Okay, I have just about had it with this fellow and his astonishing brain. I stumbled upon his blog on one of my word searches as he has a fairly comprehensive list of nautical terms, briefly defined, and had been at it like me only smarter, more energetic and professional, putting up obscure words on the web for his own and a smattering of fellow humans’ edification. Had I pursued my academic career, I could only have hoped to be as frenetic and delightful a professor, and not a chance I would have been as well-read.
So here I was hoping to purloin some bit of wisdom from his website to spark my brain into remembering a word it was looking for in the recesses of my mind, or just something to help keep my metaphors on track, and had to click on this link which turns out to be an introduction to a course he is offering this fall, with this bizarre title, at least to the non-polymath: Anthro X: An anti-seminar in culture and cognition. Now I am not a big fan of anthropology, and it played a stellar role in one of our offspring’s disillusionment with a fine Canadian university that seems to be running on the fumes of its past greatness, not that I am bitter or anything. But not to throw out the baby with the bath-water, just because anthropology as a soft science has attracted many weak logicians to its jacuzzi, does not mean there isn’t a hot baby to be kept.
Which all brings me to his reading list from which I have chosen a few gems to get you started, but I will send you to his blog to see the pharmacopeia for the mind that Stephen Chrisomalis has assembled.
[OMG, I just went and checked his name and where he teaches: he graduated from McGill in Montreal, which just might be the fine Canadian university to which I referred in the last paragraph that chewed up and spat out our child, and now he teaches at Wayne State, in beautiful Detroit, Michigan, a state that I believe is well represented by my copious readers, and from which my marvellous nephew-in-law was sprung. Maybe Professor Chrisomalis will meet Rodriquez! He specializes in numerical anthropology and was the fellow who noticed that we could celebrate Pi approximation day here in Canada, being sensible about the way we write the date and therefore never experiencing the joy of March 14th being Pi day, 3/14 to Americans, but having to wait until July 22nd, because dividing 22 by 7, that day being 7/22 to us logical Canadians, you can approximate Pi, which just has to do.]
Malafouris, Lambros. 2013. How things shape the mind: a theory of material engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Saxe, Geoffrey. 2012. Cultural development of mathematical ideas.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tomasello, Michael. 2014. A natural history of human thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wengrow, David. 2013. The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2013. Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wynn, Thomas, and Frederick Coolidge. 2012. How to think like a Neandertal. New York: Oxford University Press.
See you next year …
That last book looks like a eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious read, and in fact tangentially related to my current endeavor- Songlines by Bruce Chatwin- relating how the Australian Aborigines “sang” the earth into existence.
good grief.
like we need more soft science. is meteorology a soft science? we had zero percent chance of rain overnight, at least at midnight when i went to bed. turns out we got 2/3 of an inch of rain last night. um, that’s a lot here… this isn’t Cambodia. well that explains what all that wretched noise was, and why we got awful sleep with all the cats in the bed.
we all know economics is a soft science. so finally the ECB will begin its QE (quantitative easing) program. you know, if something doesn’t work, it’s because you’re not doing enough of it. i mean Japan and the USA would be fully recovered if just a few more millions, billions, trillions of Yen and dollars would have been so effortlessly printed. it would have trickled down simply due to the sheer weight of all that money. and it’s unfair that only bankers receive money for doing no actual work, which i will simply define as producing something of value. print enough so that the rest of us can retire wealthy, and right now. i believe what the world needs is literally an avalanche of fake money, along with more fake statistics, fake science, and more study of all this fakeness, including the study of fake words like QE.
and now if you really want to start off your morning dumb, read this…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_anthropology
rant off 🙂
QE is good for asset prices, which thankfully, I have some, but if you are waiting for it to trickle down to employment and wage strength for yourself or your college age kids, forget about it. Trickle down is a proven fraud, perpetrated by those with assets to begin with.
On the other hand, you could bounce 180 the other way and contend that Avg. Joe would be better off with austerity and honest money, but that’s a proven failure as well. It took two world wars and the great depression to finally put the nail in the coffin on that nightmare and I hope it never comes back. Hard money means scarce money and Avg. Joe has enough trouble as it is.
