An Open Letter to Students

Time for the semi-annual appeal:

Dear Students,

Sorry to interrupt, I know how busy you are right now and how stressful the end of the semester is with papers and exams. I know you've been listening to me go on and on all semester, but I have one last thing I really need to say. Please do not plagiarize.

This is not some high-horse lecture about intellectual property, academic integrity, or personal growth, this is heart-to-heart advice from your Uncle Steve because I know you are in a vulnerable position. You are facing too much work, too little time, you are exhausted from a long semester and do not know how you are going to get everything done. You are nervous about your grades because you know that both the job market and grad school admission is getting more difficult, you know it is one of the first things your parents will ask about when you get home, and you are worried that your professors will think less of you if you do not work up to what you think are their expectations. Lack of sleep and not eating well have clouded your judgment and from this point of view it will seem very tempting to cut corners, especially since you see other people doing it and getting away with it. Still, please don't.

First of all, you just aren't that good at it. I've been reading your work all semester and I know what to expect from you. I know your writing style, I know the sort of things you've been thinking about from your comments in class, I generally know what sort of other classes you've been taking and how much background you have in complex topics in other fields. Yes, it would thrill me to get a really good paper from you, the sort of work that shows you were as excited about the material as I am, the sort of work that shows some kernel of insight just waiting to be unpacked through the years of experience to come, the sort of work that opens up discussions we could have next semester over a pizza because you just can't let this go.

But that paper looks a lot different from a plagiarized paper; it sounds like you, it sounds like an enthusiastic undergrad who has gotten a real glimpse of something, but is incomplete and sloppy in the ways an undergrad paper should be, ways that would allow new doors to be opened, it is not the polished work of a professional scholar whose years of training under experts and whose doctor dissertation required a collecting of evidence you would have no sense of. I know you haven't read the footnotes in Rawls' A Theory of Justice. I know that you do not understand general relativity. I know that you do not know about the non-standard interpretations of the later Plato. But I do know how to use all the same tools you would use in finding the material to cut and paste and it is actually quite easy nowadays to get right to the text you would plagiarize from. It's not that hard to detect and not that hard to gather the incriminating evidence. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes.

Second, even if you did get away with it, it won't end up making that much of a difference in the end. By this point of the semester, so much of your grade is already determined that the difference between a B+ and a C- paper is quite small and even if it does move you a couple of +/- grades in one direction or another, that fact will most likely have no effect on who you marry, what job you get, what you name your kids, where you go for vacation when you are 48, nothing. I know grades seem a huge deal right now and professors are in part to blame because we are insecure and think that without the threat of grades hanging over your heads, you won't respect us. But in truth your college GPA means very little in the lives of most people. But getting busted for plagiarism could mean a lot. It is something that is becoming a show issue and you will be treated harshly to make a point. There is so little reward that it is absolutely not worth the risk.

Finally, your professors are not "the man," we are not looking to nail you. We like you (well, most of you anyway). We want you to succeed. We want you to keep in touch by e-mail and come back to campus ten years from now for alumni weekend and tell us funny stories about your time in college and about how you got to be wherever it is you will end up. And you know what, we won't care or remember that paper. To be honest, we will have forgotten about it long before next semester. We will not think less of you because you handed in one piece of garbage, we will think that you must have been overtaxed with work or that we gave a bad assignment. We will still like you. Attach a note to the bad paper telling us that you know it is not your best work and that if you had more time it would have been better and that you had hoped to take it in this other more interesting direction. We write papers all the time, often at the last minute for conferences. We understand, it happens to us too. We've just learned the trick of saying at the beginning, "this is a work in process" -- "in process" is professor-speak for "inferior work I hope to do well someday."

But when you plagiarize, you put us in a horrible position. We don't want to turn you in, in part because we want the best for you, but also because we don't want to have to deal with the process. We are tired too. It's been a really long semester and we just want to get our grades in so we can get to the plans we've made for break. And now you make us have to spend our time searching for your sources, documenting evidence, and explaining how we knew this had to be plagiarized. We have so much to do right now that we don't need the headache. You just made so much more work for us because you decided not to just turn in a lousy paper. We resent the fact that I now have all this extra work because you didn't want to do the work you knew you were supposed to do. You write a paper, I read a paper, that's the deal. Because you decided not to hold up your end of the bargain I now pay the price. Screw you! It is frustrating at a time when I'm exhausted and pissy, too.

But more than that, it feels like betrayal. All semester, you've been great in the classroom with interesting things to say. I looked forward to giving you a good grade and seeing you around the campus and now you go and do this to me? ME: the one who spent the time preparing for class, answering your e-mails at awkward hours, giving you extensions and offering to look at drafts. I was more than happy to write a letter of recommendation for that internship for you when I had a stack of blue books on my desk and a meeting for little league coaches to go to, and you do this to me?

So, students, please. Give me shoddy work if you must. It's the season of generosity. I know how tough it is for you right now because it's that tough for us too. Do us all a favor and try your best to get in the best work you can even if your best right now isn't that good. For all of our sakes, just don't plagiarize. Please.

Love,

Uncle Steve



p.s. Do try to get sleep, eat well, and take a break to get some exercise -- it will make you more efficient, improve the quality of your work, and keep you from getting sick.

Were the 80s a Cultural Wasteland?

Had my 8 a.m. Logic class translating dialogue from Casablanca into first order predicate logic the other day and then Confused, Maybe Not pops into the office and we started talking about the cultural legacy of decades. When we turned to our decade, the 80s, he said that looking back it seems like the entire decade is dark, just nothing there. Everything was so clearly corporately constructed for marketing purposes that there seemed to be so little that was novel and bold. It all seems so embarrassingly dated when it is looked at now, nothing that seems a timeless contribution to the collective consciousness of the culture.

We tried to think of what will be the iconic works, the lasting impact of the 80s. We couldn't think of much. TV-wise, there was "Cheers," "Hill Street Blues," and "St. Elsewhere," but are any of them really going to stand the test of time? Musically, in terms of mainstream success there were the Talking Heads, early U2 and REM, maybe Tom Petty. On the fringe was American punk and the early days of hip-hop, but what from any of them will take on a life of its own? Film-wise, The "Breakfast Club"? "Back to the Future"? We did mention "Brazil" a few days back. Literary works that define the 80s? Non-fiction? In terms of social activism, we had Apartheid rallies, Ethiopian hunger, and homelessness come to the fore and with it stadium-sized rock fundraisers featuring artists from the 60s and 70s. There was cable tv which freed us from the triopoly of the networks, but is that really it?

Can anyone cite anything that will culturally justify the Reagan years or is it all just one big Flock of Seagulls haircut?

Envisioning Science

Otto Neurath argued that social progress depended on finding a visual language in which to express scientific facts and relations. We cannot expect everyone, especially working people, to acquire the technical proficiency with formal mathematics to understand the results of science, but that doesn't mean that not everyone can understand science. We all can if someone finds a way to translate it for the rest of us.

This piece from the BBC is an amazing example of this in terms of the relation between public health and economics (hat tip to Kerry for sending me the link):

In a democracy, especially one in which our stance towards the rest of the world makes a real difference in real lives, how come we have to go elsewhere -- to the BBC -- to see something like this. Why isn't CNN with all their technological flash and fluff using it to effectively educate us in this sort of way?

Ray Guy Belongs in Canton

The list of semi-finalists for the Professional Football Hall of Fame came out yesterday. these things always lead to conflict because of deserving players who were left off. I, on the other hand, want to protest someone who is on the list; not because he wasn't good enough, but because it is a crime he is still being considered. Ray Guy belongs in Canton. He defined the position of punter. No other punter has ever been drafted in the first round and no other punter had the effect that Ray Guy had. Despite kicking over 1,000 punts, he never had a single one run back for a touchdown. They needed a calendar to determine the hang time on his punts. In fact, I believe there was one in the Oakland/Kansas City game in 1976 that is still in the air. Let's hope that this travesty is ended this year. Ray Guy belongs in Canton.

RIP Leslie Nielson: I AM dead and Don't Call Me Shirley

It is with great sadness that we discuss Leslie Nielson's death of pneumonia. He had been in the hospital (it's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now) for two days before his condition got worse and he succumbed to it last night.

He began his career as a serious leading man, playing the character he spoofed for decades on television and in the movies. Then came Airplane! It was a limited role as the plane's doctor, but he played it so perfectly that his are the lines often remembered. And it got him the role as Frank Dreben in the short-lived television series "Police Squad (In Color)" that was much beloved in my house for all three of the weeks it ran on network tv. Transferring to the big screen, Nielson became known for his comedy acting when all along he knew how to get out of the way of the comedy. It was his ability to deadpan, to never try to be funny but let the script be funny for him that made him.

He was great at what he did and we thank you for all the laughs.

