Log of my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) postings
Page #5

Len: 220,279  90.

¶ +2023.11.03. How are you verifying the videos of rescue workers and residents digging through the rubble of flattened rows of buildings?

Lebanon, Ukraine, Israel? Sudan? Some other war?

"You" likely cannot verify this stuff. And we know some of it is faked, especially a picture from one place is used to show horror in a totally different place.

But you can be opposed to all sides of each and every one of all these totally unnecessary wars, can't you? They can't fake that, can they?

If you have a job and 3 kids at home to take care of you do not likely have much time to really pursue this stuff, but you are bombarded with propaganda, like Mr. Zelensky's green t-shirt TV Commando schtick and Mr. Biden's unhinjged rants against Vladimir Putin.

I am either retired of unemployed and have spent most of my waking hours since the Spring of 2022 studying stuff mostly on Youtube and some of the people seem credible to me (I have an earned doctorate in in a humanities field): University of Chicago distinguished service Professor and West Point Graduate John Mearsheimer, former Chief U.N. Wespons Inspector USMC Major Scott Ritter, retired Colonel and PhD Douglas Macgregor, Professor Noam Chomsky, Columbia University distinguished professor Jeffrey Sachs who saved the Polish economy after the end of the Soviet Union, and some others. Note ther are no former comedians on my list, nor a man who said of himself:

"As much as I lacked confidence in my ability to communicate verbally, I always had confidence in my athletic ability. Sports were as natural to me as speaking was unnatural. And sports turned out to be my ticket to acceptance – and more. I wasn't easily intimidated in a game, so even when I stuttered, I was always the kid who said, 'Give me the ball.'" JOE BIDEN ("Joe Biden Was Once a Solid Football Player and Led His Team To an Improbable Undefeated Season: A look back on the high school and college football career of former Vice President and presidential candidate Joe Biden.", by LUKE NORRIS, Published on November 3, 2020, Sportscasting)

And it was said of him:

"Ben Rhodes, Obama's former deputy national security adviser, who was known for his mind-meld with the president, wrote in his memoir that 'in the Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile.' ... Biden's own academic career was unimpressive–he repeated the third grade, earned all C ' s and D ' s in his first three semesters at the University of Delaware except for As in P.E., a B in "Great English Writers" and an F in ROTC, and graduated 76th in his Syracuse Law School class of 85 students.... One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, 'Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up.'" (Politico, "'The President Was Not Encouraging': What Obama Really Thought About Biden", ALEX THOMPSON, 08/14/2020)

But who knows? Did you ever watch the fun but also profound movie"The Truman Show"? Do it!

I do know one thing: I want to have some joy before I die. Studying war interests me, not participating in it, so I have fun reading grim books about war, not watching HBO or Mondey nite NFL. Recommended reading today:

[ Storm of steel]

¶ +2023.11.03. What are the benefits of being "woke" to social issues?

Benefits? Well you may get a scholarship for being oppressed even if your parents are Harvard professors, because your ancestry traces back to slaves.

There is no point in answering such a question. I repost a news article from The New York Times newspaper from about 2 years ago, which, when I read it, I imagined I had picked up an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) and it had exploded in my face:

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."

¶ +2023.11.03. Is it possible for an individual to become a renaissance in many fields of engineering?

You must mean "a renaissance man" (woman, other). Not likely but far more likely than him winning a Nobel Prize in medicine or literature. Knowledge has beome so specialized today that a person is challenged to keep up0 with it in heir own sub-specialty. The possiblity of a person being a "renaissance man" may have ended with the end of the Renaissnce. ther is jsut too uch knowledge about too many things.

But so what? Everything is just something or other. What a person can do is to go deep not broad: To use a simple metaphor, if you were a flatlander: the creatures tha tlive in two dimensions (X and Y axes only), instead of trying to exhaust the 2-dimensional vector space, go into the third dimension (Z axis not equal zero)!

An engineer can study the philosophy of engineering, the philosophy of science, and the implications of engineering for human social and psychological life That he can do nd it may even make him a better engineer while he's at it.

Two books to start with: Joseph Weizenbaum's "Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation" (WH Freeman, 1976) And: Thomas Kuhn's classic "The structure of scientific revolutions".

But you can start even closer to home. Watch the videos free on the internet about William Lemessurier and the New York CtiCorp building problem. Also watch Air Disasters on The Smithsonian Channel. And if you are an engineering manager, go incognito and work on the 3rd shift office cleaning crew, cleaning the toilets you defecae in during the day. Engineering is not just mathematical formulas in books: It's how you live. And to conclude with a story from a book probably few engineers know about, "The man without qurlities" by Robert Musil:

The protagonist of Musil's book is a wealthy young man who does not have to do anything. But he is inerested in everything. So he goes to work in an engineering office because he is excited about "the spirit of precision": how engineers design very intelligent, rational, scientifically informed things. He soon leaves the office in disgust when he finds the engineers wear tie tacks with little horse heads on them: He leaves in disgust because the engineers did not carry the spirit of precision into their personal life. Me? Been there, done that. (I worked half a century in computer programming offices, including IBM and NASA, but in the latter, launching payroll not spaceships.)

¶ +2023.11.03. Do people reject science even though they have access to technology and information through their phones, computers, etc.?

Excellent question!

Let me rephrase it:Why do some people cut off the tree branch they are sitting on?

As least wome Wokies are against "objectivity" as a "white feeliing". I am not making this up. Here is the citation information: The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell. A Wokie wa accusing a teacher in an expensive private school of being in favor of "objectivity", and the Wokie wa using a "slide" to show his accusation. A"slide" is technology", not the product of voodoo activity.

There are many less unhinged critics of "technology",some of which are quite well.... The philosopher Martin Heidegger, who liked to dress up in lederhosen and play peasant, lied to ride in commercial airp0lanes even though he criticized technology.

The short answer to the quesion is something the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said: the meaning is th use. Words have denotative meaning. For instance "cat"refers to a fluffy little arnivle mammal that Meow!s. But words also have use. If a mother sternly reprimands her child:L "The cat is on the mat." that is not a denotative statement about cats and mats. It means: "Your pet cat, child, is shedding fur on my $100,000 antique Persian prayer rug and you know that is not permitted! I am going to punish you for this! Got it child?" "Yes, mommy" and child removes cat from mat.

So these people who are using technology to diss science, like as you say maybe messaging a fellow cellphone user about it or getting up on podium with a bullhorn technology.... could jsut as well be throwing brick as using words. They don't care about that what they are saying might mean to an anthropologist studying their behavior. they are behaving.

So they use a magic marker tachnology to make a pacard tha twa spaper produced on an industrial mill and hold up the placard

[ "Europe is he cancer. Islam is he answer poster]

There is a technical term for this. It is an "existential self-contradiction". The protestor in the picture is using the cancer to complain abou the cancer.

But in this case t gets worse: Some of these people migrated from North Africa to France and are living offsecular state welfare while complaining tha the secular state is evil. If they achieve their goal of destroying the French secular state they will lose their free lunch.

The ancicnt Greekdead white male playwrite Sophocles wrote:

"Many things are strange, but the strangest thing of all is man...."

And in his book "Inroduction to Metaphysics", th 20th century lederhosen wearing university Professor Martin Heidegger got it right: The strangest thing of all about the strangest thing of all, i.e., the stranget thing about man is that he finds everything strange except himself.

Tell a person who is literally insane on a hormone trip sreaming into a bullhorn about how bad technology is and they will hear your question not as a denotative interrogation of objective facts but as a THREAT, and they may respond to you by trying to tstrangle you, not bythinking about wha tthey are doing.

It gets worse. Not only do people who reject science use tachnology, but they also fight other people when they themselves are the injuring not the injured party. Some Israelis today want to exterminate the Palestineans becaus ethe Palestineans are fighting back against the Israelis having corralled them for generations in what some intelligent observers have called "the world's largest open air concentration camp". Don't confuse me with the facts! My mind's made up!

(Now that last sentence describes the response I got from urging a university professor to learn more about the Ukraine war since he supports the Zelensky regime and I felt he was ignorant of the facts. He snapped back at me, verbatim: "I don't feel the need for guidance by Sachs or Pozner or others." "Sachs" is a university professor whose CV includes not just publications but such achievvements as "advisor to Mikhall Gorbachev" an he at least says he has a direct Zoom line to Vladimir Putin. In other words, he knows something about it.

The meaning is the use. Words are often just another technology of war. Don't try to parse the sentence; try to find out what the speaker's target is.

¶ +2023.11.02. Why is it important to have dissenting voices during times of crisis and conflict?

Actually, there is something far more important. I will just repost something which hopefully will make the point:

"[After a professor told his class some idea he believed that is not generally acceptable to say: A]cademic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like.... / [T]he number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance." (Stanley Fish, Prof. of Law, Florida International Univ., "Conspiracy Theories 101", Op-Ed Piece, NYT, 23Jul06, p.WK13)

¶ +2023.11.02. How to effectively function and work when I don't like myself and don't want to reward myself?

Well, this is an interesting question.. I study this kind of thing.

Who doesn't like whom?

Look at the question carefully. Is "myself" the person asking the question or a person being judged who is not the asker? This is not facetious. Each of us is "two people" The "I" doing whatever such as thinking "I don't like somebody", where the "somebody" may be the life that the person judging looks at as benig its own past. Complicated? Yes. Maybe give you a headache thinking about it?Maybe.

One thing that may make very good sense is for a person to judge that they do not like the life they have lived: "I wish I was Marilyn Monroe, not who I have been." Or: "I wish I was Bruce Springsteen, not who I have been." No argument there. I don't like who I was stuck being. None of us chooses the birth canal or c-section we came out of.

But if the question is: "I don't like not liking myself...." That's trickier, and easier to change. This"I" can disown everything this "I"is dragging around as memories and say: "I don't like any of that, but I at least like that I don't like any of it. I think that's pretty 'cool'. But, oh dear! I'm still stuck in that mess like Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka's story of the man who wakes up one day to find his body is being turned into a giant cockroach. I don't like that I have to go to work at this job I hate today. But that's just a fact I'm stuck with: 'I', the 'I' that doesn'[w like any of it is stuck with it, at leat unless I can do something about it...."

The above is just some thoughts to make the person asking the question (or others) think: What's the problem? What's really the problem? Where did it come from? You can always solve the problem if you take enough "pills." Now I'm not recommending that, but there are persons who are in so much pain that they really, sincerely want to die. Read the classic OpEd piced which is availabl free on the internet from the Journal of the Amerian Medical Association: "It's over, Debbie." It's not cheerful and it wa highly controversial when they printed it.

Well, do "I" like anything? Do "I" like anything that "I" can actually do? Eat a Big Mac? Eat a small $60 filet mignon I could buy at the local butcher, raw (I like that). How about I like to look at the clouds in the sky if it's clear? Or the moon is pretty at night? Take a walk in my local cemetery? Anything.

Getting down to the root of much of this knot of self-loathing or just putting oneself down. A lot of it even if maybe not all of it comes from having had a bad mother, a mother who either was distant or intrusive, which as a baby before you could speak and before you remember made you feel you didn't deserve to exist. Seriously: Bad parents try to convince ther children to love them because then the kid's mind has been mesed up so the kid doesn't know he (she, other) really hates their mother and needs to take defensive measures as far a s possible against their enemy. There is a chemical in some acts' poop that causes mice to run toward not aways from cats. How convenient for the cats

I did not like my parents. I will never know what they did to earn it but I do remember that when I was 5 years of age I spoke articulately and had mutated the word "mother" to: "mud". My parents did not like this, so they staged a little one act play for my benefit: My mother was walking out the efront door of the house with a little suitcae in her hand and my father (who normally was clueless) provided the voiceover: that if I didn't tell my mother I loved her and mean it , she was leaving forever. I had no safe house to flee to and no bank account. They won a pyrrhic victory: they got the words they wanted out of my mouth, but that was the end of any hope tha woman might have had for any affection from her child. My father, as said, was clueless, like many good persons in the Wehrmacht because they happened to have been born in Germany. I was extremely intelligent, so I ended up like a V-12 BMW firing on 6 cylinders. Still better performance than the Yugos all around me but wallking wounded, and so messed up that I was an pretty much remain ashamed to ask a store cleark for help shopping, and I never could call anybody by any name for many years until I figured out to address everybody with respect ESPECIALLY if he did NOT deserve it, to show them an example of what they were not but I though thsy ought to be. "Yes, Sir [not vocalized: you a**hole]."

Non Carborundum legitimi. There is not a typographical error in the previous sentence. Do not let the duly appointed authorities grind you down. To end. The person asking this question might do well to read some very readable books by as former psychoanalyst, Alice Miller: "The drama of hte gifted child", "For your own good" and "Thou shalt no be aware". The punch line here is that she was an abusive mother whose son saved hismelf from her by reading her books.

What can you enjoy today? Unless you are Debbie in the JAMA article, the answer is probably: something. Just do it. (Aristotle said: "If you wish to become a virtuous person, practice doing virtuous acts." Feelings come later.)

1

¶ +2023.11.02. What are your favorite team building and/or group bonding activities for a large, diverse office?

I worked in large, "diverse" computer programing offices. I never saw any probles with "diversity". It never was an issue, period. The man who get the patent for cooking up our project was an ultra-orthodox jew who couldn't even drive an automobile, but he was friendly wih everybody. Especially polite and considerate of others wiere persons from India, whatever religion they were. We had at leaat one Muslim who was very helpful to everybody. A black man who was always super-helpful and very knowledgeable about fixing computer hardware issues.. The office manager was a middle class white middle-aging female who smoked cigarettes. Numerous Chinese (one had 3 children all of whom were National Merit semi-finalists). And others. We did have one white male who was getting older each day and who growled at you if you asked him for help with anything even though his job was the same as the friendly black man. You name it, we had one. Nobody proselytized for and nobody flauted their secondary characteristics. No problema.

I just recalled: In my first programming job in 1972, back before the office had air conditioning; they opened the windows and turned on fans in the summer, when yo uwould sweat while you worked, There was one young [white] lady who sort of stood out: We wrote computer programs on punch cards which were stored in long metal file trays of maybe 1,000 cards in each trsy. This was a patrician insurance company. The young lady painted flowers on the top of the cards in her card trays and wore skirts that were up to her derriere. One of the first line managers, a white male, always had his bottle of Maalox ready at hand on his desk. They actually tolerated me keeping my facial hair (scraggly beard) but I still had to keep haircutted, so there was a limit to diversity.

We did have problems, like boondoggle work projects. One real loser was where some sales excutive had a bright idea, and the idea really was pretty good, but the implementation involved completely exposing a startup's proprietary sole product to our customers for free and the big sales executive had not thought about licensing fees and our company did not do the obvious which would have been to buy out the startup, so first they tried using a freeware abomination substitute for the statup's product, and then the project just died.

Team building? Computer programming is often more individual work: self–starting individuals who want to do the work. For me, meetings were waking nightmares (occassionally I was lucky and dozed off for a while...): when will this damned thing end so I can get back to work? I would forget there was a meeting but some thoughtless person would remind me. Do double arm amputees have to attend "all hands" meetings? We were not designing the Boeing 747 where what people call "teamwork" probably was very iimportant.

To add insult to injury, a manager [young white male who was what I call a "fop"] who liked to hear himself talk. He brought in dog treats for the team: Dunkin Donuts (But the people seemed to like them, except for me).

I had one manager, an attractive [white] young lady, who had a very effective team, including one worker who was often screaming obscenities because he had Tourettes(sp?) Disorder and another who was a self-declared homosexual male ("Yeah. OK....") and another who was orthodox jewish. Each of us just did our job. We could just as well have been the proverbisl unmanageable team of house cats.

This young lady had few if any meetings and they were very SHORT. She built MORALE several ways. Herewith 3 examples for others to follow:

(1) For our employer: My job was to fix bugs in the product. All we did was fix bugs and there was no end to bugs to fix. Fix one and go get another One fine morning I had jsut fixed one and I asked her if I could unnecessarily spend some time looking further into that part of the product. She replied:

"We ALWAYS have tim to look more deelply into things."

So there you have it: Support the people taking initiative to investigate problems beyond what is necessary. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish.

(2) For team morale: One morning she held a very brief meeting where she brought us almond croissants from La Petite Patisserie (Larchmont New York).

(3) For personal morale: One fine normally busy morning about 10 AM I offhandedly mentioned to her that I had never driven a stick-shift BMW but would like to one day. They [literally] threw me her key ring and told me to go for a spin

That's how to build teamwork: Self-starting highly competent workers doing meaningful work. Support them with good tools to do the job. Don't micromanage them: If somebody doesn't show up to work "on time" but they get the job done, don't bother them about it (I myself came to work by choice at 3:45 AM to avoid traffic and having to deal with "people"; the vending machine restock person did not object to be foraging in the garbge for snack packs he discarded as past their eat-by date; I got FREE EXPIRED DORITOS!).

