I still have a childhood memory of our teacher pointing out that the date was 6/6/66. Tomorrow, at one minute past midnight, in those (sensible) countries which represent dates as day/month/year, the time and date can be represented as the sequence 00:01/02/03/04 .
From the category archives:
Obiter Dicta
Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, in today’s Australian
But, of course, if the international community knew early last year what it knows now about Saddam’s WMD programs, there would have been less debate in the Security Council about the appropriate action. Kay’s report shows that removing Saddam was the only way the international community could be assured that he would no longer threaten anyone with WMDs. Far from unstuck, the WMD case is proven.
US Secretary of Defense has received general derision for the following rather convoluted statement
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know
As I’m giving two papers on this general topic in the next couple of days, I feel I should come to his defense on this. Although the language may be tortured, the basic point is both valid and important.
The ‘Gray Lady’ nickname of the NYT implies the kind of conservatism and caution that’s appropriate to a journal of record. But in what is, as far as I know, a newspaper first, today’s NYT brings the astrology column onto the Op-Ed page, providing horoscopes for the Democratic Presidential hopefuls.
I’m bemused by this. If the implied view is that astrology is so patently silly that no-one would take it seriously, isn’t this rather a juvenile trick to play on Erin Sullivan, noted as the author of Saturn in Transit and the forthcoming Astrology and Psychology of Midlife and Aging., who appears to have contributed her column in all seriousness? If the implied view is anything other than that astrology is too silly to be taken seriously, isn’t this insulting to every reader of the NYT who has even a high school level of scientific literacy? No doubt there is some ironic postmodern stance that is appropriate here, but I can’t quite locate it.
Update The Letters page ran three letters on this, one tongue-in-cheek supportive, one critical and one, from an astrologer, concluding
I hope that Ms. Sullivan’s intelligent presentation of astrology is just the first for The Times. Perhaps we now know what we’ve suspected all along: the Gray Lady always reads her horoscope like everyone else.
I think we have to conclude that the NYT is “having two bob each way”* on this one.
* This Australian idiom refers to a horesracing bet that pays off for either a win or a place.
From the NY Times:
Tim Hurd, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a branch of the Transportation Department, said a vehicle either met the specific technical requirements of being a light truck, or it did not.
Lucy Kellaway in the _Financial Times_ (my favourite columnist but subscribers only) reveals that:
bq. A new year and a new type of management hero: Tony Soprano, foul-mouthed, bullying mob boss from the telly. Tony has just had a leadership book written about him, putting him on a par with Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, General George S. Patton, Moses, Sven-Goran Eriksson and Jesus, all of whom have been sucked dry for their last management lesson. But with _Leadership Sopranos Style_ , Deborrah Himsel has taken the genre into fictional territory for the first time (that is if one gives Moses the benefit of the doubt). Ms Himsel, whose day job is vice-president of organisational effectiveness at Avon Products, explains her unusual choice of subject as follows: “Tony’s . . . results orientation and empathy are certainly at the heart of his leadership gestalt.”
As well as the Trappists (“Orval”:http://www.orval.be/an/FS_an.html , “Chimay”:http://www.chimay.be/ , “Rochefort”:http://www.producteursdupaysderochefort.be/nl/prodinfos.php?iduser=anddsr&societe=ABBAYE%20NOTRE-DAME%20DE%20SAINT-REMY ,”Westmalle”:http://www.trappistwestmalle.be/ and “Westvleteren”:http://www.sintsixtus.be/eng/index2.html – the hardest to obtain) there are many distinctive styles such as the Lambics (Gueze Belle Vue) either straight or fruit flavoured, lager-style beers, British-style beers (developed for WW1 Scottish soldiers), dark ales, white beers (such as Hoegaarden) and so on. I’ve been given many different estimates of how many different ones there are (up to 2500!) Wonderful.
