A Point Guard’s Nightmare Descent Into Drugs

Heroin and painkillers play a larger role than basketball in “Unguarded,” an ESPN documentary on Tuesday night. “I come in here and tell you my nightmare,” the onetime star Chris Herren, long past his glory days, tells a gym full of high school students, and that’s the function of the film as well. Unlike the students, we don’t have to listen to him, but it’s a pretty good story; even if sports aren’t your thing, you might find it worth hanging around the gym for an hour and a half.

Platonic Irony - Plato and Socrates could not dwell in the Just City

Gotta love the Republic - arguably the world's and certainly my top 5 pick of all time greats.
Every time I re-read it I get something new.. and that is over 12 times now.
I was just thinking: Neither Plato nor Socrates would be allowed to dwell in the Just City! That is without sacrificing a key element of their psychic makeup.
Even more telling the Republic could not be published in the Just City.
Socrates could not conduct his philo investigations with the Guardians in the hope of moving them to critical thinking.
I really don' see this book as satire. The problem is in the actual reading of the text (the famous: 'RFTB') Socrates loves his creation and his revolutionary proposals. He suggests the city is possible!
As my good friend Mr. Nietzsche would say (my paraphrase): I am a child of my time - like Wagner - a decadent - except that I have realized it and I have resisted it.

Maybe we can see the Republic as Plato's struggle vs. his own time's decadence.

Heidegger on Transcendence and Phenomenology

I am always amazed how some very strong Heidegger scholars still get his ideas of transcendence absolutely WRONG!
It is ABSOLUTELY an existential concept
... and your mama probably thinks it is too.

Transcendence is a fundamental determination of the onotological structure of the Dasein. It belongs to the existentiality of existence. Transcendence is an existential concept.

It will turn out that intentionality is founded in the Dasein’s transcendence and is possible solely for this reason—that transcendence cannot conversely be explained in terms of intentionality. The task of bringing to light the Dasein’s existential constitution leads first of all to the twofold task, intrinsically one, of interpreting more radically the phenomena of intentionality and transcendence.

With this task—of bringing to view, along with the more original conception of intentionality and transcendence, a basic determination of the Dasein’s whole existence—we also run up against a central problem that has remained unknown to all previous philosophy and has involved it in remarkable, insoluble aporiai.

Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Albert Hofstadter, Trans.,
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, Revised Edition 1988), 162.

Being in the World - Reflections on the Fourfold - Heidegger

Reflections on the Fourfold
The basic issues to which Heidegger refers with the technical term das
Geviert ("the fourfold, the quadrate, the foursome") emerged in all likelihood from Heidegger's concern with the poetry of Friedrich Holderlin. In his poems, Holderlin often speaks about the gods and the mortals, about heaven and earth.

The term itself appears for the first time in the published works in the lecture "The Thing". In this lecture Heidegger describes Being as a fourfold polyvalence, the four basic dimensions of which he specifies there with the help of an analysis showing the four basic aspects of a pitcher, which are intimately related to the dimensions of the fourfold, heaven and earth, gods and mortals. Heidegger adds there that these four dimensions are complementary; to think one of them thoroughly is to think all of them as a unity.

They are said to mirror each other, and in this mutual mirroring each becomes properly itself. The event of mirroring each other appropriates and liberates each unto its proper self; yet it also binds what is so liberated in the oneness of their essential belonging
together.

Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morality (No! Not Morals!)

I. Morality in the Traditional Sense

What does he refer to when he uses the term ‘morality’? There is an obvious way in which Nietzsche uses the term, namely as referring to what Brian Leiter has called “Morality in the Pejorative Sense” or, as I shall call it in the following, traditional morality.

Confusingly, Nietzsche’s discussion of traditional morality commences from two distinct starting points, which are merged with the introduction of a set of criteria by which – without prejudging the issue in question – each branch can be measured. The first branch (a) is concerned with the conditions and circumstances under which traditional moral values arose and developed, while the second branch (b) investigates the notion of traditional morality itself, and is hence concerned with its theoretical implications and content.

Chocolate Pecan Bars - Yummy and Healthy... if you kinda squint

This is like a toned-down pecan pie in bar form.

For the cookie base:

4 ounces (1 cup) whole-wheat pastry flour

2 ounces (1/2 cup) all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons organic sugar or raw brown sugar

3 ounces (6 tablespoons) cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 to 3 teaspoons ice water

For the filling:

2 ounces (4 tablespoons) cold unsalted butter

1/3 cup mild honey, like clover

4 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

Pinch of salt

1/2 cup chopped bittersweet chocolate or chocolate chips

8 ounces (2 cups) pecan halves

1. Butter or oil a 9-by-13-by-2-inch pan and line with parchment. Butter the parchment. Sift together the flours and salt. Place the mixture in the bowl of a food processor fitted with the steel blade and add the sugar. Pulse to blend together. Add the butter and pulse until the mixture is crumbly. With the machine running, add the vanilla extract and ice water and process until the dough comes together on the blades. Stop the machine and, using your hands, press into an even layer in the prepared pan. Pierce with a fork all over and chill for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. Bake the cookie base for 20 minutes, until it is just beginning to color. Allow to cool for 5 minutes before adding the top layer.

3. Cream the butter with the honey, salt and nutmeg in a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment or in a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Beat in the eggs and vanilla. The mixture will look broken, which is fine.

4. Distribute the chocolate and then the pecans evenly over the cookie layer. Scrape in the butter and egg mixture and spread in an even layer. Place in the oven and bake 20 to 25 minutes, until set. Remove from the heat and allow to cool completely before cutting.

Yield: 18 to 20 bars

Advance preparation: This will keep for 3 or 4 days.

Nutritional information per serving: 244 calories; 6 grams saturated fat; 3 gram polyunsaturated fat; 7 grams monounsaturated fat; 58 milligrams cholesterol; 18 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 50 milligrams sodium; 4 grams protein.

Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers (1966)

Read and Think




His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
~ Leonard Cohen: Beautiful Losers (1966)

Autism - It's what the important people say it is

Articles on autism should emphasize that while the causes are unclear they're probably whatever a celebrity mom claims them to be.