Now more about managers. I knew about a programming team in a Federal Government Agency that was almost legendary. Everybody was an unmanageable house cat. Everybody was a master computer programmer. They had a manager who was technically incompetent. Everybody, including him, knew it and he did not try to pretend otherwise. The team worked very well: The techical people told him what to do technically; he ran interference with management to protect his workers from being harassed by the "idiots" up there. When management wanted something, he would bring it down to the team. They would give him the technical facts, which might include that it shouldn't be done. He would go back off and fight the good fight with management. Everybody was happy. Everything worked well. He also signed purchase orders for capital equipment.

Of course, I have been talking about highly schooled, highly intelligent workers (everybody had at least a bachelor's degree and many had masters degrees and one had a PhD from Yale whereas I only had a BA from there). If you had uncouth people you might need "DEI" and other kinds of things which, for the kind of persons I worked with, would at best not have helped but might even have led some, including me, to look for a different job. I never let on to anybody in the office what I thought (I am anti-theistic anarcho-snydicalist etcetera and so forth), and nobody told me what to think. The business of business is business and people should keep their personal business to themselves. I did work for IBM for 19 years, where, at the time, their motto was:

[ THINK ]

¶ +2023.11.01. What are some good magazines to read for a beginner who wants to improve his knowledge about various subjects, especially science and engineering?

I haven't read it for well over 20 years because I used to look at it in my employer's company library (NASA Headquarters and IBM Research) and I no longer have that kind of employer, or else they no longer have that kind of library.

Check out New Scientist. It's much more readable by non-scientits than things like ScientificAmerican and it even has a sense of humor with Albert the Laboratory Rat cartoons, or at least it used to.

¶ +2023.11.01. How would you build a culture of quality in an organization, such as Cleveland Hospital?

Have the top executives all be precticing medical doctors, not MBA types.

Organize all the staff from senior physicians down to the orderlies into worker self management councils.

Do hire top lawyers and some top notch accountants to do battle with insurance companies and other troublemakers, but not to run hte place.

Well, that should be a start. From tiny acorns do mighty oaks grow.

Now many years ago, probably in the 1970s, a real medical doctor not a bean counter was appointed to the CEO (or whatever the top position is) of Massachusetts General Hospital. Obviously this was a long time ago in a country far, far away from here. There wa an article about him in it was either Time or Newsweek magazine. He had zero previous managerial experience. he said:

"Any reasonably intelligent person can learn any non technical job in two weeks."

On the television in the evenings, everybody in a position of responsibility should watch Air Disasters on the Smithsonian Channel, not violence and celebrity and other soft porn on HBO etc.

¶ +2023.11.01. [ Emoji ] => Do you believe that fear can ever be completely eradicated, or is it a natural part of the human experience that we learn to navigate and manage over time?

Have you talked with The Grim Reaper lately? Or just visited your friendly local cemetery?

Supposedly some persons are "fearless". On the other hand there is the old saying tha tther are no atheists in a fox hole.

In Buddhism, when you re enlightened you apparently you no longer have fear.

"Try before you buy" (Slogan of a certain toy store)

In his film about Gulf War I, Werner Herzog quotes a line from the Book of Apocalypse in the Ne Testament:

"There will come a time when men will seek death and death will flee from them."

I have no wish to be on the Zero Line in Ukraine, do you?

The ending of Ingmar Bargman's film "The Seventh Seal" is interesting here. The protagonist of the film, a knight, is returning home from a Cusdae (why did he go there?). Anyway, The plague is racing him home. His wife is holding down the fort. She could have fled but is staying, waiting for her husband's return. She serves dinner to all the staff. She is the only person who cna read. With the approach of the plague, everybody else is losing it. She is calm. She reads from the Bible. Death comes to the door. She camly welcomes Him in, while, again, all the illiterates are terrified and out of conrol. She is not suicidal, but being literate enables her to face facts calmly.

People have ideas about education. If education cannot help us face the unbearable, and other times help us have more joy in iving, I do not think it is worth anything. I have spent my life studying in the humanities, remembering Karin in the film.

Do any of these random thoughts help you?

¶ +2023.11.01. How does our brain create the mental image of the world that we see in our mind?

Nobody has a clue abou this and likely nobody ever will. Train as a neurosurgeon. Now cut a hole in your skull and start poking around inside looking for your thoughts. Have fun!

That neurosciientists today can read off what a person is thinking from brainwaves is not relevant. It is LOGICALLY no different from listening to a person talk, even though to a simle mind (which may have a PhD in computer science and/or neorylogy) it may seem sructurally different.

People, incuding with PhDs in computer science, have very simpleminded and wrong headed notons about this kind of question. If you are serious about it, yo will study Gernam transcentental idealism and Husserlian phenomenological philosophy. It's not for the faint-hearted.

If I remember right, the high functoning autistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said that seeing is not itself anything seen. See?

¶ +2023.11.01. What does social media mean for the future of humanity... why does it seem like it has made humanity worse but now it just seems like a necessity... How do you view this problem?

Quora is a social media.

As for InYourFaceBook and the app for birdbrains, Twitter (which is now mysterymeat: "X") and Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock, the clock struck one, he mouse ran down, TikTok, and Instagram which sounds like a telegraph company, etcetera and so forth, I do not do them.

And as fo Quora I only answer other persons; questions, not ask any.

I have family who use Facebook all the time for posting pictures of their children etcetera and so forth. I do not look at it. I am interested in Mr. Biden's Ukraine War. Youtube does have high quality videos about many subjects (as well as a lot of other stuff apparently). And I myself cannot tolerate being in a group. I don't do Where's Waldo?

[ symphony orchestra and audience ]

I am now 77 years old. In my 20s I did attend symphony concerts but now I wonder why I put up with it. I love films, but not in a theater. For instance I had the VCR tape of Abel Gance's "Napoleon" and the DVD of Werner Herzog's "Lessons of Darkness".

There used to be and still are "usegroups" Email forums where you subscribe (not FOLLOW!!!) as an individual and there is no advertising and nobody is making any money off it. These were and are for special interests, for instance Patek Philippe wristwatches or making ship models in small bottles. They were and are good – well, you also had usegoups of Nazis, but every technology is value neutral except maybe Agent Orange and Zyklon-B?

Social media and cellphones seem to be synergistic. Is part of the problem the cellphones? I worked as a computer programmer for half a century and am a reverse snob: I do not know how to use a smartphone. I do not carry "my" cellphone around except in rare situations, example: My physician ran some test and I am aaiting to hear if I have cancer or not. Then I [anxiously] carry "my" cellphone.

How do you want to spend (expend) what limited time you have on this side of hte topsoil? Computers are addictive. I used to read "big books" all the time. Nowt I pretty much only read in my office. Well, that's a teaser: I never had a position where I had an office, so ever since I was in my 20s I have read serious books while sitting on the toilet. So that's pretty much the only place where I do serious reading now. and being male there are more than one reason for this. Unlike women, men generally do not spend a lot of time in public "restrooms" except to expose their genitalia to each other if they are real heterosexual "boys" at group urinals.

[ Males at group urinal trough ]

Sitting on a toilet is for girls unless absolutely necessary. So I would find an empty stall, preferably handicapped since the are bigger, and sit down and do my serious business from both ends, and while outside in the office people would annoy me all the time, they rarely do so if you are sitting on a toilet behind a latched door. If I read maybe one or 2 pages at a sitting and I go maybe 6 times a day, that's maybe 10 pages a day, so a thousand page book is less than 4 months. That adds up over half a century. I am not joking here. In graduate school I did not read very much in the reading room of the library which had too many people in it: I went to the men's room and found peace and quiet. One thought leads to another: In 1970 I worked in an art museum designed by the great Beaux Arts architect John Russell Pope. What a magnificent, large all marble men's room they had on the lower level!

"Books are many and reading too many of them wearies the soul." (Ecclesiastes in the Bible)

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

¶ +2023.10.31. Why are people using Wikipedia as a reputable source of information?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

Because in general it is "not bad" and they are not in the business or if they are it's a pretty good quick reference.

The present question is probably in need of clarification. Why is hte person asking hte question? Do they have a perspective on some topic that differs from what they find on Wikipedia?

Also, many Wikipedia articles have references to other sources of information, so one can go check out thoe further sources but that takes effort.

If a person is a specialist in some subject they probably are not gong to be relying on Wikipedia in that subject area.

The physicicist Niels Bohr told his students something that I would urge everyone to apply to everything except in rare eceptions like a fireman telling them to leave a burning building:

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

Apply that to everything in cluding what your parents and your political and religious leaders, and even yourself believes.

he motto of the British Royal Society which I think was founded by Isaac Newton is: "Nulius in verba" – Take nobody's word for it. That would include everybody you "trust".

But to get back the the question being asked her: why is the person asking the question? Only when we know that can we try to helpfully answer it. Finally, "People" are not persons: "People" are just a herd, like 2-legged sheep, which need a shepherd and follow a judas goat. If 2 picures ar worth 2,000 words:

[ March on washington and the man facing tanks in Tienaman square ]

Baaa!

¶ +2023.10.31. What are effective strategies for handling questions during presentations that help build positive engagement with the audience?

There are different kinds of questions. One size does not fit all. Strategies are for wars and must be always subject to change if battlefield conditions indicate they are not working out as one hoped. It's simple: you have something which you truly believe will be helpful for your audience, and in their opinion, not just yours.

First, make sure you have mastered you material. If not it is not a good idea to even show up.

Too many "stupid" questions can prevent you getting your message across. Or it can mean you misestimated your audience and need to lower your aspirations to what can help THEM, not to what you would LIKE them to learn.

But there is another possibility: People who are out to get you. I had one of these once: Aperson who for some reason kept causing me trouble at work and there was nothing I caould do about him. But in my presentation one morning, he asked me a question intended to try to make a fool of me. I was totally taken aback and stopped for a few seconds. I had mastered my maerial. I calmly started: "I am so glad you asked that question..." and by the time I was finished with him I had thoroughly humiliated him in front of his coworkers and I never had any more trouble out of him.

Prof Marshall McLuhan had a similar situation. In Q&A somebody stood up and started refuting everything Mcluhan had said, word by word. McLuhan just let the person tire himself out and when the person finally stopped speaking after maybe 5 or 10 minutes and sat down presumably well satisfied with himself, McLuhan said: "Next question."

But who knows. Sometimes somebody might task a quetion which you had never thought about and give you food for thought. "You know, I never thought of that, and it's important but its 'not what I am trying to present right now. Let's take it offline at the end of my presentation, please."

If you have not mastered your material you are asking for trouble. If you havve mastered your material nothing bad can happen to you (except obviously if they stand up with a pistol and put a bullet through you head or heart...), although if you are the kind of person whose mother always put you down, like mine, you might stutter or wet your pants or do something else that should not bother you.

¶ +2023.10.31. What is the highest employee satisfaction rating for Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or Facebook? Why are they rated so high and how do you know this information?

I'd bet none of them. employees today are throw aways.

If you want to learn about employee satisfaction, go back to the 1950s. Of course things were not good for many, for instance black people were discriminated against and females' place was either in the home or the steno pool. That said....

I started working for IBM in 1979, when the sun wa beginning to set on what may have been the greatest corporation that ever was (or more surely will ever be in today's race-to-the-bottom economy). One day I was walking though the ground floor hall in the Poughkeepsie New York Education Building.

So what? Well, in school it even said in my yearbook: "He opposed the cult of school spirit", and I meant it. So I look in the open door of one of the classrooms and what do I see? A room full of grown men in blue suits singing a song from The IBM Song Book.

[ IBM Song Book ]

That's employee satisfaction!

I thought it was "corny" at the time. I never sang my perp school's "fight song". Give me a break! But today I think differently, not about that school but about those men in blue suits. IBM treated them well and they were loyal to the company. It was win-win. And after 25 years they could look forward to really golden years with a very good IBM pension.

But back to their present. In the 1960s, IBM pulled off one of the great technological achievements of all time: System 360. It revolutionzed computing. You could write a program for your local bank's small computer and take it to NASA and run it on their supercomputer wthout any changes. IBM's CEO, Thomas Watson Jr, spent sleepless nights over the decision to literally bet the company in the project. If it had failed and there was good reason to expect it might, IBM would have come close to if not into bankruptcy.

The engineers gave it their all and they made it happen. They were lifetime employees. Read Fred Brooks's classic book "The Mythical Man Month". I heard a little fact which showed the level of commitment these people had to their jobs. We're talking about electrical engineers here, the stuff of Dilbert cartoons. In 1981, the engineer in Poughkeepsie named their 3031 test machine: "PKGOBABY". That was the spirit of their employment. Would you find this at any Silicone Valley megacorporation today? (More likely: What's the name of Mr. Bezos's superyacht?)

But by 1981, the sun was setting on IBM. In the 1990s they reworked the retirement plan to save some money and make the old timers unhappy. So what? I am using a "ThinkPad" computer to write this posting. IBM Sold ThinkPad to the Chinese company Lenovo. And the Windows operating software? IBM licensed it from Mr. Gates and made him the richest man in the world. So I will end with something I saw and will never forget from that time when John Akers became the CEO of IBM.

I was walking down one of the long corridors in the Armonk New York headquarters building (ca. 1986), behind two men in blue suits who probably did not know I could overhear them and they probably would not have cared anyway. Background information: "Fishkill" was IBM's mission-critical computer chip production facility at the time and you did not want to work there if you had a choice and I called it "Purgatory". So I heard the one blue suit say to the othe blue suit:

"Fishkill is not coming in with the inventions on schedule"

The sun was setting on IBM.

[ THINK ]

¶ +2023.10.31. Wouldn't it be smarter to play dumb, when a company asks you to use your smartphone or go online for something? Say you're too stupid for technology. Instead of wasting hours of your life trying to navigate websites, they just quickly do it for you?

You sound smart.

A few months ago the wa a man in his 70s (I am too) who made the newspapers in Spain becasuse he threw Aa fit demanding to be able to do business with a human employee ("teller") in a bank and not be coerced to use the ATM.

I worked for half a century as a computer programmer and got PtSD from it. I hate cellphones becasuse people can use them to annoy me. I go walking in the woods near my house. It is conceivable I could be attacked by a bear aor more likely have a heart attack. Since I do not carry my cellphone I would be SOL (Shit Out of Luck). Well, that's a risk I take.

I often have complaints about consumer products. I try to find a human customer service person to call. Some companies make that difficult. When I do get a human, who is often in the Philippines since U.S. corporations are trying to save money by sacrificing lives ("offshoring"), I often SCREAM at them, while being careful to tell them I am screaming at their employer not a them personally. Almos invraiably the human ends up making me glad I had the complaint. And I tell them so. I complimdnt them as persons and tell them I hope their employer is treating them well. I never was one and neve rwould want tobe one, but unlike most privileged people I appreciate the persons who do it. So I will end with two stories:

(1) In one of the very high end fashion companies, I forget which, the owner knwe which side his bred wa buttered on. When he would walk down the hall (he owned hte place) he would step aside whenever an employee approached coming the other way.

(2) Would you like to clean the toilets in a big office building on 3rd shift? I wouldn't. I worked in an office wher many of hte employees had masters degrees and then ther were the exeutives.

[ restoom with paper towels on floor ]

They made the people who cleaned tha trestroom stoop on the floor to pick up their used paper towels in stead of disposing of htem in one of hte TWO receptacles provided. I may add that nobody on that night shift cleaning crew probably could afford the camera I had to take that picture.

Back to "palyinng dumb". Early on I learned that the computer wa bigger than I was. If some people say God's ways are unknown to man, so too are some of the things computers do. Ask the pilots of the Boeing 737Max's who you can't ask because the flight computer crashed their plane and they along with the passengers were killed by it.

¶ +2023.10.31. What makes you enthusiastic about art and how do you communicate your enthusiasm to others so that they eventually share your enthusiasm?

Life has disappointed me. But I have art., so I can imagine what it would like for life to not be disappointing.

I can imagine I am the character Monica Vitti played in Michelangelo Antonioni's classic trinity of black and white films of the late 1950s: L'Avventura, La Notte nd L'Eclisse. Take me home to the home I never had.

[ last scene from L'Avventura ]

I don't keep up with what is going on in art today (except for the great work of performance art in Ukraine). There is only one contemporary artist I have any interest in: Anselm Kiefer. I can make his kind of art any day I want – just collect some excrement. I don't know much German but I did cook up a word to describe today's world: Scheissestuckwelt. So I create my own art, every day, but alas it does not pay. Share my enthusiasm? I did a portrait of The President of Ukraine tht managed to offend my thesis advisor from school, so it lost me a person whom I thought was a friend.

[Not shown here]

There was no art in my suburban split-levenl childhood. There was not even a Bible in my childhood home, and while it was hot in the summers we did not even have a fan. But we had at least 3 television sets.

[ Television sets and family watching the television here ]

The first two books (books are art...) I read that I liked in school were not part of hte curriculum: (1) "Waiting for Godot". Unlike my parens and teachers, Mr. Godot would never arrive; My parents and teachers would not go away. And (2) "Tea and sympathy I had a brilliant mind and a wimpy body so "I got none".

After college I got a job which was transformative: Managing the gift shop in an art museum. For the first time in my life I got some sense of self worth. Why? Because I had a blank book of purchase order forms and authorization to purchase for resale anything I wanted in the whole wide world. All I had to do was sign on the bottom line and it went to Accounts Payable. But I also learned something even more important . I said "art museum". I sold fine handcrafts. I couldn't afford to buy the paintings I looked at each day, but I could buy a small vase made by a master potter.

