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    • When you tarry with the negative, the negative tarries with you.

      I spent last year's graduation day on campus working through Dale Snow's book on Schelling. It was the fifth consecutive year I had successfully avoided having to put on the monkey suit and suffer through the interminable ceremony*. I was pretty happy.

      Moreover, it's fun to walk around campus during the day, just because the outpouring of joy is so infectious. All these parents are there to honor their kids' accomplishments. You can hear laughter rising up from all these different groups of people distributed all across campus.

      But as the day goes on and all of the parents (and most of the students) have left, the tone of the laughter beings to shift into something a little uglier, as if it is now at someone else's expense. It becomes less dispersed, centralizing at parties around campus, in some cases devolving into the kind of primal hooting that is perhaps the purest expression of unoriginal macho energy in all of its depraved imbecility.

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    • Big Data and Big-Profit colleges

      This piece up at Salon gives a good narrative account of the problems with the for-profit college industry.  These colleges prey on vulnerable students, making sunny promises about life after graduation.  Once those students enroll, the colleges pocket the students’ federal grant and loan money.  An alarming percentage of the students don't even finish a class, much less obtain a degree of any sort.  What they mainly obtain is student-loan debt.  The industry thus combines an incredibly brazen rent-seeking to protect their access to student financial aid with a basic finance-capital accumulation by dispossession: student loans are unforgiveable, even in bankruptcy, and so these students will forever be owing ever increasing amounts of money, which gets sent directly to Wall Street.

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    • Ukrainian protesters receive text message

      We have all read various things about various agents tracking us via our phones and our phone use.  But none of them has struck me in such a visceral way as this.

      The Ukranian Government sent a text message to thousands of protestors that said: “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”  More on the technical details behind this here.  What impact do you think this will have on the protests in Kiev?   What about on future protests around the world?   Does this make you think any differently about the NSA metadata collection?

       

    • three new categoris of music, with examples

      Dad music: Huey Lewis and the News

      Cool uncle music: Elvis Costello

      Creepy uncle music: Girls' Generation, Burzum, Kid Rock, Insane Clown Possee, etc.

      [Brief reflections after the jump.]

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    • Executions, botched and proper

      Last week's botched execution in Ohio has raised questions for many people about the ethics of experimenting with untested lethal injection protocols.  But it’s not clear that the standard drug protocol is any less cruel, even if it is less unusual. 

      On Thursday, January 16, Dennis McGuire was injected with a combination of the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone.  Witnesses report that he gasped, snorted, and struggled for air for over ten minutes before being pronounced dead.  Why would Ohio turn to such a controversial and untested execution method? 

      Since 2011, one of the drugs in the standardized lethal injection protocol has become unavailable thanks to a combination of global capitalism and European law. This protocol consists of three drugs: sodium thiopental (an anaesthetic), 2) pancuronium bromide (a paralytic), and 3) potassium chloride (an electrolyte which, administered in the right way, stops the heart).  Until recently, the only US manufacturer of the first drug, sodium thiopental, was Hospira. 

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    • Everybody’s facial expression just changed. Let’s see. . . You’re either hungry or angry about something.

      I once had a student at the Ohio State University who, by very improbable means, ended up talking with then President Bill Clinton for over an hour. The guy was an Army Ranger who had been wounded in the Battle of Mogadishu (of Black Hawk Down fame) and Clinton had afterwards visited everyone in the hospital. It was pretty interesting to hear about the whole thing, but one of the weirdest aspects is that the student (with slight exaggeration) noted that everyone wounded in the battle ended up being Democrats as a result of the hours with Clinton. This was prior to Bush's wars, when even grunts overwhelmingly tended to be Republican. Also, the wounded soldiers in question had been so furious about the Somali cluster**** that an officer had yelled at them right before Clinton showed up, telling them that he was the commander in chief and they'd better be respectful. But Clinton just did his thing, staying there way over-schedule, and all of the solidiers had a blast talking with him.

      From this and other stories, I gather that Bill Clinton is an archetype of a kind of person who can have a mutually entertaining conversation with anybody in any circumstance. Of course, at the other end of the spectrum are Nietzsche's gods/monsters/philosophers, people who are only really comfortable talking with themselves.