The Feast of Saint Allen

My Fellow Comedists,

This weekend is the feast of saint Allen. Allen Sherman would turn 86. As a child, LilBro and I came across the Old Man's copy of his classic album My Son, the Folk Singer and were so enchanted by it, that we had the entire thing memorized in no time. His gentle, clever, Jewish style of song parody was the end of the Borscht Belt era. Allen Sherman was what would have happened if Tom Lehrer had taken prozac.

Getting his start in television, Sherman, lived next door to Harpo Marx who so loved Sherman's song parodies that he had Sherman perform at one his parties. George Burns, who attended the party, was so tickled with Sherman that he got him a record contract and the result was My Son, the Folk Singer.

When President Kennedy was discovered to be a fan, Sherman's luck took off and he had a run of several successful albums. His 1963 My Son, the Nut, contained the hit that made him a household name, "Hello Mudder, Hello Fadder."

With the cultural upheaval of the late 60s, Sherman was too old fashioned. He would make several attempts to revive his career and would ultimately return to television as the voice of Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat a year and a half before his quite premature death.



Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

The War on Christmas Continues

Our friends Scott Aikin and Bob Talisse have a post up over at 3 Quarks daily called, "The War on Christmas, To Save Thanksgiving."

Seems as good a time as any to re-run this:

'Twas the month before Christmas and all through the malls
everything was ‘bout Christmas, no escaping at all.
The songs all about yuletide, and then on FOX news,
all the nut-jobs pretending there ain’t any Jews.

This country we know it’s a really big stew
of Muslims, and pagans, and atheists too.
But O’Reilly and Rush, not to mention Sir Hannity
are all trying to deny these good folks their humanity.

If you eat latkes, and liver, and kosher dill gherkins,
You are second class citizens, not real “Amurkans.”
We’re told “shut your hole,” if your season’s not elfish,
as these kinds of “Christians” are really quite selfish.

Don’t say “Happy Holidays” if you work in a store,
it’s “Merry Christmas” alone or they’ll declare war.
“We’re under siege!” they cry through their crocodile tears
“They’re trying to outlaw our holiday cheer!”

You can spot real Christians from those in wolves’ clothing
They’re the ones preaching love, not hatred and loathing.
But the Pharisees think it's only they who should count,
Truth be told, they should read what was said on the mount.

So Buddhists and Hindus and Hopi and Sioux,
the message is clear that is sent unto you.
When the tips of the branches get covered in frost
This country is theirs, time for you to get lost.

Those who believe that to keep of our brother
means to actually love and respect one another.
So when you are asked, “What would Jesus do?”
Answer them, “Welcome ones different from you.”

In conclusion, oh gasp, we guess we should say,
that Comet and Cupid are openly gay.
In this season of peace with the ground covered white,
Happy Holidays to ALL and to ALL a good night.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

That's Not a Boardng Pass, It's Foreplay

With the more personally invasive checks by the TSA, I'm wondering how long it will take Southwest to start running ads with the tagline, "$59 one-way, it's cheaper than dinner and a movie."

I'm just glad no one has told Homeland Security about this guy yet.

Abdullah Asieri avoided detection by two sets of airport security and palace security, in his mission to eliminate prince Mohammed Bin Nayef, head of Saudi Arabia's counter terrorism operations. Taking a trick from the narcotics trade - which has long smuggled drugs in body cavities - Asieri had a pound of explosives, plus a detonator inserted in his rectum, reports CBS News.

Maybe it is finally time to bring NIH under the Homeland Security umbrella and have our airport screeners also be licensed urologists so that the prevention of terrorist attacks and the early detection of prostate cancer both become national priorities. I mean, hey, they're already wearing the latex gloves...

Happy Birthday Terry Gilliam

Today is Terry Gilliam's 70's birthday. I will admit that I saw Brazil in the theater no fewer than six times which, I believe, comes to roughly one seventh of my lifespan.

Terry Gilliam is one of the few repositories of smart that we have in contemporary popular culture and what I love most about his work is the ability to run the whole range of human emotions from smart goofy to smart strident to smart gentle to smart alienated. If you can feel it, it's somewhere in a Terry Gilliam work and it is smart.

Happy birthday, Terry Gilliam and thanks.

And now for something...

Feast of Saint Dick

My Fellow Comedists,

This week is brings us the birthday of Dick Smothers, straight man and stand-up bass player with his brother Tommy as part, of course, of the legendary Smothers Brothers. Before there was Saturday Night Live, before there was Laugh In, there was The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. The country was exploding in the late 60s, yet television still looked like it did in the 50s. Anything that smacked of criticism of the government or the war in Vietnam, or that pointed to the social problems of racism or poverty were forbidden, indeed there were network censors who made sure dissent did not make it the people over their Swanson tv dinners.

The Smothers Brothers, clean cut, looking like the Kingston Trio lost someone in Kingston seemed harmless enough. Good folk music with some well-timed silliness thrown in, they were a way to attract kids away from the ratings bonanza that was, well, Bonanza.

But, of course, there was folk music and there was folk music and despite their look, the Smothers Brothers came from the tradition in which folk music was a tool of emancipation and political protest. Their show quickly turned from cutsie to a censor's nightmare. They knew exactly where the line was and intentionally put clever material right on it, material that that was smart and sharp and not obscene or over the top, just dead on point and right. But it was the sort of criticism that supported the side of the cultural divide in the late 60s that the corporate networks did not care to bolster.

Their writers were the younger version of the Sid Cesar gang, including Albert Brooks and his brother (who played Super Dave Osborne), Rob Reiner, Steve Martin, and Don Novello (who would go on to be Father Guido Sarducci). Their material intentionally ranged from the innocent to the edgy, but the edgy was always done with an incredibly smart sense of humor and timing. They were pros and darn good at what they did...and that is what got them canceled.

But their brave fights on the side of what is right and what is funny were every bit as important to the history of American comedy on television as what Lenny Bruce was doing for American stand-up in the night clubs.

Thank you, Dick Smothers and happy birthday.



Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

The Value of False Rituals

TheWife loves rituals. She finds great meaning in them, even if they are new rituals that she or we are inventing for our family as we go. I, on the other hand, have never been one for rituals. They've always seemed like inauthentic actions performed not because one was intrinsically moved to act, but awkwardly constructed sets behaviors bound by expectation and, like a joke you've heard before, missing their ability to inspire. I understand that at certain times, say at the time of marriage or immediately following the death of a loved one, rituals can be extremely helpful in bringing together community, making sure that necessary details are attended to, and helping people process life altering changes that are being experienced. But not all rituals deal with big events that change the way you are in the world.

Last night the shorter of the short people lost a tooth. He is at the age where he no longer believes in the tooth fairy, yet I know he would be extremely upset should he not awaken this morning to find something under his pillow. It's not the money. If I handed him the money before bed, it would not be the same. No, it has to be done in this particular way. He knows who puts the money there because he inevitably comes in to our room the next morning and asks for his tooth back -- he's a sentimental who finds parting with part of himself difficult, even if a new and improved "adult" component is on its way in and he is certainly not willing to give back the newly acquired funds for the old tooth which always seems to him so unbelievably small for all the pain it caused on its way out.

So, the question is what accounts for the attachment to ritual here? Is it something about the meaningfulness of ritualized action itself or is it more likely specific to this case, that it is a Christmas morning-like scenario of awakening to something pleasant, and therefore says nothing about ritual in general? If he knows it is going to happen, where does the meaningfulness come from? What, in the end, accounts for the power that many experience from ritual?

Finders Keepers?: The Ethics of Scavaging

We're in the middle of a job search and that means reading lots of letters of recommendation. Every once in a while, you get one from an extremely influential and therefore famous philosopher. So, when one of our applicants had a letter from Jurgen Habermas, I did start thinking about all the names that have passed by us in our last several searches: Derrida, Searle, Putnam, real philosophical rock stars, thinkers bound for the pantheon of greats. If we had a philosophers hall of fame, these folks would be easy first ballot shoo-ins.

Now, the procedure for handling search materials is that they need to be kept for three years in case of legal questions regarding the fairness of the search process and then they are shredded so that confidential bits of information, like letters of recommendation, cease to be.

Suppose as a hobby, I collected the autographs of famous intellectuals. Here are prime examples that are bound for the shredder. Would it be morally acceptable to save the signatures? I wouldn't be stealing them FROM anyone, they were just going to be destroyed. Why not save something of value? We could cut them off the letter so none of the information would survive, just the signature. Would that be o.k.? Suppose I then turned around and tried to sell it on eBay to other intellectual autograph seekers, would that be o.k.? Would it make a difference if I waited five years or until the person passed away?

Bullshit or Not: Schopenhauer Edition

There's an old sketch film called Amazon Women on the Moon and one of the bits is a parody of the old Leonard Nimoy show, "In Search Of..." called, "Bullshit or Not?" with the tagline "Bullshit or not? You decide." It's a line I like so much that I've stolen it for an irregular series of posts.