Goodbye Now, Rum Friends, and Best Wishes - John Jeremiah Sullivan

Brilliant piece of writing
You must read this even if it is simply to remind yourself
that you are nowhere near as smart as a few really smart people in the world

da-sein

“You got a good mag (like the pulp-heads say) …” Norman Mailer

This is from Norman Mailer’s letter of resignation to Esquire in 1960. It also serves as the epigraph to “Pulphead,” the recently released book of essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan, a New York Times Magazine contributing writer who last wrote for us about experiencing Disney World under the influence of weapons-grade marijuana. The response so far to “Pulphead” has been about as great as a writer can hope for — and couldn’t be, in my opinion, more completely deserved. Various reviewers have called it the most impressive collection of nonfiction since David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” and continuing the Wallace theme, there’s this, from Zach Baron’s review in The Daily:


¶To be a writer is to obsess about other writers. Mostly it is to obsess about other, better writers. “Infinite Jest” is an exceptionally good novel. But David Foster Wallace so haunts the modern literary imagination, not because of “Infinite Jest” or the unfinished and uneven “The Pale King” or any of his other books. Wallace is the object of a generation’s adoration on account of his unavoidably evident talent, which so patently surpassed that of his peers that, in a sense, it was immaterial what he did with it. Other writers knew they were not as talented as he — even the ones who wrote better books — and they stayed up nights because of it. Jonathan Franzen wrote “The Corrections” just to feel better about himself after reading “Infinite Jest” in manuscript. Smart writers always know who is smarter, even — especially — when they’d prefer not to.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that John Jeremiah Sullivan, the Kentucky-born, 37-year-old contributor to GQ, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Harper’s and other publications, is that writer at the moment. The better one. The one making it hard on everyone else.

If you’re in the mood to read about Axl Rose or about life after “The Real World” or about Michael Jackson in a way that no one else has written about him or a transformative Christian rock festival or the experience of living in the One Tree Hill house (please watch the accompanying video) … then this is the collection for you. Congratulations to John on a wonderful book.

Island of Lost Souls Finally Out! Are we not men??!!

In the pantheon of horror films, Island of Lost Souls is the most audacious, ferocious and subversive shocker of the 1930s," says horror historian Gregory William Mank. "It's 'Golden Age Horror' at its most magnificently amok, the lurid tale of a mad doctor who, via vivisection, transforms a panther into a woman, and then hopes to mate her with a human male".

Laughton, then 33, was married to Elsa Lanchester (pictured), who went on to play the shock-haired Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. Unknown Kathleen Burke (pictured) was recruited after a nationwide contest to be the Panther Woman.

Island of Lost Souls is an American science fiction horror film starring Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, Bela Lugosi and Kathleen Burke as The Panther Woman. Produced by Paramount Pictures in 1933 from a script co-written by science fiction legend Philip Wylie, the movie was the first film adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, published in 1896. The film was directed by Erle C. Kenton.

Both book and movie are about a remote island that is run by an obsessed scientist who is secretly conducting surgical experiments on animals. The goal of these experiments is to try to transform the animals into human beings. The result of the experiments is a race of half-human, half-animal creatures that live in the island's jungles, only tentatively under Moreau's control.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - a Pastiche in B flat Major

I have a very bad feeling about the American version! But we will always have this version... and my humble pastiche with my good friend Nina Simone... yes...!

Heidegger - To Be or Not to Be

For Heidegger, what defines the human being is the capacity to be puzzled by the deepest of questions: why is there something rather than nothing?

As Heidegger makes clear from the untitled, opening page with which Being and Time begins, what is at stake in the book is the question of being. This is the question that Aristotle raised in an untitled manuscript written 2500 years ago, but which became known at a later date as the Metaphysics. For Aristotle, there is a science that investigates what he calls "being as such", without regard to any specific realms of being, eg the being of living things (biology) or the being of the natural world (physics).

Metaphysics is the area of inquiry that Aristotle himself calls "first philosophy" and which comes before anything else. It is the most abstract, universal and indefinable area of philosophy. But it is also the most fundamental.

With admirable arrogance, it is the question of being that Heidegger sets himself the task of inquiring into in Being and Time. He begins with a series of rhetorical questions: Do we have an answer to the question of the meaning of being? Not at all, he answers. But do we even experience any perplexity about this question? Not at all, Heidegger repeats. Therefore, the first and most important task of Heidegger's book is to recover our perplexity for this question of questions: Hamlet's "To be or not to be?"

Lord Byron - an Anglo-Scottish poet and leading figure in Romanticism - The Corsair - Read it and weep!

The Corsair (1814)
O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam, 22
Survey our empire, and behold our home!
These are our realms, no limit to their sway,—
Our flag the sceptre all who meet obey.
Canto I, stanza 1.

George Gordon (Noel) Byron, 6th Baron Byron (January 22, 1788 – April 19, 1824),

Byron, intentionally or unintentionally, weaves himself into his poetry stamping it with his entire persona. His characters are part of himself; the poems are pieces of his mind; the events are based on experience.

Byron’s poetry is an amalgamation of all aspects of Byron. This is truer in some poems than others: some are nearly biographical and others skillfully manipulate other’s perceptions of Byron. His poetry reveals the inner workings of his mind . Because of this, the voices in Byron’s poetry are not just the voices of Byron’s characters: they are the intermingling of the poet with the poem.

One of the most pervasive and recognizable aspects of Byronic poetry is the Byronic hero who is a manifestation of parts of Byron’s own personality and thoughts. Byron’s “The Corsair” introduces the most Byronic of Byron’s heroes: Conrad. He then proceeds to emasculate him and proposes Gulnare, a former sex slave, as an alternative hero.

Through Conrad, Gulnare and the entirety of “The Corsair” Byron questions the status quo by using heroic couplets with a social parasite, reversing gender roles, and ignoring conventions. In doing so, it demonstrates the multitude of Byron’s voices most exquisitely.

Heidegger and the Priority of Dasein

THE PRIORITY OF DASEIN

In short, Heidegger rejects the sorts of reasons standardly offered
by philosophers for dismissing the question of the meaning of
Being: it is neither unanswerable, nor possessed of a simple or self-
evident answer. Nonetheless, that question has been systematically
passed over in the discipline, to the point at which it now seems
obscure and disorientating to most philosophers – and so to most
of Heidegger’s readers. Accordingly, before attempting to answer
the question, an adequate or appropriate way of formulating it is
required. We need to remind ourselves of what is involved in the
asking of such a question – which means that we need to remind
ourselves first of the fundamental structure of any enquiry, and
then of this enquiry in particular.

