Learning Today: The Four Great Inventions And Four Genius Tinkerings. Part 1: Paper

The history of the world can be written in many different ways. We can mark the centuries by the passing of kings, by the empires' ebbs and flows, or by the progress of science and invention. Each focus will make a different kind of history, with its own heroes, tragedies, and triumphs.

If we look at the history of civilization as the history of invention, the West crouches perilously on the fringes of world history, a minor player with only a few moments of greatness. Who dominates the story instead? China.

The most conspicuous evidence of classical Chinese technical superiority are the Four Great Inventions. Paper-making. The compass. Printing. Gunpowder. These, undoubtably, paved the way for the modern world.

Tinkering

We think of invention the same way we think of magic. A single person--lab coatted and wise--huddles in a dark room and creates this new thing. He emerges after months of invention, an iPod or a pulley in his hand, waiting for the thronging crowds of people to use the creation of his inventive genius.

In Malcom Gladwell's recent article on Steve Jobs, Gladwell suggests that real invention doesn't happen like this at all. Instead, it happens by tinkering. One person has a great idea--a washing machine or a printing press--and then other people take that idea and fool around with it until it becomes perfect. The first iteration of a great idea is like first tries everywhere. Kinda incomplete and crap.

These next few days we will be looking at the Four Great Inventions of China--not just the history of their invention, but also the genius that came when they were tinkered with. We will start with paper.

Paper

Before paper, if you wanted to write something down, you were in trouble. What could you use? Leather, which was expensive--or papyrus, which was expensive. Writing, literacy, the whole great life of the mind was relegated only to the rich who could afford the luxury of paper. (This also led to people actually having to remember stuff--using their brain!--and a number of mnemonic systems, including the Memory Palace, which perhaps is a topic for another post.)

But the course of the world was changed when Cai Lun appeared in the pages of history, because it's Cai Lun who assured that the pages of history would be paper, and not the skin of a stillborn calf. Cai Lun was a eunuch in China's Han dynasty. In the turn of the first century AD, he created the first modern-looking paper from mulberry bark and trash.

In the centuries to come this paper would be used for everything we use paper for and more. Armor, clothing, toilet paper, tea bags--and yes, good old fashioned writing material.

And so how was paper tinkered with? For that let's jump ahead a couple hundred years to the turn of the millennia. Because paper is not only simple writing material. Paper can become power. Dear reader, it was also in China that paper assumed its most potent transformation, from simple writing material--to money, the store of value, the root of all evil, step one in Tony Montana's simple rules for success.

The Chinese state issued the first paper currency. Again, it was made from mulberry bark. Printed with a picture of the amount in cash that the bank note could be exchanged for, these little scraps of paper greased the wheels trade for hundreds of years before the whole system crashed in an inflationary cataclysm.

Check back next time. Hopefully we'll have time for a double-header--we'll be tackling the invention of the compass and the printing press.

Learning Today: The Most Perverse Animal In All Creation

Every generation knows that it is in decline. The imperial Romans looked over their shoulders at the frugality of their fallen Republic and felt themselves unworthy. Now we all hem and haw about the existence of porn and reality TV. We wonder how it got this bad. How can a species survive when 4chan exists?

Well we have nothing on the animals.

Just take the humble Adactylidium mite, a matryoshka doll of indecency and horror. A little family of about eight or so sisters and one brother scurries around in mamma mite. The brother proceeds to impregnate his sisters while still inside the mother. Once the deed is done, the ungrateful bugs eat their way out of their mother, killing her. The brother mite, like so many males before it, just sits around mom's corpse; the sister mites make their horrible little ways to feed and grow, their awful issue already scurrying in their bellies, having sex, the next generation ready to emerge on an unsuspecting world.

What record of sin and venality these mites commit in their four-day long lives? Let's make an account. Incest--of the fetalphilic variety. Cannibalistic matricide. Polygamy. All this in four days. In four days I can barely commit a sin. It makes the worst of what human beings can come up with seem comparatively tame.

Next time someone tells you of the collapse in morals, just tell remind them to be thankful that we are not mites.

Three Rare Views Of The Great Dictator

So--who would've predicted that holding down a full-time job teaching little tiny children, tending to a loving girlfriend, and writing fiction every morning would leave me so little time to blog about facts, real and imagined?

Nevermind. I know that I have been an awful curator of this bloglet, and I will heartily try to add more scribbles soon. I promise. All I need is more coffee. And about forty-five minutes more to every single day.

But! I've come to you today to tell you something important! I want your money! No seriously. But you get words in return!

I write a lot. Mostly fiction. I think I'm good enough to actually merit a real paper and binding book, but what with the moribund economy and some predictable eccentricities re: my book's actual genre, I remain unpublished. No publisher nor agent wants to take a risk on me.

So tonight I tossed caution to the wind and decided to make an eBook.

AND YOU CAN BUY IT! From Smashwords.

The book is called Three Rare Views of the Great Dictator. It's about a dictator of an imaginary country. It's more fun than it sounds.

Leave a comment. Like the book on Facebook. And read it! Enjoy it on your ereaders! Tell your friends! Write a review! Even tiny acts of recognition can give my manuscript the little boost that it needs.

Thanks for indulging me.

Learning Today: How Do They Get Those Little Shapes On Oreos?

The practice of stamping shapes on biscuits is actually practical--it helps the crackers achieve even puffiness in the baking process. It's called 'docking'. Bakers have used a wide variety of tools for this task--before factories, bakers used “a dangerous-looking utensil consisting of sharp heavy spikes driven into a bun-shaped piece of wood.” Find out more at this fascinating story on the blog Edible Geography. via The Browser.

Learning Today: How Long Was A Dinosaur Day?

A day didn't used to be 24 hours. In fact, the rotation of the earth is slowing down. So back in the time of the dinosaurs, a day was only 22 and 1/4 hours.

So if you ever complain about there not being enough hours in a day, your solution is simple: travel back in time.

Found on the ever-enlightening, Dr Karl podcast (MP3 link).

Learning Today: Paris Syndrome

Paris. If all you ever knew about Paris came from watching Hollywood films, you'd assume that as soon as you alighted from your plane at Charles De Gaulle your journey would consist of nothing but falling in love, eating scrumptious food, and marveling at the wealth of beauty and culture that Paris affords.

People who've been to the City of Love can tell you that despite the city's charms, the streets smell like piss. It's a great city--but it's still a city, inhabited by humans in all their sweaty variety.

Travelers need to inure themselves against disappointment. Those who don't might have some problems.