Reading 19th century German social/political philosophy for the chapter of Einstein's Jewish Science that I'm currently working on, paying special attention to those thinkers who were railing against the Enlightenment concepts of egalitarianism. In that reading, I came upon this beauty from Schopenhauer's On Human Nature that lays out the classic case against democracy:

“A peculiar disadvantage attaching to republics—and one that might not be looked for—is that in this form of government it must be more difficult for men of ability to attain high position and exercise direct political influence than in the case of monarchies. For always and everywhere and under all circumstances there is a conspiracy, or instinctive alliance, against such men on the part of all the stupid, the weak, and the commonplace; they look upon such men as their natural enemies, and they are firmly held together by a common fear of them. There is always a numerous host of the stupid and the weak, and in a republican constitution it is easy for them to suppress and exclude the men of ability, so that they may not be outflanked by them. They are fifty to one; and here all have equal rights at the start.
In a monarchy, on the other hand, this natural and universal league of the stupid against those who are possessed of intellectual advantages is a one-sided affair; it exists only from below, for in a monarchy talent and intelligence receive a natural advocacy and support from above.”

Nothing we don't see in Plato, but well said.

If we want to defend democratic rule, we need to show why this is nonsense or, if not how it is counteracted.

So, bullshit or not? As usual, feel free to leave anything from a single word to a dissertation.

Folk Physics

Let's test the intuitions today with one I gave to my first year seminar yesterday:

You are sitting in the aisle seat of a jet awaiting take-off when the child next to you hands you his helium balloon. You hold it in your hand next to the aisle as the plane taxis down the runway. During the taxiing, before take off, does the balloon move towards the back of the airplane, the front of the airplane, or float straight up?

Colors and Numbers

Are colors and numbers things? We use them as nouns, but are they really nouns or just adjectives that function like nouns? Things are red or a group of objects has the property of having four members, but we treat red and four as if they have independent existence. Do they?

With numbers, we attribute properties and relations among them. That seems to be good reason to think them things. But what kind of things?

Is the same true of colors? We do label some primary and other secondary or tertiary. Does this bring colors on par with numbers?

Atheist Songs

My Fellow Comedists,

This weekend we turn our thoughts to music. Good brother Gwydion pointed me to a recent project of a true comedist saint, Steve Martin, who while on his latest banjo tour with the Steep Canyon Rangers composed a song for atheists.
It seems only fair since he did write the Comedist hymn "Grandmother's Song." But it raises a question. Are there other atheist songs?

Here is one from the Gettysburg Pirate Orchestra (billed as central Pennsylvania's premier landlocked nautical-themed ensemble)

Do feel free to download their new album Simon von Utrecht -- much there for a comedist to love (especially "Crazy Squirrels").

So, other good atheist tunes?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

War and the Cultural Conscience

Today is Veteran's Day, what used to be Armistice Day commemorating the end of The Great War which was reduced to World War I once another great war came along. Because of the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, we tend to forget about World War I but it was a horror of epic proportions. Trench warfare in which one side would charge only to get mowed down, then the other side would charge only to get mowed down. Lives lost by the thousands and no change. Just death for the sake of death. The use of chemical weapons causing more mass death in absolutely horrible ways.

The unfathomable reality of what they had done to themselves undermined European culture which before the war considered itself the ultimate end of cultural evolution. They were what history had always intended, the full complete actualization of humanity. And then they did this. What did it mean? What was it to be human after this? These questions were very much real to them and you see radical turns in almost every human endeavor that follows from the sciences to the arts to the human sciences. The war had triggered the cultural conscience.

We saw something similar with the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the bombing that killed the children in Omaugh in Northern Ireland, a point at which the horrible simply reaches a place where the culture demands an intellectual time-out.

Is American culture capable of this anymore? Do we even have a culture conscience anymore? We permitted torture and there was no outrage. The CIA destroyed evidence of torture and no one is even going to be charged. Is there anything anymore that will make us step back and ask what it means to be human if we allow this? On a day we set aside to think about the human cost of warfare, I worry that the answer is no.

Is There a Hippocratic Type Obligation to Write a Bad Rec Letter?

It's recommendation season and as I write a number of rec letters for former students and colleagues who are very much qualified for the graduate school and/or employment opportunities for which they are applying (don't worry A Stranger --it was a good letter), I can't help but wonder about having to write the negative rec letter.

I'm not talking about the case where the student is not qualified for the position. Of course, the proper thing to do is to politely decline to write. "Given that you received a D in my logic class, I don't think a letter from me will be very helpful in your attempt to get into law school." Those students, by in large, are not going to be admitted, so your lack of a letter is not really the operative factor.

But what of the student who is qualified in terms of the standard measures (grades, board scores,...), but just is the absolute wrong person for the job? Suppose someone has the grades for medical school, but you know they lack the compassion to be a good doctor or social worker? Or the convictions to be a good lawyer or climate scientist? Suppose you have good reason to think that he or she would use their advanced training in a way that would harm others or the planet? If you don't write the letter, someone else will and the person will become the person you are worried she or he will become. You can help stop it. Should you?

By agreeing to write the letter, aren't you implicitly agreeing to write a supportive letter? Doesn't the community ethos lead the person to expect to be told that you cannot write a letter in strong support? If you are using this as a chance to torpedo their application, isn't that misleading in some sense?

Should There Still Be a Security Council?

Yesterday, speaking to the Indian parliament, President Obama pledged his support for expanding the security council to include India as a permanent member. It is unclear whether this would come with veto power or not, but either way it leads to a more general question, should there be a security council at all? If the nations are united in the UN, should some countries be more equal than others?

One can argue that it was necessary in the beginning to get stronger nations to agree to join, after all if might might make right, why allow any say from the weak. If the strong are guaranteed more say, then that might be alright. One can argue that it made sense in the bipolar world of the Cold War. Why bother having the fake proxy arguments when you can cut through the nonsense and just have the major actors sitting at a special table?

But does it still make sense? With a planet full of emerging nations and countries who are disproportionately affected by the actions and consumption of the larger nations, should we still give the lion's share of the power to a handful of countries? Or is it real politik, a fact on the ground that these are the power brokers, so if anything is to be done, cut out the time consuming wrangling and just put those who need to lead in a place to do so?

Movie Better Than the Book?

At dinner last night, the less short of the short people claimed that while the Percy Jackson movie was significantly worse than the book, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was, in fact, better. The explanation, I hold, is that one is a children's book while the other aimed at pre-teens. the Percy Jackson books have much more room to develop characters and plot intricacies that do not translate well to the hour and a half film format. The former, on the other hand, needs to be filled out to be made into a movie and thus becomes more interesting.

I'm wondering if anyone thinks there are exceptions to this, movies made from books other than those geared towards young children where the film was better than the original fiction piece.

Funny Foods

My Fellow Comedists,

Between the short people discovering the Swedish chef and an in depth conversation with colleagues about garbanzo beans, it seemed as if the Cosmic Comic wanted a funny foods discussion this weekend.

My point in the latter conversation was that there seemed no reason to ever say "chick pea" and surrender a perfectly good opportunity to say "garbanzo bean" which is inherently much funnier. Indeed, I would claim that garbanzo bean is one of the funniest food names, right up there with "knish," "borscht," and "gherkin." So as not to make the list overly European, one cannot forget those fat Chinese noodle dish called "chow fun" and of course, there is the magnificently onomatopoetic "kung pao" is also wonderfully humorous.

Are there others funnier than these? What is the funniest food name?



Bork, bork, bork,

Irreverend Steve

Philosophy for Workers?

Today is the 125th anniversary of the birth of Will Durant author of The Story of Philosophy, a classic book aimed at presenting a popularly accessible account of the thought of great philosophers from Plato through John Dewey. It has been in print continuously now for 84 years and is still usable.

What may not be known is that it was not written as a book, but rather as a series of "Little Blue Books," that is cheap pamphlets that could be afforded and understood by workers in the 1920s, lower class people with little education who wanted to improve themselves and their lives. Education was the key, many including Durant thought, to helping lift people out of poverty.

We've given up on that project. Now popular philosophy is aimed at the already educated in hopes of creating a bulwark against other entertainment options which entrench thoughtless, sometimes harmful, but always commercially successful passivity.

But why not gear philosophical discussion at today's workers? Is it that education is not seen as the salvation we thought it was or are we still suffering from the picture we got from Ronald Reagan that the poor are that way because they are lazy and do not deserve our attention? We'd be wasting our time trying to better those who clearly cannot be. Is it that working and lower class people themselves do not want to be philosophically engaged? Or is it that it simply doesn't generate sufficient profit since they are not a primary book buying or philosophical media consuming demographic?

Can There Be a Fake Religion?

Before a meeting yesterday, I was glancing around the room at some of the older books in our religion department's library. One that caught my eye was called The World's Great Religions. I proposed other volumes for the series. For those that just missed making the first volume, we'd have The World's Pretty Darn Good Religions and of course one for The World's Really Crappy Religions. My colleague suggested one for The World's Fake Religions, and talked about an interesting student presentation in her Philosophy of Law class a few years back that examined the fourteen conditions put forward by a British court that define a religion and why Scientology fails to meet them.