Heidegger vs. Aristotle - Smackdown Extraordinaire

Philosophy is defined by Heidegger as the attempt to open up again the domain of originary thinking, and the release of this radical questioning. In contrast, Heidegger suggests that Western metaphysics, while governed by such originary, radical questioning, often holds these questions in a repository.

In The End of Philosophy, he says that metaphysics “can never bring the history of being itself, that is, the origin, to the light of its essence.”

The tradition is viewed as a deposit of doctrines that develop and progressively work out the meaning of being. Aristotle and Greek philosophy are thereby taken to be primitive expressions of truths that have since been incorporated or superseded by a higher development and systemization that surpass it.

It is clear from Heidegger’s writings that he considers a de-structuring of Aristotle’s works to be essential if philosophy and thinking are to be set free for their proper task. But simply returning to Aristotle is not so simple. If it is true that every historical epoch of philosophy owes its impetus to the Greeks, it is also true that our interpretation of the Greeks has derived from assumptions rooted in later history (Scholasticism, for example). And this confusion is not accidental. It reflects an essential characteristic of interpretation itself (fallenness).

But we should not cast Heidegger’s hermeneutic project of reading Aristotle in terms of an attempt to view Aristotle as a non-metaphysician. Such a project would be naive. Heidegger says: “The greater a revolution is to be, the more profoundly must it plunge into its history.” The return to the origin of the tradition is not a return to a past that is now over. Heidegger says: “Repetition as we understand it is anything but an improved continuation with the old methods of what has been up to now.”

The historical life of a tradition depends on a constantly new release and interpretation of the overabundance that cannot be confined to any one saying. Language is founded on this unsayable origin, and the disclosure of this originary logos is essentially a creative and poetic response to being.

New Van Gogh Book - Looks Amazing - Van Gogh The Life

He had “a sun in his head and a thunderstorm in his heart”: these words used to describe the French painter Eugène Delacroix were memorized by Vincent van Gogh and could just as easily have been applied to van Gogh himself.

VAN GOGH Lots of new stuff! This was NOT his last painting
Shot by two small boys!

The Life

By Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

Illustrated. 953 pages. Random House. $40.

From his turbulent emotional life, filled with loneliness and despair, there sprang — in a single, incandescent decade — a profusion of dazzling, vibrant paintings that fulfilled his ambition to create art that might provide consolation for the bereaved, redemption for the desperate. Images that would “say something comforting as music is comforting — something of the eternal” : phosphorescent stars cartwheeling through a nighttime sky in the yellow moonlight; a clutch of radiant irises blooming in a lush garden lit by the Mediterranean sun; a flock of crows winging their way across a golden expanse of wheat fields under a stormy sky.

In their magisterial new biography, “Van Gogh: The Life,” Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith provide a guided tour through the personal world and the work of that Dutch painter, shining a bright light on the evolution of his art while articulating what is sure to be a controversial theory of his death at the age of 37.

Whereas suicide by gun has long since become part of the myth of the tortured artist that cloaks van Gogh, Mr. Naifeh and Mr. Smith note that there are issues with that hypothesis — like the angle of the shot, the disappearance of the gun and other evidence, and the long hike that the wounded van Gogh would have had to make to return to his lodgings. Instead they propose an intriguing alternate theory, rumors of which were first heard by the art historian John Rewald in the 1930s during a visit to Auvers, the small French town where van Gogh died.

As Mr. Naifeh and Mr. Smith tell it, a rowdy teenager named René Secrétan, who liked to dress up in a cowboy costume he’d bought after seeing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, was probably the source of the gun (sold or lent to him by the local innkeeper). Secrétan and his friends used to bully the eccentric van Gogh, and the authors suggest that there was some sort of encounter between the painter and the boys on the day of the shooting. “Once the gun in René’s rucksack was produced,” they write, “anything could have happened — intentional or accidental — between a reckless teenager with fantasies of the Wild West, an inebriated artist who knew nothing about guns, and an antiquated pistol with a tendency to malfunction.”

The deeply unhappy van Gogh, the authors argue not altogether convincingly, “welcomed death,” and Secrétan may have provided him “the escape that he longed for but was unable or unwilling to bring upon himself, after a lifetime spent disavowing suicide as ‘moral cowardice.’ ”

There is no hard evidence for this theory, and it is laid out, discreetly, in an appendix to this biography. Which is as it should be, since the real reason to read this book has nothing to do with speculation about van Gogh’s death, but with the voluminous chronicle it provides of his life and art, and the alchemy between them. The overall portrait of van Gogh that emerges from this book will be familiar to readers of earlier biographies — most notably David Sweetman’s succinct 1990 study — but it is fleshed out with details as myriad as the brushstrokes in one of his late paintings.

Whereas the authors’ 1989 biography of Jackson Pollock, which inexplicably won the Pulitzer Prize, used reductive Freudianism to try to explain his art, this volume does its best to avoid drawing simplistic connections between van Gogh’s galvanic work and his emotional difficulties. (The authors seem to agree that his sometimes unusual behavior was caused by a form of epilepsy, much as one of van Gogh’s doctors concluded.) Instead, Mr. Smith and Mr. Naifeh diligently examine the development of his ideas, his techniques, his startling ability to inhale lessons from other painters and transform their innovations into his own.

In writing this book (and providing a companion Web site with notes), the authors drew heavily on archival material and scholarship at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and most notably from a new edition of van Gogh’s letters, which was 15 years in the making and published in 2009. Like earlier biographers, their ability to persuasively depict van Gogh’s inner life is hugely dependent on these remarkable letters — letters that not only chronicle his manic ups and downs, his creative process and his complex relationship with his beloved brother Theo, but that also attest to his immense literary gifts and his iron-willed determination to learn and grow as an artist.

