at least for reading serious books.

[ architectural plan for a toilet stall ]

And "people" tend to hesitate to bug you if you (i.e., me) are on the other side of a toilet door.

So you may need to "get creative".

My ideal? Watch the old italian film "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis". There a young scholar goes to a very wealthy family's house, and he is invited into their private library ans assusred "You will find everything youn eed here". Better stiill. obviously, to own the place.

Well, at age 77 years, I share my home study space with the clothes washer and ddryer and the cats' litter box. It was either Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld who said: "You go to war with the army you've got."

Look into yourself and decide what really matters to you, then iif people won't give it to you, see what you can get away with.

¶ +2023.07.30. How can we differentiate between satire and reality in today's media landscape?

How mush(sic?) satire is there today in today's media landscape? I do not watch Saturday night Live so maybe there is some there? (I do not watch anything on television, although I do recommend "Air Disasters" on the Smithsonian Channel It's a lot of fun.)

Most everything is propaganda, isn't it? Satire is a mortal enemy of propaganda because propaganda wants to be gullibly believed not questioned, played with and thought about.

The worst offender is the current war in Ukraine. The mainsteam American media have sold out to the Biden-Zelensky propaganda. The last honest thing The New York Times newspaper wrote is reprinted below. Here's how they lie: Instead of factually reporting taht a "Russian missile hit some building", they biasedly say something like "A biuilding was hit by a Russian aggressors' missile" Who are the aggressors? Be careful in answering. It's not primarily the Russians: It's the Americans and their proxy army led by the Zelensky puppet regime in Kiev. If you disagree I have your goto source in the next paragraph here. (I do not pretend to be an expert; but I do claim not to be dupe.)

[ image w/images/b/be/Zelensky5.gif here ]

That bobblehead in a green t-shirt costume who alternates between unhinged ranting and sycophantic puling is a first rate target for satire but everybody takes his sartorial splendor seriously. Not quite everybody. Listen to Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs free on YouTube.

Satire would flourish in a healthy media landscape, but satire about everybody, not just the people we love ot hate.

I will end with something from Marshall McLuhan. I never met him but I was a friend late in life of one of his best friends, so I am biased.

"Every joke expresses a grievance. The funny man is a man with a grudge."

--------

NYT OPINION GUEST ESSAY

The War in Ukraine May Be Impossible to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame. (aka: "U.S. Helps Prolong Ukraine War, +2022.05.04)

Christopher Caldwell, May 31, 2022

In the Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro this month, Henri Guaino.... warned that Europe's countries, under the shortsighted leadership of the United States, were "sleepwalking" into war with Russia. Mr. Guaino was borrowing a metaphor that the historian Christopher Clark used to describe the origins of World War I....

In 2014 the United States backed an uprising – in its final stages a violent uprising – against the legitimately elected Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych, which was pro-Russian. (The corruption of Mr. Yanukovych's government has been much adduced by the rebellion's defenders, but corruption is a perennial Ukrainian problem, even today.) Russia, in turn, annexed Crimea, a historically Russian-speaking part of Ukraine that since the 18th century had been home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet....

On Nov. 10, 2021, the United States and Ukraine signed a "charter on strategic partnership" that called for Ukraine to join NATO, condemned "ongoing Russian aggression" and affirmed an "unwavering commitment" to the reintegration of Crimea into Ukraine. That charter "convinced Russia that it must attack or be attacked," Mr. Guaino wrote. "It is the ineluctable process of 1914 in all its terrifying purity."....

The United States started arming and training Ukraine's military, hesitantly at first under President Barack Obama. Modern hardware began flowing during the Trump administration, though, and today the country is armed to the teeth....

Russia is not being stymied by a plucky agricultural country a third its size; it is holding its own, at least for now, against NATO's advanced economic, cyber and battlefield weapons.... The United States is trying to maintain the fiction that arming one's allies is not the same thing as participating in combat....

