Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic

I’m an undisciplined note-taker. I like to read a lot, putting post-its or other suitable markers in the pages as I go, and planning with the best of wills to take notes later. (I type very quickly, after all. I should be able to take notes even though I use so many post-its.) But then I just never get around to the sloggy, typing-it-all-in part. Recently I’ve tried to change things up. I sit down with a stack of books full of post-its and scan in just the post-it’ed bits, plucking the fluttering yellow feathers from these literary birds as I go, until I could stuff a whole pillow with used post-its by the time the night is over. I turn all the scans from any given book or article into one PDF, and I use Acrobat’s OCR capacity to make it semi-searchable. I can do something else while I work, like listen to an audiobook or podcast. I find this semi-mindless tidying of the aftermath of my reading mind’s life to be relatively pleasant activity. Now I want to take it to the next level, making the most of all my PDF’s (and docs in other formats, too, of course): does anyone here use, for example, DEVONthink, which some people have told me is good and useful. (But I am suspicious that these people are more obsessive than I about this sort of thing. I’m not a database-devotee by nature. I’m not going to go scripting stuff for DEVONthink. I know I won’t.) DEVONthink seems like a good deal because it has OCR based on ABBYYFineReader. And DEVONthink doesn’t even cost more than FineReader. Acrobat’s OCR, although adequate for basic purposes, is not great, and FineReader is supposed to be pretty good. So even if that was all I used it for …

Tell me of your time-saving note-taking methods, but don’t tell me to type it all in. What are good scanning products and OCR software suites and notetaking software. I’ve been using Zotero and I like it just fine. But maybe DEVONthink is better enough to be worth paying for, especially with the OCR?

Some thoughts, related to Michael’s ‘going pro’ post and Kieran’s recent post on impact factor. To what extent is the whole internet afflicted with the Matthew Effect? “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” If you want to be a bit more specific, to what degree are search results afflicted by it?

Let me illustrate with a couple cases I’ve personally noted, which I suspect are representative. [click to continue…]

Now why did my previous post garner scarcely a comment?

The Plain People of the Internet: It hadn’t any McArdle in it!

I: Surely, my good man, we have not come to such a pretty pass as that.

The Plain People of the Internet: But here we are, and here you are.

I: I prefer to think it was due to modesty. False modesty, perhaps. But if it weren’t for false modesty, some people would have no modesty at all. Or so I like to flatter myself.

The Plain People of the Internet: What are you babbling about, you great baby, and bottomless bag of blog posts!

I: In my post, I quoted John Kricfalusi on the baneful influence of cool. “Why do young artists say they like UPA? Because it makes ‘em cool. Hipster Emo time. (It’s also easy to fake) It’s like when teenagers discover communism. They think it’s real cool to go against common sense and experience. But then when they meet the real world head on later, they realize it was youthful folly. You’re supposed to grow out of it. I too fell under the UPA spell for the 3 weeks I wanted to be cool.” But what is it, of which he speaks? A contrarian herd instinct, thus a bleating contradition in terms? An emo knee-jerk? What is the common denominator of Gerald McBoingBoing and the dream of One World Government? In short, what’s cool? Or if you prefer, what does ‘cool’ mean? Compared to this question, the trouble with McArdle’s opposition to health care is but a bagatelle.

The Plain People of the Internet: Blast your eyes!

I: I have been doing some research on the subject. Here is a passage from Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. Joe Gargery – honest soul, who wears his heart on his rolled up sleeve, as he works an honest day at the open flame of the forge – reports on what has become of Miss Havisham’s fortune: [click to continue…]

First: why aren’t you reading more Squid and Owl? Last week we had assassination by siege engine and undersea regicide. Now we are off on a thrilling mock-Kipling romp. You are a fool not to click.

Next: even more of those psychedelic biology scans up. This one for example: [click to continue…]

I’m on this private list (a thing consisting of a set of private tubes or private trucks) on which the question arose: occult detectives? History of? I suppose it starts with Poe (where else?) Some interesting names were suggested. This site was linked.