Is there an answer? Not that I know of. I suspect it has more to do with wage differentials between the developed world and the developing world than anything, which means it’s still going to get darker before the dawn (for Avg. Joe), regardless of who’s economists rule the day.
In the meantime, it makes sense to fully maintain safety net programs, just when we need them. To do otherwise is beyond evil.
Frankly, bottom up is my choice. Prime the frickin pump. I think it would do more good to write a $3,000 check to every man, woman, and child in the country than everything else they’ve done in the last 6 years combined. Oh, how the nutbags would howl! The entertainment value there alone would be “Priceless”.
In the meantime, party on with stocks. Come on Mario, pull the trigger baby, don’t just talk us to death.
Potentially huge development in the Battle For The US Senate today.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/04/1327008/-Daily-Kos-Elections-Poll-Explorer-Kansas-switcheroo-blows-up-our-model-in-a-good-way
My daily driver Hyundai is sold to the aforementioned niece. The Dog Car is now pressed back into service as the daily driver, until I find something else.
180k on it. I’m stubbornly targeting 200k at which time I’ll probably drive it straight to the boneyard. If the dogs hadn’t destroyed the interior it would probably still be practical to fix.
What I really want is a brand spanking new Subaru Impreza 5 door, but because of the oil burning problems I previously mentioned on the new engines, I think I need to wait a year or two and see if Subaru gets on top of this. I’ll likely buy another junker for now. I’ll be Dog Car and Dog Car Lite for a couple of years.
http://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1092813_some-2011-2014-subarus-to-get-new-piston-rings
it rained a lot more here than i thought. we received more than 1.5 inches (3.8 cm)
here last night.
as far as the bottom up approach i agree. but $3000 is a slap in the face. what would the total past amount of QE be per capita?
i do not know how one could calculate true wage differentials between countries. what i do know is that if the average Joe in the USA could survive on two dollars a day, that is about what he’d be paid. (after 30 years of trickle down, supply side, greed is good, Reaganomics, Koch Bro’s style liberty/freedom er i mean Tea Party, or whatever else you want to call this absolute crock of shit.
Well, 3k per head is about a billion dollars, which is not nothing, and would probably do more good than the many more billions pissed away so far. That was my point.
In popcorn news, we’ve added turning all the outside lights on at night, and all the kitchen lights too (popcorn is right out the kitchen window). It seems to have helped, but twice now we’ve looked in the morning and thought all looked well, only to find a chewed up cob on the lawn later in the afternoon. Could we have possibly missed it? Once maybe, but twice, I don’t think so. Someone is stealing from us in broad daylight. That takes the raccoons out of contention, and puts squirrels and foxes back in the spotlight.
And today, with monsoon rains overnight, we have soggy ground, tippy corn, and gusty winds. Lots of stalks tipped over today. Trouble in Popcorn Paradise. What formerly looked like a potential record crop now looks like it will be lucky to avoid being the worst ever. Maybe next year I grow carrots and be done with it. That’ll learn ’em!
On the 3k per head thing, in their heart of hearts the wingnut response would be “White people OK, but darkies too? That’s socialism!”
Crap sakes, just heard thunder. Radar says more rain on the way…
i did not see all your other posts before posting that above. so i have a few more thoughts. i think we are witnessing the end of capitalism itself. i think the economic system we have will clearly be seen in hindsight at some point as having been about 400 years long and began with what is called modern banking in England or the Netherlands.
unbelievable that this does not get more mention in the financial press. is Bill Gross really so thoroughly discredited now?
http://www.pimco.com/EN/Insights/Pages/For-Wonks-Only.aspx
some more grist for the mill…
http://thefinanser.co.uk/fsclub/2013/04/400-years-of-boom-and-bust.html
good day to stay inside huh EO?
Bottom up is the best answer, almost always. As much as possible you want people to make their own decisions, but when it comes to safety nets it is often better to provide services than cash money. So I am once again a libertarian at heart, but I see people who need help all the time, one of whom spends his disability cheque on street oxy, cigarettes and coffee. Nice guy but it s killing him. I am trying to talk him out of the narcotic habit, and it would honestly be better if some of that money was healthy food instead of money.