Even if we don't accept Mr. Putin's claim that America's arming of Ukraine is the reason the war happened in the first place, it is certainly the reason the war has taken the kinetic, explosive, deadly form it has. Our role in this is not passive or incidental. We have given Ukrainians cause to believe they can prevail in a war of escalation.

Thousands of Ukrainians have died who likely would not have if the United States had stood aside. That naturally may create among American policymakers a sense of moral and political obligation – to stay the course, to escalate the conflict, to match any excess.

The United States has shown itself not just liable to escalate but also inclined to. In March, Mr. Biden invoked God before insisting that Mr. Putin "cannot remain in power." In April, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin explained that the United States seeks to "see Russia weakened."

Noam Chomsky warned against the paradoxical incentives of such "heroic pronouncements" in an April interview. "It may feel like Winston Churchill impersonations, very exciting," he said. "But what they translate into is: Destroy Ukraine."....

Mr. Kissinger is on the same page as Mr. Guaino [on a certain point]. "To make concessions to Russia would be submitting to aggression," Mr. Guaino warned. "To make none would be submitting to insanity."....

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine warned in an address to students this month that the bloodiest days of the war were coming.

¶ +2023.07.30. What is the process of writing? What can someone do to improve on his learning skills?

Writing is writing. There are all sorts of ways to "improve one's writing skills", and exactly what is it one wishes to improve? Grades for teaches? Getting published in peer reviewed journals? Influencing people? Writnig poetry? Self-satisfaction? Marketing? ???

As for getting published in peer reviewed journals, and other things, I strongly recommend watching some videos on YouTube by a man whose day job is getting graduate studenst' and faculty articles published in peer reviewed journals. He's no nonsense and he apparently gets results.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM

There are surely lots of books about this like just about everything else.

Experience of a long and unhappy life have made me see thing a certain way. A few points, and always remember that advice is cheap.

Have something of value you passionately want to write.

Master you subject matter.

Always remember that what matters to your reader is not what metters to you but what matters to him (her, other).

Write.: Vomit up that thing which you passionately feel is worth writing based on your mastery of the subject matter. If you think it's hopeless, jsut keep writing. Nothing comes from nothing but anything can alwys be improved.

And that's my final point: revise, revise revise. Edit the hell out of it. Turn a sow's ear in to a silk purse by revising. And you have an ally in your personal computer: Revising used to be a pain in the ass: If you couldn't finess it with WiteOut then you had to recopy unchanged text. Was this revision really worth the pain? Groan!

Now with the computer, and I'm talking her about simple word peocessing, not MS WORD ofr Grammarly or any other fancy stuff, just notepad or vi or emacs, the computer does the scut work for you, so you should get all excited to see if you can find more things to revise to make it even better. Get a good nite's sleep between revision sessions.

One last thing: Keep backups of your intermediate results. You never know wnen you will make a change which at first you think i great but on second thought you'd rather have wha tyou had before and it's a pain in the ass to get it back or you forget exacty what you write back then.

Just do it, or not.

(Oh, yes, criticism from sincere friends form whom you are willing to wccept humiliating criticism not flattery can help, too.)

¶ +2023.07.29. How might the concept of universal translators shape cross-cultural communication in the future?

It can help immensely and from what I read as an ignorant lay person, we are close to the limit already.

But computer translation can never replace open-minded, empathic and even sympathetic human persons.

The danger is a dystopian world (or if you are politically correct: a paradise) in which we have "diversity" as conformity: A world in which machine translation embodies politlcal correntness detectors which whenever a person uses a politically incorrrect word, the detector notifies the Thought Police to come and put the person in a reeducation internment camp where if necessary they will be subjected to sufficient ECT (Electric Shocks administered to their brain) to remove all their politically incorrect thoughts. Please translate for me: "My ancestry is half Polack and half White Trash." I apologize that I know no more "offensive" words to apply to my own ancestry.

Political correctness (whose previous avatars include prigs and prudes and McCarthyites) threatens to destroy civilization and make life not worth living.