One of those problems is Paris Syndrome. Sometimes, when Japanese tourists visit Paris, they are so disappointed by the tawdry reality of the city that they can suffer from a mental breakdown. The problems with the language barrier, the informality of the French, and the horror of international travel all compound to make the victim of Paris Syndrome so disappointed that they crack. The Japanese Embassy in Paris reportedly sends home about 20 people suffering from Paris Syndrome each year.

Dan Carlin On Reddit

The incredible podcaster Dan Carlin (creator of one of my favorite podcasts Hardcore History) is now on Reddit doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything.) Check it out.

Learning Today: Captain Kidd Was Framed!

Captain Kidd's name occupies the highest strata of pirate fame--the strata that's festooned with eye patches, peg legs and parrots, the strata that's immortalized in millions of seven year olds' Halloween costumes. But recent research has shown that Captain Kidd might not have actually been a pirate after all. The poor man was probably framed.

There's an important distinction to make between piracy and privateering. Being a pirate is relatively easy. You outfit a ship (with lots of cannons and stuff), go out on the ocean, and every other ship you see--you try to steal their stuff. Privateering is another matter entirely. To be a privateer you get a fancy piece of paper from your government called a letter of marque and then you prey on other country's ships and it's all legal.

This was the distinction which Captain Kidd hoped would save his life. See, Captain Kidd was hanged for being a pirate. But he claimed that he had a letter of marque. He was a privateer.

The only problem was that Kidd's letter of marque had been issued in pretty dubious circumstances by a cabal of powerful men who wanted to personally profit from Kidd's privateering. The cabal which gave Kidd his letter of marque were all high-ranking members of the current government, and when Kidd was captured and tried, none of them would jump to the poor man's defense for fear of, you know, being disgraced for outfitting a pirate.

When Kidd was hanged the noose broke, leaving Kidd squirming, in pain, hanging from the scaffold--but not dead. At the time this kind of thing was considered a gentle divine suggestion that a miscarriage of justice was being committed, but people wanted Kidd eliminated, and so he was strung up again and sent to Pirate Heaven. Or Privateer Heaven, if you prefer.

I learned about Captain Kidd from Angus "Pirate Expert" Konstam's story on BBC History Magazine's June 2011 podcast.

Puts it all in perspective, doesn't it?

In the Second World War, the Soviets suffered more casualties in Stalingrad than the total combined causalities suffered by the Americans and the British for the entire war.

Over the course of the war the Soviet Union lost about 15% of its population.

When we think about the Second World War we think of the battle in France, of troops marching through Berlin, of the atom bomb exploding in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the real story of the Second World War happened along the Eastern Front--a brutal destructive stalemate where two dictators threw countless human lives against each other without regard for the death or carnage that ensued.

Statistics from the BBC History Magazine Podcast's story on the Eastern Front in their June 2011 edition. I also encourage everyone to listen to Dan Carlin's wonderful podcast on the Eastern Front, Ghosts Of The Ostfront. It will give you nightmares. Historically accurate nightmares.

Learning Today: June 1st 2011. The Times They Were A Changin'

Before the Revolution of 1848 the tiny principality of Monaco had a really good deal going for it. Monaco was allowed to tax all the orange and lemon trees in Provence. The Princes of Monaco didn't need to do much more than sit back, look out at the Mediterranean, and wait for the farmers of Provence to bring them fresh lemon-scented money. But nothing is forever. In 1848 persky Revolutionaries put an end to many aristocratic privileges--including Monaco's right to tax those tasty citrus fruits.

What's a small principality to do? Countless other once-privileged elites across France and the rest of Europe took this opportunity to curl up into a vomit-stained ball of debauchery and decadence. The Princes of Monaco had a better idea. They would give other people a place where they could curl up into vomit-stained balls of debauchery and decadence. They would open a casino.

And it worked. Today, Monaco is still a country. The Princes of Monaco are still rich. And people still come to the minuscule country to waste their money and get drunk.

And every so often, the scent of lemon and orange wafts through the air, suggesting to the Princes the simplicity of a past time.

Found in C.A. Bayley's The Birth Of The Modern World, Chapter 11, The Reconstruction of Social Hierarchies.

Learning Today: May 31st 2011. Fact Smörgåsbord!

Smörgåsbord, the legendary tableful of tasty edibles, comes to us from the Swedish language. It means literally Butter-Goose-Table.

Today, courtesy of the Canadian Science radio show Quirks and Quarks' annual Question Roadshow, I present a veritable Butter-Goose-Tableful of facts for you, my loyal readers. I encourage you to listen to the whole program.

The show answers burning questions, such as:

Why do Canadian Geese honk when they fly? (To let other geese know where they are.)

AND

How do lakes get fish in them? (In the past, lakes were connected to each other by rivers, and the enterprising fish swam up these rivers.)

AND

Are identical twins actually identical? (Yes and no.)

My fact-loving readership will devour this, I'm sure. Save room for the Butter-Goose, though!

Learning Today: May 30th 2011. Hello Stranger!

In the Congo, "Stranger" is a common male name. Because babies come into their homes as strangers to their families.

From When You're Strange by Paul Theroux in the NYRBlog.

Learning Today: May 26th 2011. Suicide Freud.

Freud was a suicide.

You can't blame him. First, he suffered from twenty years of painful cancer. (Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Other times it kills you.) Then, he had to escape from Nazi-occupied Vienna.

One day in his exile, he sat down, read Balzac's La Peau de chagrin (the Magic Skin) cover to cover, and then was administered an overdose of morphine. And he died.

Via Ivan Szelenyi's Foundations Of Modern Social Theory course, available on iTunes U.

Apologies for the lack of post yesterday, and the small post today. I am a tad busy!

Learning Today: May 24th 2011. The Kiddie-Diddling Tumor.

Everything a person is--every thought, feeling, idea and memory--is little more than an instance of brain activity. This is a radical and unsettling idea. My feeling of love is correlated with a particular set of neurons firing. My appreciation of great works of art is identical with activity in a particular region of my brain. I am a meat computer, weighing about three pounds, engorged with blood.

Though it may be unpalatable, there's a lot of evidence that the mind is nothing more than the brain. For instance, brain damage can often cause profound changes in human behavior. Take the case of the 40 year old schoolteacher who suddenly became an uncontrollable pedophile. His wife discovered him downloading child porn. He visited massage parlors. He even solicited sex from children.

But he also complained of horrible headaches. He urinated on himself and didn't care. He was unable to copy writing and drawings.

A day before he was supposed to go to prison on child molestation charges, he was put into an MRI. Doctors discovered a tumor in the right lobe of the orbifrontal cortex. When the tumor was removed, his sex addiction vanished.