For me "art" uust include fine hand crafts, especially for me personally, pottery. Baked clay. Well in the bible God created Adam out of clay didn't He? If I had to flee my home in a war and could only take with me what I could carry in my two hands, it would mostly be a very few books and a couple pieces of pottery(and my pet cat?) – that's how important these craft objects are for me. One I bought (wholesale) in 1971 for $6 but it is a masterpiece; at the other end is one I paid the equivalent of $260 USD for in 1984 in a small town in Japan. Even that is not so much money, is it? But they are masterpieces, so if I can't own a masterpiece painting I don't feel bad about that. That's how important these works of art: burnt clay are for me (and hey are literally burnt: one was fired in the wood, not on a shelf in the kiln). After almost half a cantury, I caress them. There is a film about a potter from 1953: Kenji Misoguchi's "Ugetsu". So between that film and Monica Vitti I imagine a world worth living in.

Who thinks today about Wassily Kandinsky's art? If there is an afterlife, I hope it's like his paintings. And as for "fine art", my person of choice is Marcel Duchamp. My wife had a bottle drying rack she wanted to throw in the garbage. It's either an exact duplicate or veryf close to Duchamp's. Why not sneeze, Rrose Sélavy?

¶ +2023.10.30. I'm at a forum on use of generative AI in the classroom; the following claim was just made by a panelist: whatever is generated by ChatGPT is copyrighted by openAI, so if you just cut and paste from ChatGPT, then you commit plagiarism. Is that true?

I am not a lawyer.

But even it it is copyright free, it is plagiarism unless you cite the source.

Let me repeat that: Plagiarism has nothing to do with intellectual property rights. Plagiarism is simply a matter of you pretending to have thought up all by your little own self something you copied from somebody else, even if it is open source. Quote Saiht Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle without saying you copied it from them and it's plagiarism even though no copyright is involved. Period.

Plagiarism is pretending to have thought up something yourself when you took it from somebody else, even with their consent. "Sure you can sopy from my doctoral dissertation." If you do that and don't cite me as the source it's plagiarism even though I told you you could take it.

Inellectual property is involved if I say: "No you cannot quote it even if you do give me credit for it." I had to deal with precisely that in my dissertation.

¶ +2023.10.30. How can individuals and communities work towards fostering understanding and acceptance amidst a culture of hatred?

It should not be all that hard except for certain kinds of people.

Something to think about: One of the most hateful people who ever lived, Adolf Hitler, did something I consider suggestive. He gave the SS a specific order to provide one jew safe passage out ot Germany. That jew was a Dr. Ernest Bloch (sp? who had been his family's physician. He knew this particular jew parsonally. They had interacted personally.

I have neer met a racist, but I'd give it a shot (that's bad pun, of course) if I could engage with him (her ofther) one-to -one.. Whateer one my think of him, U.S. Assoc. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has said he would rather deal wtih an honest racist than a hypocritical liberal.

The problem, it seems to me, is largely to make a personal connection. All stereotypes have some truth in them or else they wouldn't "stick", and I think a lot of hatred is due to persons dealing with stereotypes not individuals, "jews", not Dr. Ernest Bloch.

So I would be up to trying to deal with a black nationalist or an alt-right German. One-to-won, not in a group.

But what I think is hopeless is – well, let me give you an example: I heard of a person who was a cliinical social worker. They had an MSW degree and wanted to improve themself and go back to school to get a PsyD degree. Their boss had a PsyD degree. This person did very good work for their boss. They asked the boss to write a letter of recommendation for them fo their graduate school application. The person was rejected. Later the boss's secretary spilled the beans: that the recommendation the boss had written had sabotaged the employee's application. The boss was a "malignant narcissist" who could not tolerate the idea of an underling "rising to their level". Nobody can communicate with that kind of person.

There is a great old soul song free on the InternetL "Smiling faces sometimes" by The Undisputed Truth. Nobody can communicate with a smiling face that tells lies. (Or if you are highly schooled, in G.W.F. Hegel's "The Phanomenology of Spirit" there is a chapter "Evil and its forgiveness" which says the same as I am saying here.)

I think it is possible to break through hatred unless it's hopeless. Not a racist but a person who make their living off racism. Or a Derek Chanvin, or, whle all America was incensed about George Floyd, in Paris Frence Abdoullakh Anzorov did not crush the neck of a public school teacher, Mr .Samuel Paty,, but completely severed it (beheaded) with a knife, for "insulting the prophet".

My guess is that you could get most "Proud Boys" to have a beer with you even if you were an black nationalist – if you parked your ideology in the paring lot and talked with them about what mettered to them. Not all, surely, but many.

The key to really breaking thru prejudice is if you can get not "peoplebut individual persons who don't like you to realize that but for two accidents of fate they could be you and you them. Most people are what they wer childreared to be. If you had been born to loving parents who were slave owners in South Carolina in 1930 you would likely have been pro-slavery. If you had been born to Boston merchant parents you would likely have beene anti-slavery. Once people realize this then I think the game is won. How can you hate who you might as well have been?

There is anothe angle here: Tolerance is not a matter of feelings but of behavior. You don't have to wnt to go to bed wth somebody to respect them in civil society.

And finally, revenge. It may be right but foolish. Think about the end of World War I. The victors got revenge on the vanquished: They extracted enormous reparation from Germany. Yes, and the nwhat happened? This caused Adolf Hitler who gave them back World War II. So if htey would have ate their desire for vengeance and treated Germany with respect whether or not Germany deerved it, they might have been spared what their reparations, even if just , earned them. Don't cut off youe enemy's nose to spite your face.

¶ +2023.10.30. What is your favorite John Cleese performance?

It's been so long that I've forgot it all, except for one sentence which I would apply to current U.S. Foreign Policy and to a now very famous comedian from Ukraine who on BBC once said that some British comedian or other [I forget the name if any] was "easier to undertand than Monty Python":

"And now it's time for something completely different."

But let me share two things with you:

(1) A cartoon from the British Science magazine "New Scienist", from maybe 35 years ago, about Albert the Laboratory Rat. It's just one cel. It shows Albert plopped down in the Lab Director's plush leather desk chair, popping positive reinforcement cookies with one little front paw and pressing a button on a little box with his other little front paw. Behind a one way mirror we and Albert see the sometime Lab Director screaming and writhing in pain, as Albert conducts a little Milgram-like experiment on him.

(2) Prof. Marshall McLuhan said:

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

¶ +2023.10.30. How is virtual reality changing the way we experience entertainment and education?

Education or instruction?

VR can be useful for instruction to enable persons to practice developing skill without the risks or inconveniences of reality. A pilot in a "trainer" can't kill himself or anybody if he (she, other) messes up. Also he doesn't need to get real time on a real airplane.

That's instruction. Education is or can be something different which can only come through personal engagement: by two persons talking with each other. This has not changed since the iron age and cannot change. Well, media can be a poor substitute, like some persons can actually learn something from reading a book so that they don't need to "learn from experience". Expereience can kill you. Experience is a great teacher → if you survive it more or less intact.

Watch the old fun but also profound movie "The Truman Show". And nobody is probably going to tell you the following, especially computer science junkies who think virtual reality is "cool" (fun). Maybe you can learn something about virtual reality from it or maybe not.

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.

¶ +2023.10.30. What impresses you most in the philosophy of teaching statement for a physics instructor?

I never had one (I was a humanities wimp). But I think the physicist Niels Bohr's instruction to his students is exemplary:

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

¶ +2023.10.30. Imagine that you wake up tomorrow to find that you are now 80 years old. Can you write a 1-3 paragraph personal narrative about your first 20 minutes as an 80-year-old?

I'm closing in on it (now age 77).

I have something for you to think about. A man, who happened to be a folk artist, who lived to 103. After he was over 100, he said:

"O to be ninety again, the things I would do!"

¶ +2023.10.29. Does being an avid reader make one easily see through other people's facade?

Not necessarily.

It depends on what the reader brings to their reading.

Some persons read superficial books "for pleasure" while wasting their time, e.g., cultivating skin cancer ("sunbathing") at a beach or poolside at a tennis club drinking old fashioned cocktails or whatever. They may really be hoping for a "pickup".

Some persons read for facts, e.g., the day's professional baseball or footall statistics or stock prices.

Some person read for specific scientific or scholarly or oher reasons, e.g., to learn the latest news from CERN about soubatomic paricle research or the latet archoeological findings in Iraq or the latest federal regulations in the oil industry.

Some persons are interested in "psychology" and do study books to learn more about human behavior, including "people's facades". Some of these persons like Dostoyevsky novels; others prefer psychoanalysis textbooks....

Etc.

From Sebastian Brandt's "Ship of Fools" (1494), herewith th Reader Fool who substitutes reading for living. He reads everything but hasn't a clue about anything:

[ Reader fool ]

¶ +2023.10.29. What are some potential creative purposes for which someone could use the space inside the cave house in Concord, Ohio?

Why not live in it?

If the asker here is interested in non-conformist architecture, there is a classic book (it's lavishly illustrated): Bernard Rudofsky, "Architecture without architects". It's now even availabble free on the Internet.

¶ +2023.10.29. When was artificial intelligence invented, and why?

I would urge you to read MIT Professor of Computer Science Joseph Weisenbaum's classic book: "**Computer power and humen reason: From judgment to calculation**" (WH Freeman, 1976). His name is apposite: he was a wise person.

[--------]

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)

¶ +2023.10.29. Even if you're really talented at a particular field, can you still benefit from coaching?

This is a contentious issue.

My feeling is that nobody should boss anybody else around, especially anywhere outside Camp Lejune (where U.S. Marine Corps recruits receive basic training). As the U.S. Decaration of Independence says: "All men are created equal". Bosses and employees, teachers and students, parents and children. And so forth.

[ "We learn from others ]

So a person should respectfully suggest with rational evidence what another might wish to consider doing. Respectfully as peers: Both the Coach and the coached are equally mortals created by the same God or the same Fate. As the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope observed some 2,500 years ago: He examined a pile of bones and could not tell the bones of Alexander the Great's father from the bones of a slave.

Not every person feels this way and some have POWER to enfore their opinion on others. Bullies get their way.

Of course there are exceptions such as a fireman telling you to get out of a burning building: "Now!" But even then, once both of you are safely out in the street you can argue with him about it. If anybody tells me what to do, I may have to obey if they literally or metaphoriclly "put a gun to my head", but if they don't pull the trigger I will know what they are. I actually had to deal with a coach once, in 7th grade:

[ Mike Rentko ]

¶ +2023.10.29. Does making a movie based on history always offend certain people?

Isn't it constructive to offend offensive people? If you were making a movie about Nazis wouldn't you want to offend them? If you were making a movie about Mr. Zelensky wouldn't you want to offend him? If yo uwere doing movie about MAGAs or Wokies, wouldn't you want to offend them?

Unless you are adequately capitalized, you may need to consider "offending certain people" to be able to pay your rent (or mortgage). But if you are not financially "under the gun", why should you care about "hurting people's feelings"? They are just prejudices, which are like gestering boils on their skin: they need to be lanced and exposed to antiseptic light.

Just make sure to hit the bullseye, not just spray scatter shot. Don't just be impolite which would be no better than they are: be laser focuesed with hard evidence. Ideally, get them to argue with themseles, not with you. Putting up with people's prejudices just lets them do harm to others. Dig up the dirt on them. Help them live up to the advice in the Bible:

"Let your light so shine before men that they may seeyour good works and glorify your father which is in heaven." (Matt 5:16)

Think about that carefully: It does not say to glorify your biological father, who is in many cases , worth criticizing not glorifying. (Fact: my father' father tried to blackmail him to get part o his paycheck and when that did not work, he took him to court but that didn't work either.)

How can one offend a person who acts in a highly honorable way? But some petty person who is trying to get away with something should be easy to offend. You can HELP them by exposing them. They should THANK you! (And if they don't, that's not your problem unless they take out a firearm and put a bullet through your head.)

Now let us "out" famous men and our fathers who were before us! (I use the word "out" here in a general way, not just to refer to their sex lives or lack thereof) Example If you were doing a biography of The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wouldn't you want ot includ that he plagiarized on his doctoral dissertation, that he had sex with other women than his lawfully wedded wife while he wa married to her, that he owned a Rolex writwatch which he did not flash at his mass rallies, and other of facts of his life? That might offend some people, yes?

To sum up: history or hagiography?

¶ +2023.10.28. What strategies can you use to craft content that resonates with the values and beliefs of your audience?

"Strategies" what a big word!

Master your subject matter. Know what you re talking about and why it is important and if it is not important just keep it to yourself.

Talk respectfully with your audience, get to know them, personally, not as "types". Now if you are a CEO or a tenured professor and your audience is lower life forms: the office's night shiift cleaning crew or undergraduates, this will be difficult because you wield power of life and death or close to that over them. So you will have to park your weapons in the parking lot. Find out what matters to them, even if it is that they distrust you.

I once heaerd the greatest military mind of th e20th century, USAFColonel John R. Boyd, father of the F-16 Fihting Falcon, lecture on theory of war. First let me note he did not jerk the audience around: At hte door wa a pile of handouts of his full day of lectures: a pile of photocopies over an inch thick (I still hav them). So there is the firs tthing for you: Unless yo uare going to adlib, hand out your laccture notes or transcript before you start.

Col Boyd said: "The way to win a guerilla war is to offer the people a better lif ethan the guerillas offer them" – better in THEIR opinion, not just YOURS: Offer you aldueince information that ThEY feel wll greatly benefit them, not just that YOU think would be good for them.

And if I ever again get a chance to address an audience, the fir tthink I will do is wait for everybody ot be auiet. then I will resppecctfully bow to them, either because they deserbe respect or if not to show them what they lack.

To sum up: Know your subject matter and offer your audience only what they will value. Otherwise don't waste either their or your time. And unless they are dogs, do not try to bribe them with dog treats (Dunkin Donuts), but then again maybe they will be dogs – in my jobs as a computer programmer in multinational corporations it worked (once I had a young lady manager who held few meetings and very short ones; one morning she brought in almond croissants from La Petite Patisserie (Larchmont New York) for the group. Yummy!

[ Homer eating a donut ]

¶ +2023.10.28. How can someone create a lasting impact on their community/country/world if they don't have children?

Yes!

They help just by setting a good example and not contributing further to the hyper-over-polulation glut.

It may be true that the earth can "sustain" far more concurrently squirming warm human bodies than at present, but at what cost to QUALITY OF LIFE?

Those who are currently living suffer and can also experience joy. Let's do everything we can to make life better for every currently living person. But no more of them need to be produced (reproduced) to keep making matters ever worse.

I strongly beieve in the importance of maximizing sexual satisfaction for every person, but it is not necessary for people to reproduce. Animals are limited to biological reproduction of species life; a mother cat is proud of her kittens. Humans can produce in the arts and sciences: we can have "mind children" not more babies.

I am male. If I was female I would pray to be "barren". I will not speak further here where I have no standing, but rather quote from a person who does:

"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)

[ Pregnant woman ]

Is this thing going to explode? Duck and cover!

¶ +2023.10.28. What are some of the changes you're seeing among your neighbors or in your community as they prepare for a summer of fire and smoke?

Where I live, in a small community of 1930s and 1950s houses and even wooded spaces, upcale but not wealthy suburban New York small town on the Mero North commuter rail line, the weather has been benign for at least a couple years (since Superstorm Sandy).

(We did have a day or two when the air was toxic from the Canadian wildfires.)

Nobody seems to notice anything, wether about the weather or the wars going on or anything else. People can leave the doors of their houses unlocked and not worry too much about it, but there is an occasional bear or coyote sighting.

Me? One of my favorite movies is Werner Herzog's "Lessons of Darkness", and while I never was in the military, I think about it a lot. I find the situation eerie.

August 1914 had benign weather in Europe.

¶ +2023.10.28. How might post-pandemic surpluses of vacant office buildings be addressed in your country?

I have read that at least some of them are being converted to condominiums. It is not easy.

I also read that when the people came back to work they had to reinitialize all the utility systems because these buildings were not designed to be shut down for extended periods of time. Problems like Legionairres Disease in the Air Conditioning systems.

There are lot of super-wealthy people to buy this stuff for investment property. Irrelevant aside: There is one office building in Manhatten that is or was owned by Jared Kushner with a name that some people were always superstitious about: 666 Fifth Avenue. (666 is "the number of he beast" in the book of Apocalypse in the Bible; any day now?)

¶ +2023.10.28. If an AI is built into a social network and this AI causes harm to people, should the programmers or owners of the social network be responsible for this?

I am not a lawyer. But my guess is that any person who produces anything and the thing causes harm, that person or their institution is criminally and civilly liable. "Ambulance chasers" are not all bad, and if they take 1/3 of anything they win, you still get 2/3.

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)

¶ +2023.10.27. What is the role of education in fostering creativity and innovation?

There is another qustion: What is the role of education in extinguishing creativity and innovation and reaplacing it with social conditioning to make of the young person a "good citizen" (by whatever definition of that term the political regime currently in power is pushing on the given day)?