But in an open-minded world where you can say whatever you like ("sticks and stones can break your bones but the effect of words depends on your ideological orientation") – in a free society, i.e., where persons can speak unwelcome words without fear of reprisal (e.g., "being cancelled"), computer translation can function as a shortcut for taking high school "foreign language" courses and a dictionary.

The machine will produce a machine translation. Then with your living body – gestures, etc. – you can shape the rough outline into a finished sculpture. And that's what the machine translation cannot replace: Looking another person in the eyes with a weloming visage and together the two of you lifting glasses of good wine together, or caresses with a mutually respected intmiate partner. Neither will a cat or dog accept the substitute of machine petting although they will gladly take machine feeding.

Or suppose you are negotiating a treaty with an officer of a country or tribe where neither of you knows the other's language and no human translators are available. Very risky, right? But if you have what I call "a good sense of smell" to detect hypocrites and con artists, you can probaly hobble along with a machine translateion and gestures. I think it was Dick Cheney or donald Runsfeld who said: "You go to war with the army you've got".

Better, of course, if you do not know the culture– note I did not say:if you do not know the language, but: if you do not know the broader context in which the language is deployed, then best to have a highly competent human translator who does know, but also to check against machine translation in case they are secretly an enemy agent.

Let me give you an example of cultural misunderstanding: I have read that when the United States had won the war and the Pacific (WWII), GIs would drive down the roads in Japan in their Jeeps, seeing Japanese soldiers with theri back to them along the roads. Th Americans thought they were being "given the cold shoulder" and grossly diserespected by these people. But the truth was not so: The Japanese were so ashamed of having lost the war they they did not feel worthy to look at the faces of the victors. What machine translation (or politically correct human, for that matter) would appreciate and correctly interpret that?

¶ +2023.07.29. How might engineering concepts be applied to design interactive, kinetic sculptures that respond to sound and light?

How could one do it otherwise?

Maybe I am missing the question. There is a sculptor whose work might interst you (or not)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZePhxfXlns]

And industrial robots would need even more engineering acumen.

I wonder if Elon Musk's "girlfriend" is really an industrial robot, or in your words; an "interactive, kinetic sculpture that responds to sound and light".

¶ +2023.07.29. What psychological or sociological research is needed to understand the impact of AI-generated companions, like virtual girlfriends, on loneliness?

I'm going to take a wild guess and speculate that you yourself who asked this question are lonely and girlfriendless? If not then you need not read further.

As a young person I had a brilliant mind and a wimpy body. Jocks got omerta sanitary services and I got involunary celibacy. it was so bad in my case that a physician: a medical doctor in college whose job is to help persons not to sh*t on them, told me: "Your place in life is something other than to be good with women." Since I do not believe in an afterlife I cannot expect him to burn in hell forever; and I was too young and had no senes of self-worth to put him in his place so he got away with it.

The issue is not AI-generated anything although certainly for persons who have severe neurological illness like ALS and "shut in syndrome", an AI-generated virtual girlfriend would be less worse than just being left alone in a hospital room when the nurses have to be attending to other patients.

But even for these persons, how about this: Virtual Reality facilitated companionship with other real sufferers of the opposite gender. Both of you are parallyzed and so cannot have an "in the flesh" relationfship, but supercomputer generated virtual reality could enable you in your imaginations so share intimacy. Virtual reality is dangerous (see below), but in a case like this it could be immensely helpful.

But if you are just a wimp not an ALS victim, the problem is not AI anything: It's a social world where young persons are socially conditioned to be mentlly ill: Young males to be budding minotaurs who get laid by showing off the muscles in their bodies not anytihng in their heads (i.e., minds), and females who get taught sick sex agames like "look don't touch" and "hard to get" leading in their adult lives to: applying: "advanced alimony".

But if you cannot improve the people arould you, then you do have the computer. AI generated virtual girlfriends? Possible. To avoid the third rail subject of sexuality, consider this: In Japan, elderly persons who have no relatives and otherwise would be erribly isolated and lonely are now sometimes provided with robotic pet dogs (cats?). It sounds really depressing, but it's better than the proverbial "nothing".