But wait! Later, the man complained of headaches again and started to secretly collect porn. A second trip to the MRI revealed that the tumor had only be incompletely removed. The doctors out the remaining tumor, and the man was better again.

I heard about this story on the Philosophy Bites interview with David Eagleman. Check out the rest of the episode--it's a fascinating look into the intersection of ethics and neuroscience.

Learning Today: May 23rd, 2011. Bill O's Hates.

Turns out Bill O'Reilly likes Glenn Beck and hates Sean Hannity.

Ailes also faced internal resistance to Beck’s rise. Sean Hannity complained to Bill Shine about Beck. And it didn’t help matters that O’Reilly, who had become friends with Beck and can’t stand Hannity, scheduled Beck as a regular guest, a move that only annoyed Hannity further.

From this great piece on Roger Ailes, Fox News, and the Republican 2012 Nominee.

Sorry for the scant post today, I have a case of the Mondays.

Learning Today: May 20th 2011. Celebrating The Proud And Invisible Professional Songwriters

Eg White. Al "Shux" Shuckburgh. You've heard their music in your car, hummed along to their words in the shower. Just who are they again?

These men are professional songwriters. Pop stars--it turns out--don't actually have enough time to write their own material, so they hire other people to do it for them (a lovely example of the increasing division of labor, by the way.)

No doubt it' efficient. Here's the wonderfully named Eg White on his process.

Sometimes I get two hours. Someone comes over at three, we have a cup of tea, chew the cud for a bit, go: 'All right, shall we write a song?' And by six, they've gone home and we've fucking done it. Chasing Pavements, that took two or three hours.

Efficient, sure. But there's something dreadfully unsatisfying to know that many of the songs making up the soundtrack to our lives were made this way--like work. We want our art to be the product of pure feeling, not the product of a guy trying to get a paycheck. When the market gets involved, we feel like our art has been compromised somehow.

Tangent time. This is one of the reasons for the snobbery of modern art. There's plenty of fantastic and appealing commercial art. But since it turns a profit, we're hesitant to call it real art--'high' art. True art is the art that could not survive the market--the art that must be supported by museums and art schools, rather than by people actually buying it and hanging it on their walls.

Well I think that's an awful way of looking at art. The test of art is in our experience of art--how we hear the song, how we see the painting, how we read the novel.

So tonight when you open up iTunes, raise your celebratory beverage of choice to the invisible professional songwriters, those shadowy men who make the music we hum along with.

Source: "Write me a hit by teatime: the world of professional songwriters." The Guardian, May 17th. Via Mefi.

Learning Today: May 19th 2011. Happy Commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day!

Well folks, today here in Turkey it's Commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day! Hooray! Everyone has the day off! Including me. So I'm going to slide into bed and rest enough to get over the horrible cough that's been plaguing me all week.

Learning Today: May 18th 2011. Bitcoin. The Eminent Future of Currency? Libertarian Pipe Dream? Finally A Way To Buy A Tab Of Acid Online?

In the beginning, if you wanted stuff you had to give someone else stuff that they wanted. I want your goat, I have to give you twenty-five turnips. If you don't like turnips, tough cookies for me. Or tough turnips. I don't get your goat.

Slowly, and perhaps inevitably, people chose a particular good to exchange better than all other goods. It could be cowrie shells. Or barley. Or whiskey (in Revolutionary Era-America.) But the grandpappy of cool stuff to swap was gold.

Gold was nice and shiny. It didn't rust or degrade. And it was relatively light. This made trade a lot easier. If I want your goat, I don't need to bother with whether or not you want turnips. I can sell my turnips for some gold, give you that gold, and you can give someone else gold for that iPod touch you've been eyeing up.

But there was a big problem with gold: there wasn't enough of it. People wanted to trade, but they couldn't because they couldn't get the gold. People did all sorts of crazy things to get over the lack of gold. From the bill of exchange to the Ming banknote, getting over the problem of the scarcity of gold was troubling business. But what could you do?

Then paper currency came along. Paper currency was light, movable, there was (usually) enough of it. Soon people didn't really care about gold. And the world dropped the gold standard sometime during the Second World War.

We may be seeing a revolution in currency every bit as wild as paper currency. Say hello to BitCoin. The world's first electronic currency.



Could it really be one of the most dangerous things the internet has ever created? Even more dangerous than shock sites? Than Jay Beebs? Or is it all a bunch of libertarian hoo-hah?

I have no idea, because I just found out about BitCoin today. Via Waxy.

Learning Today: May 17th 2011. The Octopus Of Love And Death

When you love someone, what's better than giving them a little reminder of yourself? A poem. A picture. Something that reminds your lover of you when you are gone. The male blanket octopus has found the perfect gift. He gives his mate his penis.

Well, it's not really his penis. Male octopuses have a special sperm tentacle which they use to give lady octopuses their sperm sack. Sounds lovely, I know, but it gets the job done. When Mr. Blanket Octopus hands over his bag of squiggly octopod love, Mrs. Blanket Octopus gets a little something extra. He gives her his entire love tentacle. And then he dies.

Isn't nature great?

Source: Sex Drugs and Sea Slime on CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks, May 14th.

Learning Today: May 16th, 2011. The Eight-legged essay of China.

Welcome to Learning Today. I come across a huge number of facts in my daily procrastinating, and I thought--why not share those facts with the world? Or at least with the tiny number of humans and web-bots that read this blog?

Our inaugural bit of wisdom comes today from China's imperial examination system. Civil servants in Imperial China were chosen on the basis of their performance on a test. Hooray meritocracy, you say! Not so fast. This wasn't a test of actual practical things. This was a test of the Chinese classics. It was horrifically difficult. The leader of the Taiping Rebellion, Hong Xiuquan, failed his examinations over four times--despite scoring in the top one percent of applicants. People would spend their lives taking the exams. Makes GRE test prep look peachy, no?

Why were the exams so hard? For an example, look at the dreaded eight-legged essay. Not only did the eight-legged essay give strict limits on the word count, structure and expression, but it demanded that writers not mention anything that happened after the death of Mencius in 298 B.C. From Wiki:

Words, phraseology, or references to events that occurred after the death of Mencius in 298 BC were not allowed, since the essay was supposed to explain a quote from one of the Confucian classics by "speaking for the sage"; and Confucius or his disciples could not have referred to events that occurred after their deaths.^[1]

That's what I call learning.

Back!

So I'm going to be trying something new with this blog in the coming days and weeks, let's see if I can keep it up.