My schooling retarded me. I had brilliant mind but a wimpy body and my school teachers came to work each day to get paychecks.

Now, it doesn't have to be that wsy and fortunatly for some young persons, it isn't. Or else they thrive on being beat down, as in the case of high shool jocks who get trained in head-butting (football) and locker room pub[l]is nudity even though they are not homosexual.

Schooling and education, of course, are very differnt things unless a person wishes wilfully to define the word "education" as a synonym for "schooling". Columba University Teachers College Professor Maxine Greene has a couple short videos on Youtube about how schooling can foster creativity and innovation.

Example from the internet of two different kinds of teachers in schools: A boy had had a benign experience in elementary school. In his first day of junior high school, he had a science class taught by a teacher who got off on being strict and humiliating young persons. The boy went in tears to his new English teacher whose name curiously was Mrs. Dean. He asked her if now that he wa no longer a child this kind of abuse was what he had to look ahead but not forward to for the rest of his life. Mrs. Dean told him it was not right and if a teacher ever treated him tha way again he should stand up and object to it. I never had a Mrs Dean.

Here is a suggestion from Dr. Robert Ballard, the man who discovered the wreck of RMS Titanic, so he is not (like me) a wimp:

"Kids retain 5 percent of what they hear and 10 percent of what they read but 80 percent of what they do and 90 percent of what they teach."

If in school I had not been subjected to one-size-fits-all notes-by-rote ass-ignments, I had instead been tasked with teaching younger kids, I might have deeloped intelletually, emotionally and socially. Instead I just learned to fear everybody and everything and try my best to get hurt by them as little as possible. Since I innately was highly intelligent I was able to perform well as a dog doing tricks for them. Bow, wow! They wasted and ruined my life and got away with it.

But it could have been different. At age 37 years I went back to school n a doctoral progarm I thought would not hurt me and I guessed right. I took one lecture course from Professor Maxine Greene (see above). Before the first clss I went up to her and asked if I could write an essay on a topic in which I had a passionate nterest instead of doing the assignments. Let me repeat that: INSTEAD OF DOING THE COURSE ASSIGNMENTS. She replied for me to go do it. That is the kind of teachers I always needed.

Actually, I needed private tutoring by Aristotle, like Alexander the Great had. But there too I have an instructive story. My dissertation advisor, like Professor Greene, gave me total freedom to do what I wanted to do. Sink or swim. If I failed I would have nobody to blame but myself, not the teachers. But he had another student he was supervising. He had long conversations in his lovely faculty apartment with good whisky, every Friday nite with this other student. I was jealous. But later we talked about it and concluded I got the better deal because I taught myself how to learn whereas the other student got hand-holding (not exact words). Yes, we both had a great experience. The other student getting wisdom every week from a great scholar, and me off doing my own thing. And what did I do? Well for one thing, the few times I wanted to talk with a living person not just buy another book, I paid public experts by the hour to talk with me; they could not hurt me because they were not associated with the school. And you may guess my dissertation was on destructive teaching and what it should be instead.

Consider that probably the finest President the Unitd States ever had was Abraham Lincoln. He had only a very few years of schooling as a child. Or Benjamin Franklin whom I believe never went to school at all. Contrast with Mr. Joseph Robinette Biden Junior who, even though hae had to repeat third grade did finally get a law degree. Who would yo urather representyou in court: Joe or Abe?

Then you can have the situation of a person who gets very good schooling but as human being may be questionable. Dr. Henry Kissinger got his doctoral degree from Harvard with distinction, which is a rare thing.

I was greatly harmed by "The American Dream". But America's second President, John Adams, had a different American dream to whcih I heartily subscribe and whouldn't teachers too?

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

Sign me up!

¶ +2023.10.26. Is Sunak using ChatGTP to write his speeches? Could it really get any worse?

I don't know what you are taling about. But could Liz Truss be worse?

¶ +2023.10.26. What sources, books or websites do you know of that have an extensive set of examples of manipulative situations within the work environment, accompanied by useful tips and strategies for managing such situations?

Is "The Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks, of any interest to you?

¶ +2023.10.26. How has art and activism helped your perspectives on the state of the world today?

Soured me on it.

A couple years ago I had a distasteful interaction with a woke activist , a white male who lived partly off inherited weath: an ActiFist, who deployed the semiotic weapon of mass destruction of freedom of expression against me: "**insensitive**". I was "**insensitive**" for saying that a person who was not epidemiologically educated might call SARS-2 (Covid-19) a "China virus" and not be a racist. He ***excoriated*** me that persons whose ancestry is from Asia were being victims of racist crimes and that I was being "**insensitive**". Not all activists are bad, but

"Every revolution... ends in reappearance of a new ruling class." (Sebastien Faure, cited by Barbara Tuchman)

Send me an email and I will send you a transcript with either minimal or extended commentary as you may wish.

We have neo-tribalists who want to destroy the civilization that brought them the mass media they use against it: People are busy sawing off the branch they are sitting on to try to get a free lunch.

As for art, in he first half of the 20th century there was **The Bauhaus**, and humanistic artists including Wassily Kandinsky and Marcel duchamp and Henri Matisse. In architecture we had Adolf Loos ("Ornament and Crime"), and then the humanist architect-teacher Louis Kahn.

I have examined in detail the crimes of the postmodernist architect Robert Venturi, simply by quoting his own words in his anti-intetllectual screeds "Complexisty and Contradiction in Architecture" and "Learning from Las Vegas". Modernist architects committed the terrible crime of trying to raise the cultural level of the masses.

I know very little of what is going on today, except for the Ukraine war. But even there I am more interested in the past and the next book I want to examine in what time is left to me on this side of the topsoil (now age 77 years) is Ernst Junger's "Storm of Steel". All it took for me to go from thinking things were bad to fearing they were far worse was one news article in The New York Times newspaper (*below*), which, when I saw it on the front page of my print copy of the paper, I imagined I had picked up an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) and it had exploded in my face.

Among "important" artists today, there is one whose work I feel is constructive: **Anselm Kiefer**.

Why are "we" throwing out the baby with the bathwater? Of course the white slave dealers and the conquistadores et al. were evi, just like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos et al, today (check out DemocracyatWork (d@w) (http://democracyatwork.info) for something hopeful). People who get off on what I call anti-racist neo-racism (white people are bad) I would urge them to read a short book: "Prisoners of ritual" by Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, especially the ladies in the audience.

It could be different and better. Art could have built on **The Bauhaus**. Of course real racism had to be put an end to, but so too, which Amerians don't talk about, intolerant religionism. When everybody in USA was competing to see who could be most incensed by a rogue cop having killed a putative small-time felon, George Floyd, with a knee to the neck, in Paris France a school teacher who never did anything illegal was **beheaded**: his head totally separeted from his torso, by an Islamist, for teaching freedom of expression in a middle school classroom: Samuel Paty. After civil rights, everybody should get educated, and go back to go forward from Edumund Husserl's 1935 lecture (available free on the Internet) "Philosophy and the crisis of European Humanity"

https://www.pro-europa.eu/europe/husserl-edmund-philosophy-and-the-crisis-of-european-man/I am now an old man. I will not live to see the earth turn so hot that people will have achoice of being steamed in New Orleans or dry roasted in Riyadh, or when their cellphones dies and there iare no white males still living who know about electric circuits and differential equations. Maybe voodoo spells will fix their cellphones and airconditioners?

People have a choice: to be woke or to try to be awake. (I apologize: I forgot the MAGAs.) Two thoughts from dead white males who were not slave dealers:

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

"Take every tatesment I make as a question not as an assertion." (Niels Bohr, physicst)

Unfortunately for many but fortunatey for some, with very few possible exceptions, everybody dies one day or another. I do not like the Abrahamic Deity, but I do recommend for the interim, the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. KISS (:Keep It Simple, Stupid", Kelly Johnson inventor of the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, and the U.S. Navy, 1960)

[--------]

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."

[ Political correctness cartoon]

¶ +2023.10.26. Can you give me more information about buying and selling parts from old ships that have sunk?

Yes: Consult a lawyer first.

¶ +2023.10.26. => Do you think this statement '' Read what you love until you love to read '' can helps us trick our mind to appreciate reading?

What is hte question here?

If a person is loving reading something then they are probably loving reading [it], yes?

So is the question really the folllowing: Can reading what you love to read help you to plow through school ass–-ignments or pa[erwork in a meaningless job that you ha e zero desire to waste your time on but which you must read to avoid homelessness and dyig as roadill on I-666 (the highway to hell)?

In school I HATED no: I avoided the stuff I was ass–-igned to read by middle aging white male losers (this was back before "civil rights"). Why the Dickens did I have ot read Charles paid-on-the-installment-plan Dickens?

And indeed I did "cut off my nose to spit my face". We kids wer wupposed to read 2 books each summer to spoil our summer vacations. I didn't (I was a straight A student, somehow I did good dog tricks for my masters). But there was one book on the reading list that I should have read: "All quiet on the Eseten Frnt".Why? Because my whole life was going to be me as an infantry soldier fighting againt teachers, bosses and others, including the Selective Service System (id: 18–11–46–503. What will you SSS id be when Mr. Biden reinstates conscription for Vietnam II in Ukraine or you may have a choice of Taiwan?).

In adult life, however, I found books that were meaningful to me. I still had trouble reading, but now it was worth it.

If you have to read crap you have no desire to read, the best thing I can think is to divide the wordcount into digentible chunks and promise yourself a little treat after you successfully read each chunk. Something that won't hurt you, like maybe a cup of black coffee or a short walk in the open air.

There once were some education researchers who brought a bunch of teenage males who had zero interest in school and whose reading level was way behind grade level, up to grade level in 6 weeks: They found these hopeless cases were interested in automobiles. So they got some broken down cars and tools and they gave the boys automobile repair manuals. Since they wanted to repair the cars, they learned to read. What the Dickens?

¶ +2023.10.25. Have you ever had an easter egg or inside joke on a creative project or artwork, and did others find it?

No.

But just about everything I write has occasional sentences with multiple meanings, including my doctoral dissertation. And if I use a word I may mean more to it than is in the dictionary.

I think a lot lf people are two dimsnsional. I strive for depth. Trivial and silly example. Sometimes people on the internet use a handle of "Anonymous". Well, I have a thing about small rodents, and also I am fragile, so it is easy for Bullies to hurt me. So I might use: "Anonymouse"

[ Mice cartoons ]

If somebody asks me: Are you a man or a mouse?" I would answer: Squeak!

¶ +2023.10.25. How do you celebrate the process, the journey, and the creative sparks rather than only focusing on the outcome?

Definitely!

The outcome is: death and I either won't know it or will look back on it from some place far, far away.

The process is all we have. All products are just partial, tentative results which become inputs to more processing.

One specific: I type faster than the computer keyboard can handle it right and I make a lot of typos. But I don't just "correct" them. I mine them for new ideas. Some are amazing. Of course a lot more are jsut dead misspellings.

Remember tha Johannes Kepler revolutionized zastronomy due to a diecrepancy of 8 minutes of arc in some observations of the planet Mars. Somebody else might have said: "Oh, probably just one more data entry error.... Let's get on with more important things!"

I think companies shoudl reward intelligent dead ends just like successful discoveries, and journals should publish them. Ditto doctoral dssertatons.

If you take the old philosophy cliche seriously, it changes everything:

"Is doesnot imply ought."

Nothing that exists can have any value: it just exists (Martin Heidegger: "Es gibt"). The value is in new acts of valuing which then sediment into more stuff that just exists....

"The past is a bucket of ashes" (carl Sandberg?) And that includes your ancestors, your deity, your country and everything else that exists – including your self. (OK, mine, maybe not thine?)

I suspect I misunderstand Leon Trotsky's notion of "perpetual revolution". I think he meant extending the revolution everywhere. I mean that once the revolution wins, it then has to overthrow itself, ever again, onward and upward forever.

What value have you created today? Correction: right now.

Corrective: If this sounds like perpetual frenzy, I also endorse the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, although I do not endorse the Abrahamic Deity.

¶ +2023.10.25. How many questions does an average person likely think up or ask themselves throughout a day in their mind?

One size does not fit al.

I had a mother who seems to have had a 5.5th grade education. Sometimees she would say something tht made me wonder wht might had gone on or not gone on in her head. She would say "Now let me think" Did that mean that most of the time she was not thinking? Wht was going on in her head then? Nothing?

My father had zero imagination. He was a highly ethical salesman (yes tht is something it is possible for a person to be), so he ws probably thinking a lot about how to serve his customers, etc. But did he question things? Well, maybe what was going on at home with a wife who should have been in a mental hospital and a son who must have een a disappointment being a brainy wimp, so although there is a cliche that nobody ever died wishing they had spent more time in the office, I am sure he looked ahead to Monday Mornings (he travelled so he was away from home all the work week).

On the other hand, the physicist richard Feym=man who at lest claims he had an IQ of only 125 which is I don't know maybe 780th percentile, had a father who was always asking him to ask questions about everything from the ducks swimming in the water to the start in teh sky.... So he was asking questions all day.

It depends. If you are a social scientist, you can be a bean counter or you can interview individual persons in depth. If job opportunities are scarce you may not havve a choice. Otherwise how do you want to spend the bst hours of hte best days of your life?

Various if not numerous persons have said that the only thing that endures is the process of thinking, not any of the things thought, i.e., asking quesitons, not any of the answers. (Tell that to a fundamamentalist preacher or any other "boss".... You don't get men to die on the attlefield that way, or to bring home the bacon, etc.)

¶ +2023.10.24. Do managers not understand that by changing every worker's schedule every week they are reducing productivity?

Part of every manager's education should be working a month on the night shift cleaning crew in the building where they will have their office, clearning the toilets they will take their dumps in.

If you live on Mount Olympus and have never seen what is beneath the clouds, you can have all sorts of "bright" ideas about groundlings.

These people either don't hve a clue about circadian rhythm and that persons like to do things in habitual ways, etc. or they don't care,because that they are telling othere to do is not bing applied to themsevles and their parents and children.

Remember that in the Vietnam War, Secy of Defense Robert Macnamara was sure we were sinning because the kill ratio was 10 to 1 in our favor. We won, right?

And then: What is productivity? I worked in computer programming. Mediocre programmers would expend enormous amoutnts of time producing mountains of code that accomplished little, whereas a superprogrammer could get much more done in far less time and with much less code. Working smart beats wrking hard almost(?) every time. The problem with the old Aesop fable was that the rabbit rested before he finished the job.

Then there is "multitasking": juggling multiple complex tasks all at the same time, especially if they are similar to each other but different in subtle ways ("IS an X in project A a Y in project B or is it the other way?"). Good luck!

¶ +2023.10.24. Why is the world pushing us in front of computers instead of face-to-face interactions?

You have probably guessesd there are many reasons.

One big one is that computers are cheaper than human employees.

Another is that some people are "faxscinated" by computers, just like some people in the middle ages went through the streets flagellating themselves because the end of the world was coming or any other fanaticism or addiction.

And maybe "pushing" is a key word here. Beware of people who are "pushing" anything as opposed to USING it in a reasoned way.

Let's say that empahic and educated teachers are in short supply but people have reproduced like the proverbial rabbits. You don't have to be "pushing" computers to think that maybe they can delliver better education to the many all too many then there are good teachers available. Now, of course you could say that more people should want to become teachers than to become salesmen or internet influencers, but that is wishful thinking. In my own education my school teachers embodied a line from a poem by a very astute man I knew:

"Hammurabi's children made their house of slavery's bricks imprimatured by some mad priest's imagined good. the good is gone, the priest stamps on..."

Tonite's home work, students is.... Do you think computer education couldn't do better than that if it was designed by persons who might have been good teachers in a less overpopulated world?

And then there are the fanatics, the true believers some of whom want to implnt networked microchips in each person's brain to "enhance" them. Do you want ot be "enhanced" tha way? But these people have PhDs in computer science and know how to write grants to get funding for better weapons for the military to kill more people (I am not against honest soldiers of all nations, but the flag officers are a different story). "Hey generals, if we implant networked computer chips in everybody's brain you will be able to meet your enlistment quotas with man who will pass the physical and be enthusistic to go over the top....). Give the boy a billion dollars, now

Yes, "Push" is a key word. Consider an oncologist who is pushing destoying patients' immune systems and reinjecting healthy immune cells to cure them, versus an oncologist who laments that people have eleukemia but that with the present state of medical science, destoying their' immune systems and reinjeting healthy immune cells to cure them is the best we can do so let's do it as well as we can. The first guy is a oose cannon on the deck, isn't he (she, other)?

We need persons who know how to use computers for good. Persons who know not just how to do things with computers but wha tis worth doing with comptuers and wht is worth not doing with them and why. We need persons who are disinterested. Disinterested means not being partisan in forming your judgment (uninnterested mean not caring about it). Partisan means: my country right or wrong!

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)

¶ +2023.10.24. Is it okay to imagine scenarios? I can't stop making scenarios in my mind and I even prefer to imagine scenario than doing other things.

Why fight it?

But also: why not make use of it? Write theses scenarios down in a notebook. Maybe you cna turn them into short stories? Who knows? But do writ them down so tat you can get something out of them, and if not today maybe 30 years from now.