I'm not interested in a discussion of the details of Scientology here, but rather am fascinated by the phrase "fake religion." Could there be such a thing?

A fake religion would not be a false religion, that is, one whose foundational beliefs turn out not to be the case. That would still be a legitimate religion, just one that turned out not to preach the absolute truth it thought it had. It would have to be something else.

What about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Again, that seems not to fit either because it is not meant to be a religion at all, but rather a set of absurd doctrines and artistic artifacts that mirror those of legitimate religions in order to create a logical equivalence between something designed to be clearly irrational to be used in a larger reduction ad absurdum. It is not a fake religion, but a religion-like non-religion.

If people at the top do not believe, but there are legitimate faithful below, is that sufficient to make a religion a real religion? Can there be a fake religion?

Is Non-Fiction Writing Art?

As I work on tightening up chapter 3 of Einstein's Jewish Science, I can't help but think of non-fiction books that I really love, books like David Quammen's The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, or Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, or Loius Menand's The Metaphysical Club or classic works from Tom Wolfe or Truman Capote that are so incredible fascinating or powerful. When non-fiction is done right, it is incredibly affective.

But is it art? Does the fact that the author is bound by reality limit the creativity of the act in such a way as to make it mere stylized journalism or is the process of stroy telling enough to make non-fiction writing art? Is it art in some cases and not others? If so, what are the criteria that differentiate one from the other?

The Value of Freedom

Had lunch yesterday with a political scientist and a sociologist and the following question came up: Could there be a prison in which you would be willing to voluntarily be incarcerated? Is liberty inherently so valuable that no matter the material comforts it is necessarily trumped by the freedom to come and go and do as you choose?

Trick or Treat?

Once again, we took the short people trick or treating last night. It's really not fair. They go door to door collecting attractive little packages of candy they are not allowed to have. Taking kids who can't have candy trick or treating is a little like taking Michael Vick to PetSmart. There's just something not right about it.

I still say we need a new iPhone app called "wiki treat" that takes neighborhood maps and lets people enter what each house is giving. There can be little icons for each major candy and a special flashing icon if it is a full-sized bar or they are giving the kids a handful. That way kids know to skip the ones with dum-dums and head right for the snickers. There will be a black skull for houses that have run out of candy and a marker for houses that scare little kids. Any developers out there?

One thing I do wonder about every year, what is the appropriate age to stop trick or treating? At what point are kids too old to be collecting candy? 16? 14?

Happy Halloween

My Fellow Comedists,

In our efforts to be environmentally friendly, it's probably worth recycling this one:

I love Halloween because I love clever costumes. My best was in college. My girlfriend wore a blue dress with a ribbon in her straight blond hair and little black shoes. I wore a white trash bag with yellow, red, and blue dots. We went as Alice and Wonderbread.

The next year I couldn't talk her into wearing a sequined dress with a beehive hairdo while I wore a long robe and long white beard -- we would have been Diana Ross and the Supreme Being.

But at the party we went to I saw a guy, at least six feet tall, dressed as a condom. He was drinking whiskey, so I went over and warned him that he'd better stop soon or he'd be a midget before the night was through. He didn't find it very funny, but then, he did kind of look like a dick.

Best Halloween costume you've ever worn or seen?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irrevend Steve

Novel Graphics and Graphic Novels

Gwydion asks,

"Of late, the trend in superhero comic book art has been a move toward a more painterly style, as expressed best (perhaps) by Alex Ross, rather than the simpler line drawings of our youth. Why is that?"

It is a reflection of a change in status of the once maligned art form. Comic books were printed on the cheapest of paper with line drawings in order to entice young boys to spend their allowances. But then three things happened.

With the sentimentalism of the baby boomers, comic books and baseball cards went from toys to serious collectibles. The price of older rare comic books went sky high and brought up the monetary values of not so old, not so rare editions. With this increase in worth came an increased sense of value and the notion that the comic books would have to live up to this new found status.

At the same time, popular culture was being elevated from its status as low art. No doubt the works of Roy Lichtenstein made everyone look at comic book illustrations differently, but in general we started looking at everything from television sitcoms to comic books with a more critical and sociological eye, trying to make sense of what our art forms said about us. My Grateful Dead book is part of this tide that takes what was once held to be beneath intellectual treatment and allows it the pride of place of other more standard topics of deep conversation. The works of artists like R. Crumb, Steve Gerber, and Gilbert Shelton put comics in the political arena while not lapsing into the separate world of political cartooning. So, it became a more serious place.

Indeed, we now have a new category of "graphic novels." A graphic novel used to be a story with elements for adults only, now it is a comic book for grown-ups. Works like Art Spiegelman's Maus took the medium to a completely different sphere. Now, you see complexity and sophistication not only in the artwork, but in the plots of series like The Watchmen that were not there a couple generations ago.

Finally, there is technology. Art is now done not with pen and ink or paint and brush, but with a mouse and software. Better than simple line drawings can be easily generated and disseminated free through on-line comics. If you want to charge for your art you better be able to do better than what is free.

Any art form will have movements and I think the comic book has emerged as a legitimate art form. I think what Gwydion points out is simply one trend among many that are and are to come.

Feed a Cold, Starve a Fever?

PeterLC asks,

"As I sit here ill, is there any credence to 'feeding a cold and starving a fever?' or is it the other way around?"

First of all, get better, my friend. As for the advice, nope.

Medicine worked for centuries under the humour model (not to be confused with Comedist medical theory which focuses mainly on the sounds of digestion) in which health was based on a balance of moist and dry and warm and cold. Different bodily fluids had different properties with respect to these factors and if you had an imbalance of fluids, it caused physical and mental instability. We still have notions left over in contemporary language from this view -- we still call people sanguine or phlegmatic.

It was thought that if you had too much or too little of certain substances that it would create an excess of heat thereby causing a fever or a deficit of heat causing a cold -- which is why we call it that. Doctors would try to cure the ailment by bringing the amount of fluids into balance. This is why doctors used to bleed people with leeches, it was thought that an excess of blood caused certain ailments.

It was also believed that food created warmth within the body. So, if you have a cold, it means you are warmth deficient and food, in creating heat, would help to reestablish balance. If you had a fever, it meant an overabundance of heat and thereby eating and adding to the heat would only make the imbalance and therefore the illness worse.

Of course, we know that colds are actually caused by exposure to a rhinovirus and the effects are ways of trapping them in mucus and expelling them from the body and that fever are usually the result of infections and is the body's way of creating a hostile environment which makes them less likely to propagate and easier to kill. So, feed a cold starve a fever is not the way to go, but eat healthy foods as your body wants them and make sure to stay hydrated in either case.

Understanding Unacceptable Utterances

Kerry asks,

"So Juan Williams follows Rick Sanchez, Octavia Nasr, and Helen Thomas as the fourth journalist to get fired recently for expressing personal opinions on their own time, not on the job. Political correctness run amok, justifiable punishment, or something in-between?"

To be honest, not sure. We have a strange media right now where part of it is fact-free partisan rhetoric designed for explicitly propagandistic purposes and half that sees itself as a quaint little village of elite opinion makers. Those who were fired were removed from the island not because they voiced personal opinions, but because they embarrassed the village by breaking a rule -- no talking about groups except "real Merkans" and they are to be spoken of with the utmost reverence. Aside from white male Christian conservatives who have a peculiar knack for embodying authenticity and truth (maybe it's something in the water or the Budweiser), all else is an atomistic meritocracy and we never, never, never say anything about any ethnic group except to speculate how they will vote as a homogeneous bloc.

What is interesting is that, in a sense, these firings were based on a desire to make sure that their respective news outlets are seen as not-FOX -- in part out of self-image and in part because their audience is upper-middle class socially liberal and fiscally conservative so-called "moderates" or "centrists" or some other name that indicates virtue and superiority. Yet, when the White House had the temerity to label FOX "News" as not a legitimate news outlet, they all feign shock and outrage and rushed to Fox "News"'s side. They are part of the tribe, just don't show yourself doing their part of the job.

Is it political correctness run amok? Well, sort of. The insight behind political correctness is that language is loaded with connotations that can reinforce unfair political structures in ways that we are not directly aware of. As such, we want to be careful with our language to keep from further entrenching injustice. What it turned into was something else, something in which offensiveness was seen as the ultimate crime and this then transformed into the prohibition of speaking about groups. In a sense it is not political correctness, but it is a result of what political correctness turned into, something irrational that instead of allowing us to address thorny issues in a way that allows everyone a seat at the table, limits what can be said in a way that reinforces the power structure's "moderate" position.

Evolution and Humor

Kerry asks,

"What evolutionary sense can we make of humor?"

There is no doubt that there is a physiological element to laughter and whenever there is something built in, the temptation is always there to try to explain it in terms of natural selection. Alastair Clarke, for example, makes the case that humor is the brain's way of rewarding itself for seeing new patterns.

