Category Archives: Personal History

A Gary Story

13 Friday Aug 2021

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Sometimes, the good guys win. This was brought to mind by a recent story at OpenCulture that tells of Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She is the discoverer of pulsars, in case you didn’t know (which is likely.) Because her – and, of course, it is always HER – male advisor took the credit and was awarded the Nobel prize for it. You can read the original OC story HERE.

However, not all such stories are as infuriating (and even Bell Burnell’s is far from being the worst example from a seemingly endless list of women being denied earned credit.) For example, there is this one that I can attest to as a witness: I was there and I knew the people involved, and I saw it come to light in real time. So, this being my blog, it is my right and privilege to deviate from my normal focus on philosophical topics to tell personal anecdote. This one is from about 40 years ago, back when I was well and thoroughly ensconced in the computer and high-tech industry as a professional technician. So permit me to tell you a Gary Story.

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A Place In The Sun

01 Tuesday Jun 2021

Posted by in Personal History, Process Philosophy

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I have this absurd fantasy that sneaks up on me sometimes in my mellower moments (so, rarely). It is the thought of moving to some place like Key West, or one of the smaller Hawaiian islands. I’d spend my days hanging out at beachfront cabanas sipping rum drinks, noodling away at whatever writing project engaged me at the time. I’d be so familiar to staff that they wouldn’t even trouble to ask me what I was having before bringing my first drink over. I’d never wear socks, or underwear, or shirts with collars ever again. (Actually, I’m already basically there with that latter.) My head will be filled with creative imaginings and ear-worms of Beach Boys songs.

Now, as I’ve already noted, this is an absurd fantasy. Quite aside from the fact that, short of winning one of the larger lottery prizes I’d never be able to afford such locales, there are the facts that I can barely suffer the heat and humidity of Midwest summers, and AGWi driven sea rise means the storm surge from the next big blow to hit these places will sweep away every last trace of human habitation. But fantasies seldom allow logic or facts to interfere with them; just consider those pitiful rubes who voted for Trump (twice!) and even imagine he won the 2020 election. Yet I still buy a lottery ticket every now and then, even though I understand I’ve a better chance of being struck by lightning in any given year. (About 1 chance in 1,220,000.)

But there is something about those places, something that really catches and hold your imagination. For the record, I’ve been to Key Largo and Key West. And while I’ve never been to Hawaii, I have been to Tahiti, which has a very similar climate. There’s just something in the air and the light that is not like other places; something romantic even in the loneliness. And that’s what I want to talk about here, the sense of place.

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Year of The Plague 7: Cats

28 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by in cats, Personal History

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I’ve struggled these last months to say anything of any interest – to myself, much less to anyone else – and as one can see by tracking the entries to this blog, I’ve not enjoyed much sense. I’ve started this YotP7 entry at least three times now, gone almost all the way to the end, only to throw it all away as empty twaddle. So I’ve finally decided fuck it (it’s my blog and I get to say that), I’m just going to talk about my cats. I don’t expect there to be any redeeming philosophical content here, though I don’t preclude the possibility. (Writing is, after all, a creative activity, and creation takes on a life of its own.)

Bluesy and Jazzy as Kittens.

Before proceeding, one caveat that any cat person will readily understand: talking about “my” cats can be a little problematic, since the suggestion of possession or ownership also suggests a sharply drawn line. A person I’m connected to on Twitter periodically shares photos of “Not My Cat”, a young brown tabby that continues to walk into his home and help itself to food, shelter, napping places, and companionship. My situation is not quite so extreme, but it still merits making, or at least being alert to, a distinction.

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Year of the Plague 4: Leaving Facebook During Isolation

09 Saturday May 2020

Posted by in Logic, Personal History, Plague

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I left Facebook – permanently – on Wednesday, May 6th, 2020, around 12:00 PM Central US time. What an absolutely peculiar thing to do during a period of extreme social isolation, especially for someone who is already at the extreme end of social isolation. Perhaps the only peculiarity is that it required a plague year to drive me to it. This will be a personal blog entry, with no special appeal to higher philosophical principles than those that naturally leak through me on account of who I am. Besides, it’s my blog and I’ll b!tch if I want to.

Before I go further, let me state that I am in favor of social media establishing and enforcing meaningful community standards of what is appropriate and acceptable. Fascists, terrorists, psychopaths, racists, and their ilk are persons who would exploit nominal tolerance for the purpose of annihilating it. Karl Popper spoke and wrote on this subject at various times under the heading of “the paradox of tolerance.” But there’s nothing even marginally paradoxical here. “Tolerance” is toleration for other ideas and for rational disagreement. But there’s nothing even remotely paradoxical about a refusal to be patient of one’s own extirpation. Tolerance can only go as far as those who are equally willing to be tolerant. Those who would destroy “the other” – really, all others – for the purpose of hegemonic, monocultural domination, own no space under, and have no claim upon, the umbrella of tolerance. There is nothing paradoxical about this. Continue reading →

Year of the Plague, #1

21 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by in Personal History, Plague

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I have been away from this blog for a while now due to personal reasons that I’ll not discuss. It seems like it is time to pick it up again, as much for still other personal reasons that I’ll not discuss, as well as external realities that I will discuss. You can probably guess what my topic here will be, just from the title. From the number, you can safely infer that I anticipate more such posts in the coming weeks and months.