Unless a person has things going on in hteir mind that are destructive of self or other, bon't try to mess with you head and force yourself to like something you don't like or dislike something you like, for then you will become alisnated from your own self and not know wht you like or don't like but only know wht you are supposed to like or not like and who told you that? A parent? A teacher? A cleric? Political propaganda? They ha etheir own lives; they should let you run yours.

But if you have only lemons, make lemonade. Don't try to mes with your head but do try to make use of what you've got. That's not trying to undermine your mind, which is bad but people try to do it or do it to others.

But if the fanasies are preventing you from paying your bills, then you do need not to disown them but to limit them enough to get the bills paid. You may need to change your behavior, but not your feelings. Writing you fantasies down will be a change of behavior if you are not already doing it.

Does this help? If not, forget it. Advice is cheap.

¶ +2023.10.24. Do you believe hustle culture encourages pushing oneself to exhaustion?

"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, 20th Century Roman Catholic philosopher)

¶ +2023.10.24. Why is it plagiarism if you turn in a paper you already wrote and turned in once before, after all you still did all the research on it and wrote it?

Excellent question!

It is not plagiarism. It is petty teacher persecution of students and they can get away with it.

Presuming what you wrote is true: "you still did all the research on it and wrote it", you are clean. The teacher is just being a bastard.

Now it would not be right for you to submit your paper to multiple peer reviewed journals and after it has been accepted for publication not tell the others. But that is not what the question is about.

If I was a teacher I would not have a problem with you – provided you could pass my test: Let's assume you paper is so good that I the teacher learn from it even though I got my doctorate 30 years ago. I am in awe of your work and want to submit it with myself as second author to one of the top peer reviewed journals and let you teach the rest of the course and I'll sit in the audience to learn from you. All you have to do is one thing: Tell me more. Further elaborate on what you wrote. If you do that I don't care if you had somebody else WRITE the paper for you, just so long as they were phrasing out YOUR IDEAS.

Plagiarism is about only one thing: Not giving credit to the person who thought up something but pretending you cooked it up yourself. "I invented the wheel" is plagiariam. It's that simple. But!

I am consistent: Even in small talk with friends and family or at a party, I cite the source for anything I say that is not either common knowledge or that I did not think up myself. People don't like that. they think I am being "superior". Well, as the Hebrew National Hotdog people say (see that I am citing my source here!): "I answer to a higher power": in my case, intellectual integrity. Do you? Does that teacher?

¶ +2023.10.24. What should I read? I want to gain a general understanding of all psychological theories, for personal life & my interest in self-knowledge & understanding human beings. For example, in 1000 pages. My detailed question is in the first message. Thanks

I would suggest you read and think about the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible (aside: I am not a believer in thr Abrahamic Deity, so I have no vested interest in "pushing" The Bible). But you may have ears but cannot hear and eyes but cannot see. I hope that is not true of you.

¶ +2023.10.24. Out of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, who would you guess is the most technically adept (regarding coding, software, and general IT domains)?

I doubt any of them could (to borrow an old cliche) code their way out of a paper bag. They are all carpetbaggers.

Bill Gates just might be able to write code, if he wrote the original MS-DOS himself or at least part of it. I don't know.

I think I can safely say that buried under all the glitz there must (not Musk!) be a lot of very difficult computer code. I worked for half a century as a computer programmer. Here's a challenge I would like to see the bunch of them try to do, OK two, only one which I could do myself:

(1) Wire a breadboard to sort punch cards. This one I can't give the details for because I can't do it either.

(2) Keypunch punch cards to feed into a card reder to boot up (IPL) an IBM System 360 mainframe to do something, for instance what I myself did: Turn a S/370 Model 158 into a simple adding machine using the built in console keyboard and CRT. That's right: I IPLed that room size computer from th card reader and I myself keypunched the holes in the cards (I worked as a "systems programmer back in 1972, a job which gave me th informal perk of playing with a major corporation's corporate computer in a secure locked room on 3rd shift on Sundays).

I don't think any of them can code anything, again, Mr. Gates and some other old timers may be exceptions. But you know what? It doesn't matter. They know hoe to make monay, and money can buy coders to do the coding for you.

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)

¶ +2023.10.24. If you could do one thing. Right now. Completely free in a monetary and consequence sense. What would it be and why?

I would stop the Ukraine war which has killed (first degree premeditated murder by the political leaders involved) probably over 1,000,000 men, made refugees out of several millions of civilians, devasteted an enormous amount of property and wreaked havoc on the global econmy and and which rrisks escalating to thermonuclear Armageddon and ending all human and higher animal lifeon this sad planet (earth).

I would buy many cases of Ukrainian vodka and tell all the Ukrainian and Russian and "volunteer" soldiers to lay down their arms, embrace, get drunk in moderation and go home to those of their loved ones whom this war has not yet killed.

Optionally there should be war crime trials for all the people in The United States government who are responsible for this humanitarian disaster since the 1990s because of their policy of trying to reduce Russia to a U.S. neo-colony, instead of negotiating security for Russia's Western border where in World War II they had been attacked by the Nazis with over 10,000,000 killed.

You said "only one thing". If I had two I would next move to end the war in the Middle East, ending the Israeli persecution which provoked the Palestineans to start this oher horrific humanitarian disaster.

Three things? Sorry, but I've spent all my time studying Ukraine so I am not up on al lthe other wars and other humanitarian disasters that are going on all over our sad planet (earth) and all the other bad things indluding the fundamentalist Islamists in France who beheaded a school teacher for teaching freedom of expression in a classroom and murdered the staff of a humor magazine for "disrespeting the prophet". And I'm elfish: give me enough wishess and I want to have some joy before I die.

¶ +2023.10.23. How far away is (AI) from becoming our greatest educator (on any subject matter) due to its potential to assess our individual cognitive style and adapt (in real time) with optimal content feeds?

Just what do you thind an educator is? An instructioner?

If you want to learn what a teacher **should** be, watch Maxine Greene's litttle videos on Youtube. I took a course frm her. She was the most esteemed professor in Columbia University Teachers College since John Dewey. Before class I went up to her. Neither of knew who the other was. I asked her if I could write an essay on a topic inwhich I had a long-standing passionate interest INSTEAD OF DOING THE COURSE ASSIGNMENTS. Repeat: i-n-s-t-e-a-d–o-f. She immediatly told me to go do it. At age 43 years that was the first fully appropriate interaction I had had with a teacher in my life (well, with one exception).

Pre-college I had attended a so-called "prep" school where:

And this big hunk of ad**o**lt male flesh was even my master and it was after 1863 in USA. Now I may be an exception but I feel I should have been respected by the fasulty as their peer, and that they should have interacted with me according to **Luke 2:41–52** in the Bible and/or also according to something Robert Ballard, the man who found the wreck of RMS Titanic urged:

"Kids retain 5 percent of what they hear and 10 percent of what they read but 80 percent of what they do and **90 percent of what they teach**." (Robert Ballard)

So in say 11th grade, I should not havve been subjeted to ass–-ignments but been teaching 7th graders. Think of the money the school could have saved by dumping people like that 7th grade English teach who tried to crush my little soul. I am very physcally fragile, so he could easily have killed me with his two hands. The sword is mightier than the pen (vide: Lee Harvey Oswald and John Kennedy, for example)

There is instruction and it has its place in this world but I did not want any, and especially I should never have been tsted or graded. If someody wanted to know what I knew, they could have respetfully asked me about it.

In my case, my human tachers were so destructive that the computer, with ot without AI, would have been far better for me. It would have been better than my parents and teachers both. But that's not saying much.

Maxine Greene was a good teacher as she briefly indicates in her little videos.

So yes, Ai is better than bad humans. But is is not nearly as good as real human lovers of laerning who also love to share their love of learning with others. Example: lonely aged persons can find companionship on a robotic dog. But the robotic dog would not be as good as a real dog or an intelligent and empathic human. I enjoy "tallking with" the Bing Ai far more than some managers I had in multinational corporations.

Just imagine: If industrial robots could do all the scut work and free all persons from the curse the Abrahamic Deity laid on all humanity for Adam eating a piece of fruit, Nobody would have to do anything. They could waste their time watching pro sports on the television or HBO, or they could go fishing, or they could engage in leisured study with others, insluding younger persons with shom they could share what they had learned from experience. A good teacher can always also learn from thei students. Also if education is not fun, something is wrong. Scholarly books can be sexier than porn films. Dig it?

So back to the perp(*spelling intended*) shcool I attended. I tried to sabotage their yearbook. I captioned a picture of their prize football team charging up the field "We are the hollow men" They caught that and held an Inquisitorial Proceeding against me which I actually more or less won but that's adiffernt story. Thers was something else very cynical I did which they either did not catch or in their benightedness they may have thought is was a compliment: I captioned a picture of the class brown-noser: "**Notes by rote**" (you have to look close to see it in the picture immediately below)

In that school I memorized the word: "Ashurbanipal" (A-s-h-u-r-b-a-n-i-p-a-l). Well, here is a picture of Mr .Socrates and has students, which doesn't look like AI to me:

As said, I would have done far better with computer learning, with or without AI, than with a humn who **THREATENED** me for showing intellectual initiative. .Another advantage of the computer: If it did cause me troublt I could pull its electric cord out of the wall socket.

¶ +2023.10.23. Can heavy traffic on a commute contribute to presentism in the workplace especially if people have to sacrifice sleep to allow enough time to get to work in traffic?

I think the word is "presenteeism"? SOme people just like to schmooze around the office water cooler irrespective of their commute; they don't belong on the payroll.

When I worked in an office I did not like the office for a variety of reasins including that people could easily annoy me for trivial reasons or if didn't look "busy" I was fair game to get hit with a "tar baby" (something that had to be done that nobody wanted to do and often entailesd working late..), so I got in at 3:45 AM and tried to leave by 2 PM which did not win points with bosses who came in after 9 and liked to see their employees working after 5.

The one thing I did like about the office was that when the snack machine restock man came around and discarded snack packs past their eat-by date in a trash can, he did not object to me foraging in the garbage for: FREE EXPIRED DORIOS! (That's partly my Yale graduate reverse snobbery in action, but I also liked the Doritos). Otherwise I didn't like the office much, or some of the people in it.

But the worst was commuting. Commuting was for me a total waste (w-a-s-t-e) of my time and energy – it did no good for either me or my employer. But the roads were usually pretty clear at 3:30AM. And 2PM was less bad then 4 or 5 PM. The very worse was when it was bad weather. Then I could not concentrate on my work because I was afrrid of being trapped in the office or stuck for hours on the road. I just wanted to get out and get home!

Each morning when I fastened my seatbelt and turned on the engine of my Toyote Corolla, I envied Japanese World War II kamikaze pilots who only had to make their commute once and one way. In retrospect they had anoher adventage: If they completed their mission they also neutralized (i.e., destroyed by bomb blast) the office. Banzai!

¶ +2023.10.23. What's one thing the organisers of a conference did to make the event unique and memorable?

This is just slightly off topic and idiosyncratic but it may be of interest.

I worked in technical offices (computer programming) for many years.

I was subjedted to many meetings that I did not have the power to risk not attending. A meeting is something like a conference, yes? Often the meeting organizer would bring in Dunkin Donuts. I found this a turn off. I am not a dog and so am not appeased by dog treats. Everybody else seemed to wolf(?) them down along with their coffee in styrofoam cups.

I had one manager, a young lady, who held few if any meetings and kept them short. But one morning she brought in for the team almond croissants from La Petite Patisserie (Larchmont, New York). She "won points" with me for that.

This young lady, unfortunate for me, soon enough got promoted and replaced by a member of the Duncin Donut brigade. She did two other things which were unusual if not unique which also favorably impressed me:

(1) For our employer. I had fixed a bug in our product. All we did was fix bugs and there was no end of them. I asked her if I could entirely unnecessarily spend some time looking further into the component where I had just made the fix. She replied:

"We ALWAYS have time to look into a matter more deeply."

(2) Now the personal side. One fine normally busy morning (more bugs to fix...) at about 10:00 I offhandedly mentioned to her that I had never driven a stick shift BMW but would like to some day. She threw me her keyring and told me to gof for a spin.

As said, unfortunate for me, she soon got promoted and replaced by

[ Homer eating a donut ]

¶ +2023.10.23. Have you ever used an assignment writing service to help with your academic tasks? If so, what was your experience like?

There are individuals "out there" who do "gray" work.

The good ones are not easy to find and they do not come cheap. And they cannot work miracles.

You can probabky find people to write a freshman term paper for you in Whatver 101 which has a thousand students and the TAs might just as well grade the papers by throwing them all down a starcase and giving grades based on how high the stair each landed on. Today AI can crank out this kind of stuff for free but somehow you have to figure out how to camouflage it.

But if you are trying to pay for a doctoral dssertation, these people will not be able to fake fo ryou at your oral interrogation, edpcially since, since you do nit knojw what you are doing, you will not likely have been able to conince them to be nice to you., and as I once heard somebody say in a TEDtalk, f there are wany junior faculty on the cmmittee, they may iterally be out to get you to show the gray-hairs that they desere tenure.

Where a ghost writer might well be helpful, and really not very "bad" wvne though probably treated as such if found out, is if you know your material very well but have difficuty "expressing yourself". Then they may be able to take ideas and research work which are authentically yous and work them up into a pretty package to make your diissertation committee happy, but since they are only putting icing on the cake, you will be able to go to your orals confident tht you will be able to handle difficult questions about it.

My big fantasy has long been as school kd who turns in a paper which awes me and I invite him (her, other) to my office and tell thet I want to submit their paper to an important peer reviewed journal with myself as second author, but first, since I still want to lern more evne though I got my doctorate 30 years ago, for them to please enlighten me further about this subject concerning which they know so much more than me, and I''m also going to let them teach the rest of the course ald I'll sit in the audeince to learn from them..... Uhhhh? And then I would have enough money to take out full page ads inThe New YorkTimes and The Wall Street Journal And The Washington Post, naming this student and describing in detail what he (she, other) did.

¶ +2023.10.23. What major physics knowledge is used to defense radar system to detect the enemy target?

I know nothing about this. I am a humanities scholar who cheated on high school physics.

But I seem to understand this: In the Kosovo war, somebody did something very clever that brought down one of The USA's prize F-117 Stealth fighters: Instead of using what I would call "positive" radar or other technology to look for something abnormal in the sky, they looed over the whole normal sky for a place where it was missing, maybe like looking for a hole in a piece of cloth. This was some people who were working with relatively low technology (but a clever mind!), and they beat the bleeding edge of the world's greatest superpower's best. Cool, eh?

¶ +2023.10.23. Is it normal to experienfe drama at the workplace?

The business of business is business not monkey business. If there is "drama" in the workplace work is not being done. The place is ysfunctional, a Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools).

The problem needs to be disinterestedly (which does not mean "uninterested" bu rather seeing the issue from all sides not just one partisan perspetive) and resolved, so everybody can get on with business, in extreme cases with one or more personnel now no longer on the payroll

I know of someone who is having a lot of drama in the workplace. The place and the person are both dysfunctional.

I did, hwever, now many years ago (1980), see something that was emotional and which I thught was silly at the time but now I see it differently in the current time of throwaway people: the gig economy (are you a gigger?):

In IBM, I was passing through one of the company's education buildings and I looked in the open door of one of the classrooms. ther I saw a room full of grown men in blue suits singing a song from the IBM Songbook. Silly? Yes. But also, it said something: It said those man were loyal to a company that was being loyal to them. A win-win. Those were the day, my friend, we thought they'd never end. Those were the days, o yes, those were the days....

[ IBM SongBook]

¶ +2023.10.22. Should I study international relations or journalism? I'm curious about critical thinking, information and international topics and I would like to be a social entrepreneur.

STUDY international relations. Then maybe DO journalism, if you want. Why? Because then you uwill know something about what you are reporting about.

Try to get John Mearsheimer at The University of Chicago to be your thesis advisor.

-–––

Oops! Sorry. I thought you were interested in what's going on in the world to understand it and/or inform others, not to make buck out of it. I have no advice about "social entrepreneur".

¶ +2023.10.22. What are the implications of a computer that can predict the future?

Run the crucial xperiment and either find out or don't:

This is imperative: Record the whole experiment with timestamps.

Now ask the computer to predict what you are going to be doing exactly 10 minutes from now. If it's something wierd try again, until you get some sort of answer like: "You will be scratching your head because it itches" or "You will be walking out of the mens room after having taken a piss" or "you will be looking out the window in the empty office on the south side of the building". Something simple. Now try to do somehting different at the expiration moment.

Write it up for one of the top scietific peer reviewed journals. The result as far as I can see is entirely unpredictable but you will find out and that will answer your quesiton. And remember: If you don't remember, watch it on the video recording.

¶ +2023.10.22. Can using AR rather than VR reduce the chance of photosensitive epilepsy?

I am not sure what this quetion is asking, but I am quite sure of something it brings to my mind:

Nobody should ever employ any kind of repetitive or other "cutesy" sensory experience that even remotely might lead to anybody having a seizure or a headache or any other harm. Period.

The obvious counterexample is confirmatory: To use this as instrument of war, like a machine gun.