Entirely Subjective Reveiws: Shearwater

Shearwater perfectly expresses a certain feeling: you're sailing with some friends and at some point a quietness comes over everyone so you look over the prow. You listen to the waves lap at the boat. You watch the proud sea. A bird flies overhead and looks lonely and beautiful. And even though you're smiling and you know that actually you are quite content, you feel a deep and bitter sadness. Then for a minute or two nobody speaks.

Shearwater's Rook
Metacritic: 85
Amazon: 4 stars
Pitchfork: 8

Entirely Subjective Reviews: The Pacific

Like my grandma watching a Waynes Brothers movie, I can't tell anyone apart.

The Pacific is a beautifully shot TV show which tries to explode our heroic myths about war and I cannot understand it at all even though I tried really hard.

There's one big problem: I can't tell the characters apart. I know there's supposed to be an Italian dude and a southern dude, but after that--the characters are just all the same. Lots of men. Sitting around. And they are dirty and they eat food. And then there are explosions! IMPORTANT EXPLOSIONS! And then there are dead bodies and we feel bad because we know about the horror of war. But then there are explosions again! Whee! And we are in the past so we know that things are DIFFERENT.

I tried really hard to like The Pacific. I read episode guides to try to figure out which characters were which. But after about forty minutes through the second episode squinting trying to figure out whether there were two curly haired dudes or one and who the guy was who won the medal of honor and why he won it I put The Pacific on pause and went to do something else--and my life was not a single smidgen worse.

Metacritic Rating: 87
IMDB: 8.5/10
Amazon: 4/5

Octopus Kills Shark

Via my dad via HuffPo via Boing Boing.

Reviews in the Age of Aggregation

One of the most dramatic elements of the new internet age has been the rise of aggregation. Before the internet, data was limited. Now we have unlimited data, and the limiting factor on people's consumption of data is time. In the previous generation, important people may have been 'personalities' who provided interesting outlooks on the world. Now important people are collectors who organize data in useful ways.

I think that aggregation has fundamentally changed the role of criticism in our culture in a way which most critics have not yet realized.

First let's take a look at the role of criticism before the rise of aggregation. And here I am talking about friendly accessible newspaper criticism which people use to decide whether or not to consume a particular work of art. I do not care about ponderous useless academic criticism which people use to gain jobs as tenured humanities professors.

So here's how people's relationship to criticism used to look: You want to see a movie this weekend. So you open up the arts section of your newspaper of choice and you read the movie reviews. Maybe you pay attention to the byline of the reviewer, and certain reviewers--A. O. Scott, say, or Ebert--will influence your opinion more than other reviewers.

In this situation, the reviewer is trying to get at a kind of objective criticism of the work in question. Since the reader is only going to read one--or at most two--reviews of a given work, the reviewer will do his or her best to set aside their individual opinion and try instead for a more universal opinion. The reviewer does not answer the question "Did I like it?" but answers the question "Is it good?"

This stance was a result merely of a technological limitation. The collection of large sets of data about people's opinions was difficult and time consuming. So the reviewer had to take the position of the sole judge.

Yet now, with the rise of aggregation, that has all changed. Data is cheap and plentiful.

These days, if I want to judge a given work of art, I will look at a site which aggregates opinion. Sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes digest professional reviews into numerical scores which provide a good guess at how good a particular work of art will be. Other sites like Amazon.com and Imdb allow users to contribute their own reviews. Sites like Netflix and the iTunes music store use complicated algorithms to look at individuals' tastes and try to figure out what art and music will appeal to them. And then just look at the plethora of different top ten, top 100 and top 1000 lists out there. We love aggregation. Sometimes we might look at the reviews of a particular favorite reviewer, but that reviewer is no longer the only source we use to judge whether we give our time to a work of art.

So there is now no more need for the reviewer who positions himself as the sole arbiter of a piece of art. The reviewer can merely give his or her own personal opinion and then let the aggregation do the work of providing a more 'objective' criticism. There is no harm now in saying "I don't like this film because the actor reminded me of my brother-in-law." The peculiarities of individual opinion are leveled by aggregation.

But criticism has not yet changed. To show what I think modern criticism might look like, I will periodically post reviews of things on this site, giving the most biased and personal reviews possible. To balance out these biased reviews, I will also include as much aggregated criticism of the given work of art as possible--its Metacritic, Amazon, and if possible, Imdb rating. In this way I hope to show both sides of aggregation--the small-scale, personal and biased individual reviewer, and the numerical, sphinx-like and sage aggregated number.

Things Which Don't Suck, Part 1

Rhapsody in Blue




My first sip of coffee in the morning.

Jess' jokes.

Gordon S. Wood.

Dostoyevsky and Salinger.

Dorris Lessing and Laurence Durrell.

Tulips and Irises.

Squids and octopuses.

Miyazaki and Pixar.

Keroro Gunso





What else doesn't suck?

The Narrative Fallacy

We tend to look at the events of our lives as stories. While our stories will fit the data of the world most of the time, there will be rare but significant moments when our stories about the world will fail. These incidents are as distressing as they are inevitable.

Anyway. Here’s something I thought of on the bus today.

Since we understand the world in terms of stories, we judge the validity of particular storylines not only by how well they fit the world but also by how successful they are as stories.

This isn’t a huge problem when we have a lot of data (in our own life, for instance). Since we have a lot of data we’re probably constrained to make storylines which are a closer fit to the world.

Where this effect is really significant, I think, is in parts of our knowledge where we rely mostly on hearsay—where we don’t have a lot of easily available data to whittle down our storyline options.

Now tons of stuff we believe in relies on hearsay. Our beliefs about the nature of the universe, our beliefs about politics, and history are mostly formed by stories other people tell us rather than from our own observation.

In these situations since we don’t have a lot of data with which to falsify or verify these stories, we will tend to choose stories which provide more narrative satisfaction.

For instance, I am interested in the US health care debate, but I do not have time enough to adequately educate myself about it. But I still need some kind of opinion about it. So what opinion do I choose? I will choose a story which makes sense to me. “President Obama is selling us out because he is a liar.” Or, “President Obama is standing up for me and he will choose the best possible policy option.”
Now this problem is especially pernicious when it comes to journalism. The success of a journalist is dependent on his or her ability to construct meaningful stories out of the data of the world—not on their ability to construct more accurate stories about the world.

You can see this in reporting on the stock market. The condition of the stock market effects the well-being of many people, so it is a story which we have to tell. So when there is an unusual movement of the stock market journalists have to explain it. “The stock market crashed and then recovered very quickly today because of a computer error.” “The stock market rose today because of investor hopes of a change in the interest rate.” But the stock market is a notoriously complex system which defies easy analysis. The same conditions which are used today to explain a rise in the stock market will be used tomorrow to explain a crash in the stock market. The real reasons for these rises and falls are too complicated for non-experts to understand (and probably too complicated even for the experts to understand.) So we tell ourselves stories about these events which make sense but don’t actually convey the nature of reality.

