Philosophical Questions Every Day, a blog

Philosophy is often considered one of the academic subjects less suited for amateur study. There is a truly unfortunate cultural perception of its opacity and limited applicability -- that "real philosophers" are eggheads in ivory towers whom nobody else can access.

This is just blatantly untrue.

Anyone who enjoys thinking in the abstract and hypothetical, who considers their place in the world, who has opinions about right and wrong that they can justify, is interested in philosophy.

Enter this blog:
http://www.pqed.org

It poses excellent, thought-provoking philosophical questions about current events and mundane issues, and includes non-academic discussion of these topics. It's well worth reading.

In particular, it provides a good list of book recommendations for the layperson interested in philosophy:
http://www.pqed.org/2014/01/reader-question-what-can-i-read-to.html#more

A gem of a find. I hope it will increase awareness of philosophy, and mindfulness in general.

"Borges and I" by Jorge Luis Borges

I was just rereading one of my favorite short stories, and I wanted to share it with all of you. It's a very short piece called "Borges and I" by Jorges Luis Borges, and may be found here:
http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/borg&i.htm

It's not precisely a story, and it's so short that it might qualify more as flash fiction or microfiction -- or perhaps not any sort of fiction at all. I first encountered it, that I can remember, in a philosophy of literature course at university. Even then, I was awed by the way the piece conveys all the meaning of an essay in just a few paragraphs. It's stayed with me, the idea of the human being as a vessel for the creative spirit, much like Athena in the skull of Zeus.

In particular, there's the line "I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me." I find that over the past few years, I've appropriated that term, "justify," for my own use when thinking about creative output, human identity, and self-worth. It's a particularly powerful word in that it demands an answer. A person spends a lifetime striving for that answer -- especially artists, philosophers, creators, and others who feel the need to pursue goals greater than themselves.

It also introduces, in just a few turns of phrase, the dichotomy of solitary creation and human experience. Art is usually a form of commentary and a crystallization of ideas -- even if the artwork and the artist espouse no agenda nor any overt message. Good art requires some understanding of the themes and cadences of human existence, of living our lives on this planet. And yet so often, when an artist in the act is not experiencing anything new of the outside world; rather, he experiences himself in the act of creation. So, in one flesh and one mind, there must be some rub between the human being who lives and learns, and the artist who creates. Is it, then, the artist's fate to oscillate forever?

Just some food for thought, going into the new year. (The lunar New Year was this weekend.)

Free Will and Nuclear Winter

I've been thinking, lately, about free will -- and I recalled this article that I read last year. It's a good, concise analysis of causality (particularly the bits about levels of complexity), and addresses some of the fallacies of breaking down human behavior into ever-smaller constituent components:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/09/free_will_debate_what_does_free_will_mean_and_how_did_it_evolve.html

The question is a version of "are we more than the sum of our parts?" Many people attempt to derive an answer from religion, espousing a concept of "soul," a metaphysical quantity that science is -- by definition -- unable to prove or disprove. But in the absence of such a belief, are we not just collections of atoms? Isn't each of our thought processes a mere chemical reaction in our neurons? It's a chilling way to think about ourselves; the idea that there is only one possible course of events because our actions are governed by a set immutable physical laws, that each circumstance leads logically into a specific next circumstance, is essentially a secular version of the idea of fate or predestination.

But there's a scientific argument against fate: the multiverse. If there is an infinite number of possible universes, infinitely many points at which one universe becomes multiple, then there isn't one logical state for the universe at any given point in time. The possibility of parallel universes implies, if not conscious choice at all times, then at least many possible outcomes, none of which are certain to happen. Quantum physics likewise deals with uncertainty -- with thought experiments such as Schroedinger's Cat, in which a situation manifests both possible outcomes simultaneously. Science, it appears, disproves fate.

Then, there are situations like this one, in which one person's choice, a split-second decision in a situation of incomplete information, may have prevented all-out nuclear destruction:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24280831

Given a circumstance like this, it's hard not to believe in free will. I'm sure that there's a parallel universe out there in which the world ended on September 26, 1983.