But, tragically – sinisterly, even – no mention was made of possibly the greatest occult detective of all. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you …

He appeared in a 1940 issue of Jungle Stories, available in this volume [ amazon].

Not to give away the ending, but …

Fero, Planet Detective:

Turn-offs:
Long walks on the beach
Women

Turn-ons:
Detecting planets
Stamping out vampires of Pluto that have invaded the earth.

I learned a new word today: periplum! From wikipedia: [click to continue…]

Sigh.

You know what that means. I’ve been reading Jonah Goldberg again. Here we go, pondering the notion that a few of these teabag types might be right-wing extremists of a certain sort.

I wrote a book on fascism which tried to show that what everybody knows isn’t necessarily true. The idea that soldiers will return from war and become right-wing militants? Well, that has its roots in Fascist Italy, where veterans returned as black-shirted shock troops of “Il Duce,” Benito Mussolini. The only problem with this theory is that what they clamored for was socialism — the socialism of the trenches! — and their leader had earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the Socialist Party.

Now obviously ‘socialism of the trenches’ means something like: recover that feeling of unity and common cause we had, in the immediate aftermath of that initial irruption of chaos and disaster, when everyone set aside petty class differences and stood, shoulder to shoulder, against a perceived external enemy.

And it’s obvious that nothing like that could be spiritually akin to – oh, say, Glenn Beck’s 9/12 project. Because Glenn Beck isn’t in favor of socialism.

Sigh.

Let’s talk Texas secession. Like I said, Belle bought me this stack of old paperbacks – because she loves me – and the whole mouldering lot are turning out to be weirdly prescient. First the beaver management, now this. [click to continue…]

You know me. I love ‘em. The worse, the better.

Take the anti-same-sex-marriage stuff, for example. NRO has two perfect examples up right now: “The Future of Marriage”, signed by ‘the editors’. And Maggie Gallagher’s latest effort, “Married To Liberty?” [click to continue…]

Brad DeLong links to Matthew Yglesias linking to Damon Linker linking to my old Dead Right post. How gratifying! I was thinking of writing it all out again, in response to Charles Murray’s rather odd AEI dinner talk. But they’ve saved me the trouble. (I would like to say, however, that I prefer the term ‘Dark Satanic Millian Liberalism’ for what Linker calls ‘Donner Party Conservatism’.)

Let me make a few somewhat fresh points about stuff in the general vicinity of the Murray speech (which was well received by conservatives. Goldberg loved it, and Douthat thought it was pretty good.)

As you’ve probably noticed, conservatives tend to argue against liberalism/progressivism by asserting (plausibly) that Robespierre, or Stalin, or Hitler did bad things; then asserting (considerably less plausibly) that liberalism/progressivism somehow equals, or naturally tends to slide into, bad authoritarianism of a distinctively modern sort. Ever since Burke wrote his book about the French Revolution, some such slippery slope argument is the Ur-argument of conservatism as political philosophy.

Suppose we sketch out that thing that it is feared liberalism/progressivism will slipperily slide into. See if you don’t agree that the one thing every conservative swears up and down that he hates in all its many works and deeds, is anything resembling the following: [click to continue…]

[Note to readers: We are having a caching problem which we are trying to fix. If you see this as the top post on the front page (it shouldn’t be) try http://crookedtimber.org rather than http://www.crookedtimber.org .]

I realize that beaver management jokes are so a fortnight ago. Nevertheless, my wife – because she loves me – bought me a book on the subject. [click to continue…]

I have acquired a copy of R. Wilmott’s English Sacred Poetry of The Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1861) for the Dalziel brothers engravings. Which I am moderately pleased with. The book itself is fantastic looking. Comically heavy-bound and smoky-dark object. Zoë (age 7) got to see the thing before I did and her reaction shows she understands me well: ‘Daddy is going to love this. It even has water damage.’