This narrative fallacy can explain religious and political enthusiasm, too: having a particular storyline which can explain everything in the world is very comforting. “Everything would be better if people just followed Marx.” “The world is bad because nobody is a real Christian.” “America is corrupted by special interests.” All of these ideas provide very compelling stories which explain the world in narratively satisfactory ways. The problem is that they don’t accurately reflect the world. Since we don’t actually have a lot of commerce with data about politics, we are able to keep these inaccurate beliefs safe from recalcitrant experience. In our personal lives we are held to greater accuracy about our stories because we are more likely to encounter recalcitrant experience.

Here is Tocqueville talking about something similar. He's discussing how pre-Revolutionary France was led by its writers.

When we study the history of our Revolution, we realize that it was prompted by precisely the same outlook which inspired so many books on the theory of government. They reflected the same attractions for universal theories, comprehensive systems of legislation and an exact summary in the laws; the same contempt for existing facts; the same faith in theory; the same taste of the original; the ingenious and the novel in reshaping institutions; the same desire to reconstruct the entire constitution at one and the same time following the rule of logic and according to a single plan instead of seeking to reform it in its separate parts. A frightening spectacle! For what is a good quality in a writer is a failing in a politician and the very themes which have often produced fine books may lead to great upheavals.

If I was Malcom Gladwell I’d call this something like ‘The Storyteller’s Illusion’. But I’m not. So it’s ‘the Narrative Fallacy.’

ALL CAPS LINKAGE

MEMES FROM AN ALTERNATE DIMENSION

VIA WAXY

HAPPY ALL CAPS TUESDAY.

Time For The Times

Doing too much at the same time, even at the risk of failure, is a core American trait that built the nation. It’s as American as Benjamin Franklin, “Moby-Dick,” the New Deal and a double cheeseburger with all the toppings.

David Foster Wallace And Hypertext

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest just might be one of the most popular things on the internet. There are so many websites devoted to reading and re-reading IJ that I am refraining, right now, from linking to any of them, because it would just take too much time. There's a small irony here, because DFW's serpentine, infinity-recursive prose is just about the exact opposite of what you'd want you polished blog prose to be like, which is clean and concise. Anyway. I apologise if you've never read IJ; I encourage you to, and I also encourage you to join us here again tomorrow, when we might--MIGHT--talk about something interesting. Because if you haven't read IJ you just probably should stop reading this post right now, because it is inside baseball, at best.

My argument is that IJ is the first great novel of the internet age, even though it somewhat preceded it. Now. There's something interesting you can say about Infinite Jest's take on mass media, something very interesting, especially in the hypertrophied entertainment culture of O.N.A.N.ite USA. But that's not what I'm going to be talking about today.

I think that the densely allusive, footnoted prose of IJ is an almost perfect hypertext, in that original sense of hypertext which was an infinitely referenced network of texts, the ideal of the internet before the internet became real. I will show you what I mean. Here's just one paragraph, taken pretty much at random, which I have gone about and annotated as best as I could. It's from the brochure for the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, as read by Madame Psychosis on page 187 of my book, for those of you at home, following along:

'Those with saddle sores. Those with atrophic limbs. And yes chemists and pure-math majors also those with atrophic necks. Scleredema adultorum. Them that seep, the serodermatotic,. Come one come all, this circular says. The hydrocephalic. The tabescent and chachetic and anorexic. The Brag's-Diseased, in their heavy red rinds of flesh. The dermally wine-stained or carbuncular or steatocryptoic or God forbid all three. Marin-Amat Syndrome, you say? Come on down. The psoriatic. The exzematically shunned. And the scrofulodermic. Bell-shaped steatopygiacs, in your special slacks. Afflictees of Pityriasis Rosea. It says here Come all ye hateful. Blessed are the poor in body, for they.'

Infinite Jest has the sort of hyper-referenced information overload that swamps all of us these days in 2009, those of us who read lots on the internet. Though Wallace wrote before the wide-spread popularity of the internet, he expressed well the information overload of us blog-seeped netizens. I see a fully-referenced hypertexted version of IJ as entirely possible, and I could encourage anyone with connections in the publishing industry to pitch this idea. Hard. Just give me some props if it ever comes true.

Am I Internet Famous Yet?

My Kickstarter project might get a buck from Choire.

Someone should convince him.

Now Is Time To Help The Starving Artist

So I've recently finished a novel, and I'm trying to get it published. Writing a novel is pretty easy, all things considered. Getting it published is hard. I'm also pounding away at another novel. It is really a beautiful life, writing, I assure you.

But there's a problem. You see, normal human beings use money to buy goods and services, including housing and food, which are considered by most to be necessities. Writing fiction--especially when it is fiction whose only laurels to date are some absolutely glowing rejection letters--does not provide much of this money.

Yet, there is a solution. It is called the internet.

There's this neat website called Kickstarter, and I've started a project up there. The idea of Kickstarter is this: you give artists money, and you get stuff in return. If you give me five bucks--ONLY FIVE DOLLARS!--you will get an electronic copy of my novel when it is finished. If you give me seven dollars, I will chuck in a copy of my already completed novel. Wow! There are many other wonderful things you can get, including me being your personal writing slave, so I encourage you to check it out.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

A BRIEF SURVEY OF ALL CAPS LITERATURE

ALL CAPS HAS A BAD REPUTATION. ONE WISE IMMINENCE RECENTLY ADVISED ME THAT WRITING IN ALL CAPS SUGGESTS MENTAL UNBALANCE, ILLNESS, AND NOT AWESOMENESS. THAT IS WHY WE HERE AT RAISE HIGH THE ROOFBEAM, CARPENTERS HAVE PUT TOGETHER THIS BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO ALL CAPS LITERARY PRODUCTION, TO RAISE CONSCIOUSNESS AND ALL THAT, IN HONOR OF ALL CAPS TUESDAY.

MF DOOM



RAPPER MF DOOM'S NAME IS WRITTEN ALL CAPS. "ALL BIG LETTERS BUT IT ISN'T NO ACRONYM."