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Problema seu’

      Rolling Stone Brasil announced their ‘Best of 2013’ lists. Topping the list of best Brazilian songs of the year, a curious item: ‘Problema seu’, by Felipe Cordeiro, a singer from the northern state of Pará. In Pará, the genre ‘brega’ (initially a pejorative word, something like tacky/distasteful/cheap, originating from a term for 'brothel') is particularly popular, with its over-the-top aesthetics and ultra-mellow lyrics, but in Pará mixed with local sounds and with a splash of Caribbean influences thrown in.

      Brega, like funk carioca, was for a long time considered to be ‘cheap music’ and frowned upon by the intellectual and cultural elite, while being widely popular with the masses. The fact that a song with a clear brega inspiration makes it to the top of Rolling Stone Brasil’s list of best songs of the year is remarkable (though in previous years brega diva Gaby Amarantos had also scored well on the RS lists), but for this song in particular, it is not that surprising considering the groovy guitar riffs, a high danceable factor, and catchy lyrics (Você pra mim/é problema seu…). So yes, a rather good song!

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    • ((Another (possibly boneheaded) question about a priori contingencies.

      I am going through David Papineau's beautiful little book, Philosophical Devices, and I've run accross a claim that I don't understand.

       

      He claims the following is a contingent fact that I can know a priori:

      (J) Julius invented the Zip.   (Where 'Julius' is defined as "the inventor of the zip.")

      He notes that "The inventor of the zip necessarily invented the zip" is ambiguous, and is true if "the inventor of the zip" is used de dicto, but false if used de re.  So far so good.

      But then he says

      (1)I can  know J a priori because I have defined "Julius" as "the inventor of the zip" but

      (2)  J is only contingently true because "Julius" is a proper name, and hence a rigid designator, and Julius might have been dropped on his head when he was a child and then not gone on to invent the zip.

      But I don't see how you can both define Julius as the inventor of the zip AND treat it as a rigid designator.  If I define Julius as "the inventor of the zip" than the statement is necessary and knowable a priori.   But if Julius is a proper name, then it doesn't admit of a definition, and hence the statement is contingent, but not knowable a priori  (if Julius is really a proper name, then a fortiori I could learn that he did not invent the zip–in some sense I take one of Kripke's main insights to be that we use names to track objects about which we could learn any number of new facts).

      The relevant passage is here.

      I'm not a philosopher of language so forgive me if I botched all this.  Thoughts?  Comments?

    • (Possibly Boneheaded) Question about Axiom of Choice, Soundness/Completeness, and Pi 2 Formulas

      I'm not a logician. Nor do I play one on T.V. So please be patient if I'm messing up something basic in what follows. An explanation of what I'm messing up and/or some relevant citations would be pretty helpful too.

      Gregory Moore's masterful Zermelo's Axiom of Choice: Its Origins, Development, and Influence contains the following passage:

      Vestiges of the first state – choosing an unspecified element from a single set – can be found in Euclid's Elements, if not earlier. Such choices formed the basis of the ancient method of proving a generalization by considering an arbitrary but definite object, and then executing the argument for that object. This first stage also included the arbitrary choice of an element form each of finitely many sets. It is important to understand that the Axiom was not needed for an arbitrary choice from a single set, even if the set contained infinitely many elements. For in a formal system a single arbitrary choice can be eliminated through the use of universal generalization or similar rule of inference. By induction on the natural numbers, such a procedure can be extended to any finite family of sets.

      I don't get this at all.

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    • Guest post by Zoe Drayson: Happiness-prediction and careers advice

      A guest post by Zoe Drayson (Stirling).

      ——

      Can you imagine being happy in a non-academic career? This question is often posed by academics to prospective graduate students, who are encouraged to pursue an academic career only if their answer is ‘no’. This advice came under Nate Kreuter’s scrutiny in a recent Inside Higher Ed column:

      Let me start this column by looking at what I think is a horrible but common piece of advice. […] I have often heard of faculty members advising prospective and current graduate students to pursue or continue their graduate studies only if "you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else." The implication, of course, is that you should only pursue an advanced or terminal degree if being a professor is the only way you can see yourself being happy […] [T]his is shockingly bad advice.

      While Kreuter worries that this advice fails to acknowledge the possibility of combining academic degrees with non-academic careers, my own concerns are more fundamental and focused specifically on the discipline of philosophy. I’m worried that, by dishing out this advice, we are unintentionally discriminating against precisely those groups of people we are trying hardest to attract and retain.

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