The Economist: The Dream of Interstellar Starships, or, the Hows and Whys of Technology

I'm in California, hanging out with a lot of techie folks whom I met at university. We've talked about things like Amazon drones and Elon Musk's proposed hyperloop... and naturally I was reminded of this article, which I saw in The Economist a month or two ago:

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21588349-if-starships-are-ever-built-it-will-be-far-future-does-not-deter

Scientists have been contemplating interstellar travel for as long as science fiction authors have been writing about it (indeed, these two groups have a significant overlap). The above article catalogues some of the problems facing any space-adventuring hopefuls, most notably that of propulsion. It also asks the important question of why.

I was just discussing with a college friend the differences between the humanities and the sciences. It's engineers like them -- like the people I know who work at tech companies up and down the Bay -- who give us the means to achieve what could scarcely be imagined a few generations ago. The sciences answer the question of how. But for what purpose? To what end? Those are the questions the humanities hope to answer -- but we have too few people asking, and too few caring to ask.

There's always hype about the next great "disruptor" in the marketplace, the technology that no one ever imagines he needs, but which he soon finds indispensable (see Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, for example). But I can't help wondering: what kind of society do these visionaries hope to create with their revolutionary ideas? (There's Google's "Don't be evil," but that's hardly descriptive. It's not proscriptions, but rather prescriptions that build a new future.) Beyond the often nebulous concept of improving quality of life, how do inventors imagine their products shaping our society? (Interstellar travel, a la Star Trek, would irrevocably change the way we live and our understanding of our place in the universe.) As the article points out, "Because we can" is not a sufficient reason--it doesn't tell us why.

Some food for thought. I'll likely revisit this topic after my trip.

Reality, Relativity, and Light

I read José Saramago's The History of the Siege of Lisbon last week -- in translation, of course, since I don't read Portuguese. It's excellent, and somewhat stylistically and structurally unusual. But I was struck, in particular, by this line, spoken to the protagonist by his lover (the relationship is rather more complicated than that, of course):

Switch on the light, she said, I want to know if this is real. (p264)

The relationship between any two people -- even within family, even between people who might have known each other their whole lives -- is a fragile thing. Within that relationship, there are layers of reality, of perception. It's a sort of relativity, even -- one that isn't governed by any laws of physics. His reality and hers could be completely different, and each moment's reality different from the next. It's odd to think that we can never know what another person's reality looks like; the closest we can come is to achieve an understanding of how our reality compares to what we perceive to be their reality, with full awareness that our vantage point colours our reading.

This is especially relevant to the subject matter because the 1147 Siege of Lisbon, about which the protagonist writes, was a manifestation of a centuries-old clash of cultures and religions, a battle between two peoples who understood the same God through different scriptures and different prophets. Elizabeth I once said, in another century about another religious conflict, "I would not open windows into men's souls." Such windows can only be approximated, even in the best of circumstances.

I'm also taken by the Saramago's use of light in this scene -- something one normally associates with visual art rather than with prose. It's ripe with symbolism; the notion of shedding light on something intangible, that our eyes can tell us about reality between two people, &c. I'm reminded of two things:

Perhaps we may frighten away the ghost of so many years ago with a little illumination...
~ "The Phantom of the Opera," Act I, Scene 1

So many years after the events of "The Phantom of the Opera," the very chandelier that was associated with the disaster perpetrated by the Phantom is now a source of illumination -- both as a refurbished light fixture, and as a window into the murky past, the audience's introduction to the story. Because it is an inanimate object with a lofty vantage point, it is, in a fashion, the impartial observer of the story. And yet, it is also a crucial "participant" in the story. Its impartiality is not so much due to its placement, a lamp hanging high above the human characters, but rather because it has no free will, no desires or motivations of its own.