“The development of pattern recognition as displayed in humour could form the basis of humankind’s instinctive linguistic ability. Syntax and grammar function in fundamental patterns for which a child has an innate facility. All that differs from one individual to the next is the content of those patterns in terms of vocabulary.”

It is an interesting conjecture, but like so much evolutionary psychology, little more than a just-so story.

It is certainly the case that certain heritable properties have been selected for in terms of their ability to aid in survival and reproduction, but that does not mean that every trait for which we can find advantageous was itself selected for. It may be an evolutionary free rider, that is, something that came along with other traits that were selected for.

There is no doubt that certain kinds of humor are as Clarke points out connected with intellectual abilities that would have given our ancestors certain advantages. Although I'm not sure that finding someone else's slipping on a banana peel and falling into a large pile of lion dung only to have a chimp pelt him with rotten fruit while on a hunt in the jungle necessarily conveys anything useful, but it would certainly be recounted around the fire for years to howls of approval.

The historical developmental case would have to be made with evidence that may or may not be there. These sorts of claims are notoriously difficult to establish, but it is certainly possible. Finding things funny does develop alongside language, so the question of what is responsible for what and what was the trait actually selected for is an interesting one. Either way, it certainly is natural.

Tea for Two?

Philo asks,

"With people like O'Donnell, Angle, Paul, Miller, Buck, Paladino, ... running for the highest offices in the land as evidence, can we safely conclude this is the craziest election in the last fifty years?"

On the one hand, we've always had fringe characters running on the outsider platform. Minnesota did elect a professional wrestler as its governor not so long ago. In Louisiana, the former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan did receive a third of the popular vote. And, of course, let's John Ashcroft's loss to Mel Carnahan for Senate in Missouri despite the fact that the Carnahan campaign had probably the most significant public relations hurdle possible to deal with -- the fact that the candidate was dead at the time of the election.

But those were individual sideshows, not a general trend. What we have this year does seem different. It has been building for a while, of course, but it does seem to have reached critical mass in a peculiar and scary sort of way. There seem to be three related lines that have intersected this election: We don't need competent managers, but ideologically pure conservatives, the "Joe Sixpack" fetish,

Between the 70s and 80s, the elite pro-corporate conservatives struck a deal with the major figures among the religious, cultural conservatives to unite behind a conglomeration of their views. The corporate conservative anti-tax, anti-regulation message was framed as a smaller government message which then transformed into a broad anti-government message. When you have people who don't believe in the power of government who are then running to acquire the power of government, it means that they don't have to be the most capable individuals because they are there to destroy, to dismantle, not to accomplish anything.

Add to this, the "Joe Sixpack" fetish of the media in which "real America" is white, Midwestern, Christian, and conservative. The goal to strip the working class vote from the Democrats is nothing new, it was the heart of Nixon's Southern Strategy and has been in play for decades. Part of this has been standard conservative rhetoric since William F. Buckley in the sixties argued that names picked at random from the phone book would be better for government than the best and the brightest Ivy League figures (especially the women and minorities) the Democrats placed in visible posts. "Elite" became a four-letter word and education the mark of a lack of knowledge and understanding. When combined with voter guides distributed in churches, you had a group that had not be used to political power suddenly greatly emboldened and Republicans winning elections.

Then with the rise of Sarah Palin, this group that had been the engine of the Republican Revolution decided that it would also claim the steering wheel. They no longer wanted to just vote for the conservative establishment, they wanted to rule the roost themselves. This, of course, scares the solid excrement from many of those who have long occupied positions of power in the Republican hierarchy. The tide they have been fomenting in order to surf to power was now washing over them. They had figured they were playing these people, getting them to do their bidding; but now they've come back expecting to be the ones with the power themselves. The check of the structure has been swamped and as a result you get a crop of candidates who are not the polished, vetted types of figures we are used to. The mediation of the organization has broken down and the result is something that is unusual.

Auto Mechanics to Quantum Mechanics

I have schtick I do at the beginning of all my classes where I let students ask any question at all, anything from auto mechanics to quantum mechanics and if I don't know the answer I try to find it. When I first started the Playground, some former students asked if I could recreate it here, so every once in a while I do. If there is a question you've always wanted to ask, let 'er rip and we'll try to get to as many as I can during the week.

Ghost in the Machine?

When TheWife's grandfather passed away a number of years ago, her sister broke the news to her daughter who was about five at the time. Looking thoughtful, she asked her mom where Greatgrandpa is now, to which my sister-in-law responded that his body is still at Greatgrandpa and Greatgrandma's house. Looking a bit confused, she asked, "But where is his head?"

The word body is oddly ambiguous. We do distinguish between head and body, on one hand, and body and mind/soul/spirit, on the other. Surely, these stem from the same notion, the sort of dualism that comes to us from the Greeks and has become part of the Western religious worldview. It is also something that was challenged in the 20th century by Continental thinkers.

So, let's ask their question: Do you have a body or are you your body?

The Irony Awards

Today is the birthday of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist who invented dynamite and owned a major arms manufacturer before establishing the Peace Prize with his name. What other awards could you come up with the would rival it in irony? The Louie Anderson Iron Man Triathelete of the Year, perhaps, or the Dick Cheney Award for Government Transparency? Others?

Fantasy Philosophy

At the Lighthearted Philosophers' Society meeting last weekend, I came up with my next great idea. Fantasy football has completely transformed the way football is watched and followed, so why not expand upon the idea and transform the way we read philosophy with a fantasy philosophy league. We'll need to fill in the details a bit to get it off the ground, but here's the general idea:

Every participant has to come up with a name for his or her own "university" and each university will have a philosophy department consisting of twelve positions:

- Ethics
- Epistemology
- Continental
- American
- Social/Political Philosophy
- Philosophy of Language
- Philosophy of Mind
- Philosophy of Science
- Aesthetics
- Ancient
- Modern
- Emeritus (Open AOS)

We'll have a draft to determine each participants' department, such that each department will fill each position, plus have three additional faculty members "on leave". You can move your sabbatical faculty in and out once a month. If your emeritus member passes away during your semester, you must wait one month to fill the position. For every book published by one of your philosophers during the year, you get twenty points.* For every journal article, you get five points, with certain journals (to be determined) earning seven points. Articles that are direct responses by other philosophers or book reviews in a journal get you three points. Posts on the Leiter Reports dedicated to one of your philosophers gets you one point. If your figure is department chair of their actual department, all direct publication values are increased by 50%.

If we have enough people express an interest, we can work out the details and schedule a draft.

So, what do you think? Other AOSs, rules, or point values needed?



*If you have Nicholas Rescher in your department, the point value for any new book will be that of an article for any other philosopher just to keep it fair.

The Vodka Ad and the Ethics of Endorsement

I was listening to Woody Allen's bit "The Vodka Ad" the other day and wondered about the veracity of the hook he uses in that bit. Is it immoral to endorse a product you do not use?

Of course, there is the question of what constitutes endorsement. The obvious case is someone saying I use it and you should too. Should you say those words if you don't use it? Ads for exercise equipment always feature people who are professional trainers and that contraption for three payments of $39.95 are not the reason s/he has those abs. But is there something wrong with that person saying how great of a workout it gives you and leaving the impression that it was? Is it buyer beware -- anyone fooled by such an ad deserves to be scalped?

When a celebrity allows his or her image to be used to market the product as a spokesperson, does that constitute endorsement and do we have the right to infer that the person really does believe in the product and isn't just collecting a paycheck? Surely, just allowing your work to appear in an ad does not constitute endorsement, so we don't think that when MicroSoft used "Start Me Up" in Windows ads that it meant Mick and the boys are pro-P.C., they just licensed use of the song. But how far do you have to go to have some responsibility to believe in the product? Or is there such a line at all?

Is Bullfighting Art?

Spain has moved the responsibility for overseeing bullfighting from its ministry of the interior to the ministry of culture. The idea is the activity ought to be considered art rather than sport. I am not interested here in ethical questions of the legitimacy and cruelty of the activity, but rather how we ought to think of it.

On one hand, hunting, fishing, and rodeo activities are sports. Isn't bullfighting just an exotic cousin? The goal is similar in that if done well, an animal is conquered.

But, of course, the means are clearly different in that one does not camouflage oneself -- quite the opposite -- and the goal of bullfighting is not merely the death of the animal, but to be maximally graceful in all aspects of the ritual. It is the grace, not the death that is the criteria of judgment of success or failure. Does that make the activity art or just a different kind of sport, like figure skating to speed skating?

Or is it something completely different? The word ritual does seem to apply, is it a religious ritual for a civil religion? Or is it something else?

Joke Theft

My Fellow Comedists,

This weekend, I am giving a paper at the 4th annual conference of the Lighthearted Philosophers Society. My topic is joke theft. The cardinal sin amongst stand-up comics is stealing someone else's material. But to define joke theft, you need (1) a notion of joke ownership and (2) a notion of joke identity. When I write and perform a joke, what is it I have claim to and when is your joke the same as my joke?