You can only do your best. But if you watch "pornography" on your personal computer remember than anything with children in it is illegal and you need to make tsure that the prying eyes of people who have no business poking into your life but cannot be content with minding their own budiness: prigs and prudes and other busybodies need to be protected from learning anything they could hurt you with. What you do so long as it does not cause material harm to anyone is your business, not anybody else's unless they sincerely want ot help you not just cause you even more peoblems than you already have. And for somebody to "be offended by something" is not material harm; it's just social hypocrisy. (I imagine a soldier in Vietnam writing to Nancy Reagan and assuring her that we are winning the war on drugs: that they really help him and his buddies get thru the day and would she and Ronnie like a toke....)

Does this help or is it irrelevan to you? Finally, think about a little virtual reality experiment I conducted some time ago. As for AI, I worked as a computer programmer for almost a half century, so I play with the Bing AI → get that? I PLAY with it like the toy it is for me.

--------

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror – no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.

¶ +2023.07.29. I have terrible social anxiety and this is my last year of middle school and we have big presentations, any tips to just get through the year/presenting?

Advice is cheap. And so too are persons who make other persons feel anxious instead of supported.

First: YOU NEED TO PREPARE. YOU NEED TO MASTER YOUR MATERIAL. If you cannot do this do not try to fake it. Start by saying explicitly you have been put in a position wher you are not able to succeed: throw the ball back at them! It's not your fault! They are trying to meke you feel it its your fault so that the do not have ot face up to their responsibility to help you!

So if you cannot be prepared, be prepared to make them fail you. "Fail" in two senses: Give you a bad grade but also themselves fail as human beings. There is nothing you can do about bad people who are more powerful than you except to deny them glee in hurting you.

But if you can propare yourself, if you can master the material, then –- just do it. Go to the lavatory and take a piss even if you don't need to (they do provide you privacy in the rest room, don't they, or do they fail at that?). SPLASH YOUR FACE WITH COLD WATER1 Then just give it your best and if you stutter hopelessly, if you wet your pants, whatever, its not your fault and if nobody comes to your aid then you know what they are: failures as human beings. Shame on them!

Just one more thing: Do not fight any unnecessary battles. Don't succumb to "peer pressure" or "parental expectations". If anybody tries to shame you into doing something you are not comfortable with just say "I aologize, but I do not feel it is appropriate for me to do that. Thank you for understanding." But if you absolutely positively must do something you do not want to do, remember: You didn't ask for it, so you can only do your best.

As Vince Lombardd said (and this is what he apparently really said, not what some people say he saaid):

"Winning isn't everything; trying to win is."

¶ +2023.07.28. Why does optimizing (mood) have such a powerful (effect) upon optimizing memory & learning?

The better the mood you are in, the better you can remember things you want to remember and learn things you want to learn. Distractions do not help; leisure helps.

But also, obviously, it helps to have things you really want to remember or to learn, not just "ass—ignments" from a teach. It's synergistic: a good mood helps you learn things you want to learn, learning which improves youur mood....

"No pain no gain" is for oxen. Compare Henri Matisse to John Henry.

"Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.... in our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture – and ourselves." (Josef Pieper)

And good friends, a loving pet and a loving intimate partner all help a lot too. Of course it makes learning something even better if you can share it with others who will appreciate it and learn from it too and then give you back something from themselves for you to learn more.... A posiive feedback loop.

¶ +2023.07.28. When making judgements about the intelligence of others, do we over rely on verbal fluency and on communication skills? What are other equally reliable standards?

Theodore John Kaczynski, aka "The Unabomber", was probably one of the mot intelligent persons on the planet. What do you rely on in judging people?