The second thing is Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Our understanding of what goes on inside another person's mind is rather like to the prisoners' understanding of the shadows on the wall. Another person's reality undergoes several layers of translation before it becomes comprehensible to us; the "truth" is distorted by their perception, interpreted by their mind, conveyed by their words, filtered by our ears, and only then is it analyzed by our minds. Plato's prisoners are eventually unchained, but there is no way for any of us to overcome this process of interpretation. The amount that must get lost in translation is mind-boggling. It makes me wonder what a society of perfect communication (of telepathy, essentially) would look like.

Edit: Soon after writing this post, I chanced upon an io9 article about philosophical thought experiments: http://io9.com/9-philosophical-thought-experiments-that-will-keep-you-1340952809@AnnaleeNewitz. The third entry therein, "The Beetle in the Box" (aka the Private Language Argument), is very much like what I discuss above. The second entry, "Mary the Colorblind Neuroscientist" (aka the Inverted Spectrum Problem), is also quite similar to the Allegory of the Cave. It's well worth reading.

io9: Why Eugenics is a Bad Idea (aside from all the obvious moral reasons)

I recently read Paolo Bacigalupi's short story collection Pump Six and Other Stories, which is deliciously creepy and dystopian. That anthology, and this io9 article (which I read at around the same time), got me thinking about human genetic engineering on a macroscopic scale:
http://io9.com/5925024/why-eugenics-will-always-fail

Our notions of eugenics can be roughly sorted into two categories: ways to optimize our species (for some agreed-upon and likely artificial optimal characteristics), and ways to eliminate genetic weaknesses (an extremely aggressive, sentient form of Darwinism). The former option represents selecting for a hypothetical upper bound, and the latter would be selecting against a lower bound.

When we talk about eugenics, most of us imagine the first option. The cultural connotation of the term "eugenics" includes the Holocaust, the book Brave New World, and the film "Gattaca" -- all of which involve human rights violations. In selecting for a certain ideal, a society makes mincemeat of the rights of those who fall below the arbitrary cut-off. Because eugenics usually comes with gross restrictions of free will -- and in many cases, murder -- we tend to see it as a purely moral evil. This usually brings about international intervention (the timeliness and effectiveness of said interventions being a different matter entirely), or at least the common recognition that such atrocities ought to be prevented.

The above io9 article lays out a few intuitive arguments against eugenics from a practical perspective, contending that -- morality aside -- it simply wouldn't be effective. They boil down to: imprecision, biodiversity, and the limitations of human foresight. (In essence, the short-term microscopic, the middle-term macroscopic, and the long-term in both. The article explains in further detail.) We don't know enough (and likely will never know enough) to get away with attempting to fashion our species in the image of some ideal -- not to mention that it would be impossible to get all seven billion of us to agree on said ideal in the first place. These are all, however, problems that arise when selecting for an upper bound, a hypothetical ideal specimen of humanity.

A (very) soft version of a scenario where we select against a lower bound is already in place, given amniocentesis and women's right to abort. Many women choose to abort after they receive an abnormal genetic diagnosis -- when the fetus has a genetic or congenital defect that would severely diminish the hypothetical child's lifespan or quality of life. The logic is that never existing -- which, for the record, is distinct from ceasing to exist after a period of existence -- is preferable to a life of pain and suffering with little ability to self-actualize. Self-actualization is incredibly important -- it's what makes us human and distinguishes us from other animals. This form of selection, which can be considered a mild and diffuse form of eugenics, increases the average human being's ability to self-actualize, thereby increasing (in a thought experiment where sentience is quantifiable on a scale) our species's average sentience through conscious choice by prospective parents -- a rough extension of natural sexual selection, in the way that most technologies exacerbate existing dilemmas and play upon existing quirks of human nature, rather than creating new ones where they didn't exist before. (To be clear, I recognize that I just exploded a can of worms -- that humans aren't generally more or less sentient than other humans, and that legally, ethically, metaphysically, &c. we all ought to be considered equally sentient, except in cases of limited ability to consent (i.e. children, mentally disabled persons), in which case laws are made to protect said people.)