A couple of follow-ups to things I’ve blogged recently: Tim Lambert has assembled “a chart of where various bloggers are”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/surveys/compass.html?seemore=y on the “Political Compass”:http://politicalcompass.org/ test. Three Timberites are listed so far. The two dimensions of the test seem to resolve to one in practice, with most people on a diagonal running from left-libertarian (hooray!) to right-authoritarian (boo!). In unrelated news, there’s an “op-ed at PLANETIZEN by Robert Steuteville”:http://www.planetizen.com/oped/item.php?id=110 on the new urbanism and crime issue (link via “City Comforts”:http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/ ).
Apparently it’s easier on your hands to type like a pirate. (Hat tip: Mark Liberman.)
Travellers on Britain’s rail network are used to long delays and an all-round miserable experience. They are also used to implausible sounding announcement involving excuses aimed at “customers” (“passengers” having been abolished by some deranged management consultant around the time of privatization). One well known one is “leaves on the line”. Now the Guardian “has an account”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1067932,00.html of why the leaves might indeed have become a problem, and only recently! “The wrong kind of snow” still awaits an adequate explanation. (Hat tip to “The Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html .)
Musing further on whether technological development has helped or hindered thinking, and especially philosophical thinking, it occurs to me that the ideas of which I’m (rightly or wrongly) most proud have generally started not when I’ve been trying to do philosophy, but when I’ve been daydreaming about it whilst doing something else: travelling on a train, riding a bicycle, swimming or whatever. Purely mechanical and repetitive activities can been good for this too, though it is for good reason that there are a whole range of philosophical stories in which philosophers let cooking pots boil over, poison people or run them down whilst in the middle of their reveries.
Then there’s the business of writing, of trying to turn ideas into publishable prose. I’ve adopted two strategies for getting this done – both of which work very well, but eventually seem to run their course.
Via both CalPundit and Mark Kleiman comes the news that Trotsky’s great-grand-daughter has a high-profile position in US administations as director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She seems to have an odd line on the incompatibility of science and politics. An interesting nugget of historical gossip, anyway.
For me, one of the interesting things about visiting another country is the slight strangeness of the everyday. In France, for example, everything is slightly different from England: light fittings, electrical sockets, window catches and openings, the fact that they don’t use kettles, the typography on signs etc etc. Having lived in France for a while, I really really enjoy films like Polanski’s The Tenant and Depardieu’s Loulou for the way in which they get the detail of French life. Ireland just isn’t weird like this. Everything is the same as back home … or so it seems. Then, having been lulled into complacency by the apparent familiarity of everyday objects one is pulled up short by something that just isn’t how an English brain expects it to be.
Pauline and I are just back from a ten-day holiday in Ireland. It was our first time there and we were impressed. It also turned out to be a pretty smart place to visit given the prevailing weather conditions: untypically there was hardly a drop of rain, but the temperatures were comfortable rather than lethally hot (as they were elswhere in Europe).
I may opine further on the country over the coming days, but given CT’s numerous Irish contingent, I’m sure to get slapped down by those with greater expertise. Without them, though, the holiday probably wouldn’t have happened and certainly wouldn’t have taken the form it did. Thanks first to Henry (and family), whom we were lucky enough to meet up with and enjoy a wonderful lunch of Killorglin smoked salmon provided by his mum, which we followed by an exciting drive across the Kerry mountains. Here’s a partial Crooked Timber team photo in Kerry (Henry is the tall, handsome one).
And thanks to Kieran, whose post last year about Newgrange set me thinking about visiting Ireland. Newgrange is a remarkable and magical place which puts Stonehenge in the shade. 5200 years old, perfectly aligned with the sun for the winter solstice, and absolutely dry inside after five millennia. What an achievement.
This particular bit of wood is off for a brief holiday in Ireland. Henry reported a while back that internet access isn’t great. So even if I wanted to, I probably couldn’t blog. With luck, I should meet up with Henry in Kerry somewhere – thereby doubling the number of Timberites I’ve encountered in “real life”.