It's not cute. It's abusive. It can cause permanent harm; it can destroy a person's life and it does not matter whether you can understand this or not, Don't abuse other people. (You may, however, feel free to do it to yourself and other consenting adults, in the privacy of your home with the blinds drawn or the volume down so nobody outside can see or hear.)

This kind of stuff causes some persons to have migraine headaches. Playing a "song that you can't get out of your head" is psychological warfare: The person you have subjected to it may indeed not be able to sleep due to "not getting it of their head". Just keep it in your own head and keep quiet about it. Unless, that is, you are a psyops warrior aiming to cause the enemy to psychologically collapse so you can conquer them without fighting.

Have I made myself clear?

¶ +2023.10.22. What and describe in detail an academic encounter (a particular class, teacher, project, event, etc.) that triggered a love of learning in you or has been rewarding in some way?

At age 43 years with the advantages of experience and tuition reimbursement from my employer (IBM), I want back to graduate school at Teachers College Columbia University, in a program that I expected to be "easy", i.e., where I could focus on learning not struggling to get a grade.

In one course I went up to the teacher before the first class session and asked he if I could write an essay on a topic in which I had a long-standing passionate interest that was tangentially related to the course topic, INSTEAD OF DOING THE ASSIGNMENTS, not in addition: INSTEAD OF. She immediately told me to go do it. That was the first time in my life I had an appropriate educational experience. As it turned out the teacher (Maxine Greene) was the most esteemed professor in the school since John Dewey and she gave me an "A+" on the paper and I was still too immature to fully benefit from the experience because on her notes she wrote that she might be able to help me further n life and I didn't take her up on it. So while the essay may have deserved the grade she gave it, I myself as a human being did not.

I always needed to be treated with respect, not as an inferior life form to be ass–-igned by teaches who had, at least in the so-called "prep" school I had attended been less intelligent than me and who greatly retarded and otherwose harmed me (it was aftr 1863 in USA and they were my masters).

In college it was less worse but still not good enough. I had been so badly ignoranced by my school teachers that I couldn't stand up for myself as a person. I did once, hwoever:

In a philosophy course taught by Prof. John WIld, he one day lectured us kids on human freedom. After the class I went up to the podium and looked up to him and said that I did not see where I had any freedom since I would have to take an exam at the end of the course. In other words I politely called him a hypocrite. He kindy looked down on me and apologized and told me he meant no harm. That was the first time I had encountered a teacher whom I could really respect and who set a model for me of how a teacher should be. John Wild, a gentle giant. So there is my second example of"an academic encounter (a particular class, teacher, project, event, etc.) that triggered a love of learning in you or has been rewarding in some way"

As for my teachers in the perp(spelling intended) school I had attended, the GPS coordinateds of the campus are [39.4324433, -76.6766731], in case you are a B-52 weapons officer with a JDAM to spare.

¶ +2023.10.22. Do intelligence or resources make any difference in war fighting? If so, how? How about imagination, focus, communication skills, and persistence?

This question asks for the sun, the moon and the stars.

I would suggest the poster buy and study a copy of "The Art of War" by Sun-Tzu, but that will take him, her or other a bit of effort, and this is just one person's opinion so take it or leave it for what it's worth or not worth to you.

¶ +2023.10.21. Can economists help us to make policy decisions?

now

You bettcha!

Policy decisions are generally about allocating human energy and material resources to accomplish certain objectives. That's what economists are experts at. But!

You need to choose the kind of economist you want, to get the knid of result you want: (1) Marxist, (2) Keynesean, (3) Milton Friedman, (4) other.

¶ +2023.10.21. What if we could unlock the secrets of our dreams and harness their power for creativity, problem-solving, and personal growth?

It has happened at least once. The chemist August Kekulé said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail. (Wikipedia) This may be apocryphal.

I knew a person who said he could control his dreams. Unfortunately his imagination was limited to kitsch science fiction so the results were not very interesting, but he was a clever young man with a PhD with honors from Yale who managed to plagiarisze the work of a famous mathematician to build his list of scholarly publications and he got away with it.

If you can remember them, think about your dreams. I don't "buy" Freud's dream analysis but it too provides information to work with. Freud himself said that the main reason he required his patients to report their free associations absolutely verbatim was that otherwise they would not take them seriously as material for analysis. But as psychoanalysts also say: "Everything is grist for the mill" (except their fee schedule and sex life)

If you have secure leisure, you can imaginatively play with anything (I like to play with stories in the Bible), but take your play seriously too. Having worthwhile fun is not frivilous. It's where many albeit not all masterpieces of art come from, or even just artworks that sell for a lot of money (which are not necessariy the same).

¶ +2023.10.21. What is the definition of a "soft" subject? Are the arts and humanities considered to be "soft" subjects? If so, why are they not called "hard" subjects like STEM fields?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

"Hard" versus "soft" subjects is an unhelpful distinction althugh soe people may use it for paopagandistic reasons: "I'm studying hard science; you are jsut studying soft humanities stuff. I'm a real man; you're just awimp. My research deserves funding; your doesn't."

There is areal distinction: The exact mathematical sciences of physical nature versus hermeneutics (interprettion of human activity). Thi sis a real divide. A physicist does not decide to love his children by their IQ ranking and in proportion to their IQs. "I have 3 kids. Mary has an IQ of 160 John 130. Sam 105. I love Mary 1.238461538461538 times as mush as John and1.523809523809524 times as much as Sam." Conversely, when a pyhsicist says that a postive ion is attracted to a negative ion, hs (she, other) is not referring to 💗💗💗💗💗. Another name for the "hard" sciences is: The exact Galilean mahematical sciences of physical nature.

Physics and textual interpretation deploy different methodologies. And, meataphorically, mathematical equations are "harder" than poems in often in two ways: It is rare to find a text that is so difficult to interpret that only a person with a PhD in a relevant subspecialty can understnd it and then cannot explain it to anybody else except someone similarly so educated. But how many people can solve differential equations or if they can, explain it to a humanities scholar?

So "hard" and "soft" are caricatures and all viable caricatures have some basis in fact.

Then there are lots of disciplines )areas of study) that are a mixture of computation and interpretaiton. And this is not always innocuous. There is a souk sickness some people who study human beings suffer from which might e called: physica envy. These are persons who are or should be doing hermeneutics (interprettion of human activity) but look over their shoulders and see the physicist getting lots of grant money and prizes and fame and fortune and want to be like them, so they apply numbers to people whereas numbers really apply to particles. They realy do hings like allocate admissions to elite universities by SAT score rankings: ""I have applicants for college admissions. Mary has SATs of 1550. John 1580. Sam 450. So Mary goes to Harvard. John goes to University of Marylena. And Sam goes to Westcheter Community College." There are various disciplines in this gray area, such as economics, and parts of others such a sociology. The distinction drawn here is often between "quantitative" an "qualitiative" studies.

Quantity is not quality. No abount of Andy Warhole lithographs will equal one Picasso paintong (or Kandinsky or Matisse or Bosch or Breughel or Rembrandt or Laonardo, et al.) On the other hand, a Rembrandt painging if burned will not yield enoughcalories of heat to drive the turbines of a battleship very far.

So don't speak of "hard" and "soft" sciences. that will jsut show you are superficial or intellectually sloppy. Speak of the excat mathematical [Galilean] sciences of physical nature and interpretation of human activity (or, using a big word: "hermeneutics" or maybe "exegesis")

Ad always remember that, despite what petty school teaches tell you, dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive. Whatevre you say however you say it, if you get the message you desire to convey to your intended audience, gets an "A+". If it don't it gets a big flat "F".

--------

¶ +2023.10.21. What can companies do to avoid alienation and create an authentic workplace?

I was made redundant by a big tech company, from a computer programming job in 2018.

I have heard that since then there have been instituted required brinwashing / loyalty oath indoctrination procedures called "DEI" in many workplaces. These cannot result in "authenticity" but only conformists and people who don't like it but keep their opinions to themself like used to bbe in Eastern Europe under the Cold War Soviet Occupation or probably today are in North Korea.

I worked for half a century in a variety of computer programming groups in incurance, banking, goverment contracting and other places. I never saw any discrimination based on people's secondary characteristics. Everybody kept their personal predilections (religion, ancestry, etc.) to themseles; everyone respected eerybody else in civil society as peers committed to getting the job done for our employer. Muslim. Hindu. Christian. Black. Chinese. Female. Indian (from India). Homosexual. Orthodox Jewish. Whatever. (I never told anybody my belief; it was none of their business.) There was never a problem. But had I been subjeted to tthought control I would have only stayed on the job out of dire financial necessity. And ditto all this for teachers and students in educational institutions, etc.

Now my experience may be a special case. Everybody had a college degree and many had masters degrees. Perhaps in an organiation of people who never graduatd from high school, people do not know how to live with each other; I don't know. As a matter of fact, where I worked, the people from India were far more respectful of others than many Americans.

I am told that it is no longer enough to be "color blind", that one must celebrate people one would not like to go to bed wth. And loyalty oaths? Since I entered the labor force after the demise of Joseph R. McCarthy, I never saw one, Including working in a sensitive Federal agency. "Do you now or have you entertained a politically incorrect thought?"

Stanford University has recently issues a directive saying faculty and staff can use politically incorrect words, so ther is hope maybe. (Let's see: my ancestry is half "Polack" and half "white trash" and if you tell me any more politically incorret words that fit I will use them to desctibe myself. I am also an "intellectual" and a sooner or later to be "dead white male".)

As for "diversity, equality and inclusion" or whatever "DEI" means today, I the first time I had any was when I worked in IBM Reaserch in the early 1980s and finally was free not have to subject mysef to the humiliating conformism of haircuts.

[ Haarschnitt macht frei ]

So when I hear about "diversity" I wonder if it means that you can be any color sheep you want but not a goat? (All sheep are the same color in the dark and none are either goats of shepherds.)

Thought control will make every person everybody else's enemy except for the people who do not think for themselves but just are mediocre (and, of course, the people who get paid to be the thought police!). That is not the way to produce great innovations and to inspire loyalty as opposed to signing loyalty oaths. But then what company oday, even before DEI was inerested in employee loyalty in the race for the bottom deregulated economy where there are no pensions nd many staff positions have been converted to gigs and/or offshored? I have invented a new politically incorrect word to describe many persons' employment situatiion irrespective of their DEI: "giggers".

But don't take my word for it: indeed, don't take anybody's word for anything. Herewith a news article from The New York times newspaper from 3 years ago and I have read it's still getting worse, or, maybe if you see things differently from me, better.

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."

[ Political correctness cartoon ]

¶ +2023.10.21. What are the advantages of writing technical blogs (say a data science, machine learning or programming blog)?

If you are on the front lines and see what's really gong on, my experience in half a century of doing computer programming work, including 19 years in IBM, is that most of the persons who do this kind of work do not think about what they are doing – they just do what they are told.

I went thru the GOTO War in 1980. "Improved Programming Technologies" were a kind of totalitarianism, especially "walkthrus" which could be exercises in people with fake wood top desks humiliating people with gray plastic top desks. Nobody was writing about this stuff. It just happened.

And in the 2010s there came "scrum" another repressive technology of social control to which I fortunately was never subjected but would only have put up with if I was incompetent to do my job so would not dare to call it out for what it is: North Korea type loyalty pledge meetings each morning.

Another thing. In the 1970s, IBM had gone to great expense to produce high quality technical manuals for System/360 and the associated applications. In the 2010s I had to try to make freeware apis do undocumented tricks. I got PTSD from it.

Let's consider "higher level languages". When I was in IBM MVS Development back in 1980, almost all of the code was written in a PL/1 like higher lavel language. In the component I was working in (with a gray top desk), there wa one assemlbly language program left which nobody wanted to touch becaue they were all politlcally correct. Well, I wanted it. A couple things happened: My 3rd line manager told me (and this is close to verbatim after over 40 years):

"We know you can do hte work your way, but what do we do with all the people who can't tell an 'L' from an 'LA'?"

(I clled them "the mongoloid hoard".) I rewrote that program (still in assembly language) and my manager, who literally was a Mickey Mouse: aside, he was heterosexual but came to work wearing socks with machine stitched images of Mickey and Minnie Mouse on them, in IBM, well, my manger told me they were going to hold a walkthru of my code.

I had seen them thoroughly humiliate a person at my job rank in one of these events – actually, I had not seen it, just overheard it from across the hall. I told him that I would consider specific criticisms of my code but that I "would not be gtound up". He cancelled th walkthru and my very risky code shipped unreviewed, which is something thst did not happen but it did in this case. My career did not go well, but I did get one win. A year of so later they had a mission-critical eyes only secrecy project that had to be done right. It was a big engineering task with a small software patcht. They knew I did not get along with the development group, but they asked me to do that little part. Of coure I agreed, on one condition: That the people in that group would have no say in what I would do. Management agreed and kept their part of the deal. The code I wrote was not politically correct but it was technically the best way to do it. It shipped even though the dude with the fake wood top desk in that group probably didn't like it.

Now if you have stories like that to tell, write a blog.

Or if you have complaints about the syntax of a progtarmming language your are using, write aboutu them.

Read two books: MIT Prof. of Computer Science Joseph Weizenbaum's classic: "Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation" (WH Freeman, 1976).

And, Philip Kraft: "Programmers and managers: the routinization of computer programming in The United States" (Springer, 1977)

Don't just be a techie, be a technologically savvy technology critic.

"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)

[ THINK ]

¶ +2023.10.21. Do motorcyclists use two-way radio communication? If so, why and is it helpful for them to communicate with others on the road?

Off topic and I only rode a motorcycle once in my life, although I once declined an offer from a friend to drive his....

I ould presume they use two way radio communicaiton, or at least used to before callphones, for things like warning each other there was a cop ahead on the road, or if one of them had a breakdown or whatever, like long haul truck drivers.

Also, there are some persons who "don't fit the mold" who are motorcyclists. The CEO of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), in its heyday, Thomas Watson Jr, rode a motorcycle.

And I had a full professor of the phiosophy of science in college (Yale, 1967), who not only roda a Harley Davidson but had his own private F8F Bearcat fighter plane which he piloted. People think of "professors", as sometime Alabama Goernor George Wallace famously said, as not being able to ride a bicycle straight. Prof Norwood Russell Hanson had made the newspapers by looping the Golden Gate Bridge on returing from the Pacific at the end of World War II. Vroom! Vroom!

¶ +2023.10.21. What is an example of an emergency situation that requires strangers to come together and work as a team?

This is a general rule of human social life:

People squabble with each other about any little thing that gets a burr up their ass, like the nations of Europe started World War I in 1914 because some dude knocked off a person nobody liked anyway, blah, blah, blah.

But when an external threat that is more powerful than any of them or all of them put together comes along, all the squabblers immediately join forces to fight this threat to them all. Then if they beat it, they go back to squabbling with themselves all over again.

I would argue that a classic case was World War II where the United States and Great Britain joined forces with The Evil Empire which they had long been trying to destroy – The Soviet Russia ("Communism") – to beat the Nazis, and then once that job was finished, they went back to squabbling with each other ("The Cold War").

Most rules have exceptions, of course.

¶ +2023.10.21. Do stories of successful people breaking through limitations inspire you or set unrealistic expectations?

Somebody eventually wins every lottery.

I try to not be "impresssed" by anybody. My disserttion advisor in school said something, although The U.S. Declaration of Independence said it 200 years earlier in different words which I don't think people take seriously ("Yes, boss"):

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

Shakespeare lived an ordinary life, just like you.

If I met The Buddha in the road, or Mr, Joseph ribn=ineet Biden Junior, or Elon Musk or anybody else such as a homeless Vietnam veteran or The Abrahamic Deity, I would keep social distance in case they had a communicable disease, and greet them respectfully and proceed according to whether they were respectful to me in return. If not I would try to give them a wide berth and be on my way but if I looked back and saw them convulsing on the road I would call 911 if I had my cellphone which I rarely carry because I do not like people annoying me for trivial reasons, so then if I could find a house or place of business nearby I would try to ask them to call 911.

But ther are some persons whom I find , to be colloquia about it, "inspiring" or rather I would really like to talk with and learn from them, but you've probably never heard of any of them because they are not famous. Well, here's one: I strongly feel that all competitive athletics are destructive; all competition is bad. But that said, I would like to have met Abebe Bikila. Why? Becaue he won two Olympic marathons on his tso honest godgiven bare feet, not cheating with high tech prostheses ("running shoes") like all the other wimps. And, like Jesus for his Apostles, why not maybe even wash his feet?

I have no unrealistic expectations, but, like any other person can do, I judge the world I find myself living in. With rare and ultimately inconsequential exceptions, it fails to meet requirements. I once knew a man who was "better" than me and had it even worse than me. He once said of himself:

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

Some persons are luckier in what birth canal (or c-section) they came out of.

¶ +2023.10.21. Is it unprofessional of a job coach to be looking at their phone and social media and act uninterested in working with you sometimes?

They are telling you how much, i.e., how little they value you.

"Unprofessional" is big word. How about: insulting? selfish? taking your money while doing something else?

Here is a job coaching question for you: Why are you putting up with this person and not calling them to account for what htey are doing to you? Is this how you will let yourself be treated in your next job?