The danger, then, is where the upper and lower bound options meet in the middle. (I'm resisting the obvious temptation to make some horrible joke about quantum mechanics and relativity here.) It's significant, therefore, that the former option is mandated by an external force and doesn't allow parents to meaningfully consent; the latter option is voluntarily initiated by the potential parents. The lower bound scenario never turns into the problematic upper bound scenario precisely because of this element of free will. The moment it moves from a bottom-up to a top-down approach -- when it veers too close to selection for an ideal, thereby impinging upon the rights of the sentient but non-ideal population -- it becomes the morally degenerate form of eugenics of genocide and dystopian science fiction. There lies the bright-line we should be aware of.

And that's all for now. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

The Economist: On Pollution, China is Better and Worse Than We Think

I'm reading Jared Diamond's excellent book Collapse (you know it's important when it has its own Wikipedia page!), which devotes a whole section to the real sociopolitical dangers modern China faces as a result of environmental fragility and degradation. I rather serendipitously happened upon this article in The Economist, which discusses developments therein (both good and bad) since Collapse was published in 2005:

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21583245-china-worlds-worst-polluter-largest-investor-green-energy-its-rise-will-have

I subsequently ended up thinking a lot about the subject, so I thought I'd muse about it in prose. (Sometimes -- very occasionally -- I miss writing essays for college history classes...) This post is rather long, so I've put it below the cut:

Faulkner on Literature, Humanity, and Immortality

On Sunday, I had dinner with my friend Brett after an afternoon visit to the Met. I was telling him about an amazing, inspiring book talk I'd recently attended: it was a conversation between Adam Johnson, a Stanford English professor and this year's Pulitzer winner in fiction, and Fredrik Logevall, a Cornell history professor and the Pulitzer winner in nonfiction, moderated by their editor, David Ebershoff, of Random House.

Brett was reminded of (and sent me) this particular speech delivered by William Faulkner on the acceptance of his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html

It's brilliant and quite worth reading (and not very long) -- so do actually read it! Faulkner's claim is, essentially, that literature -- the written word, storytelling, art -- is humanity's way of achieving some semblance of immortality. He writes not of the genetic "immortality" perpetuated by our biology, of course; I think one of the prerequisites of sentience is a consciousness of meaning greater than base instinct. Rather, Faulkner speaks to our legacy as a species -- the ideas, the intellectual and creative achievements by which humanity might define itself.

Literature is one such vehicle. I would hesitate to call it a record -- that term falls too much in the realm of historiography (which is itself an ambitious and meaningful endeavour, of course) -- but perhaps one might consider literature the pared-down essence of what it means to be human. In books, in art, we see reflected not only the best (and the worst) -- but also the deepest, truest, and most beautiful aspects of ourselves. In literature, we are immortal -- not only the writer, and sometimes not the writer at all (Homer is the example that comes to mind) -- but we, as a sentient species, are captured, burnished, chased in silver -- forever.

Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment centuries earlier:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
(Sonnet 18, lines 13-14)

Today

I performed at an open mic for the first time in a while. I went to the one at Pete's in Brooklyn, a cozy, non-judgmental venue I've played on occasion in the past. I had a new song to try out in front of an audience, and I don't think I have been this nervous about performing in quite a long time.

Art -- true art -- is terrifyingly honest, terrifyingly intimate. I would liken it to a flaying of the soul, so that complete strangers can see my bones and sinews, the colour of my blood and the ticking of my heart. It's the baring of the darkest and most vulnerable parts of oneself, the parts that make us most human. The fact that we can write about such things, can continue to sing about them and use them to fuel our greatest creative works, means that we are every day surviving them and weaving them into the fabric of our existence.

Part of what moves us to create, what drives us (or at least me) to write, is that it's an extension -- even a distillation -- of self. I've often heard writers say that there's a piece of themselves in every work of literature they produce. One's creation never quite lives up to the vision in one's mind, no matter how we strive for perfection, but seeing it actualized on the page fulfills in us a primal need to see ourselves (our thoughts, our dreams, our nightmares) reflected in the world around us -- the wonderful, frightening, and utterly strange place that it is.