STEPHEN CRANE



BEST KNOWN FOR WRITING THE PERPETUALLY BOOK-REPORTED RED BADGE OF COURAGE, STEPHEN CRANE ALSO WROTE SOME PRETTY ALL CAPS POETRY. AND BY ALL CAPS, I MEAN LITERALLY ALL CAPS. CRANE'S COLLECTION OF POETRY, THE BLACK RIDERS AND OTHER LINES, WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ALL CAPS, THOUGH LATER EDITIONS HAD NORMAL CAPS, WHICH SUCKS. I THINK THAT THE ALL CAPS VERSION IS MUCH BETTER, EMPHASIZING THE STARK, POWERFUL IMAGES IN CRANE'S LINES. HERE'S THE THIRD LINE, MY FAVORITE SINCE I WAS A LITTLE BOY:

IN THE DESERT
I SAW A CREATURE, NAKED, BESTIAL,
WHO, SQUATTING UPON THE GROUND,
HELD HIS HEART IN HIS HANDS,
AND ATE OF IT.
I SAID, "IS IT GOOD, FRIEND?"
"IT IS BITTER BITTER," HE ANSWERED;
"BUT I LIKE IT
"BECAUSE IT IS BITTER,
"AND BECAUSE IT IS MY HEART."

THE TELEGRAPH



DID YOU KNOW THAT BECAUSE IT WAS AWESOME, THE TELEGRAPH SYSTEM WOULD ONLY SEND MESSAGES IN CAPITAL LETTERS?

DO YOU, MY FRIENDLY READERS, KNOW OF ANY OTHER ALL CAPS LITERARY PRODUCTIONS?

What Makes A Compulsive Song Compulsive?

Right now I am listening to Okkervil River's Calling And Not Calling My Ex from their latest album, the Stage Names. (The embedded YouTube vid above is, in fact, a live recording of the song.) I have been listening to this song a lot. And by a lot I mean maybe three, four, five times a day, whenever I find a spare moment.

Now it doesn't take a Master's in psychology to figure out the etiology of this compulsion. I have been thinking a lot about an ex of my own. But we might find some interest in the details. What first drew me to the song was the line "I'm feeling pretty stupid now for ever having said goodbye." Which is exactly how I feel when I'm feeling, well, however it is that I feel. The sympathy I felt at that line made me stop, rewind the song, and start to listen again. Now, one way of explaining great art says that great art expresses what we otherwise find inexpressible. That great art alone can express these feelings because those feelings are too refined to be explained by our own poor powers of expression. But the emotions I find reflected in the song remain unexpressed by me, not because they are too ineffable or complicated, but because they are too cliched, too mawkish. I miss you. I never wish I said goodbye to you. The beauty comes from a simple sentiment, expressed simply, but a sentiment that if I actually said it would encourage my friends wonder whether I had turned emo on them. (Maybe, perhaps, I have.)

This has led me to think about obsessional songs. My housemate is currently listening over and over again to a verse by the British hip-hop legend Jehst (his verse starts at 1.10). In my sophomore year of college I listened to Mirah's song Mt St Helens every single morning when I woke up, much to the chagrin of my roomate, who at first hated the song, then grew to despise it, silently, while still in bed, trying to sleep, every day. (The song's first lines, "From the morning when I rise from my bed / to the evening when I lay my head in slumber" outright encouraged obsession--indeed, the song was compulsive because it was about compulsion. I blame you, Mirah, for mornings of moody music-listening, and for the discomfort you caused my roomate.)

These songs, I think, are just proxy obsessions: in my case, I am trying to find some way to channel my care for girls who, for whatever reason, are far away from me. In my housemate's case, he listens to Jehst ten times in a row because he is obsessed with the sheer skillful exuberance of the English language, with hip-hop, with speech.

Which is a little healthier, perhaps.

I don't know if what I'm talking about here is the already much talked-about earworm, but I suspect there is some difference. The earworm comes into your head unbidden. These songs, you invite them in.

I had first planned these paragraphs as an introduction to an open thread, and so will conclude:

TL;DR: What songs are you obsessed with, and why?

And again, the Times

An interesting thing is happening in this Times article on Jackie Chan's inadvertent reactionary activism--there's a YouTube link! In the lede! Since when did the Times start including external links in its web versions of print stories?

I feel like I have missed the boat on this one.

And here's a funny sentence, for your pleasure:

As the storm gathered, words turned to action: the mayor of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, dropped Mr. Chan as an ambassador for the 2009 Summer Deaflympics in Taiwan.

More Red Flag Words

1. "Let's catch up soon."

2. "Whatever does not kills you makes you stronger."

3. "My personal philosophy."

4. Gratuitous use of scare quotes.

5. Chocotinis.

6. "X pokes you!" (On Facebook.)

7. "I'm sorry but I just have to be selfish right now..."

8. "I finished writing my novel."

A Fact So True I Wish I Had Made It Up Myself

Detroit hockey octopus throwing tradition. It exists.

Via mefi (thread contains MANY more octopi links, like my new favorite blog [sorry, Brendan!] Today In Tentacles.)

HAPPY ALL CAPS TUESDAY

IT'S TUESDAY AGAIN, THE DAY WHEN WE RITUALLY HIT THE CAPS LOCK KEY, AND THE WORLD--SUDDENLY, MIRACULOUSLY, BECAUSE OF THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES OR SOMETHIN--BECOMES MANY TIMES MORE AWESOME THAN IT WOULD BE OTHERWISE. YOU GUYS KNOW THE DRILL. WELL, IF YOU HAVE NOT YET RECEIVED THE ALL CAPS MEMO, I WILL TELL YOU THE DRILL:

EVERY TUESDAY

ALL CAPS

SO, WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, HERE ARE SOME MEMES THAT I MADE.









ARE YOU ENOUGH OF A BADASS TO MAKE YOU OWN MEMES AND POST THEM ON THE ALL CAPS TUESDAY FACEBOOK GROUP? PROBABLY NOT.

I MADE THE DEPRESSION DOG AND ADVICE DOG MEMES USING THE TOTALLY ALL-CAPS MEMEGENERATOR.

A Papal Fact

Of all the popes, the most curious must of course be Gregory the Uncertain, who was pope for only three years, between 1012 and 1015.

Gregory entered the papacy enamored with the fashionable superstitions of the time, such as miracles performed by holy men, the wondrous properties of relics, and the existence of and communication with demons. In fact, in his first year as pope, Gregory entertained a near-record number of pilgrims, con-men, and supplicants, who filtered in and out of the halls of the Vatican presenting the finger-bones of famous historical figures, odd growths on their foreheads that looked like cauliflower, and talking animals who got suddenly shy standing in front of the pope himself and would barely be able to talk about the weather. Gregory was quite amused by all these visitors, and was often seen clapping his hands and laughing.