I think that the kind of anthropology this professor is doing is actually interesting. I have often speculated on the differences that must exist between brains that use character based languages and one’s who use individual letters strung together. And he is interested in the way people write down numbers and numeracy which is very different around the world. And living in Detroit would be a culturally anthropologic experience these days. And the history of thinking is always interesting.
But I agree that the implementation of economic theory has been a disaster for the poor. We live in a fairly affluent town and my experience of this economic downturn is not as drastic as yours which makes me less angry.
We have decided to keep the Pilot but never drive it a long way again because one of the back wheels is, well, held on by an axel that is not exactly prime, spend a considerable amount of money replacing the exhaust in our old, once Ben’s parent’s old, 1998 Toyota Avalon, which will never die, even though I have never liked driving it. We will sell the Pilot as is, sad to say, and live without a truck for a little while. It is about to turn over to 300,000 kms, and we never much liked the new transmission that we put in around 200,000. But the darn thing looks great from the outside. Basically no rust, one indent from a f*&%**&^@$ing garbage collector hurling our black bin at the driveway and having it bounce and totally punch in one of the back panels. Sprayed it underneath like a madwoman every year for the first five years. Only new car I will probably ever buy but it sure was a good little truck. And we got the ten years out of it that justified the sticker price and I felt safe shuttling around little hockey players and cheerleaders. But I don’t really drive much these days so we realized maybe we should just wait, and while we are coming up out of a financial not so nice picture, not spending money is currently a very good idea. Want a Toyota Landcruiser, gently used, because I am a spoiled, demanding, whiner, and I know hubby wants one too, so it really ups the odds, especially because he is enamoured of ones with diesel engines. And I can search for months for a bargoon. But I agreed we could sell the Pilot and I wouldn’t be sad just because I would never own anything new or nice again.
I hadn’t seen the story about the Problem in Popcorn Paradise, or I would have led off with how terrible. And they looked so fabulous. Good thing we weren’t all banking on bumper crops and low corn prices. At least what ever popcorn you harvest will be incredibly precious because it is scarce.
I bought a whole salmon today, because it was very inexpensive, only $2.99 a pound for pink Atlantic salmon. Not the best perhaps, but the whole thing was just $10. I am going to bbq it, and am searching around the web, but thought I should throw it out there because I have rather noticed a tendency around here to give advice. Just like home. I am going to leave on the head and tail.
Oops, brain fart. 3k per head is a trillion, and would do more good than the several trillion already pissed away down the trickle down rathole. As Mrs. O would say, “You know what I meant!” Had to hurry back from the hardware store and get that in. Now to read the new posts…
I think it needs a little extra moisture, because it is a slightly drier meat. Butter should be involved.
3K would be over 7 months rent for our middle child who lives a fairly minimum wage existence if you ignore the syphon he has still attached to his mum.
Here was my recent treatment of a nice piece of Sockeye that I bought. Wrapped in bacon and grilled, in a basket for easy turning. Serve with plenty of melted butter, and the side dish of your choice (preferably something that likes butter too 😛 ).
Just to prove I hit your links, DP
ON the cars, you talk kms and we talk miles, so…yeah…
Dog Car is @180,000 miles. Not far from your 300k kms on the Pilot. Long Live the Dog Cars!
And, little secret here just between us, I TELL Mrs. O I’m waiting for the new Subaru’s to be right, but really I might just drive a series of junkers from now on. Shhhh…don’t tell. It’s all on my retirement planning spreadsheet… 😎
Wrapped in bacon! And we have a big fish shaped basket. Treat it like a giant scallop. I also bought six scallops because I have a strange fondness for them.
You would love my neighbour across the street. He is magic with junkers. Once drove a $500 dodge dart for over a year. His latest is a toyota tercel that was around $1500, which he calls his new muffler, because that was the estimate on the exhaust on his last junker, a VW Golf that he drove for 4 years. This thing has been going for well over two years now, and when he has a momentary midlife crisis he just waits for it to pass and then we celebrate how he has just saved anywhere from 10 to 50 thousand dollars.