So I sat on a barstool, under a spotlight in a dark room where I didn't know anybody, looking out into that small sea of upturned faces. I was there to play a song that I was in serious danger of not being able to finish -- I am still too close to the material. I had other pieces I could have performed instead and no one would have been the wiser -- and for a few heart-stopping moments I considered switching songs -- but I felt that I owed it to myself to bite down and see it through. The very nature of art, it occurred to me then, meant that -- if I was doing it right -- I would always be, in some capacity, too close to the material. It's not supposed to be safe or comfortable or without risk. It's meant to be honest, a reckoning you're never quite ready for.

On that stage, fingering the first few notes on my ukulele, I realized that I couldn't make out a single face in the crowd -- that I wasn't playing for them at all. I wasn't thinking about whether they would enjoy it or what they would think of me. All I knew was that, in those five minutes, for all that it would leave me gutted and flayed, I had to get through the song for me. It was the most perfectly selfish thing -- and it was exactly what I needed.

I sang it with my eyes squeezed shut. I left out one or two chords in the middle of the piece. My voice cracked once -- I may have choked up at some point. But I remembered all of the words, and in the right order. It was not my best performance, but by god, it was art. 

And the moment of silence before the applause, when all I could hear was the buzz of the stage lights and the thundering of my own heartbeat in my ears -- that was a small victory in itself.

Erasmus, the Consummate Bibliophile

Story of my life:

When I get a little money, I buy books. If any is left, I buy food and clothes. 

~ Erasmus

To reassure those of you with concerns about my continued survival... I doubt I'd ever actually resort to such extremes. Library cards, after all, didn't exist in the fifteenth century.

And of course, Erasmus is one of my favorite Catholic philosophers, though admittedly, I admire him more for his humanism than for his religion. (Granted, his being Dutch -- as opposed to, say, Spanish -- during the Renaissance might have something to do with it.) In a day and age filled with all manner of extremists, he was a moderate -- a principled, rational, articulate moderate, and a champion of religious tolerance amidst rampant sectarian violence. It was all the books, of course! :-)

Discover: How Would Time Travel Actually Work (or, something for all the Whovians)?

A good, cogent article on the physics of time travel:
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/mar/02-the-real-rules-for-time-travelers/

I first encountered this explanation of time travel in Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban, where Harry and Hermione use a Time-Turner to save Sirus and Buckbeak. (I trust that I didn't spoil the book for anyone -- and if I did, you're way behind the times!) The detail of the Time Turner chapter that I found most memorable was the thud of the executioner's axe: Harry and Hermione heard it fall in real time and assumed that Buckbeak had been beheaded; however, when they went back in time to rescue the hippogryff, they realized that the sound they'd thought was Buckbeak's decapitation was actually the executioner swinging the axe into a hunk of wood in frustration upon discovering that Buckbeak had escaped. Harry and Hermione, therefore, did not change the timeline using the Time Turner; rather, events incorporated all nonlinear parts and intersections of the timeline.

The concept of free will, as the above article notes, becomes problematic if this framework of time is true. Nature, it would seem, is more like a Greek tragedy than we Americans would like to believe. We are uncomfortable with the idea of external limits on our free will, and time is too nebulous to most of us to think its laws as insurmountable as, say, those of Newtonian physics. If we were told that our free will is limited by gravity (no matter how much we might wish to levitate through the air, we cannot), we do not find it unjust. Told that Oedipus had no choice but to kill his father and marry his mother, despite all of his attempts to escape his fate, we find his situation grossly unfair. The above description of time travel suggests that our universe operates more like Oedipus's than we'd imagined.

I believe in free will. I do. But I'd love to try time travelling -- it sounds fascinating.

Beauty and Madness

 I've been reading some William Morris for a literature class on medievalism (both medieval literature and Victorian medievalism). This line, in particular, struck me:

 I was half mad with beauty on that day...

~ William Morris, "The Defence of Guenevere"

I've noticed that beautiful people, and people who create beautiful things, are often a little mad. (By "beautiful people," I mean people who have beautiful souls or minds, not attractive exteriors.) There's a sort of fragile beauty, the sort where you can hear the madness vibrating under the surface, like an impossibly light glass orb that might shatter if you touch it. It's the wildness of it, the thrill of unpredictability. It's the beauty of the endangered predator, the tiger that doesn't know it's one of the last of its kind, that can still kill you where you stand.