Corona Virus 1

As I write, Governor Pritzker’s “Shelter In Place” (SIP) order is scheduled to go into effect at 5:00 PM. (I live in Illinois.) As I already live an exceptionally quiet, sheltered-in-place life, Pritzker’s order has very little effect on me. I can still shop much as I always did, for all the things I would otherwise have purchased. The only difference for me is that now I will forward my shopping lists in advance for curbside pickup, rather than in-store browsing and purchasing. And this isn’t even part of the SIP, simply my choice to add an extra layer of caution. (A comprehensive discussion of Illinois’ SIP may be found HERE. The Chicago Tribune has waived its paywall for this story.) The biggest impact on my life will be the canceling of the in-person meetings of the Dungeons and Dragons game I was involved with.

As noted, I expect there to be a series of posts related to the novel corona virus and COVID-19 in the coming months. But this first shot out of the gate, I don’t plan to dwell on the metaphysics of pandemics, nor do I intend to rail against those steaming piles of maggot excrement who continue to spew indefensible twaddle about how “it’s only the flu!” I’m sure the times (plural) will come for that. No, this time I want to focus on my own, immediate intellectual and emotional reactions to the early stages of “all this.” This is for my own clarity of mind; writing it down helps me. Perhaps sharing it will help others, but I don’t know. Right now I’m just struggling to understand what I feel, what it means to me, to find myself living in this Year of the Plague. Continue reading →

Pressure. Cooker.

22 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by in Personal History, Process Philosophy, Relationalism

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My limited, and very humble, cooking experiences have never involved a pressure cooker. However, I do understand a little about how they function and why they are used. For many dishes, it suffices to permit the steam generated by cooking to pass out of the cooking vessel, and permit the food to otherwise be finished by ordinary methods of heating. But some recipes require that the food be cooked in a more intense manner: the steam that might otherwise be released unused into the indifferent world are instead contained under pressure, and that pressure in turn forces that steam back into the food, to provide an especially deep, internal, and unremitting form of cooking. This is all just physics, lacking the resources and the motivation to attempt such recipes, I’ve no idea what the process or products actually look like. My motivation for mentioning it is quite different from culinary compositions.Pressure Cooker

Cooking is often used as a basis for metaphors for human psychology. For example, a person who is “fried” or “baked” is someone who is exploring better living through chemistry. “Scrambled” is great for eggs, but speaks to a chaotic and disorganized state of mind in a person. Steamed vegetables have a happy crunch, but a person who is steamed is likely to be poor company. So the effect on the person is often taken from the effect on the food, rather than our enjoyment of that effect. (Presumably, the vegetable derives no joy from being steamed.) But the usefulness of such metaphors is always limited, and sometimes just genuinely wrong. Such can be the case with pressure cooker images. Continue reading →

Rules

06 Tuesday Jun 2017

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Objective Morality, Personal History

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(“More what you might call ‘guidelines’ …”)

If you don’t get the above reference, then I pity the life you’ve led.

Anyway, it turns out that I have “rules.” The idea hadn’t occurred to me so much, one way or the other, until some 20 years ago, when I happened to formulate these “rules.” (I’ll stop scare-quoting the word now.) I may or may not have mentioned the fact that I was (for a while, at least) a moderately serious Renaissance Faire participant, what is often referred to as a “rennie.” And by “participant,” I mean I had invested something in the neighborhood of $1,200.00 in garb and gear (about half of that was for my custom made, thigh-high boots alone) to participate in character as a low ranking German nobleman of the 16th C. The attached picture really is me (and yes, that is my hair). I share it here with the generous permission of the photographer, Jeffrey Gibson, D. Phil. The hyper link at his name is to his photographer’s website, and I encourage everyone to follow that link and take a look at some of his work.Gerhard11 - Gibson photographer

In any event, it was at Ren Faire – in garb and in character – that I learned that I had rules. Rules about interpersonal, social/sexual interactions. This would be a matter of scarcely any interest even to myself, except that the nature of those rules has some interesting philosophical characteristics over and beyond just what I personally will or will not do. It is to this latter I wish, ultimately, to address myself. But first I have to say a bit about the rules themselves, so that the philosophical implications have something to build upon. But to get to the rules themselves, I first must tell a story. Continue reading →

Bridges

22 Monday May 2017

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I don’t like bridges. I mean the physical, not the musical, ones. Your typical short span over the local creek won’t upset me. But those huge, arcing monsters traversing vast rivers or bays give me the willies. Perhaps the Sum of All (my bridge) Fears is the Coronado Bay bridge in San Diego, pictured below. It is high, it is long, it is curved, and it doesn’t even have any external skeletal structures to give you any sense of containment or safety. As you can see from the picture, there’s barely even a guard rail at the side. Look again at the little dark bump a bit right of center of the picture, on the bridge. That’s a vehicle driving by. I’m sure it has never happened, but in my nightmares I envision cars flipping over that rail and going into the bay.san_diego_bridge_05

But the nightmares get much worse than that. In them, there is no rail at all, and only a line separating oncoming traffic from each other. The curves are canted at such an extreme angle that you have to accelerate into them or risk sliding right off. But if you accelerate too much, you’ll fly off the outside edge. The whole thing is more twisted than a knotted shoelace, with multiple on and off ramps and cars streaking past at insane and uncontrollable speeds.

Go ahead: you can make that jump …San Diego Bridge Construction

You might ask yourself, why I am sharing these sleep disturbing images with you? Well, good question, glad to see you’re paying attention. For the record, I did tag and categorize this post as “personal,” meaning that the reflections are largely personal ones that need not have any deeper philosophical significance. Although, in this instance, there is a deeper personal significance to last nights squirrelly dreaming. Continue reading →