This person is an opportunity for you to build up your "character" and your courage. Or for you to be a whimpering whipped dog.

Now, if you are in a position where this person has power to harm you, then you need to keep your mouth shut and tell them they are being very helpful to you and you appreiate thie help – until you can get away from them and then like Lot's wife in the Bibie, don't look back.

[ Boss ]

¶ +2023.10.20. Is it okay to talk stories about my workplace experiences on social media even though I don't work there anymore?

One poossibility is to "anonymize" the stories Instead of

"I saw Jim do [whatever] in the last place I worked"

You might say:

"I heard from a friend that he had heard about someboy who did [whatever] in their workplace."

UNLESS, that is, you specifically want to say wimething abou tht company and are prepard for any possble consequences. Ten you would name names but don't do this except if you have a very specific purpose, such as saying something people don't know about the company that you want to expose. But if it was something really "bad"thne you would best not put it on social media. You might wan tto cll the police or the company's president or whatever.

Social media is a dangerous place to put anything. It will probably stay ther frwver and people may take it out of contextext or you next possible enployer might snoop around and find you said [whaetever].

Bu if you "anonymize" something that should be OK even if not as satisfying a saying it in the first person.

I worked for IBM 40 years ago and have told some things I saw in the company entirely straightforwardy. But the were 40 years ago, and they were not anything that should caue anyting other than embarrassment to them. But, again, it was 40 years ago, so it doen't likely apply to today. I have no idea what goes on in the company today, and back 40 years ago I was like a proverbial blind man describing an elephant.

(Yes, that is a picture of an official IBM part, a little desk accessory, that employees could order from "Mechanicsburg" like a lot of other things.)

[ THINK ]

¶ +2023.10.20. Do I need to put conceptual framework in my research even if it is only descriptive? What type of research uses conceptual framework?

Data exists only in a conceptual framework. A person can pretend it doen't but it stlll does. Let's say one wants to count sheep (either the 2 or the 4 legged kind). There is no such thing as a sheep except in the conceptual framework of pastoral or agricultural nature or some other conceptual framework

I once took a course in college that I did not much understand from Norwood Russell Hanson ("Patterns of discovvery", etc.) Besides being a full professor of the philosophy of science at Yale (1967) he had also been a fighter pilot in World War II. He said that he once experienced "pure sene data", outside any conceptual framework: when his plane had crashed and his seyeball was dislocated in its socket.

Let's say you want to count incidences of liver cancer. You can only do that because you re operating in th conceptual framework of modern medicine and anatomy. If you were a Maori before the coming of the white man, you could never encounter a cancer but you might count cases of demonic possession: different conceptual framework. Data presuppose theory, albeit it may be the theory of animal husbandry of medieval peasants, not 21st century European biochemitry.

One of Hanson's examples; Duck or rabbit?

All seeing is seeing as, and the "as" is determined by the person's theoretical framework, or world view ("Weltanschauung" sp?)

"There is more to the surface than meets the eye." (Aaron Beck)

¶ +2023.10.20. What are some of the most interesting inflection points in world history that would have drastically changed our world if they had gone differently?

Some of these are well known/ In Amerian history:

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He should have aked Alan Pinkerton to accompany him and his wife to that silly play he went to watch, or just have stayed in the Whit house.

The assasination of John F Kennedy. He was foolish to ride in an open car. Again he probably should ha stayed in the White Houe. In general is it nt a good idea for leaders of nations to absent themselves from the center of power since "things happen" in their absence.)

The Assassnation fof Malcolm X. The trajectory of civil rights might ha e gone differently with Malcolm's emphasis on getting educated and building ghetto economic institutions. Black nationalism.

The deaths of Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson before they could define the peace at the end of the two world wars. Both died too early. Lesser men messed things up.

The U.S. Supreme court giving the 2000 election to an incompetent person, George W Bush voting on party line.s Albert Gore was an educated and responsibile person who was a champion for the enviironment and would possibly not have got us involved in the boondoggle Iraq mess or Bush's aneurysm economy that burst, etc.

Col Claus von Stauffenberg's failure to kill Adolf Hitler 20 July 1944 because the briefcase that held with the bomb was inopportunely in a place that shielded The Fuhrer from the blast.

I have also read that had Grigor Rasputin been in the Kremlin and not recuerating from an illness elewhere, he migh have infuenced the Czarina to keep Russia out of World War I, with potentally important onsequences for that war either not starting or being a lot less terrible than it was.

that' a few that could easily have gone the other way but didn't Counterfactual speculations are not very helpful; learning from history to not repeat its terrible mistakes is highly relevant.

¶ +2023.10.20. Is creative nonsense better than factual boredom?

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Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

"Better" is alwaysrelational: better than what for what for whom, etc.?

If I have cancer, obvusly factul boredom is what I need, and hopefully enough of t to get the goddamned disease cured and without a lot of suffering or medical bils, etc.

But not ever person all the time is in a do-or-die situation aslthugh some persons such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lament this: "So long as we live under a peaceful sun we must lead an everyday life" No thank you, Mr. Solzhenitsyn.

Student: "Happy the land that breeds a hero."

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

I want my life to be aspragmatically boring as possible. No excitement like getting shot at in a battle trench or watching men who are more like meatloafs collide with each oture no a football field.

When you rae not at risk of death or disaster, creative nonsense is really "cool". My favorite artis is Marcel Duchamp, whose art is all creatie nonsense – to be precise: intellectually and erotically creative nonsesne, not Homer Simpson stuff or smoe new flavor of Dunkin Donut.

[ Homer eathig a donut before dying for his country ]

So it all depends on the context: In the ICU factual boredom comes first and probably also last and always. Get me out ot there! I got my latest Covid and Flu shots yeaserday in hopes of having a factually boring life and not having to expend my time and energy in what Karl Marx eloquently called "reproduction of individual and species life". Yuk!

Let me have creative nonsense! "Why not sneeze, Rrose Sélavy?"

[ Duchamp why not sneeze ]

And you Sir, Madam or other?

¶ +2023.10.20. What should I do about a condescending, smarmy periodical editor/gatekeeper?

If they have power over you and you lack power over them, you may just have to "eat it"

[ Big bully humiliating somebod ythe hase power over ]

There is generally little point in "arguing" with such people becaus the are pre–-judiced, i.e., they have made up their mind before looking at evidence. They do not dare try imaginatively try to put themselves in your shoes.

The one hope sometimes is th think like Sun-Tzu: to win without fighting. To somehow say and/or do something, perhaps a "killer joke" that causes them to argue with themselvs. Somehow maneuver them into a self-contradiction they themselves see. They still may just be Big Bully, but it's the only hope that hold much hope for the person who lcks power to protect themseles from them. Get them to fight with themself not with you. You only want to help them, right?

¶ +2023.10.20. What can be done to fix our degenerate society?

One big problem is: Whose notion of "degenerate".

For some persons, teenagers having loving sex taking precautions to avoid inooportune pregnancies is degeneracy. Or even for a legally married couple to decide to not produce any soldiers and baby factories (aka future citizens) for the glory of the father or motherland.

For some other persons, being a religious fanatic who either themself does or encourages their faiends and family to behead a public scool teacher (Samuel Paty, Paris France, 2020) i is degeneracy.

I think both MAGAs and Wokies are"degenerate". Each of them thinks the other and persons like me who are "universalists" are degenerate. And one of my favorite persons to abominate is the postmodernst architct Robert Venturi (yes, I have collected evidence from his own words ).

I feel postmodernism is degeneracy writ large and would encourge anyone aho can read about 12h grade level to read (free on the inernet)

Edmund Husserl's essay "Philosoph and the crisis of Eurpoean Humanity",

Julien Benda's "The Treason of th Intellectuals" and

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

nnd that young persons should gently enjoy their bodies not engage in brutalizing compatitive "body contact" athletics including tackle football and soccer. Locker rooms are "dens of iniquity " for me. You better believe persons like U.S. SUpreme Court Assoc. Justice AMy Coney Barrett would call me degenerate, and you can guess waht I think of that (to use a polite word:) woman.

So what to do when people cannot agree to play nicely together or at least let each other live in peace. Wanna have an abortion? Wanna be conscripted to fight on the zero line in Zelenskia (otherwise known as Ukraine)? Wanna "Just say: 'No!'"?

Dear Mrs Reagan.

This is Private John Doe writing to you from the front. I just wanted to thank you for you very wise advice. We are fignting the war on drugs. They really help us get though the day. You and Mr. Reagan want a toke? Gotta go now, Incoming!

Is that degenerate?

¶ +2023.10.18. Should all stories have a resolute end?

That depends.

Probably bedtime sories for small children should hve a resolute end but even even for chuldren when the goal is not unconscinusness,.... Open-ended creative thinking is desirable, isn't it, not closure which always leave out a lot of context but fits in well with such small-minded people as degree granting institutions and other bureauracies.

My faorite book,which changed my life like intelletual Ex-Lax, has three sections, one of which ends (quoting from imprefet memory):

"With the material with which the reader has been provided, the reader can figure out the rest of this story for himself."

Another one of th great but not populr novels of he 20t century, Robert Musil's "The man without Qualities" remained unfinished at his death at well ove 1,000 pages in 3 volumes. But I consider the third volume to be "lab exercises for the reader" like a physics course is not just classroom study.

Sightly different topic: My attitude is also that if reading the last chapter of a book first does not make th experience of reading the rest of the book ***more nriching*** than otherwise then the first 90% of the book probably was not worth reading anywasy since you already got most of it.

I do not read books for "diversion" but to further enrich my mind, or if you will, my soul. Value added is all.

Many history and other reality-oriented books perforce end i*n medias res*..For novels,, of sourse, the author and the publisher often know the ending so it is no surprise except:

**A surprise ending is a ****secret** (https://storyess.quora.com/w/images/4/4d/OpenBook.gif)**.** In the The New York Times Sunday Magazine, 03 December 2000, p.77, Luc Sante wrote "What Secrets Tell": "People need secrets because they need the assurance that there is something left to discover, that they have not exhausted the limits of their environment, that a prize might lie in wait like money in the pocket of an old jacket, that the existence of things beyond their ken might propose as a corollary that their own minds contain unsuspected corridors. People need uncertainty and destabilization the way they need comfort and security. It's not that secrets make them feel small but that they make the world seem bigger – a major necessity these days, when sensations need to be extreme to register at all. Secrets reawaken that feeling from childhood that the ways of the world were infinitely mysterious, unpredictable and densely packed, and that someday you might come to know and master them. Secrets purvey affordable glamour, suggest danger without presenting an actual threat. If there were no more secrets, an important motor of life would be stopped, and the days would merge into a continuous blur. Secrets hold out the promise, false but necessary, that death will be deferred until their unveiling." *C'est triste.*

But then I don't believe in "paying games". As St. Friday used to say on the TV series, Dragnet: "Just the facts, Ma'am."

In reality, the only conclusion is death. In science, answering a question generally gies rise to new questions. Crescit eundo (it grows by going forward)

––––

The word by way of preface which seeks to break through the screen stretched between the author and the reader by the book itself does not give itself out as a word of honor. But it belongs to the very essence of language, which consists in continually undoing its phrase by the foreword or the exegesis, in unsaying the said, in attempting to restate without ceremonies what has already been ill understood in the inevitable ceremonial in which the said delights. (Emanuel Levinas, "Totality and Infinity", 1961/1969, p. 30)

¶ +2023.10.18. What can be done to recognize and appreciate those who have tirelessly dedicated themselves to bettering our community?

Write them a check of a size proportionate to your appreciation.

Do not try to pressure them too much (don't klll gooses that lay golden eggs).

Sincerely respect them by trying to be at least as helpful to the communty as they are, and by sincerely asking them how YOU and the rest of thee community can help them personally.

Not exactly the same thing but similar: I once worked in a big corporation organization whre "everybody" was trying to get promoted. There were two persons whose job wes to fix all the problems everybody else caused but could not (or maybe just weren't insterested...) to fix. These two were the "top guns". And guess what? Management had to *pressure* them to take promotions. They were only inerested in one thing: Doing good work. They were exceptions.

Walk the walk, don't just talk the talk.

¶ +2023.10.18. How can you say that you are media and information literate as a student?

Well, I am a special case. I not only had as a teacher, but after I finished my schooling, as a friend, one of Marshall Mcluhan's good friends, the professor who introduced McLuhan to Aemericn academia: Louis Forsdale. There is an interview of McLuhan by Professor Forsdale on Youtube.

Here is something he said that if you take it seriously will not win you many friends, paraphrasig slightly:

"Always ask of anything you encounter in life:'What i thisa instnce of?'"

Mr. Biden tells you that Vladimir Putin is a horrible person who must be removed from his job as President of The Russian Federation. He wants you to believe this.

I ask: what is this an instance of? On, it's somebody trying to get me to support something they believe in. Well, I can compare it with many other instances of persons who tell persons to believe somethinng they believe in. Interesting, isn't it? "Oh, no, I did not mean for you to find what I said interesting: I meant you to BElLIEVE it!" Oh, what is this an instance of? Ah! Another cass of somebody telling somebbody they want them to belive something they ant them to believe . Your mother tells you something. Ah! Another instance of somebody telling you to believe something they want you to believe....

That's media literacy: examining everything, not naively "buying it" (or naiely ejecting it). Just studying it and then, if you need to act, deciding hat to do about it: Accept it or reject it for something else. If you don't need to act, then mybe no need to form an opinion.

What shape is the earth? Is it flat? is it round like a big tennis ball? Is it a big flat plate on teh back of a celestial turtle? Do you BELIEVE it's round? If yes, have you conducted experimnts to try to rationally argue for this (there are such experiments which can be done without expensive apparatus). Or did your parents and teachers tell you it's round and not a big platte on the back of a celestial turtle? Why make a judgment about it if you are not going to try to circumnavigate the globe and don't want ot fall off the edge of a flat earth?

Wath the old, fun but also profound movie:L "The Truman Show"

Always ask of everything: what is this an instance of? That, of coure, is a "reflexive" question, i.e., you should apply it to what you are doing in reading the persent sentence.

Also, everything is a media, not just radio and television and newspapers and such.

"The medium is the message" (Marshall McLuhan)

People participate in or watch competitive athletic evvents. Well, part of the medium is that the participants try to pay their rent by doing participating in the eventst. An even bigger part is that the team owners, like the owners of a casino need to keep people interested in it so they will buy tickets. But naive fans focus not on th medium but on the message: Team X jsut scored a goal. Uh, huh.Every game has a winner and a loser or it's a tie. The big issue is the team's balance sheet, to which the fans are contributiing whichever team they root for and whether it wins or not, jsut so long a they keep rooting, i.e., buying tickets.

There is a book with a telling title: "The disenchantment of the world." That's media literacy. Isn't it interesting to watch people watching the game? And to watch politicians trying to make people b patriotic? And religious leaders trying to get them to believe in their dogma du jour? Here we go again, another politician trying ot et people wored up to die in a war they want. Here we go again, another repligious leader gtying to gt people to believe he religion he (she, other) is trying to sell....

"What is this an instance of?" Partial answer: Me the poster exposing social customs as things people get duped into believing in. Why do I do it? Because nobody made me a deal I could not refuse to be one of the people doing the duping and I don't like not making a lot of money for doing nothing and since I do not have a sword, I try to get even with the only weapon aI have: a pen (OK: a personal computer on the Internet). I study not just others, but also myself.. Do you study yourself?

¶ +2023.10.18. What does it mean when Oedipus says "I am blind"?

Well, he did gouge out his eyes, didn't he?

The whole myth has as far as aI can see, been grossly misundertood by everybody, and in some cases the reason seems pretty clear.

Sigmund Freud cooked up his "Oedipus complex" from the myth, that supposedly infant males want to murtder their fathers to f*ck their mothers. But the story says diametriclly the opposite: the helpless infant's father contracted hit men to murder his son. (More on that below) Dr. Freud wa a male chuvinist pig: a paterfamilias ruling over a big household full of women and, yes, also his sons. He even had soul incest with one of his daugghters: he psychoanalzed Anna. Of course he did not want to give up his totalitarian dictatorship ovr this hen house, So he accuses sons of trying to overthrow their fathers. Well, in the end, old men do have to relinquish their power to the next generation. But the myth is clear: Oedipus did everything in his power to avoid harming his parents but his father (who according to other myths may hae ben a rapist of an earlier emplyoer's son) was an intended first degree murderer of his son, and then a second time he tried to kill Oedipus by vehicular homocide by running him off a road in road rage. In this second case, however, Laius did not know who he was tryiing to kill , so only the first instance qualified as first degree murder.

(Aside: I would not argue tht some epear: some little boys may indeed want to knock off their fathers and/or have sex with their mothers, but this would apply ony in particular circumstances, not "globally". I myself found both my parents repulsive, so I had no desire to have my mother's body anywhere near me, and my father was clueless. But a boy would with ery good reson want to kill an abusinve father such at Partiarch Abraham, or Oedipus his own biological progenitor. And if the the boy had a sexy mother, then why would he not possibly desire her?)