However, Gregory was a weak-willed man, chosen more for his political connections to the powerful Florentine merchants the Snarkerellis than for his spiritual or organizational might, and he soon grew tired with his amusements and began in earnest to think of the nature of worship. This initiated what were known as the Months of Confusion, as Gregory would issue decree after decree, almost daily piling up new ordinances and suggestions, often confusing, mostly contradictory. For instance, on one day, Gregory, after studying some scrolls made the more obscure by his poor Aramaic, proclaimed that Christians should not keep cats. Duly, there were many devout families who, on hearing the news, tossed out their cats to the night and praised god for it. However, not more than eight days later, Gregory issued another statement proclaiming that the keeping of all pets, cats included, encouraged the love of Christ, and was a blessing, confusing all those who had so callously tossed our their family pets not eight days before. Gregory’s fiddling touched topics as diverse as haberdashery, accounting, archery, meteorology, cooking (especially the drying of fruits and fish), alchemy, the training and up-keep of house-squid, the naming of children, and a spectacular, daily, three-week-long clusterfuck of decrees relating to the wearing and washing of undergarments whose various twists and turns of argument are utterly incomprehensible to the modern reader.

Pope Gregory, however, ensured his obscurity when he pronounced his last bit of advice, in which he, in mealy-mouthed Latin, proposed that maybe the whole dogma stuff of the Catholic church should be taken as a metaphor or something, because it really makes more sense that way, right? He was found dead three days later. He was canonized in 1456, and is considered the patron saint of stutterers and the indecisive.

This pope fact was requested by reader Melanie Poole. Request any sort of fact in the comments, and there you go, I will write you one.

Metaphor

Can I Has Relaunch?

So. I am posting more in this here blog. And I changed the title image. What do you think?

Also--tell your friends! Drop some comments.

Carousel

via Mefi

Why You Should Want Higher Taxes

Check it out. My colleague Ilan Moscovitz at the Motley Fool proposes that the financial crisis was caused, in part, by investors focusing on short-term gain rather than on the long-term health of the businesses they were investing in. He proposes a tax on short-term sales of stock to provide an incentive for long-term rather than short term investing. But why am I telling you this? Go read it yourself.

Nine Red Flag Words

Here at Raise High The Roofbeam, Carpenters! we are committed to providing you with the most up-to-date in conversational technology. That is why we present you today with this handy list of red-flag words, phrases which lift a metaphorical red flag to announce the potential approach of conversational danger. When your conversational partner utters any one of these phrases, we advise you to take care, plan your escape routes, and calmly assess the situation. Remember: don't panic! If you are prepared and watch for the warning signs, you too can avoid the pitfalls of interlocutory disaster.

1. "I'm just at a point in my life when..."

2. "Deconstruction" to mean destruction or taking apart.

3. "Deconstruction" to mean "Deconstruction".

4. "Vis a vis", also, "qua".

5. "I don't mean to be [racist/insensitive/stupid] BUT..."

6. "Yeah, I know that X is an asshole, but he's really nice once you get to know him."

7. "I only [dance/sing/talk to girls/go out] when I'm drunk."

8. Anything to do with quantum mechanics or neuroscience (fMRI studies in particular) when the person's only source is "Some article I read..." or, in a more extreme case, "Some video my friend told me about..." that 'scientifically proves' [telepathy/time travel/the existence of god and/or the afterlife] ESPECIALLY when included in a discussion of recreational psychedelic drugs.

9. "Yeah, I wrote something about that on my blog."

Please suggest your own red flag words in the comments.

Local Media Me

I will be an audience member on SBS' Q&A tonight. I won't be doing any Aing, nor will I be doing any Qing, but if you tune in you might be able to see my interested, beautiful face.

Nostalgia

Right now I'm living in Canberra, where I went to high school. I left six or seven years ago. At the bars I crane my head around, looking for ghosts of people who knew me in high school, or who I used to know, and I often find them. Someone came up to me in the supermarket who used to buy my zines. People ask me when I cut off my dreadlocks (about eight years ago).

One of the questions people ask me is whether it's strange to be back, since so much has changed. The city center of Canberra, which is really the social heart of the city, and the only place that mattered to me as a kid, has changed dramatically. A mall has grown up around the edges of it, where once there were big thirsty parking-lots, and embraced the open square of Garema Place with a stone-face curtain of shops and movie theaters. That has changed, certainly. But the strange thing is more how everything has stayed the same. There still sits the same sleepy Vietnamese restaurant you never saw anyone eat in, that you were sure was about to go out of business, with the same faded plastic sign, the same sun-faded menu. The same streets and trees and the same faces. The same feeling of gentleness.

But for me this place is haunted. And each place has for me a memory. I remember driving by this empty lot nearing to the Braddon Club, heading up towards my home just a couple weeks ago. It was just gone autumn and the gutters were beginning to brim with leaves. And I remembered, so immediate that it hurt, walking down that very street, going home, in the cusp of autumn, with a beloved ex-girlfriend, just as we were beginning to court each other. The memory was so close, it was surprising that it was seven or eight years old. The fact that she wasn't next to me, that I couldn't call her, that our relationship had grown older, more complicated, and adult, just struck me for that brief moment as impossible--how could she not be waiting just outside of my vision, about to take my hand? how could it have changed. And yet I looked around and in the car were strangers, absolute strangers. (I had hitched a ride home with some acquaintances.) She wasn't there. Once I made it home I touched that place with my mind again, hoping to find her, but could taste only a dim memory, half-cold and unappetizing. For the twentieth of thirtieth time that day, I wished to go back in time, and wished at the very same moment to be right exactly where I was.

Robert Caro On LBJ On Charlie Rose

Something to chew on

Are we then not beasts to call the labor which makes us bestial?

...Perhaps we are right to condemn ourselves for giving birth to such an absurd thing as a man; right to call it an act of shame and the organs which seem to do it shameful.

--Montaigne, from On Some Lines Of Virgil

Hitting the gym!

Guys, this blogging thing is pretty tough! I'm gonna go training!

via waxy.

What's The Use In Talking?

So Thucydides is writing about the Spartans' debate about whether to go to war against the Athenians, treating us to pages and pages of arguments for and against, well-argued and cogent. Yet in the end the argument that wins the day is a quick paragraph so full of platitudinous cliches it makes a Hallmark Birthday card look like Winston Churchill. Thucydides says this:

The Spartans voted... that war should be declared, not so much because they were influenced by the speeches of their allies as because they were afraid of further growth of Athenian power....

This made me think of Lyndon Johnson, who in the position of Senate Majority Leader, saw the magnificence of public speaking much like the way you or I would look at a sledgehammer, that is, a blunt tool, to be used by someone else.