Drawing upon these letters and van Gogh’s drawings and paintings, Mr. Naifeh and Mr. Smith provide a minutely annotated map of the intellectual underpinnings of his philosophy and art. Though he could be erratic and difficult, though he suffered breakdowns and depressions, van Gogh was far from the madman of myth. His sensibility and art were shaped by his avid reading of writers like Dickens, Shakespeare, George Eliot and Zola, just as his admiration for a succession of painters and the ever-growing museum of images in his head informed his evolving vision and techniques as a painter.

Van Gogh’s early, somber paintings of peasants were inspired, partly, by Millet, and aspired, the authors say, “to celebrate not just the peasants’ oneness with nature” but also “their stolid resignation in the face of crushing labor.” His later paintings with an electric palette owed a debt to the Impressionists, whom Theo had urged on him for years in the hopes that Vincent would paint more landscapes and use more color to produce more saleable canvases.

Van Gogh would also learn from the pointillism of Seurat, the primitive simplicity of Japanese prints, the Symbolists’ embrace of dreamlike imagery. Mr. Smith and Mr. Naifeh nimbly trace van Gogh’s peregrinations, and they evoke the intense atmosphere of creative ferment in Paris during the 1880s. They dissect how van Gogh’s restless, obsessive and highly contrarian intellect hungrily assimilated and transformed disparate philosophies, iconography, even brushwork, and how he moved from explorations of the play of light on surfaces to more intense excavations of his own psyche, from simple descriptions of reality toward a more expressionistic style that would remake the world as a mirror of his own “fanatic heart.”

Along the way we are given insights into how van Gogh’s gymnastic use of color reflected his ever-changing moods: the piercing yellow of a vase of sunflowers saluting the sun that suffused his life in Arles; the serenity of a new palette of violet, lavender and lilac that crept into his paintings while he was at the Asylum of St. Paul in St. Rémy; the stormy blues and ominous clouds, suggesting a threatening view of nature, conjured on the late canvas “Wheat Field With Crows.”

What Mr. Naifeh and Mr. Smith capture so powerfully is van Gogh’s extraordinary will to learn, to persevere against the odds, to keep painting when early teachers disparaged his work, when a natural facility seemed to elude him, when his canvases failed to sell. There was a similar tenacity in his heartbreaking efforts to fill the emotional void in his life: ostracized by his bourgeois family, which regarded him as an unstable rebel; stymied in his efforts to pursue his religious impulses and become a preacher; rejected or manipulated by the women he longed for; shunned and mocked by neighbors as crazy; undermined by a competitive Paul Gauguin, with whom he had hoped to forge an artistic fraternity.

The one sustaining bond in van Gogh’s life was with Theo, an art dealer, who provided emotional, creative and financial support. The authors of this book convey the love and exasperation Theo felt for his needy, demanding brother and how fearful Vincent was of losing Theo’s devotion. And they trace the arc of the brothers’ intense, conflicted relationship over the years, ending with Vincent’s death in July 1890 and Theo’s death only six months later.

Vincent van Gogh’s lifelong yearning for emotional connection, of course, would finally, and most lastingly, be realized in his art. “What I draw, I see clearly,” he wrote as he was beginning to find his vocation. In drawing, he went on, “I can talk with enthusiasm. I have found a voice.”

Gay Science - Aphorism 283. Pioneers

For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!

At #283 we find an extremely important statement of Nietzsche's ethical project, and this continues through #290. This project will carry us from the few noble souls of his own age to an age of "preparatory humans" who will themselves be replaced by a race of such beings. He even emphatically uses the word 'overcome' in this context. What is it in each of us, indeed in all things, that needs to be overcome?

Nietzsche continually uses rhetorical language aimed at heroism, waging war, living dangerously, etc. But it is extremely important to recognize that these are wars of the mind. It is hard to see through the cultural crust that clothes us in habit; therefore, we need to go to ourselves ready for warfare and ready to take the risks of original thought and skepticism. As the theme continues in #285,

Nietzsche stresses the constancy of energy necessary in the kind of existence that he is proposing and suggests that, "you will the eternal recurrence of war and peace." And finally, "perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god." Note at #292 his hostility toward morality as such. Nietzsche's project is an ethical system to be taken up by brave and adventurous individuals, not a formula to be laid down over individuals to stifle their own activity.

At #301, again, he makes the crucial point that, while we always think ourselves to be "observers" of life, I suppose that "life happens to us," we are really the poets who keep creating life. This is especially true of values. Natural things have no intrinsic value, for Nietzsche, for we are the ones who bestow value. "Only we have created the world that concerns man!"

Monism - Presocratics and Spinoza - Many much more single material

Monism
Advanced Information

Heraclitus - pictured here!

Although the term was first used by German philospher Christian Wolff (1679-1754), monism is a philosophical position with a long history dating back to the pre-Socratic philosophers who appealed to a single unifying principle to explain all the diversity of observed experience. Notable among these thinkers is Parmenides, who maintained that reality is an undifferentiated oneness, or unity, and that consequently real change or individuality of things are there?

Substantival monism ("one thing") is the view that there is only one substance and that all diversity is ultimately unreal. This view was maintained by Spinoza, who claimed that there is only one substance, or independently existing thing, and that both God and the universe are aspects of this substance. In addition to having many eminent proponents in the Western philosophical tradition, substantival monism is a tenet of Hinduism and Buddhism. In Hinduism each element of reality is part of maya or prakriti, and in Buddhism all things ultimately comprise an interrelated network.

Attributive monism ("one category") holds that there is one kind of thing but many different individual things in this category. Materialism and idealism are different forms of attributive monism. The materialist holds that the one category of existence in which all real things are found is material, while the idealist says that this category is mental. All monisms oppose the dualistic view of the universe, which holds that both material and immaterial (mental and spiritual) realities exist. Attributive monism disagrees with substantival monism in asserting that reality is ultimately composed of many things rather than one thing. Many leading philosophers have been attributive monists, including Bertrand Russell and Thomas Hobbes on the materialistic side, and G. W. Leibniz and George Berkeley in the idealist camp.

The Christian intellectual tradition has generally held that substantival monism fails to do justice to the distinction between God and creature, and that of attributive monisms only idealism is theologically acceptable.

Nietzsche's Dog - The Gay Science

Aphorism 312

My Dog.