Madness itself can be beautiful, in its own way (hence the Gothic novel). There's a certain purity to madness, in that everything that affects a lunatic ultimately comes from within her own head (much of it is exhibited as response to stimuli, but the response is atypical -- i.e. not socially dictated). The greater part of the significance that literature assigns to madness is the uniqueness of its perspective.

Western culture idealizes individualism to an extent unmatched in other societies -- and that applies to Western intellectual culture as well. I think of it, sometimes, as the "genius in a box" phenomenon. People are attracted to the image of great ideas springing fully formed from the aether, like Athena from Zeus's head. They like thinking that geniuses are born, not made, and that they achieve their success purely through their own inscrutable methods. Of course, this construct doesn't quite reflect reality; as Newton once said, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." (His expression of the sentiment is the most famous, but not the first; the earliest known attribution is to Bernard of Chartres.) I actually just read, for a history of science class, an interesting book by Peter Galison entitled Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps, which argues (perhaps a tad overzealously) that Einstein, the quintessential representation of genius in modern Western culture, was inspired in the formation of his theories of relativity by the mathematician Henri Poincaré. One can't be a pioneer in one's field without having a good grasp of the work that preceded one's own. Genius is hardly ever as isolated as the romantic ideal would have it.

The thing is, genius is isolating only insofar as society renders it so. There were plenty of intellectuals throughout history who, in addition to being brilliant, were also scintillating conversationalists, consummate socialites and courtiers, and infamous Lotharios -- Renaissance men, as it were. It's terribly unfortunate that in the modern day, intelligence is seen as a social liability (that's probably a reflection on the state of American society, but we'll not go there tonight). But it's that isolation that makes it seem mysterious, unattainable -- and therefore beautiful.

A bit of a digression, I suppose. Perhaps not quite what Morris was going for, but that's how I read it.

NYTimes: What's in a Name?

Seeing as it's Thanksgiving -- a celebration of family and loved ones -- I thought that this would be an appropriate article to post; it's an observation on an inevitable quandary in naming trends, given recent (within the past several decades) developments in gender equality and increasingly diverse modern familial structures:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/fashion/babies-surnames-to-hyphenate-or-not.html?_r=1&ref=fashion?src=dayp

I've given this a fair bit of thought. As a heterosexual female, Western social customs would have me relinquish my surname in favor of my hypothetical husband's, if I were to marry at some point in my life. I'm not so keen on that, myself; I'm rather attached to my last name. It has a history behind it, a connection to generations of family and culture.

Ergo, one of my goals in life is to achieve a level of "success" (definition variable) such that if the time comes, it would appear to be logical (rather than vain or self-serving) to keep my surname. It's rather sad that society is still at a stage where a woman needs a reason to keep her maiden name, while a man may do so merely by virtue of his Y chromosome. I hope that someday, English-speaking society will have progressed such that women keep their own names as a matter of course, and some equitable system exists whereby children's surnames are evenly distributed between their sire and dam.

I'm not sure about hypothetical children (haven't given them much thought -- I'm many years too young for that!) but I imagine it would depend a lot on the ethnic origins of their father. Surnames in some languages lend themselves more readily to hyphenation than those in others. I'd want them to have a Chinese name, too. If the father were non-Chinese, I'd like to give them my own Chinese family name to use in contexts that would require it; phonetically deriving one from the father's surname seems a little cheap, next to a name with history and family.

Interestingly, in Chinese society, women retain the use of their maiden names throughout life; it's only when referring to them specifically as "wife of so-and-so" that they go by the equivalent of "Mrs." Gender equality is, in some respects (this is a pretty significant caveat), more apparent in modern Chinese society (i.e. beginning with my generation). I think it has a lot to do with the One Child Policy, in that if parents have only one child, they will give it the best they can in the way of opportunity and attention. There is much less opportunity for parents to favor sons over daughters (after the birth of the child; female infanticide is still a problem in some areas), because they typically only have one child to dote upon. The surname given to the child is still the father's, so it's not a perfect system, by any means, but in this specific practice, it's a bit closer to gender equality than in English-speaking countries.