Of course stupidity, as exhibied by America's current President who himself says he always has trouble with words but was always "a kid who could carry a ball", is no virtue. But Dr. Henry Kissinger who surely knows far more about foreign policy having earned a PhD with honors from Harvard Univeristy and negotiating America's "Opening ot China", as opposed to having had to repeat 3rd grade, is not entirely ethically "clean" is he?

I go by what people "smell" like and I am not referring to "BO" here. There is a great old soul song free on YouTube which I would urge you to listen to: "Smiling faces sometimes", by The Undisputed Truth. Surely their IQs are lower then TK and higher than JB but I would tend to distrust them less than either. of those two...

¶ +2023.07.27. How has technology changed the way we study and understand history?

What do you understaand by "technology"? If alphabetic writing and the printing press count, then....

Without writing ther is not history. Without writing ther are only the songs of bards in which events from pst times are recalled in poetry. The Iliad is one familiar example.

With scribal writing but before the printing press there is a beginning of historiography, i.e., exact historicl memory, but it's hit or miss. In copying manuscripts, scribes make mistakes and also make changes, so the original text gets corrupted. I have read that scholars have found 20,000 errors in The New Tesstament of the Bible, most of which areinconsequential but not all.

Then along came the printing press. Read Elizabeth Eisenstein's classic and quite lovely book: "The Printing Press as an Agent of Chnge" (Cambridge University Press, 2 vols in 1; She hs a shorter version but this is "the real thing" and at maybe 800 pages it's too short).

Then Prof. Eisenstein wrote a second book which gives wven more information here: "Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending" – this brings us up to date with the current "digital media" revolution.

Those two are your "goto" books if you are seriously inerested in this topic. they are both scholarly and pleasurable to read.

To end: How do "we" understand history? Who is "we"? Is it some school kid being indoctrinated with his government's hagiography in a school? "My country right or wrong"? Or is it a scholar who has sent his (her, other's -) life, includingn their evenings at home, reflecting on the structure of individual experience and its sedimentation hi social life? Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sache sees the history of the past 40 years very differently than Virginia Nuland and Homer Simpson sees it in yeta a differnt way.

In school I hadd no interest in history which was names and dates of "important events" but which really meant getting right or wrong answers on tests from teaches. I sa the brightest kid in my school. I wa not so stupid as to take "Advaneced Placement" American History" which would have been a lot of work for maybe a bad grade from a teach who had no mor empathy for me than the concrete blocks in the classroom wall. I took American History for idiots, i.e., for joskc (I neve once eentered their pub[l]ic nudity roo, aka locker room).

As an adult I have studied the philosophy of history over many years. Around 1995, by lucky accident I even hit upon a first-class discovery about World War II, so I acually have been, arpat from not finding a venue to publish it, a historian.

Now I love historiography, and the study of hagiography, too. And I study the trouble that patriotism causses, including America's unconscionable anti-Russia war in Ukraine today. A goto historian her eis Prof. Jeffrey Sachs who has videos on Youtube. He has been one of the major shapers of current history as well as a student of it.

Je me souviens.

¶ +2023.07.27. How possible is it to meet and pitch a venture capitalist (VC) without someone introducing us first?

Wouldn't that mean a "cold call"?

It either takes guts or a sociopathic personaliy or a lot of practice at it. But wht othe choice do you have ? If yo utry you may fail. If you don't try you cannot succeed. You will be dead soon enough whether you try or not.

Hone your "sales pitch". These people are no stupiid but they are also "heartless". They want to make a profit. You need to explain to them why they want to make money out of you.

If you are a reclusive inventor that may not be how you like to spend your time and energy but if you don't have "connections", you've got to try to find some way ot "plug in". That's just a fact.

If you believe in what you are trying to accomplish, your passion for your product should give you the gumption to just do it.

Always remember: What matters to your audience is what matters to them, not what matters to you. So you need to make your sales pitch offer them something they will want, not something you will want.