I have given a name to my pain, and call it "a dog,"- it is
just as faithful, just as importunate and shameless,
just as entertaining, just as wise, as any other dog - and
I can domineer over it, and vent my bad humor on it, as others
do with their dogs,servants, and wives.

What does this mean??
It is far more than a reflection on dog-ownership.
This is a N. test... what does it mean.
I know... do you??

Become Who You Are! ~ Nietzsche Gay Science

This is but one example of Nietzsche‘s wilful contrariness; there is conscious relish in the difficulty that his writings instigate for a reader: I am certainly doing everything I can to be hard to understand myself!

It is tempting to label Nietzsche as an observer of the moral
tradition rather than a creator of a particular brand of moral philosophy, but this risks the implication of passivity and would be entirely ignoring the aggressive vigour in which he systematically and brutally seeks to deconstruct various moral arguments — akin to the pessimistic mole of the sceptic perhaps?

But no, pessimism is not suited to Nietzsche (and nor, incidentally, is scepticism); his argument seems rather to seek a redefinition or a recalibration of moral values, or even just to proclaim encouragement for a consideration of whether our perception of such values can be an accurate one; he does not seem reconciled to the inability of humanity to change and so pessimism or in fact, fatalism, would be inappropriate labels.

West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life (Little, Brown & Company),

West, being West, is hardest on West in his autobiography.


Still pursued by his demons at 73, he reintroduces himself as flesh, blood and anguish in his new autobiography, “West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life” (Little, Brown & Company), going past the point where the cheers fade and sports books end to pose a question that rarely comes up: What is it all worth?

“There were two, three times when we started this, when I said, ‘I’m not doing this,’ ” West said in a recent interview as he talked about his agreement to do the book. “It’s true. It’s not made up. I’m hoping the book will be inspirational because you can overcome a lot of things in life and do something that makes you feel good — for a moment, maybe not for a whole long time.”

That’s West in one sentence, trying, but only qualifiedly able, to commit to a happy ending.

He’s an object lesson in the price of success, if not one of the starry-eyed ones usually passed down to children.

West was an outlier in the early 1960s when Malcolm Gladwell was still in his playpen, but the young Lakers star put more than the requisite thousands of hours into his craft — he threw in his entire being and peace of mind. His intertwined brilliance and agony were always his blessing and curse, pulling everyone into his narrative.

Even the hated Boston Celtics, who lived to rule and make sure opponents understood it, beating West’s Los Angeles Lakers in six N.B.A. finals in the 1960s, were moved by his ordeal. Stunning Westin a surprise appearance at his 1974 farewell ceremony as a player, Bill Russell walked onto the Forum floor, where he and his Celtics had made their successful last stand in Game 7 of the 1969 finals under the Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke’s presumptuous balloons.

“If I could have one wish granted,” Russell told West, “it would be that you would always be happy.”

Like anyone, West in the book remembers things his way (he says hiring Phil Jackson as coach was his idea; Shaquille O’Neal says it was his).

Like few others, West shreds, or at least, candidly describes everyone from his physically abusive father (“I told him that he’d better never lay another hand on me and reminded him that I had a shotgun under my bed and would damn well use it if I had to”) to Jackson (“I don’t think he wanted me around”) to West’s adoring wife, Karen (“who loves, cares for and nurtures a very complicated man”).

Of course, West, being West, is hardest on West.

His infidelity to his first wife, Jane, is in the book. So is Jane’s fury at learning he is dating Karen while they divorce. West describes Jane driving to Pat Riley’s home, which he has been renting, and dumping West’s trophies, pictures and mementos in the driveway.

When Riley, who was playing in Phoenix, returns, West tells him to throw it all out. “I kept it for a long time in an attic,” Riley tells the book’s author, Jonathan Coleman. “Now I think it is in one of the storage bins I have here in Miami. One day, I have to go down there and look at it. He might like it.”

The books plumbs the depths of West’s despair, publishing the 1999 letter Karen writes to the Lakers owner Jerry Buss, who has finally let West, deep into his second decade as general manager, waive Dennis Rodman.

In the letter, Karen says of her husband, “If he were suicidal, he would be gone.”

“The fact that some major Laker decisions have been made that he did not agree with and ... that the team is now, as he says, ‘the laughingstock of the league’ has put him in a downward spiral that is almost as self-destructive as Rodman,” she wrote.

“Wednesday, Jerry told me that the only things he cares about in the world are our children and the Lakers. On Thursday evening, after the Rodman release, he told me that he was leaving the Lakers and he was leaving us. ... I think that you and he need to sit down together for a long, friendly talk. Just thought you should know. Sincerely, Karen.”

West was a front-office icon — his Utah counterpart, Scott Layden, once said they should name the executive of the year award after him — and he turned Lakers fortunes around within five years of Magic Johnson’s 1991 retirement when he acquired O’Neal and Kobe Bryant within seven days of each other.

Buss, meanwhile, never lost his admiration of West, but eventually he was no longer just a phone call away. Detaching himself from the day-to-day operation in the post-Magic era, the owner told his high-maintenance general manager he could reach him through the Lakers’ lawyer.

And Buss began grooming his son, Jim, to take over. Showing how much he did not know, the son told Sports Illustrated that “10 fans out of a bar” could rate players as well as N.B.A. scouts.

In 2000, with the resurgent Lakers having won the first of three titles in a row under Jackson, West abruptly resigned, walking away from three years and $10.5 million on his contract and skipping the team’s news conference that announced the move. Having won one ring as a player and four more as general manager, the man most identified with the Lakers franchise slipped away like a journeyman on the waiver wire.

After a five-year comeback in Memphis, taking the lowly Grizzlies to successive finishes from 2004 to 2006 in which they won 50, 45 and 49 games, West has just come out of retirement again, accepting a $2 million-a-year consultancy that includes an ownership stake — not with the Lakers but with their downtrodden rivals, the Golden State Warriors.

West, whose unvarnished scouting report last winter foreshadowed the Lakers’ fall in the spring (“You can keep a car running for a long time by changing the tires ... but you can’t change a player’s tires”), says that as a Warrior executive, he can no longer discuss another team or its players, like Bryant, his onetime rapt pupil.

In 2004, Bryant began rethinking his intention of signing with the Los Angeles Clippers after calling West, who told him not to assume he could change things anywhere he went and noted his own pride in having played for one team. Bryant refused to be interviewed for West’s book — possibly at the agent Rob Pelinka’s direction, West writes — although it is well known that no one calls shots for Bryant.

