What do the following words have in common? beat bumf cackle combativity congery hog-wash shot thing vaticinatory That’s right. All of their OED quotations cite Lewis’s The Apes of God. Is it as accurate of a systasis as the Amazon SIPs? Maybe not. But still.
I don’t root for professional basketball teams out of some mere locality. North Carolina, during most of the time I lived there, did not have a pro team; and, while I detested Michael Jordan and UNC when I was very young, I gradually became a Bulls fan during his career. Aesthetically, perhaps, the Bulls were [...]
I’ve read with some interest a SEP article on experimental approaches to moral psychology by John Doris and Stephen Stich. In particular, their citation of Nisbett and Cohen’s Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Westview, 1996) caught my interest, particularly the description of the “asshole” saliva experiment (with a member of [...]
I know that we’re nearly two days in. East 1. Pistons over Bucks in four. I haven’t watched a Bucks game all year, including today’s. 2. Pacers over Nets in six. This one seems easy. The Pacers are a playoff team. They are always much deeper than they appear. Stojakovich is good for at least [...]
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Not the first, or even the fiftieth, person to note that Porter Goss seems to have turned into James Jesus Angleton.
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A not surprising article in the Post today reviews an article by Lisa Cosgrove coming out in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics that demonstrates the close ties that experts on mood disorders, including all of those who have written the relevant entries in the DSM-IV, have to the pharmaceutical industry. I’m curious about how often we’ve seen [...]
From Richard Clarke and Steven Simon’s NYT editorial While the full scope of what America did do remains classified, published reports suggest that the United States responded with a chilling threat to the Tehran government and conducted a global operation that immobilized Iran’s intelligence service. Iranian terrorism against the United States ceased. Clarke implies here [...]
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As it promises Hacking on autism and an article on Borges. The green freedom of a cockatoo, even. I finished teaching The Magus on Thursday. Here’s a choice quote from an interview with Fowles in Contermporary Literature: Once you’ve done one good novel about the working class, it becomes a very difficult field to go [...]
Information sickness and the computational messiah. Jonathan Goodwin writes in the magazine about the utopics of automated reasoning. “And how reliable can any truth be that is got/By observing oneself and then just inserting a Not?” (Auden, “The Way”) It’s important to note that there is a philosopher of science Kevin T. Kelly and one [...]
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A reference in the title there to F. Crick and L. E. Orgel’s “Directed Panspermia” (Icarus 19 [July 1973]: 341-346), mentioned in the same footnote as this “For the general idea of life on Earth having arisen from extraterrestrial activity [. . .] an idea also elaborated in the Strugatsky brothers’ [. . .] Roadside [...]
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Sorel even suggests that Galileo perhaps derived his interest in the laws of gravitational acceleration from the type of constant force presented by the monarchy, with its power swelling under his eyes every day. (Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 29). I wonder if Sorel was the first person to make that observation. Probably [...]
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[. . .] For him, Cupid’s bowModified in PeenemündeVia Brueghel. “The Cast,” Ted Hughes. Birthday Letters. A trove of his writings sits unread a few miles from me, and will sit, if I understand the terms, for quite a while. Speaking of casts, Emory also has one of Joyce’s death-masks near the checkout counter, worth [...]
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Eliminate the horns. I also don’t like “spilling the beans.” He pronounces “fish” is exactly how it’s said in the coastal regions of the North Carolina, a dialect with at least one book describing it.
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Tell me if you think this is from the current or, say, 1911 edition of the Britannica: While instinct is an unconscious reaction more or less present in all individuals of the same species, the degree of its expression varies according to the individual and its development. Most horses can sense a rider’s uncertainty, nervousness, [...]
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Is the next big thing in today’s tour of the news. I’m immediately curious about how often this has been used in horror stories, and I’m ashamed, given how much time I spent reading them in adolescence, that no examples come readily to mind. The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine by Catherine [...]
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This, at least, is amusing: In the middle of it all are longtime residents such as Brzezinski, who at 78 remains active at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the District. He bought his five-acre estate, with its relatively modest, older house, nearly 30 years ago. He doesn’t much care for the mansions [...]
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Two articles from the Washington Post and from Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Though it feels somewhat overoptimistic at best, I’m currently subscribing to the bluster theory. I think it’s self-evident enough that there are no viable military options that the administration is working hard on a little “Madman” theory. And “explosive carrying dogs?” [...]
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