I want to pump some intuitions from the congregation on this topic (easy, Jeff). Tell me if you think the following two jokes are examples of the same joke. The first was written by Will Carey, for my money the best joke writer on the Baltimore/DC circuit -- go see him if you get a chance. The second is mine. Are they the same joke or not? If I performed the second joke on stage (I never have), would Will be justified in accusing me of joke theft?

Will's joke*: I walked into an optimist club it was half empty, but when I left it was half full. They do amazing work.

My joke: They have an Optimists Club, so shouldn't also have a Pessimists Club? I was going to start one, but, nah, it would never work.

His is better, but is it a better joke or a better variant of the same joke?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

* This joke was used with express permission of Will Carey and let it be duly noted that he was incredibly cool about it, is in no way hypersensitive about joke theft, and has been very thoughtful in correspondence about the topic.

When Two Letters Go Walking and They Both Do the Talking

Trying to think of words with double letters in which the letters make different sounds. It's pretty easy for vowels -- reentry, skiing, cooperate -- but I've only been able to think of one with double consonents -- accent. If one letter is part of a dipthong, as in threshhold, it doesn't count. Can you think of others?

Middle Class

I've been listening to an interesting series of stories on NPR this week about the notion "middle class." Turns out that if you ask almost anyone where they fall on the socio-economic ladder, the answer will almost universally come back "middle class." But if you ask "Are you lower class, working class, middle class, or upper class," the answers will split evenly between working class and middle class.

So the question they asked, which I'd like to play with here, is what does the phrase "middle class" mean? Are middle class and working class mutually exclusive or is working class a subset of middle class, or do they intersect in part? Is it purely defined by income or is it lifestyle?

Dehumanizing Science

In a faculty development seminar on Science, Technology, and Society that I'm leading, a couple of the participants commented on a feature of new science textbooks that is being pitched as a selling point -- names are being stripped from laws, theories, and bodily organs. So, the islets of Langerhans are now being called pancreatic islets. This is billed as a pedagogical advance because the name is now reflective of the placement or function and thus the language is more useful to the practitioner and easier to remember.\

But, of course, what it also does is strip the last element of history from the teaching of the science. Thomas Kuhn pointed this out in the 50s when he first called our attention to the use of textbooks in science education. We already lose the narrative, the context, the elements that led some incredibly smart and clever person to ask a question in a new way or approach it in a fashion no one else had considered and as a result advanced human understanding of the natural world. Now we want to make it seem completely non-human, something that comes down complete without a biography, without a history, without a backstory.

Now, this whitewashing is being held as the cutting edge of science pedagogy. I'm hoping someday someone tells its story.

Symbolic Incest

I want to officially retract a claim I made last week about the moral blandness of questions around IVF. No sooner had I made the claim than a senior thesis writer had us considering what one philosopher calls "symbolic incest." In Britain, cases of IVF must pass an ethics board. There have been cases in which a single woman with certain types of fertility issues wants to become pregnant through in vitro means and wants the child to be genetically related to her. So, she enlists a brother to provide the sperm while an unrelated donor provides the egg. The zygote would then be implanted and she would give birth. Apparently, in deciding whether to approve the procedure, the board considers the role of the sperm donor in the child's life -- but not in the way you'd expect. If the sperm donor wants to be involved in the child's life as a father, the procedure is not allowed. But if the sperm donor wants merely to be an uncle figure, then it is fine. To have a brother and sister act as mother and father is tantamount to incest, they argue, "symbolic incest" one philosopher labeled it, even if there is no intercourse and even if the implantation would be acceptable under other circumstances. Granted, the arrangement is odd, but is it problematic?

Citation

We always tell students that the purpose of citation is to make sure that those whose ideas we are using get the appropriate credit. But what really is the real reason we cite? Is it credit where credit is due? Or is it to make arguments by authority? See, someone else important says this, so it must be right. Or is it to show how well-read we are? What I'm saying must be true because I can quote a wide variety of experts on a wide range of topics and someone this smart must make sense. Or is it to enlist those whom we quote to our side since we think they are our friends, they should think of us as their friends? Or is it to make other people think that these important thinkers are in fact our friends and since we run in such smart circles, we must be smart and our thesis must be well-grounded? What is the real motivation to cite?

God Hates Fred Phelps

My Fellow Comedists,

Following up on yesterday's post, it is well worth posting some photos of the counter-protesters who have begun showing up alongside Reverend Fred Phelp's travelling circus.









Others you've found?

Live, love (everyone), and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Political Correctness Goes Invisible

Nietzsche said that when a political movement triumphs completely, it becomes invisible. Having power, he argues, allows you to shape the lens through which we understand the world and we see through the lens, we don't see the lens.

I was listening to the arguments offered in the case heard by the Supreme Court the other day in Snyder v. Phelps, the case in which the father of a dead soldier sued the Reverend Fred Phelps and his band of merry bigots for protesting his son's funeral. Phelps contends that because he cleared the protest with the authorities and obeyed their demands to the letter, that their actions were legal and their speech protected by the First Amendment. (And they're right). The father claims that because it was a private service, the protest and accompanying comments amount to "intentional infliction of emotional distress." He was harmed psychologically and this is equivalent to being harmed physically and for that, the perpetrator must be held to account. A jury in Baltimore held that the Westboro thugs were such jerks that they should pay Snyder $11 million dollars, but an appeals court unanimously overturned that ruling and the case is now being heard before the High Court.

what struck me the most about this discussion was the fact that the father's claim was being supported by groups across the political spectrum. This is, of course, for pragmatic political reasons -- no one wants to be associated with Phelps and even more so, no one wants to be seen as not supporting the troops who died in the line of battle. But at the same time, and this is what gets me, the central claim is the move that is at the heart of the universally disparaged political correctness movement -- speech is an act and hurtful speech inflicts real harm.

The argument against political correctness is always something akin to "sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Just suck it up. Life is offensive, deal with it. Everyone gets insulted. And this is the case especially when it is a minority whose place is being diminished and words are being used to entrench certain biased presuppositions into our worldview. But when it is a socially privileged group, a white soldier's family, suddenly the pain they feel from speech acts is considered without question to be authentic pain that needs to be stopped and retribution enacted. When political correctness benefits those in the in group, it's basic tenet is accepted without question. When it benefits those in the out group, it is ridiculed.

The Other Temrinal of the Battery

I only saw the 9th inning of Roy Halladay's no hitter last night, only the second ever in a playoff game. But when it happened, you got the standard shot -- the catcher jumping on and embracing the pitcher, the two of them sharing a brief moment before being mobbed by the rest of the team. And it is appropriate, the catcher has a special role, one that interestingly is diminished in the record book.

It is always the pitcher who gets credit for the no-hitter. In Cooperstown there is a display case with a photograph of every pitcher who has thrown a no-no and a ball from the game immediately beneath. Nowhere is the catcher listed. In the interview last night, you got the standard complement of a pitcher who has just thrown a great game -- "He mixed his pitches well, kept our hitters off-balance." But, of course, it wasn't the pitcher who mixed the pitches, it was the catcher.

The two parts of the battery are truly a team. The catcher is the brains of the outfit, deciding what to throw, when, and where. It is the catcher who is playing chess, getting inside the batters' heads, figuring out what the pitcher is doing well, what the batter is expecting, chatting to the batter to throw him off and set him up, and making the calculation as to what would most likely do the trick each and every pitch. The pitcher executes the plan, but it is the catcher's plan that works or doesn't.

Yet, the catcher receives none of the credit. Jason Varitek has called the most no-hitters of any catcher, four of them -- the same number thrown by Sandy Koufax (only Nolan Ryan threw more, seven). Why isn't Varitek universally lauded for this feat to anything approximating that of Koufax? Why do we not applaud the intellectual work behind the deed, only the physical?

In Praise of Community Colleges

I taught for years at a community college in Maryland and it was a wonderful experience. Older students, students with children, younger students who had experience in the real world -- it made discussions of theoretical issues much more prescient, more meaningful and their anecdotes so much more powerful.

But now, there is a challenge to this educational niche from for-profit colleges (not to be confused with private non-profit colleges). They have a more corporate look, effective advertising, and the sheen of being cutting edge. you've probably seen them advertised in a sidebar on line recently. But they also have a purpose other than education -- profit.

And as a result, their students have incredibly high student loan debts and low employment rates which when coupled mean high loan default rates. Some of these loans are through banks, but many of them are federal grants. An educated workforce is essential in these times where manufacturing jobs are leaving or becoming increasingly technological and the idea that the government would step in to do what they can to help with creating a more educated society is a fine idea. But here, we are being hung out to dry by a scam when there is a better and more economical option available.