In his recent interview about the book, West said he still treasured his relationship with Jerry Buss, lamenting the fact it “just wasn’t the same” in their final years together.

“But every time I have to make a decision in my life, who’s the first person I call?” West said. “It’s him.”

He added that “it would have been flattering” if the Lakers had asked him if he wanted to return as a consultant, “but they didn’t need me and I really wasn’t wanted there.”

“But that’s O.K. because I understand that,” he added. “ I’m not a shrinking violet. I would give my opinion and probably be a lot more aggressive than they have been. But that’s my nature.”

“Jim’s bright, O.K.?” he went on in a reference to Buss’s son. “I think everyone assumed I did not like him. That’s far from being true. You’d like him around more often but he wasn’t around very often.”

All of this is not old-school. They didn’t make them like this back then, either. It is just Jerry West, after all these years, trying to make it work.

The Paradox of Inquiry per Meno Part Deux - Gotta Love my Perserverence!

Socrates is often the character in Plato’s dialogues who asks thought provoking questions that do not seem to have answers. However, in Meno, the situation is reversed, and Meno ponders about the process of inquiry during a discussion about virtue,
“But how will you look for something when you don’t in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don’t know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you’ve found is the thing you didn’t know?” (Meno 80d-e).
These questions eventually became known as Meno’s Paradox. Socrates responds to Meno, but his explanation for the paradox, his Theory of Recollection, can barely satisfactorily explain inquiry as a process for acquiring non-empirical information; when one applies his theory to empirical knowledge the theory seems to collapse completely.
“Meno’s Paradox,” also known as “The Paradox of Inquiry,” questions how anyone could ever truly know when he has succeeded in finding a correct answer, whether that be an answer to an empirical or a non-empirical question. In layman’s terms, I will now try to describe Meno’s objection to the entire process of inquiry. One begins in one of two states: either the person knows what he is looking for, or he does not know what he is looking for. If the individual knew what he was looking for, inquiry itself would be altogether unnecessary, due to the fact that the information would already be known. However, if the individual did not know what he was looking for, inquiry itself would be altogether impossible. One cannot look for something without knowing what it is he is looking for. Therefore, inquiry seems to be either completely unnecessary or utterly impossible. Thus, one cannot learn what he already knows or what he does not know. At the very most one could only know the questions he does not have answers to, but, even then, there would never be any way to know when one has stumbled upon a correct answer.

Meno's Paradox - Mysteries That I Love! ;-)

Meno's puzzle has generally, and, as I believe,
erroneously been taken to represent merely a
bit of typical sophistic logic-chopping. Shorey,
for example, refers to it as 'this eristic and lazy
argument. '3 Taylor's comment on the passage
is that, 'At this point Meno again tries to run
off on an irrelevant issue. He brings up the
sophistic puzzle. . . . etc. '4 And Ritter asserts
in similar vein that Meno 'encumbers the inves-
tigation with the proposition advanced by the
eristies, that there is no sense in looking for
something which one does not already know.

As over against all such interpretations of
Meno's paradox as irrelevant eristic, I wish to
submit the thesis that the objection is perfectly
germane in the context of the problem being
discussed-namely the nature of ethical knowl-
edge-and that, moreover, the entire passage is
one of real philosophical import and is basic for
understanding the Theory of Ideas and the re-
lated notion of Reminiscence. Far from being
solely an instance of sophistic eristic, it contains
in embryo one of the essential contentions of
sophistic nominalism as a philosophical position,
and it raises a problem which the Theory of
Ideas is designed to meet, and which it must
meet if it is to have any plausibility whatso-
ever.

The seriousness with which Plato re-
garded the puzzle is shown by his invoking of
the Myth of Reminiscence in order to reply to it.
It is inconceivable that he should have gone to
this length to meet an argument which he viewed
as a mere sophism.

The Absolute and Overwhelming Brilliance of Archimdes

“The Archimedes Palimpsest” could well be the title of a Robert Ludlum thriller, though its plot’s esoteric arcana might also be useful for Dan Brown in his next variation on “The Da Vinci Code.” It features a third-century B.C. Greek mathematician (Archimedes) known for his playful brilliance; his lost writings, discovered more than a hundred years ago in an Istanbul convent; and various episodes involving plunder, pilferage and puzzling forgeries. The saga includes a monastery in the Judaean desert, a Jewish book dealer trying to flee Paris as the Nazis closed in, a French freedom fighter and an anonymous billionaire collector.


Archimedes Palimpsest
A processed image showing the Archimedes text of "Floating Bodies."
At the center is an ancient volume, its parchment recycled into a 13th-century prayer book. And at the climax we see those old folios, charred at the edges and scarred by dripping wax from the candles of devout monks, being meticulously studied for 12 years by an international team using the most advanced imaging technologies of the 21st century. And what is found is more revelatory than had ever been expected.

The Archimedes Palimpsest has precisely this history. It really does begin with a 10th-century copy of Archimedes’ third-century B.C. writings. Three centuries later they were scraped off the parchment, which was reused — creating a “palimpsest.” And while there aren’t enough dead bodies or secret cabals to support a full-fledged thriller, there really is a sense of excitement in the account of the book’s history, restoration and meanings, at an exhibition at the Walters Art Museum here: “Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes.”

Almost nothing about the tale is banal or ordinary. In a companion book, “The Archimedes Codex” (Da Capo), William Noel, the museum’s curator of manuscripts, describes how the saga was brought to its conclusion. In 1998, after reading about the Palimpsest’s sale at a Christie’s auction to an anonymous purchaser for $2 million, the museum’s director, Gary Vikan, suggested to Mr. Noel that he discover who bought it and whether it might be exhibited at the Walters.

The purchaser not only deposited the book with Mr. Noel but also provided funds for the project, as scientists and other experts took it apart for restoration and research. The owner, who remains anonymous, also stipulated that all the findings and images be made available to the public. (Next month Cambridge University Press is publishing a two-volume account of the team’s discoveries.)