Long story short: The whole Oedius story shows that politeness and social taboos are mssively destructive. Once Oedipus found out the prophesy, he fled his parents' home to avoid harming them. He did not know that his loving parents were not his parents: they had adopted the baby whom the hit men had not finished off but just left to rot on a hillside ("Oedipus" means: swollen ankles; the hit men had tied the infant's ankles before leaving him to be eaten by wild animls.).

Had Oedipus's loving adoptive parents told him the truth: that they wer not his parents but "just" dearly loved him, he could have stayed in their home without worrying that he might harm them according to the prophesy. Oedipus's adoptive parents were victims of a social taboo that it is shameful to let a child know they are adopted. This continues today in much of the world. Politeness kills.

Now for what I propose would have changed everything: Oedipus is astory of communiction failure yet another way As soon s Oedipus learned the prophesy he should have gonte to his liocal tunic maker and had tunics made, like t-shirts today:

[ t-shirt ]

He would then have needed to wear one of thee tunics exposed with nothing hiding it, 24/7/365.25.

Finally, the nonsense about incest. Oedipus was the legitimate king of Thees and so had the widowed queen for his wife. Did she know anything and not fess up? She must have seill been a hot item not a frumpy aging "mother",yes? And incest, especially before modern genetic medical research was no big deal: The Egyptean royalty, inclyding Akhnaten who inveted monotheism did it.

Poor Oedipus. A victim of politeness and social hypocrisies. There was no reason for him to put out his eyes, except maybe to no longer have to look at such a shameful world where his own father had tried to murder him. I would not want to be blind, but there is so much I wish I did not hve to look at today.

Oedipus, highly honorable man. Oedipus, victim.

¶ +2023.10.17. I'm a student from Nigeria and I would like to ask you for some questions. Can I go ahead?

My email is no a secret: mccormick.bradford@gmail.com. But I woud have some question to ask you, and they are not politically correct. I am very much intereestd in learning about sub-Sahara Africa.

¶ +2023.10.17. As a college professor, are there any instances where you need to motivate your students other than using grades? What was your method of motivating them if you did?

If a college professor needs to motivate students by grades, he (she, or other) is in a very pathetic situation. The professor is dealing with asses (donkeys) not young persons who want to learn. Or else they are dealing with young persons who may be eager to learn but not to learn what the professor is professing at them.** Obey OR ELSE!**

I am an old man. I entered college (Yale) in 1964. The very best professor I had, whom I had ben too ignoranced by my parnets and school teachers to really appreciate was, a man named John Wild. But I wa not totally worthless.

In my sophomore year ("sophomoric" is a synonym for foolish and simple-minded), I took one of his courses. I forget the exact title but he had introduced existentential phenomenology to American academia. Yes, this was the age of "existentialism". One fine day he gave us kids a lecture on human freedom.

After class I went up to the podium and looked up at him and very politely said to him that I did not wee where I ha any freedom since Iwould hav to take an examat the end of the course. n other words, I very respectfully called him a hypocrite.

He gently looked down at me and apologized and told me he meant n harm. He let me take his graduate seminar the next term for an easy "A". There at the end of one class he literally begged the students to do th reading for the next class session.

John Wild did not motivate by grades. He was what I have later alled "a gentle giant", a person of sincere caring for persons, including that lower life form: students.

At the onset of middle age I went back to school in a less prestigious place, Teahers College Columbia University. Now talk a bout motivation: At the start of a class I went up to the teacher. Neither of us had ever met the other and by accident she turned out to be the most distinguished professor in the history of the school since John Dewey. Anyway, I asked her if I could write an essay on a topic in which I had a long-standing ***passionate*** interest which wa tangentially related to the course **INSTEAD OF DOING THE COURSE ASSIGNMENTS**. She immediately replied for me to go do it.

Finally. Once the was a bunch of education researchers who had on their hands a number of teenage boys who were far behind in reading level and who had zero interest in improving themselves. Sounds hopeless, doesn't it? Well, it wasn't. It turned out these hopeless young males were "into" automobiles. So the education researchers got some broken down cars, tools and automobile repair manuals and the boys wer up to grade level in reading in 6 weeks. They wanted to fix the cars!

If you try to motivate me with a grade I will detest you and do my best to avoid you becaue you want to hurt me. I had an intrusive mother so I paid in he nursery. But grades may be good for other young persons. *Baaaaa!*

#91; Judas goat leading sheep ]

¶ +2023.10.17. What is the difference between Automation and Artificial Intelligence?

I am not an expert.

Thinking about it, I think(sic) that "artificial intelligence" is both wrong and misleading. Ther is no intelligence in "artificial intelligence". HAL in 2001 wa a science fiction, not an H.A.L. (aka IBM) product. "Artificial intelligence" jsut computes: it is a computer program tha twas written by some computer programmers. It jsut processes ones and zeros according to branching instructions in a processing chip.

But ther is something else here: "Artificial intelligence" sounds like something new, as opposed to, say: "Data processing". But it's not qualitatively different: it's just quantitatively a lot bigger.

Analogy: Consider an old "wire photo" in a 1040s newspaper. Now consider the best graphis we can produce today on supercomputers and for all I know with "#d printing", so that a reproduction of a Rembrandt painting not only looks the same from 10 feet away but even the brush strokes in 3 dimensions are insidtinguishable.

Same thing, just higher resolution. "Artificial intelligence" is just "data processing" on steroids. And you can read about this in MIT PRof. of COmputre Science Joseph Weizenbaum's classic and highly readable book which I strongly encourage everyone to read: "Computer power and human reason: From judgment to calculation" (WH Freeman, 1976). With a very primitive computer, Prof. Weizenbaum wrte a computer progrem to simulate a Rogerean psychotherapist. He could not believ the result: People (e.g., his secretary) wer telling it their deepest darkest secrets which they would not dare tell another human. This was "artificial intelligence", already, just much less simpleminded(pun here) than the new AIs which cn simulate a much more sophisticated therapist.

It is probablytheoretically possible to produce a computer that really thinks. Why do I say that, because we already do it thousands of times every day, by copulation, so why not in a testtube with maybe germanium not carbon in a lab not a uterus? Reducio ad absurdum.

To end: Alan Turing once wrote to his mother that if we ever make a compute that really thinks:

"we shan't undertand how it does it."

Are we having fun yet?

I don't believe in any religion, but I think ther is a lot of wisdom in the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. Among other things, the Preacher says that books are many and reading too many of htem tires the soul. Hear that computer science techies?

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

¶ +2023.10.17. How can I create an engaging narrative for storytelling in content?

I am contrarian. You may not like my suggestion, and of course, I may be wrong because "to err is human"; take it or leave it:

Have something you sincerely anticipate your intended audience will feel is of lasting value to them, and they will listen intently to it whatever it is and however you say it.

Note I did not say anything about what YOU might think of the material.

Example slightly off topic: Some educaiton researchers once had a bunch is teenage males who were far behind in their reading level and who did not care about reading. Hopeless, right? Wrong! They got a couple of broken down autmobiles and tools and automobile repair manuals. These young men were all excited about repairing automobiles. They came up to grade level in reading in 6 weeks.

¶ +2023.10.17. What is usually the hardest major in the humanities field at colleges or universities for most students and why?

I never thought of it this way. I have always thought that humanities were for wimps (such as myself). I picked philosophy partly because of my deep and abiding interest in understanding the foundations of life and culture and everytihng else, but also because I read very slowly and the reading lists were short and I was terrified of the reserve book room in the library not to mention a physics or chem lab. The teacher from whom I learned the most in college was conveniently also the easiest grader.

I always thought the hard sciences: physics and chemistry, were for "real men" (whatever their "gender"). I had to take a science course in college, just like I also had to swim 100 yards. (This was Yale, 1964–68.) Well I managed to hold my breath hard enough to float 80 yards and the athletic inspector gave me the other 20. I took astronomy for idiots which was taught by two real astronomers who had pity on us poor humanities students and I realy lucked out: I got thru by finding a compuational error in Galileo's "Dialog of the two world systems" and that's what I wrote my term paper on.

How difficult something is to do has no necessary intrinsic structural correlation with how worthwhile it is to do it. The chemist August Kekulé visualized the ring structure of benzene in 1865 in his sleep. I obliquely knew a man who was a famous mathematician from France. They have an annual exam there to determine who gets into the elite university. Most of hte students studied very hard. He came in either number 2 or number 3 in the whole couldry without studying at all.

What's "hard"? As said, I read very slowly, but I could probably understand Martin Heidegger's philosophy better than many people who can read much faster. For me answering factual questions about a Dickens novel would be extremely difficlult because if there are more than two characters in a book I keep getting them confused, but "the ontological difference", is that easy for you even if you can read War and Peace in half an hour? And what about persons with "eidetic memories"? You may read a book and have to take notes. These people can look up the pages in the book in their minds for a test.

I learned German grammar easily; vocabulary words painfully. I could read Hegel but not a pulp novel. And I never did succeed in swimming 100 yards but I bet it would be a piece of cake for Michael Phelps.

Why are you interested in finding what humanities subject is "hardest"? I took two sociology courses. One was for me a waking nightmare of statistics and bullshit that was less appealing than eating cardboard; the other I eagery learned about such things as the communist revolution in a village in rural China in the late 1940s and also one of the students brought in his photographs of a Roman Catholic bishop blessing Ford Falcon police cars in Guatemala. History? I could not tolerate American History in school. I did not care about Washington =crossing the Delaware or Fort Sumter. Most of the bright kids (I was #1 for the 4 years of high school) took "Advanced Placement" American Hstory; Since the teacher smelled to me like a tough grader with the empathy of a cinderblock and maybe inciient dementia, I took American History for idiots (jocks) to get an easy A, but I would voraciously consume hsstory of the philosophy of historiography (could that high school hisory teach even understand those words?). And by accident I made a real discovery in Amerian History 30 years after I graduated from school which I doubt any other student in the whole history of the institution ever did: "Bradford, you get a big fat 'F': the due date was May 1, 1964 and you submitted your paper in 1995, what kind of fool do you think I your teacher am? 'F', you scum!"

No pain no gain and all that stuff is ideaoogy that serves a certain kind of people. That is material for sociological study. I will end with 2 short readings you may wish to think about, concening the teaching of "the humanities" and a personal story:

"[After a professor told his class some idea he believed that is not generally acceptable to say: A]cademic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like.... / [T]he number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance." (Stanley Fish, Prof. of Law, Florida International Univ., "Conspiracy Theories 101", Op-Ed Piece, NYT, 23Jul06, p.WK13)

"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)

[ Mike Rentko ]

¶ +2023.10.17. What is the most powerful mantra to remove ignorance and gain knowledge, intelligence, and concentration of mind?

[ THINK ]

¶ +2023.10.17. How and why did the Boomer generation stop talking about peace movement and social issues?

"Boomer generation"? Is that the people some of whom today are snowbirds enjoying their gold plated years in sunny Florida which for all I know may be the Squamous cell carcinoma capital of America?

[ Snowbirds picture ]

Are you talking about the veterans of Woodstock and "Hell no, I won't go"?

Veterans for Peace today? One size does not fit all.

But in the aggregate which is always depersonalizing even though a lot of persons never really personalized (2-legged sheep)

[ March on Washington picture ]

???

I cringe at being siloed as any thing but I was dumped out of a mentally ill woman's birth canal 01:02 AM 23 November 1946, so I guess you can call me a "Boomer" (or a "Buster"?).

I graduated from Yale in 1968 and I did not attend "my" commencement ceremony. Instead, in my silly cap and gown costume, I stood with a little tin can at one of the gates to the Old Campus where the ceremony was being held and collected donations for Quaker Vietnam War Relief from the 2-legged sheep who entered their holding pen. $130 in the can by the end of the morning – and looking back maybe I was lucky not to have been escorted off the property by the police.

Fast forward to 2022/23: Why isn't there big anti-war movement agsinst Vietnam II: The Biden administration's neocon war against Russia in Ukraine? I don't know why.

I post a message to the White House website each morning asking them to stop this new folly. So I am one "Boomer" (or "Buster"?) who is still moving for peace (I also take Metamucil each morning).

Former CIA officer Ray McGovern is a "Boomer". Columbia Univesity Professor Jeffrey Sachs is a "Boomer". They are both talking peace. You can find both on them on Youtube.

Maybe Prof Sachs has the answer to how we got to here: The assassination of John F. Kennedy, perhaps as a conspiracy by pro-war elements in the U.S. government? Prof Sachs argues that had JFK lived he might have ended the Cold War. I'm not so sure. Bob Dylan (is he a "Boomer") has a song "Murder most Foul".

I don't know why there is no peace movement today. Mr. Zelensky is Jim Jones writ large and ALMOST everybody seems to have drank his Kool-Ade (or is pretending to have for cynical purposes).

As for social issues, isn't that all over the place today? Wokeism and MAGAism? I try to live in the past and have enough education in the humanities that I don't need to watch television (I did like Air Disasters of The Smithsonian Channel but I watched the episodes so many times during the Trump years that I almost know many of them by heart). Apart from the Ukraine War, I fill my time with Marcel Duchamp and The Bauhaus and such. A man I knew who told me about him and his father sometimes greeting Sigmund Freud on the street died 25 years ago and I still think of him each day now. A professor who later bacame a friend, who also died now 25 years ago, inroduced Marshall McLuhan to American academia. And in collge I wa too young to really appreciate one of my teachers who may have known Edmund Husserl.

I do not identify with any identity. There is a book about this:: "The man withut qualities", by Robert Musil. He spent most of his life on it and it's unfinished at well over 1,000 pages. It's 3 volumes; I call the 3rd volume lab exercises.

"I shall think of the sorrow of my children, and of the sorrow of my grandchildren for their children, in this harsh new world," Professor Freud wrote, "and I will leave the world with relief thinking of all that will have been spared me." (Sophie Freud. Sigmund Freud's last surviving grandchild, New York Times obituary, Sam Roberts, Published June 3, 2022, Updated June 6, 2022)

¶ +2023.10.16. What could be the most profoundly tragic or horrifying backstory for a character?

This is one of those "ier" questions. Any proposed answer can always be bettered by something else, and if not today then tomorrow r man=ybe the next day.

I like try to see the obvious. For instance: Patriarch Abraham in the Bible was a war criminal for following an illegal order to kill an innocent civilian (his own son even, but Joseph Stalin did something similar, so what else is new?). That Yahweh let him off the hook at the last moment justshowss Yahweh resorts to entrapment – what a creep! Well here's one:

You must have heard of Sigmund Freud's "Oedipus complex", you know, where infant boys are supposed to want to knock of their father s to f*ck their mothers? Well, read the myth: It's the other way around. Oedipus's daddy hired hit men to murder his son but they took the money but didn't completely carry out the mission, leaving the infant to die on a hillside with his ankles bound (Oedipus means: swollen ankles). And then daddy tried to murder the kid again by vehicular homocide but this time he didn's know who h ec=victim was, so it's not first degree murder just road rage. Oedipus did everything he could to PREVENT killing his father and, a fortiori, copulating with his mother. And he might have ucceeded except for politeness: His loving ADOPTIVE parents had been socially conditioned to feel it was shamefiul to let their beloved [adpotive] child know he wa adopted. So Oedipus ran away form home to keep from hurthing his [presumed] parents. Solution to the problem, if hnot the adoptive parents being honest? When Oedipus found out the oracle he should have gone to his local tunic factory (like t-shirts today), and had tunics made for himself to wear exposed 24/7/365.25:

Moral of this story: Politeness kills. See also the death of one of the greatest scientists who ever was: Tycho Brahe, who died because he was too polite to leave the dinner table when he had to take a piss and consequently got a urinary bloakage which a few days later, before modern medicine, killed him in pain.

Politeness kills. That is a horrifying backstory!

¶ +2023.10.16. How do you survive when no one will listen to you?

That depends on your "character".

If you were raised by a mother who loved but did not smother you, and who encouraged you to do what you believed was right regardless of what anybody else might think or not think of you, you may just feel sorry for them all. They are missing out on your good companionship and insights. Poor people! You may not even be "lonely", because even after your mother is dead and under the topsoil, her comforting and supportive voice will go with you "in your mind"; she, at least, is still listening to you even from beyond the grave (and even if you don't believe in an "afterlife").

If like me, you had an intrusive mother who was always making it clear to me that if I messd up, the "**OR ELSE**" would happen to me, and when I was 5 years old she really did threaten to abandon me for not loving her, well then you might have trouble surviving.

In Christianity there is a famous "battle cry" of a holy man who stood up against what he saw to be sinfulness all around and he preached the gospel as he saw it to them. and nobody listened to him:

"Athanasius contra mundi" (Athanasius against the whole world!)

It depends.

¶ +2023.10.16. What does it say about team dynamics when players stare down their opponents before a game?

What does this mean?

It's not a game: it's a fight, albeit with rules. There's no rule against looking at your opponent, is there? It's not "hitting below the belt".

I had a professor in school who told a little story. It was before World War II and he had a girlfriend in Black Mountain Art College whom he went to visit during the summer. One sunny Saturday afternoon, the students had a little softball game, with beer. But not a real softball game, just everybody goofing around pretending to be playing softball and having fun, Then, he said, one of the students decided to start taking it it seriously and started playing to win: "And then it got ugly."

[ Goodsportspersonship picture ]

+2024.01.15 v264
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