For writing, and slao applicable here are some fine videos on Youtube by a man whose day job is getting graduate students' research published. He keeps bo of kleenex on the table because he makes they cry but he gets results

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM ]

¶ +2023.07.27. Why can't I focus on one problem to solve it when I feel that this problem is related to other problems that also need to be solved, but I don't understand how to solve them all at once?

Maybe you are lucky and unlucky.

Lucky in that many (most?) persons are superficial and don't see that things are interconnected and compicated and complex. They are easy dupes for propaganda like The American Dream of a lawn mower and a mort-gage ("mort" means: deaht, of course).

You see that things are not so simple and you can easily lose focus because the world is a whole horizon not just a particluar focal object.

Good for you!

But you are unlucky because probably you have not had parents and teachers who would have leveraged your specialness and helped you learn how to thrive with it in a world where you are like of a different and more highly evolved species than most of the peole you will have to put up with in your days. In he land of the bind, the one-eyed man is surgically operated on at birth to make him healthy, whole and most imporantly: normal.

You may guess I am speaking here from bitter experience of childrearers and teachers who were more like rearenders as in a car crash from behind. My parents and school teachers wrecked my life but I have tried to make the best of what they didn't destroy.The best that can be said of them is that the road to hell is paved wiht good intentions but not all of them even had good intentions. You?

You need to try to find persons who can help you. There are teachers who are genuinely helpful to students who are "outliers". But most teachers are more interested in diminishing gifted but vulnerable young persons: The school I wa ssubjected to was concerned about my "social adjustment" not my esthetic sensibility. (What hte heck? I hav eincluded a picture athte bottom of htis posting) As the title of a film by Akira Kurosawa about the Japanese mafia has it: "The bad sleep well."

You need to "get organized". Advice is cheap. But you hvae no choice. You need to figure out how to keep your curiosity, your sense that there are problems all around, but also try to keep clear in your head the things you are, at least for hte moment, pretty sure of, and you need to have a battle plan: "I will address problem X right now and then unless something uexpected comes up, Problem Y and everything else will jsut have to wait, including Problem X.A if it turns up in working on PRoblem X...." Review you battle plaan at least once a day but don't get sucked into spending all you time on it or else you will not ge tanywhere. Black holes are all around, arn't they?

One thing that can really mess you up is trying to be polite and to please "people". Do this only to the minimum degree reauired to pay the bills. Hurt feelings are not material harm; people are daults. If they are not helping you you do not own them anything except what is necessary to keep them from hurtng you more, and petty people are nasty even though they often have smiling faces. Never trust a smiling face.

Is this what you wanted to hear? Don't betray yourself but try to minimize your difficulties in living in a social world that is not good enough for you but you are stuck in it unless you can find a way up and out – not just out, because one can always excape a bad situation to get into a worse one (like quitting a job you hate and becoming homeless as a consequence) – only go out if you can also go u, nd then remember Lot's wife in the Bible.

Now, as for your questions and wuations. Her is what the great physicist Niels Bohr told his students. The people around you probably do not tell yoh this. They are consqeuantly a problem for you:

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion."

Whether you believe in a Deity or not, Godspeed!

––––

[ Image w/images/e/e9/SocialAdjustment.jpg here ]

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¶ +2023.07.27. Can you please clarify what you mean by "I'll think about it"? Are you saying that you will consider the idea/ suggestion, or that you need more time to make a decision?

When a person says "I'll think about it" they are often telling you they will not give the matter any attention and do not consider you to be worth the effort to do so on their part. They are often being "polite", i.e, lying but wanting to look god about it. This is not always the case, but one can usually [metaphorically, of course...] "smell" the difference.

There is a great old soul music song available free on Youtube about this kind of stuff: "Smiling faces sometimes" by The Undisputed Truth. For what it's worth, it is a song which has inspired Assoc. U.S. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas ever since law school, and mysefl for many years too but I am nobody and I do not matter.

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¶ +2023.07.26. How can businesses leverage AI for personalized customer experiences?

Personalized or personal?