It may be difficult, at first, to understand the fuss. At the exhibition’s start you come face to face with two leaves from the Palimpsest; all you see is a fragment of a ruined manuscript, charred, stained and inscribed with prayers. But lines of reddish text, scarcely visible, run perpendicular to those prayers. And you can also make out the ghost of a diagram, a spiral. Above these leaves a series of slides shows the same pages under colored lights, revealing various details.

The juxtaposition neatly demonstrates the challenge posed by the Palimpsest and the technology used to explore it. The effort is made more complicated by the Palimpsest’s nature. After being erased, each leaf was rotated 90 degrees and folded in half, one Archimedes page yielding two of the prayer book’s.

That book was apparently in use for centuries at the Monastery of St. Sabbas in the Judaean Desert. Its towers peek out of the rocks in one of David Roberts’s otherworldly Holy Land illustrations from 1842, shown here. But by then the book was gone. In 1844 a biblical scholar happened upon it at the Metochion of the Holy Sepulcher in Istanbul and saw the curious mathematics underneath; a leaf from the book was found in his estate and deposited at Cambridge University Library.

Then, in 1906, the Danish Archimedes scholar Johan Ludvig Heiberg saw the book in Istanbul and recognized seven treatises by Archimedes behind the prayers, making it the oldest source for his writings in existence and the sole source for two unknown works, “Method” and “Stomachion.” Heiberg deciphered much of the text and took photographs that he worked on in Copenhagen.

It was assumed that Heiberg discovered all there was to find out, which may be one reason that, when the battered volume was put on sale almost a century later, few buyers were panting after its riches.

What became startling to the Walters, though, was the extent of the restoration required. Through much of the 20th century the Palimpsest had disappeared. Heiberg’s photographs juxtaposed with leaves of the book show how ruinous that century was for its condition. Some leaves disappeared. Illustrations of Evangelists, forged to look medieval, were inexplicably painted on some pages.

As part of the restoration the book’s history was examined and is surveyed here. There was the devastating impact of World War I on Istanbul’s Greek communities, which affected a large number of artifacts. Some damage may have happened at the Metochion. Similar stains appear in another Metochion book at the Walters.

The exhibition also notes that in 1932 the Palimpsest had been offered for sale by a Jewish dealer in Paris, Salomon Guerson, who recognized its importance. But no purchasers were found. The suggestion is made that Guerson may have ultimately been responsible for the forged illustrations, seeking to raise money to escape Nazi-occupied Paris by creating a more attractive volume. (A green pigment used in the paintings was only available after 1938.) Later the Palimpsest came into the possession of Guerson’s friend Marie Louis Sirieix, a Resistance fighter whose daughter Ann married Guerson’s son; Ann put the manuscript up for sale in 1998.

The exhibition also explores the heroic restoration guided by Abigail Quandt, the museum’s senior conservator of manuscripts, as she attempted to dissolve mid-20th-century glues, examine fragments and remove debris, until contemporary technologies could reveal what the naked eye could not.

Some revelations have become public, including the discovery of two speeches from the great fourth-century B.C. orator Hyperides. In addition one of Archimedes’ works, “Stomachion,” was uncovered in enough detail to be interpreted by Reviel Netz, a classicist at Stanford University and co-author of the companion book: it was an attempt to examine how many ways a set of pieces can be arranged in the form of a square. Visitors are challenged to move colored pieces of felt to explore that question, a style of inquiry, Mr. Netz suggests, that had not been associated with Greek mathematics. As for the title “Stomachion,” the exhibition tells us: “In the ancient world, if you had a puzzle, you didn’t have a brain-teaser — you had stomach trouble.”

The show’s final gallery, which turns to the documents’ substance, is almost too cursory. Instead of the museum including a gallery detailing other restoration projects, it would have been far more illuminating to extend this mathematical section further.

Turn instead to the companion book and read about Archimedes’ geometric proofs. Mr. Netz argues that this manuscript’s diagrams may be closest to the ones Archimedes drew. They were not meant to be pictorial, he says. In fact, if they seemed to illustrate the conclusion too closely, they would appear more like examples than proofs.

So we see straight lines deliberately shown as curves; points placed off kilter; and here at the show, an unusual example in a discussion of floating bodies (the subject that led to the story of Archimedes leaping out of the bath in the ecstasy of insight and running naked outside shouting “Eureka!”). The diagram shows an inverted semicircle sitting inside an incomplete liquid sphere.

Archimedes, the exhibition suggests, created a “radical idealization of real-world phenomena.” But it may also be that he knew that the ideal world of straight lines and regular objects was only an approximation of the real world’s curves and complexities. Such approximations and calculations were among his preoccupations. Mr. Netz sees anticipations of 17th-century calculus and of other aspects of modern mathematics.

And we see, throughout, hints of someone standing triumphant at the borders of the ancient world, peering at us through accumulated catastrophes and layers of destruction, and surviving — just like the hero of any good thriller.

Real... Good .... Chicken Fingers! Yay

Mitzi's Chicken Fingers
SERVES 6

INGREDIENTS

FOR THE DIPPING SAUCE:
1½ cups mayonnaise
¼ cup honey
2 tbsp. roughly chopped dill
2 tbsp. fresh lemon juice
1 tbsp. dry mustard powder
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

FOR THE CHICKEN FINGERS:
2 lb. boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into 3"-long-by-1"-wide strips
1 tbsp. sugar
1 tbsp. kosher salt
1 tbsp. freshly ground black pepper
1½ tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. paprika
1 tsp. dry mustard powder
1 cup flour
4 eggs, lightly beaten
3 cups finely ground fresh breadcrumbs or panko
Canola oil, for frying

INSTRUCTIONS
1. Make the dipping sauce: In a medium bowl, whisk together the mayonnaise with the honey, dill, mustard powder, and lemon juice. Season with salt and pepper, and stir together until smooth; set honey-dill dipping sauce aside.

2. Make the chicken fingers: In a medium bowl, toss together chicken, sugar, salt, pepper, garlic powder, paprika, and mustard; set aside. Place flour, eggs, and breadcrumbs in 3 separate shallow dishes; set aside. Pour oil to a depth of 2″ into a 6-qt. Dutch oven; heat over medium-high heat until deep-fry thermometer reads 325°. Working in batches, coat chicken in flour, shake off excess, and dip in eggs; coat in breadcrumbs. Fry chicken until golden brown and crisp, about 3 minutes. Transfer to paper towels to drain. Repeat with remaining chicken. Serve with dipping sauce.