Democrats have been holding hearings on this in Congress, but Republicans have been objecting because ideologically, they hold that it must be the case on principle alone that the private sector can do it better and cheaper -- whether they do or not in the real world. We shouldn't hold these institutions to account because they are free market profit driven entities and the market will decide whether they are doing the job or not. Uh huh, right.

What we see here is the higher ed version of the school voucher fight that the conservatives have been waging for decades. For-profit schools will deliver the educational product to clients more effectively and efficiently, they argue, because the profit motive always leads to better means and therefore better ends. But students are not clients and as a teacher I am not a service provider. I'm an educator and that involves a certain sort of human relationship, one that is not reflected in the relationships among those in the marketplace. And as we have seen with health care, when you try to take institutions that are not about fee for service, but about something more humane, reducing them to service transaction sites robs them of their ability to do well what we expect of them. It takes the soul from them and it is within the soul of that institution that its mission and its ability to connect and help reside. Community colleges are part of the soul of our economy and their competitors need to be shown for what they really are.

Soup

I always wanted to open a Jewish deli called "Yavantah Sendvich." Every Jewish deli needs to serve soup, so please tell me do you eat soup or drink soup?

Was IVF Really Ever a Moral Issue?

Robert Edwards (no, not the NPR host) won the Nobel Prize this year for medicine for his work developing the procedures for in vitro fertilization. I remember back when the first "test tube baby" caused an uproar. Huge scare headlines on prominent news weeklies asked about the morality of it in large part because the Catholic Church denounced it for theological reasons. But theology is not the same as morality. Today couples who have medical reasons why they cannot conceive the usual way go to IVF with the only second thought being financial. There are not any moral issues there. The question is whether there ever were or whether it was just the shock of a new technology allowing us to do something we had never considered being able to do. That, of course, ought to always give us pause in considering whether there are any moral issues we need to think carefully about, but does not in itself mean there are such issues. Are there any here?

RIP Greg Giraldo

My Fellow Comedists,

This week we sadly lost Greg Giraldo. A New York lawyer turned stand-up, he was one of the few who managed to take a really, really hard life dedicated to an art and turn it into a straight job. A very smart writer with a rock solid delivery, he became the epitome of post-Seinfeld stand-up comedy; never a household name, but the go-to guy when a tv show needed a scruffy-looking stand-up comedian. Whether it was his gig as a judge on Last Comic Standing or any of the dozen or so spots he held on shows for Comedy Central, he always worked as the quintessential professional comedian of the early 2000s.

He died this week after an overdose of prescription medication left him in a persistent vegetative state and his family took him off of life support. Good-bye Greg, and thanks for all the laughs.

Here's a routine of his from Montreal:



Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Einstein's Jewish Science and Contemporary Science and Society

First, good news. Einstein's Jewish Science, the book project I have been working on with my colleague Stephen Stern has been picked up by the Johns Hopkins University Press. It should make it to bookstore shelves by March 2012.

The project examines ways in which Einstein's science fits (or doesn't) into the politics of the time and the community he came out of. We often hold to a naive view of science in which practitioners are a combination of Joe Friday asking for "just the facts, ma'am" and Mister Spock using nothing but cold logic on those facts. But the fact is that the scientific project is undertaken by people and embedded in a larger context and that context does play some role in what science gets done and how it gets done. We are not making the absurd move that the theory of relativity is Talmudic in origin (it isn't), but asking the more intricate question about where the cultural residue that covers all human activities might be located with Einstein.

Where is it with current science? A federal court is right now reviewing whether embryonic stem cell research on new lines can move forward with government funding. Here's a place where contemporary politics and religion are affecting research. Are there others?

Handwriting and the Examined Life

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but then Socrates never had to grade the exams. I have a stack of logic blue books in front of me which means I will do everything I can to avoid grading them...including writing a blog post about them. The first thing that strikes every prof when grading is how different the handwriting is. It leads to an empirical question that I've not yet been amply motivated to systematically study and so will, in the worst tradition of philosophy, ask for a priori guesses.

Is there a correlation between neatness of handwriting and success on handwritten exams? There are two elements here. The first of which I am less interested in, does the ease of reading by the instructor make the instructor more likely to give better grades? But we can set this aside by taking something more objective like a logic exam as our second element, which I find more interesting, is neater handwriting indicative of a more ordered mind? There has been handwriting analysis for centuries that has sought to uncover correspondences between personality and writing style. One might think that those who take the time to more neatly compose their answers also take the time to be more composed in answering. On the other hand, doctors are supposed to have notoriously poor handwriting and yet also are supposedly among the more intelligent and educated of the culture.

So, any relation between the neatness of one's handwriting and the cogence of the content of what has been written?

Bullshit or Not: Cervantes Edition

There's an old sketch film called Amazon Women on the Moon and one of the bits is a parody of the old Leonard Nimoy show, "In Search Of..." called, "Bullshit or Not?" with the tagline "Bullshit or not? You decide." It's a line I like so much that I've stolen it for an irregular series of posts.

Today is not only LilBro's birthday (happy birthday, man), but also that of Miguel de Cervantes, so let's play with a short quotation from him,

"Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other."

Is it true that all is fair in love and war? In both, we leave ourselves vulnerable and seek certain objectives. Both tend to lead to hostilities which conclude with negotiations in which either (1) both sides find a way to exist next to each other, or (2) one dominates the other. In these negotiations are we not allowed strategems? But how apt is the metaphor, really?

As usual, feel free to leave either a response anywhere between one word and a dissertation.

Strong Gun Laws Work (Or, Rather, Weak Ones Don't)

Last week, a man with a concealed carry permit from the state of Virginia shot himself, his mother, and her doctor in Johns Hopkins Hospital because he wasn't pleased with the treatment offered by the top hospital on the planet Earth. Because he thought his mother's care was not moving her towards health quickly enough, he killed her. And then tried to kill the doctor. And then he killed himself. Thankfully there was an incredibly talented, incredibly smart, and incredibly dedicated trauma surgeon just two floors down (who wants to remain anonymous -- let's call him EGG) who saved the doctor's life.

Again, the state of Virginia decided that this man ought to be allowed to carry a loaded firearm with him wherever he went.

For those who claim that the more guns we have, the safer we are, please note that Johns Hopkins Hospital is crawling at all times with visibly armed Baltimore City Police officers. Their presence is sizable and unmistakable. The killer had to know they were there. He had to have seen them. This shooting did not occur because (and it is unbelievable that I have to type this next phrase) there were not enough guns in the hospital. These shootings happened because of Virginia's lax gun laws.

A new report out from Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group of over 500 mayors from across the country, traces the origins of guns used in crimes from every corner of the U.S. And guess what they found,

"states with the weakest gun laws are the top suppliers of the guns recovered in out-of-state crimes and are also the source of a greater proportion of likely trafficked guns."

Ten states provide the guns for almost half of the gun crimes across the country. Loosening restrictions does not make us safer, it makes ALL OF US less safe.

My suggestion, universal background checks with extended mandatory waiting periods of nine months and during that time, allow the person seeking the permit to have all the Viagra he can use -- after all, it serves the same purpose and is likely to harm many fewer people.

If You're Happy and You Know It

The shorter of the short people was singing "If You're Happy and You Know It" yesterday at the breakfast table and it led me to wonder whether the line is redundant. Is happiness opaque, can you be happy and not know it?

Comedist Confessions

My Fellow Comedists,

We just had Yom Kippur, the day when Jews around the world ask for forgiveness for their sins. (Leave it to the Jews to make the holiest day of the year a time set aside to feel guilty.) Catholics have confession and I was just listening the other day to Jim Gaffigan's take on confession -- "My wife keeps telling me I need to go to confession. It's been a long time. Now don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't enjoy lying to a holy man." And it struck me that we Comedists also need some means of absolution for our Comedist failings. We need an appropriate day. I was thinking of February 25th, Carrot Top's birthday, but I'll leave it open to suggestions.

Anyway, it seemed that in lieu of a formal day, we ought to have at least a post where we can air out our humorous sins and clear our consciences.

I will admit that I stifled a joke this week. I was driving the short people to school and as we passed a stable near us, the shorter of the short people read aloud a new sign that said "Weddings on horseback" and asked what it means. I thought it, but failed to say, "It means there will be more than one nag at the ceremony." Saint Shecky, please forgive me.

My fellow Comedists, where have you come up short?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Prison Rape

Yesterday was the sentencing of the young man who stabbed his ex-girlfriend at the school where I teach and I overheard someone saying, upon hearing the sentence and the facility in which he would be held, that he would surely become someone's bitch there. It caught my ear in part because I had been thinking about my friend Andy lately who passed away last year. He was a criminologist who in the last years of his all too short life had become a leading expert on prison rape for the bureau of justice statistics.

It is interesting that prison rape has become a cultural cliche. Comedians have overused the theme, in films from The Shawshank Redemption to My Cousin Vinnie it is used as a plot device, and my guess that if a "Family Feud" style question of the form "Fill in the blank: 'prison ______'" were asked, "rape" would be one of the top answers.