He also has a hippie van, and got a much better deal than we did, but mine is blue, and that was all that really mattered. Blue with white canvas.
some salmon suggestions… maple syrup or honey, and bourbon, reduced in volume by about half on the stove top. i like to add tarragon too. some black pepper right on the meat.
or KISS. onions, lemon slices, pepper. i used to smoke them like that, whole, as you are doing. you can stuff quite a lot into the body cavity.
sorry for ranting a lot today. the QE insanity across the world is revolting to me. there does come a time to hang the rich, and i do not think that day is too far off.
btw, my car has been at the dealership for two weeks straight now – it was towed in. they cannot find the problem. it randomly will not start. (always turns over normally) no codes. i am trying to wait them out. shaming them, threatening them, begging, and kissing ass have all failed.
yes EO, same problem as before. i have had it in 4 times now, 3 different auto shops. and i am no dummy about cars either.
What kind of vehicle is it?
just to put in context my “hang the rich” comment. what i mean is that all the western economies and their governments have been captured by the elite. speaking of semantics, elite is a fancy word meaning one who is incredibly wealthy.
this guy is a terrible writer, and also somewhat of a d.b. IMO, but is he not saying basically the same thing that we seem to agree on, when we say only a “bottom up” economic approach can work?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-09-04/martin-armstrong-asks-has-western-society-become-fascist
a 2005 Chevy Aveo that we bought new from that dealership. it has been a nightmare from day one. back before General Motors became a bank, they would have been forced by lemon laws to replace this vehicle. it’s a long story. one major problem after another, one minor bug after another. plenty of recalls, but only for safety concerns. we have dropped over $6000 (make that over 7500 – just asked wife) repairing known defects! DO NOT EVER BUY A CHEVY AGAIN! GM is not the company it was. i doubt they will ever be again either.
xty, your comment reminds me of when we bought Mrs. O’s new Subaru Legacy back in 2011. We are standing there, trying to not look too excited in front of the salesman, but we were both whispering sideways to each other, “It’s the blue one!”
We eventually just told him, “We’ll buy it.” Then we realized we hadn’t even dickered price at all. We are total rubes when it comes to this sort of thing. Fortunately, he took mercy on us and knocked it back a bit. I think I probably overpaid for every car I ever bought. I do a shitload of homework, but when I want it, I want it, and that’s all she wrote.
If you wrap in bacon, it will flare up initially, so be on top of it. It will settle down after a while as the bacon gets rendered out a bit.
DP- Too bad anthropology is not a “hard science” (pun revealed later) but I find it amusing that the cultural bias you bring to that view is what indeed it is all about. For many cultures of the world, hard science doesn’t even exist, or need to.
I am by no means an anthropologist, but I am curious. And my endorphins kick in when I encounter a mind bending practice like- (pun revealed) subincision. You’ve heard of circumcision, male and female. Check this out. Not for the prudish. Contains graphic picture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penile_subincision
EO- I’ll take my $3000 and spend it, but only because I am debt free. I fear way too much of it would just go to pay down staggering debt loads and how would that really make a difference.
Xty- let’s go campin’ and grill some salmon!
NFL- please nix pregame HipHop- just prolongs Packers fans’ misguided optimism.
I think there’s data out there that suggests that for most people, especially as you go lower down on the scale, the whole 3k would immediately be spent, and thus stimulative to the economy. They’ve seen it before with the effect of tax credits, etc, and I think it’s corroborated by the periodic articles you see about how most Americans don’t have so much as two weeks pay in reserve and are living from paycheck to paycheck. I think for the majority, it would be spent on the spot. Groceries, rent, new tires, day care, on and on. Boom, it would go into the economy overnight.
But, what the hell, never gonna happen anyway.
LOL, dude. While typing the above, I turned to Mrs. O and said, “Are they gonna start this fucking game or not?” She gave me the Evil Eye and said “Seven Thirty!”
Oh, pardon me. Then what are we watching all this crap for?