And now I would like to report that the book contains the single worst argument against atheism yet devised. I present “The Atheist and the Acorn”, by Anne, the Duchess of Winchelsea. Complete with an engraving of the young PZ Myers by H.S. Marks: [click to continue…]

I just discovered that Daniel Pinkwater has a regular podcast [that’s the link to the site, but I prefer to get it through iTunes], which includes readings of his old books! He just got through chapter 3 of Borgel, which is drop-dead my favorite novel that isn’t Melville’s Confidence Man. And he’s reading other stuff with it. There’s this screamingly hilarious, alliterative bit about Bugsy Schwartz, M.D.-to-be. “I was looking after this broad with … a stomach ache.” You have to listen.

What are your favorite podcasts that I probably don’t know about? (I have this weird problem where iTunes decides it doesn’t like certain podcasts after a while and won’t download them anymore. Example: I can only download Rachel Maddow at work because my home mac doesn’t do that stuff anymore. I click. It tries for a second then gives up. Very strange.)

In other news, I haven’t been posting at the Valve of late. But I finally got back on that horse and hauled off and posted a great huge thing about literary stuff and Theory … just for those who are all nostalgic for the good old days.

God, I don’t want to read such a thing (you reasonably protest, and I can offer no cogent counter-argument.) Then, after you read it, you come back and complain: after all that hemming and hawing, you don’t even say whether Nietzsche has an unsatisfactorily one-dimensional account of power, in your considered opinion, or not?

Very well: it is my opinion that Nietzsche’s philosophy of power is precisely isomorphic, in dimensionality, to the subject matter of this work of art, “Monster Attack”, by young Eli Kochalka. It is the greatest work of art ever. Ergo, Nietzsche is a very sophisticated theorist of power!

I suggest you click on the Monster Attack link and leave it at that.

On X-Mas I gave good ol’ PZ a visit. He had up a quote from Rick Warren:

I believed that evolution and the account of the Bible about creation could exist along side of each other very well. I just didn’t see what the big argument was all about. I had some friends who had been studying the Bible much longer than I had who saw it differently…Eventually, I came to the conclusion, through my study of the Bible and science, that the two positions of evolution and creation just could not fit together. There are some real problems with the idea that God created through evolution… My prayer is that you will have this same experience!

The Bible’s picture is that dinosaurs and man lived together on the earth, an earth that was filled with vegetation and beauty…man and dinosaurs lived at the same time…From the very beginning of creation, God gave man dominion over all that was made, even over the dinosaurs.

After that, I decided to give my X-Mas presents the attention they richly deserved. The adverb that describes the way my mother-in-law shopped for me is ‘awesomely’. [click to continue…]

Eszter’s Amazon Price Discrimination post generated some heat and also light. Clearly folks are fascinated by how it all works. (I am.) So here’s something: Aaron Shepard, author of Aiming At Amazon, has posted the draft of the 2nd edition as a free PDF download (here’s the blog link; here’s a direct link to the zip file itself.)

What’s it about? I’ll quote the subtitle: ‘the NEW business of self-publishing – or – how to publish books for profit with print on demand by Lightning Source and book marketing on Amazon.’ That’s pretty narrow, so maybe you don’t care. If you do think that might be interesting, I’d say it’s a good book, and an excellent how-to. If you want a practical step-by-step to starting your own micro-publishing business, he’s got the blueprint. If that’s not for you, it’s still interesting. For example, he has smart things to say about Amazon’s apparently hair-raisingly ruthless attempts to stamp out the POD competition. (If you don’t know about that, you could start here, then graduate to reading the actual legal complaint here. It’s an ongoing class action suit.) Shepard doesn’t deny that Amazon is ruthless but he takes a small-fish-can-still-swim-here line. I’ll quote from his blog (presumably he doesn’t want his draft quoted, but it says pretty much the same): [click to continue…]