Top 10 Mahler Recordings - 2011

10 great Mahler symphony recordings
Kubelík's classic Mahler First (DG)

A cycle that draws on Gramophone’s current recommendations and The Gramophone Classical Music Guide, mindful of Gramophone Award winners (though we have replaced the studio/EMI Tennstedt Eighth with the recently released live recording from LPO, and the CBSO Rattle Mahler Second with the live BPO re-make).

Symphony No 1 – BRSO / Rafael Kubelík (DG) CD from Amazon / Download from Amazon

Symphony No 2 – Royal; Kozená; Berlin Radio Chorus; BPO / Sir Simon Rattle (EMI) CD from Amazon

Symphony No 3 – Lipton; Schola Cantorum; Choir of the Transfiguration; NYPO / Leonard Bernstein(Sony Classical) CD from Amazon

Symphony No 4 – Battle; VPO / Lorin Maazel (Sony Classical) CD from Amazon

Symphony No 5 – Philharmonia / Sir John Barbirolli (EMI) CD from Amazon

Symphony No 6 – BPO / Claudio Abbado (DG) – Gramophone Award winner – CD from Amazon

Symphony No 7 – BPO / Claudio Abbado (DG) CD from Amazon / Download from Amazon

Symphony No 8 – Varady; Eaglen; Bullock; Schmidt; Rappé; Riegel; Schulte; Sotin; Eton College Boys’ Choir; London Symphony Chorus; LPO & Choir / Klaus Tennstedt (LPO) CD from Amazon / Download from Amazon

Symphony No 9 – BPO / Herbert von Karajan (DG) – Gramophone Award winner – CD from Amazon/ Download from Amazon

Symphony No 10 – BPO / Sir Simon Rattle (EMI) – Gramophone Award winner – CD from Amazon / Download from Amazon

Hemingway's Nobel Acceptance Speech

No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with good luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.

Vann Nath

At the time of his arrest on January 7, 1978, Vann Nath was working in a rice field in his home province of Battambang like many other Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge took him to Wat Kandal, a Buddhist temple used as a detainment centre. They told him that he was accused of violating the moral code of the organization of Angka. He did not understand what that meant.

Vann Nath was a painter and writer whose memoirs and paintings of his experiences in the infamous Tuol Sleng prison are a powerful and poignant testimony to the crimes of the Khmer Rouge.

Vann Nath was an outspoken advocate for justice for victims of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge and this is reflected in his writing. His 1998 memoir A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge's S-21 Prison, about his experiences at S-21 is the only written account by a survivor of the prison. It has been translated from English into French and Swedish.

Buffalo Chicken

Buffalo Chicken Lettuce Wraps
Ingredients
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
8 large boneless, skinless chicken thighs
Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper
1 bunch green onions, thinly sliced, about 1 cup
3 medium celery ribs, diced, about 1 cup
4 medium garlic cloves, peeled and minced, about 1 tablespoon
1 whole marinated roasted red pepper, diced, about ½ cup
1 cup hot pepper sauce
1 head leaf lettuce, 25 to 30 leaves, washed and dried
Method
Heat the olive oil and butter in a large skillet over medium high heat.
Add the chicken to the pan. Season with salt and pepper. Sear the chicken until golden on both sides, about 5 minutes total. Remove the chicken to a platter.
Place the green onions, celery and garlic in the pan. Cook until soft, about 5 minutes.
Stir in the red pepper.
Place the chicken back into the pan.
Pour in the hot sauce.
Reduce the heat to medium and simmer the chicken in the sauce until cooked through, about 15 to 20 minutes.
Remove the chicken to a cutting board. Use 2 forks to shred the chicken into bite-size pieces. Place the shredded chicken back into the sauce.
Serve the shredded chicken in a bowl. Place the lettuce leaves around the side.

Day & Taxi Jazz Trio

DAY & TAXI is a Swiss jazz trio whose music is an inventive and engaging balance between the seemingly abstract avant-garde (how long does avant-ness last, anyway?) and the necessities of swing and rhythmic impetus.

And they have the most enchanting cover model I have seen in years! ;-)

Most European jazz/improv performers get stuck with the „too cerebral/can‘t swing“ tag, but DAY & TAXI avoid this, while still maintaining their „Euro“ sound and tradition – as opposed to merely emulating what they perceive to be an „American“ sound.........and Ulrich‘s crisp playing maintain the the supple and elastic forward-motion of swing, even at the more abstract moments. It‘s this quality that separates DAY & TAXI from the many squeak-and-doodle outfits that couldn‘t swing if you spotted them a trapeze. D & T play appealing, challenging and accessible compositions and improvisations, a singular combination.

Supertasks - Puzzle's Interiority

Supertasks

Supertasks have posed problems for philosophy since the time of Zeno of Elea. The term ‘supertask’ is new but it designates an idea already present in the formulation of the old motion paradoxes of Zeno, namely the idea of an infinite number of actions performed in a finite amount of time. The main problem lies in deciding what follows from the performance of a supertask. Some philosophers have claimed that what follows is a contradiction and that supertasks are, therefore, logically impossible. Others have denied this conclusion, and hold that the study of supertasks can help us improve our understanding of the physical world, or even our theories about it.

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

A bold experiment in distributed education, "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" will be offered free and online to students worldwide from October 10th to December 18th 2011. The course will include feedback on progress and a statement of accomplishment. Taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, the curriculum draws from that used in Stanford's introductory Artificial Intelligence course. The instructors will offer similar materials, assignments, and exams.

Award Winning Chairs - Lovely! ;-)

The award-winning Diz Chair by Brazilian modernist Sergio Rodrigues is made of responsibly sourced, hand-oiled eucalyptus wood with an imbuia veneer. Available in various finishes.

The iconic Eames Molded Plywood Lounge Chair, also known as the ‘most famous chair of the century,’ features a moulded plywood seat and back and hardwood inner ply for added durability.

RELIGION IN HUMAN EVOLUTION: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

RELIGION IN HUMAN EVOLUTION:

From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

By Robert N. Bellah

746 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $39.95.