AI can make every interaction 100% personalized. AI can dig through all public records, everything the person has ever put on the internet including social media, you name it, IA can target the person like a USMC sniper can take out an emeny soldier at 1 mile. Done!

This is not personal. It is "personalized".

What is personal?

Shut down your computer. Restart a friendship. The conversation is waiting. Go there. (Grand Marnier (liqueur, aka cordial))

OK, you don't like alcoholic beverages or it's a company policy. Then take the customer to tea. Use the AI to learn about a "prospect". But if you are in the game for the long haul and not in it just to make a killer dea and leave the person to rot on the economic roadside ditch. You know who they are and they know who you are and you know what you are and who you are.

"Hello, Siri! I want to order 37 F-22s for delivery tomorrow at Ramstein AFB." "I am sorry General Gray, but F-22s are back ordered and we will not be able to fulfill your order until at least February 14, 2027. Can I interest you in F-35s, We have 12 avilable to ship tomorrow it that will help you." "No, Siri, I want F-22s." "I am sorry, General Gray, but the earliest I can offer you is February 14, 2027. Do you wish to be notified when your initial batch will be ready?" "No, Siri. have a good day." "Thank you ,General Gray. You have a good day too. And congradulations on your 3rd star which I understand you were awarded on May 17th at 14:27UTC, General."

¶ +2023.07.25. Can you be an architect and doctor at the same time, since I'm interested in both. Could anyone be able to have 3 different types of jobs, and if it is, how can I make it possible?

If you are Superman, get an MD degree, an MArch degree and an MBA degree (oh, yes, and also a JD while you are at it) and then fix the world. THe medical-industrial coomplex is sick. Medical professionals are losing hope and quitting in the face of the reduction of the healing professions t white collar assembly line labor by "bean counters".

The doctors should be running the hospitals, not investment bankers.

Being practical, you are not likely to have that kind of super stamina.

As for architecture, I wanted to become an architct but I have zero freehand drawing ability. I would go head to head with any architet about the philosophy of architecture. I have an essay about "Morality in modern architecture", from 1982 if you dare to read it:

Nullius in verba | 1983
https://www.bmccedd.org/1983.html

Long story short: Robert Venturi wa one of the greatest culture criminals of the 20th century along with Educational Testing Service (ETS) and The Franklin Mint. The humanist architect Lousi Kahn died like a stray dog in New York City's Pennsylvania train station. He had an idiosyncratic definition of a city:

He said that a cillage is a pace of NEEDS, where peoplew labor to [to borrow a phrase form Karl Marx:] reproduce individual and species life. But a city is a place of DESIRE. A place wher a young boy, goin from the workshop of one master craftsperson to another may find something he wANTS to do for his whole life.

As an architect, will you be building edifices wher the persons who spend part of their lives i nthem will be raised from a life of NEED to a life of DESIRE?

In 1982, I took Harvard's summer non-redit "career discover in architeture program which is to let persons see if they really want ot become architects by playing at being architecture students. I took it seriously and really enjoyed it: Iwould be the last person in Gund Hall each nite except fo rhte nigh watchman who came ot know Iw snot an intruder, and I'd be the first person back in the next morning. So the teachers knew what and who I was. At the end of it I asked the person in charge of it, whom I had previously alled out for an error in one of his assignments, how an application for Harvard's MARch program from e=me migh be receives. I expeted a noncommittal response but that is not waht I got:

"When we admit people like you they tend to leave after a year without us having to ask them to."

Follow your passion and hope you will be able to pay the bills. (Being "interested in" something is not necessarily being PASSIONATE about it. If you are not PSSIONATE about anything that is either good or bad fortune.)

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Jessi Je

¶ +2023.07.25. What are critics and audiences saying about "Oppenheimer" and its storytelling, performances, and direction?

I am cynical. I have no interest in this movie unless I need to argue with somebody and then I will not "watch" but study it. I am not an expert I wa not there (I was born 23 November 1946)

I recently listened to some lectures by Dr. Oppenheimer on Youtube. I've studied some of the history of his interaction with "McCarthyism". There is also an interesting book about the Manhattan Project, not about the physics or the politics but the daily life inside the fence: "Reminiscences of Los Alamos, 1945-1945".