A Transcendentalist Microwave

A picture of our microwave:



It's Lucas's doing. Not that I don't approve, of course.

The Marrow of Life

I don't normally read The Stanford Review, but something struck me about this particular article:
http://blog.stanfordreview.org/2011/01/28/the-intensely-lonely-world-of-stanford-students/

It's not breathtakingly profound, or even anything that hasn't been said before, but it does make me think, sometimes, about what I'm doing here at Stanford. In twenty years, I'm not going to remember my midterms, my problem sets, the paper I pulled an all-nighter trying to finish. I know, rather, that I'll remember the wonderful friends I made, the late-night conversations, and the random crazy stunts we pulled. Those are the memories I should be making in my last year here. As Henry David Thoreau once wrote:

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life... (Walden, Chapter 2)

I've promised myself: I'll do something interesting, fun, and maybe unexpected every week (or even more than once a week, if I can). It might be something simple and solitary, like finding a good poem, or learning to cook something new. It might be a fun activity with friends, like attending a dance event, or having a long and interesting conversation with somebody. And I'll try my damnedest not to let the relative isolation of my dorm (Mirrielees, which does have its perks, like a kitchenette and a bathroom in each suite), or the scattering of my friends, or my rather demanding course load, stop me.

So, for those of you at Stanford, if there's something you think I'd like to try, or something you think I don't know much about, by all means, drag me to your event! If you just want to chat, stop by for dinner or tea. Chances are, I don't see you nearly as often as I'd like.

Snippets from Summer Reading (Just My Type, by Simon Garfield)

Something to live by:

By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately, and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.

~ Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style (Just My Type, p258)

Something to amuse (but nonetheless wise):

The good type designer ... realizes that, for a new fount to be successful, it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty. If my friends think that the tail of my lower-case r or the lip of my lower-case e is rather jolly, you may know that the fount would have been better had neither been made.

~ Stanley Morison, of The Times (Just My Type, p259)

It's an excellent book, besides.

NYTimes: Meat without Slaughter

A most interesting article on synthetic meat and its moral implications, from one of my favorite New York Times blogs (Dot Earth):

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/meat-without-slaughter/

I can sort of understand why some people might be "squicked" (for lack of a better term) by the idea, but I'd be all for synthetic meat, if it were indeed identical to (or better than) naturally-begotten meat and the production process were better for the environment than the current one (which I imagine wouldn't be all that hard for synthetics to achieve). I'd be curious to know what a moral vegetarian (that is, someone who abstains from meat for ethical reasons) thinks of it.

All Roads Lead to Philosophy

 According to Wednesday's xkcd, if you click through the first non-italicized, non-parenthetical link on any Wikipedia page, and keep clicking through every subsequent page, you will eventually reach the article "Philosophy". Naturally, I had to try this:

NYTimes: Morality and Human Nature

I found this really interesting article a long while back, on the origins and development of the sense of morality in humans:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?hpw

It's really validating for an optimist; I've always believed that people are fundamentally good. We are, methinks, born with a sense of natural law, of right and wrong -- and this is only a small exaggeration. It is usually those with innate psychological imbalances, or those exposed to corrupting social influences, or those who have been driven by circumstances to desperation and folly, &c., who do evil. Humans tend not to be evil by choice; evil is often motivated by lesser vices, such as laziness, pride, and so forth.

Anyhow, you should read the article for yourself; they talk about a lot of interesting case studies and experiments therein.

NYTimes: Plants and Animals are Not So Different After All

I have been asked, quite a few times over the years, why I am not vegetarian. To those who know me, my personal sense of ethics and morality seems extremely compatible with the values espoused by many vegetarians to justify their choice. I have never quite been able to explain myself to the complete satisfaction of the inquirers; this article does a very good job of it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/science/15food.html

What do you think?