Why is this?

My guess is that it is our eye for an eye notion of retributive justice. We see it as turnabout -- even when the crime for which the person was convicted was not rape. This is because at a deep level, we realize that rape is not about sex, but about power. Prison rape especially is about enforcing power relations and we revel in the just deserts of the person who has been arrested being forced into the position of the person who is victimized from a lack of power.

Crime in the public mind has had different meanings at different times. In the 1960s and 70s, portrayals of crime and lives that had to deal with crime were focused on social stability, on the ability to live a meaningful life in a world of crime. The assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK and then the drug related crime wave of the 70s made places unlivable. Think of the effect in the opening sequence of Barney Miller in which the chief's wife opens the drapes to expose the bars on the apartment window. Nice people felt trapped by crime.

In the early 80s, with Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and the wave of white collar crime, the concept of crime became about greed and the problem was not the transaction but being caught. Think of the portrayal of Gordon Gecko in Wall Street.

But in the late 80s, we began to see prison rape show up as a cultural icon connected to crime in the collective consciousness. Why? Like so much else in our culture, it comes back to class insecurity. We are not comfortable that we and our families will necessarily be able to maintain our places and lifestyles and this constant low-level fear hums in us at all times and creates a sense of powerlessness. That manifests itself in a number of ways, but leads us to resent criminals because being victimized exacerbates our sense of being out of control. We see criminals through the lens of control as those who wrongly seized it and seek revenge upon them by positing prisons not as a place for rehabilitation or for being kept out of society, but rather as a place where they will become powerless, where they will experience at the hands of someone else what it means to not be in control of your life or body.

It will be interesting to see whether in the next couple of decades, if the social dynamics change whether the meaning of prison to white middle class Americans changes as well.

Is Stress a Choice?

Interesting question popped up in a conversation last night and wondered what you folks thought about it.

Is stress a choice? Do you choose to be stressed out by something or is it something that is not a matter of one's own control? We can practice stress reduction techniques, but do they alleviate the stress or just distract you from it? We tell people who are stressed about something we don't find stressful to relax, and we use the imperative form commanding them as if they could simply throw a switch and not be stressed by that particular stressor. But can you? If you use meditation, primal scream, or whatever other tool, are you masking the stress or actually eliminating it? Is that question even meaningful, that is, is stress nothing but the feeling of being stressed and therefore losing the feeling is equivalent to losing the stress? Or is choosing not to deal with something that would still cause the stress if faced head on? In Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen claims to believe six impossible things before breakfast. This is nonsense because we cannot just choose our beliefs. Is stress the same way?

Stickers and Gender

Guest-post from C.Ewing today:

So, I've been tutoring in a fourth grade class. The kids get stickers as they do their work, do chores in class, etc. At the beginning of the new week (usually Monday) they get a reward for having earned the most stickers. Positive reinforcement at work. But that's not the issue. The issue I have is that the boy with the most stickers and the girl with the most stickers are the two who get rewards.

And I'm wondering: why?

Now, it just so happens that in this particular case (the first I've seen) the boy and girl had precisely the same number of stickers. So the boy and girl in question were both on equal footing. If the two in class with the most stickers had been the ones getting prizes it would have worked out to be the same two people. There are more girls in the class. The ratio is actually about 2:1 in this particular class. There is thus more competition for the girls and less for the boys. That seems odd to me, since I would think it would be best just to have the class compete as a whole.

We've discussed gender interaction in schools on this blog before. I admit my staggering inexperience in this field. I've tutored before, but I've never done so in the classroom until now, and I've never done so with children until now. Is there an issue I'm missing here, which makes this make sense? I'm just not getting why the division. Granted, they're fourth graders, and maybe things are different with kids, but I don't see why or how.

If you're going to do the top two, I don't see why there's a gender division. Why top boy and top girl? Why no just the two with the most? There are more girls in the class. But wouldn't it just make the boys work harder so that at least one boy wins? Couldn't it beneficial in some way to have the boys and girls actually compete with one another? Is it just so that a boy and a girl will always win? What purpose does that serve? You just don't want to allow that one gender might not be represented?

Maybe I'm not looking at this right, but it seems odd to me, and possibly just outright wrong. Can anyone shed some light on this to help me make sense of it?

Plagiarism and Language

Guest-post from Michael Schmidt today:

The ethics of plagiarism have been crossing my computer screen a lot, lately.

On August 9, Stanley Fish wrote on opinion piece in the New York Times stating that plagiarism “is not a big moral deal.” The rules of plagiarism are “an insider’s obsession,” he contends, and plagiarism “is not a philosophical issue.” A lot of Fish’s argument (if it can be called that) seems to rest on the popularity (in some circles) of the notion that there is nothing that is truly original, so there’s no philosophically clean line distinguishing “original” text and copied text. The rules of what kind of copying are allowed, then, is just based on historical practice within disciplines.

I didn’t start by reading the Fish piece, however; I started by reading Lindsay Beyerstein’s critique of it , wherein she counters that plagiarism is a big moral deal, because it is deception and cheating. In this society, people get rewarded for having original ideas (no quotation marks) and to be rewarded for ideas you stole, and deceived others into thinking were yours, is morally wrong. That seemed about right to me.

Then, last week, The Scientist emailed me a blurb about an article on self-plagiarism. The topic of this article seems to give a little more weight to Fish’s contention that the rules of plagiarism are more like the arcane rules of golf; some people find it deeply wrong to steal words from yourself. If you aren’t stealing someone else’s ideas, who is harmed by such plagiarism?

I think that one answer to such a question is that others whom you are competing with are harmed. There are instances in which duplicate papers are published in multiple journals, which is a way of increasing your number of publications, and increasing the chances that your work will be cited. This is deception, because of the prevalent assumption that each article published represents new work. People who practice this sort of deception benefit unfairly in competition for jobs, promotions and grants, because, like it or not, some people in positions of evaluation just like to count up articles and citations.

But what if, as in the initial example in the linked article, you are just reusing a paragraph or two in the introduction? Is there an assumption made that all sentences are newly minted for the occasion? Are you really benefitting unfairly if you’re only saving yourself the 10 minutes needed for rewording the same old background to the same old problem you’ve been attacking the last 10 years? And what, really, would be the value of putting the same literature review in slightly different words?

That brought to mind the idea of “formulation.” Often, in science, we state a conclusion in a sentence of symbols, an equation. Nobody wants people to express equations differently every time; let’s say F = ma or E=mc2 and be done with it. Why do we find these repeated mathematical formulations salutary, but get upset when the same words are used in the same order in natural language sentences?

It's Pronounced I-gor

Listening to the news of the advancing hurricane, I cannot help but bristle every time the name of the storm being mispronounced.



If only the previous storm had been named Froedrich...

Deep Metaphysical Quandary

My Fellow Comedists,

A brief metaphysical quandary this weekend (with apologies to Shulamith Oppenheim):

What is a full professor full of?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Moral Obligation and Ignorance

Do we have a moral obligation to correct innocent ignorance? If you spot the Hank Aaron rookie card at a yard sale for a quarter, are you morally obligated to tell the owner what s/he has and how much it is really worth? Are we entitled to think badly of the person who doesn't and purchases it?

The Big Unit

A foot is twelve inches long because that was the size of the King's foot. A rod is six and a half feet long -- methinks the King was a liar.

The unit of electrical resistance is the ohm, named after the Bavarian researcher Georg Ohm. The quantity electrical conductance is the inverse of resistance and its unit is therefore the mho, the only unit of measurement that makes any reference to the Three Stooges. The mho, however, is not universal and is sometimes called the siemens which I believe establishes a leitmotif for this post.

Can the Palestinian Authority Negotiate Peace With Israel?

Today's question is whether the Palestinian Authority can negotiate peace with Israel. I'm not asking whether it is likely to happen when Abbas sits down with Netanyahu, I'm asking a more basic question -- are they the ones who should be sitting down? What is being negotiated and who has the right to do it?

If they are negotiating peace, then it seems like the people who should be at the table are the combatants. The Palestinian Authority is not at war with Israel, Hamas is. So, why negotiate with the PA? Making peace wihtout addressing the combatants would be like apologizing to Hanno because I hit Kerry in the nose.

On the other hand, if they are negotiating and end to the occupation and establishing borders for a new Palestinian nation, it would seem that you would need to sit down with the closest thing to a provisional government. The PA is that, sort of, although they lost the election in Gaza to Hamas. Having Hamas at the table would in one way make any agreement that emerged more legitimate, but it would also practically guarantee that no agreement would emerge. You would be buying legitimacy at the price of sabotaging the process.

On the third hand, if what is being negotiated is something that will come back to the people for ratification in a referendum of some sort, then it wouldn't matter who did the negotiating since they really are not being given the power to speak for the people.

Should the PA be considered the voice for "the Palestinians"? What exactly are they negotiating? Or is there an exactly here?