Learn the physics. Learn the history. Learn about the project. Learn about

" 509th Composite Group - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/509th_Composite_Group

Relive it imaginatively in your own mind. Unless you are a movie critic for a newspapaer, why watch the movie?

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¶ +2023.07.25. What are some interesting questions we should be asking about the implications of Japan's evacuation preparations for remote islands?

I had not heard about this. Does it have to do with preparation for a possible attack n islands claimed by Japan, by The People's Republic of China (PRC)?

The United States and the PRC are currently engaged in an entirely unnecessary squabble about American neo-Conservative lust for unipolar global hegemony versus apparently hardening PRC neo-nationalistic determination. The primary potential victim is the island of Formosa but any other place tha thas ever historicaly been part of China is also a candidate for destruction in a war between the two superpowers like Ukraine is currently being entirely unnecessarily destroyed in the war between The United States and Russia.

I am no an expert. Columbia University distinguished Professor of economic sustainability Jeffrey Sachs is in my opinion which does not matter becasuse I do not matter, the goto person to try to avert yet another entirely avoidable himanitarian catasrophe. He has numerous videos on Youtube. The current United States government, led by a man whose level of intelligence is that he had to repeat 3rd grade and prides himself on has ability to carry a football, does not listen to him.

Flag-waving is fun for ignorant uneducated people but it causes people who want no part of it to be murdered in the resultant wars. Some words from Pope Francis from early in Russia's "special military operation" against the Kiev regime's NATO aspirations and ATO (Anti Terrorit Operation) against its own ethnically Russian citizens) likely also apply to the Japanese -PRC situation:

"The world is at war. For me, today, World War III has been declared. This is something that should give us pause for thought....

"We have to move away from the normal pattern of 'Little Red Riding Hood': Little Red Riding Hood was good and the wolf was the bad guy. Here there are no metaphysical good guys and bad guys, in an abstract sense. Something global is emerging, with elements that are very much intertwined....

"Tragic scenarios are being reenacted, and once more reciprocal extortionate demands made by a few potentates are stifling the voice of a humanity that cries out for peace."

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¶ +2023.07.25. Why would it behoove our global society to adopt a service to others outlook rather than a service for self-orientation?

This is a foolish and wrong-headed idea: What rational person would do anything for anybody else at expense to self and for no constructive return, other than under coercion? This is the ideation of "no pain no gain" and "pay your dues" self-righteous, i.e., cryppto-selfish, people....

Now, of course we do not want people to be really selfish like most Celebrities who have many fans, and Wall Street [not hamburger] flippers who destroy publicly traded mulitnational corporatons, or Silicone Valley oligarchs who build superyachts so big that bridges have to be torn down to get them frm the shipyard to the sea. No such selfishness for us, right?

Why not win-win: Make all activity do good for he indivisual as well as doing well for the society. And don't jump up and du=oen like a monkey for a banana here: A person who has satisfied all their intellectual aspirations n ife and holds a tenured chair in a major university might genuinely ENJOY helping young scholars learn and do that not for altruistic reasons for for selfish ones: tohave more satisfation in their life. What can be more joyful than enjoying oneself bringing joy to others too? The more the merrier!

If not us, who, if not now when? H.L Mencken's definition of a Puritan: "A person who suspects that someboody somewhre might be happy." I would change that slightly: "A person who finds happiness in making sure nobody else is happy."

Did you know that Benjamin Franklin served his country in the 1776 rebellion by having sex with aristocratic Parisian ladies to gain Frendh support for the rebels? That's my kind of patriotism: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria copulare"!

Read free on the Internet: Individuality and Society (Jan Szczepanski, UNESCO, "Impact of science on society", 31(4), 1981, 461-466)

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Todd Skyler

+2024.01.15 v458
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