Eloquence on the floor of the Senate didn't matter because it was not eloquence that changed votes. It was Johnson with his promises, threats, and compromises. Even after hearing the most moving speech, a Johnson crony would still vote, not with his conscience, but with Johnson, for voting with Johnson was how people got things done. Johnson's early success as Majority Leader came by way of limiting debate on the floor: he made the entire Senate much more efficient by using a hitherto little-used parliamentary technology called a unanimous consent agreement, which forced the entire Senate to vote on particular bills at a particular time, clearing up the traditional speechifying logjam of Senates past. Indeed, the only real importance that speeches had on the floor of the Senate in those days was the threat of the filibuster, and comparing the filibuster to normal eloquence is like comparing a fancy dinner with a competitive eating championship.

This happens in the critical moment in the debate about the 1957 Civil Rights Bill:

Once, when Everett Dirkson of Illinois rose to support [House Minority Leader William] Knowland with his special brand of empty grandiloquence ('I have been thinking much of Runnymede'), Johnson half-yawned and lazily scratched his chest, in a magnificent gesture of casual confidence.

That was Stewart Alsop as quoted in Robert Caro's magnificent biography, Master of the Senate. Here's Caro's quick gloss on Alsop:

The speeches didn't matter; Johnson's every gesture made that clear. What mattered was the votes--and he had the votes.

And he had the votes not because of speeches, but because he appealed to practical things. Yet still I think rhetoric is important, speeches are important, eloquence is important. Why?

The Secrets of An Exclusive Secret Society Revealed

It's the first day of the Easter long weekend here in Canberra, and I am sitting in my bed with an espresso battling the cloying demons of memories of previous Easter long weekends. So, here I will give you a quick squib I wrote a while ago. Enjoy.




“Is that the office of some sort of a secret society or something, that ornate building you guys are exiting now?”
Me and Ronnie were dressed in lavender robes leaving the Osiris Temple. It was two in the morning and we were being accosted by some drunk too lonely to know not to talk to strange men late at night. Ronnie shook his head and told the guy that we were just renting the place out for a convention and so we didn’t know if it was a secret society or not, but wouldn’t it sure be funny if it was a secret society now, wouldn’t it!
And that’s one of the best things about being in a secret society: you get to tell people you are most definitely not in a secret society.

Conversations I get to have now that I’m in a Secret Society
GIRL: Wow, look at this, this guy at the Exclusive Hollywood Party, a photo of whom is in the tabloid entertainment magazine I am currently reading, he certainly looks a lot like you, isn’t that strange?
ME: Yes that is strange.
GIRL: And is that Scarlett Johannsen giving him a rather amorous kiss on his cheek?
ME: Yes. It appears to be so.
GIRL: That guy is very lucky, isn’t he.
ME: I agree wholeheartedly.

COLLEGE FRIEND: I didn’t know that you knew my (boss / girlfriend’s father / pastor) so well. Thanks a lot for getting me out of that jam I got myself into through of a startling lack of foresight and wisdom that unfortunately is well within character. If it wouldn’t have been for you I would have lost my (job / girlfriend / position in the church choir).
ME: It was no problem.
C.F.: And you know what’s weird, I just got my utility bill today, and there must be a problem with my meter, because now they’re actually giving me money. Can you believe that?
ME: Yes. Yes I can.

GUY AT A BAR, TO ME AND RONNIE: What was that elaborate, acrobatic handshake you guys just did? It wasn’t a secret handshake for some sort of secret society or anything, was it?
RONNIE: Of course not.
G.A.A.B.: Because whatever it was, it looked really awesome and I wish you could teach me.
RONNIE: We could, but then we would have to kill you.
ALL:
RONNIE: That was a joke. We wouldn’t have to kill you.
ME: We’d just have to poke out your eyes.
ALL:
RONNIE: Actually, we wouldn’t have to do anything. We have an army of thralls to do our dirty work for us.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: I bet you guys get up to some weird stuff. Probably with celebrities. And that it’s kinda gay.
And I’d say to you: The rituals of the Secret Society, while being continuously updated to reflect the changing times, are based on a proud tradition that dates back to the very founding of the Secret Society itself – which is a really mind-bogglingly long time ago (I can’t tell you how long ago, exactly, except that it pre-dated and was responsible for some pretty major milestones in the development of human culture, you’d be surprised) and while a few of these august rituals might seem a little, well, baroque to the outsider – even cruel – it’s still part of our tradition: and plus, they give the whole thing a sort of dangerous mystique which is so very integral to the proper coolness of a secret society.
And of course there are celebrities. But not the ones you’d expect. And they all go by their real names. And are a lot of fun at Charades, which, while not our official party game, is pretty close. Our official party game is one of our closest guarded secrets.

You know, the power, the celebrity friends, the parties – all of that is great. But it doesn’t make me happy.
What does make me happy is this. I get to go through the boring shit I have to do every day to keep up appearances and I know that underneath it all, behind the hours of work, beneath the restaurants and bars and strip-malls, lurking inside the television news broadcast smiles and the scientific discoveries there works a hidden but understandable intelligence. And it’s especially cool to know that I have some power over this intelligence. I live a parallel life in which the curtain hiding the truth of reality has been pulled back, and I can smile at the futility of it all, and the majesty. Which is pretty cool.

An Australian Fact

One of the most successful medicinal hoaxes of English-speaking history was perpetrated against the nascent Australian settlers in the mid-18th century. Posing as a Hindu yogi named Adulakar, the disgraced Scottish physician Dr. Sam Arkman sold a snake-oil cure for "recidivism, onanism, and malingering, used exclusively by the Hindoo Prince for upwards of three millennia, now for the first time available for purchase or barter to the White Man, whose industry has now made him a fit subject for this miraculous mixture, this potent brew, available for only 2d, or equivalent in goods or specie." Although the exact composition of Hindbrew, as the drink was called, is for the most part unknown, it was no more than a mixture of hastily distilled spirits, mud and tincture of semi-medicinal herbs. However, due to Dr. Arkman's intense charisma, and the penchant of the Australian people for drink, Hindbrew became a staple of the Australian landscape, only being removed from school lunches in New South Wales, for instance, in 1979. After a series of exposes by the Sydney Morning Herald, which bravely revealed the truth about Mr. Arkman and his popular cure in 1981, Hindbrew was quietly removed from the Australian marketplace, being replaced by an alcohol-free solidified substitute known as 'Vegemite'.

Books I Am Reading

Thucydides
David Mitchell--Ghostwritten
Jon Elster--Ulysses Unbound
Montaigne

Any other recommendations?

Daily posting will resume now.