EDIT: Already grumpy. Will be in bed by halftime. Same thing happens to me at the movies. After 25 minutes of commercials, previews, and “turn off your phone” garbage, I’m already in a foul mood before the show even starts. The experience is doomed.
Kickoff was at 7:41, just for the record. Lying rat bastards. And the singer on the national anthem sucked too, btw. 😆
pretty sure everyone is in bed, and this will be the last post tonight. (better luck next time sports fans) i feel bad for my rants today, so i want to dedicate this uplifting song to you Xty as a way to close today’s comments on a positive note. hope that you find this song early in the morning, and its enduring melody brightens your entire day.
This is a good place for ill-tempered rants. It gets them out and I am sick to death of the ultra rich too.
For the first time in my life I am going to allow a political sign on my lawn. I treasure the secret ballot and revealing for whom one votes is fraught with consequential danger in this messed up world, but we have a local candidate for city council whom I have known through his involvement in the neighbourhood for the last twenty years who has refused to accept any donations from developers, etc., and he just might pull it off. We suffer from insane over development and somehow a much beloved councillor lost the last election by a hair to this femme fatale who has allowed height violations in general and an appalling light rail plan that is designed to run through neighbourhoods and nowhere near business, hospitals or malls in particular. The city is massively in debt, and yet a billion dollar plan from hell is somehow front and centre on their minds and you can drown in potholes. In my last interchange with her I called her a moral failure and she had the gall to write back and wish me a happy weekend.
But back to the importance of making ill-tempered rants in public, it reminds me of one of my sister-in-law’s seemingly ludicrous but highly effective way of getting rid of those incessant repetitive negative thoughts that bad experiences can leave you with – she described it as like having the needle stuck in a groove in a record – and drown out productive thinking. She and some girlfriends got together and wrote down the worst of those things on paper, and then tossed them ceremoniously into a bonfire – I am sure mind altering substances were appropriately applied – and ended up feeling much better. Not that the internet is a bonfire … my metaphor machine is experiencing intermittent problems. Speaking of which, the sentiment “I will never buy another Chevy” seemed somewhat popular on the internet when I briefly looked into your odd car problems. Best the web seemed to say was a bad PCM or fuel pump, or never buy another Chevy. Like swearing to never fly Air Canada again.
Oops, Garlic Butter, I meant to say, on the salmon discussion. It’s an important point, to me at least.
When my sister-in-law got divorced, the girls in the family did some sort of thing where they wrote down some stuff on little papers and burned them. I think the ringleader was someone’s roommate who was Wiccan or something. Or, as we like to say “She’s a witch!”
It made them all feel better, so I guess the magic worked.
I think when you get a group of embittered women together, who’s collective experience of men is pretty poor, they act a little crazy, maybe, and their hair might not be as well-coiffed as in the past when they were into man pleasing and they might be drunk. And they might try to poison people. It is a good thing they aren’t witches, because I think they wanted to be!
The salmon ended up simple – sea salt, dill, lemon and butter. Roasted what was called a red sweet potato, which was a delicious yellow inside – poked some holes on the top, cheated in the microwave for ten minutes, and then put in foil, split on the top with more butter, maple syrup and salt and pepper. And because the salmon was slated to be a little dry, I made dill butter to put on it after cooking. Many web sites agreed that you should slash the outside dramatically, and we did and it worked well. Also put lemon slices on the outside of the fish against the basket on both sides that worked well to contain the burning of the skin.
That was way soupier than I remembered. Antidote:
soup·y
ˈso͞opē/
adjective
adjective: soupy; comparative adjective: soupier; superlative adjective: soupiest
having the appearance or consistency of soup.
“a soupy stew”
*(of the air or climate) humid.
*informal
mawkishly sentimental.
“soupy nostalgia”
must be that last one. in Wisconsin we say
chees·y
ˈCHēzē/
adjective
adjective: cheesy; comparative adjective: cheesier; superlative adjective: cheesiest
*like cheese in taste, smell, or consistency.
“a pungent, cheesy sauce”
*informal
cheap, unpleasant, or blatantly inauthentic.
“a big cheesy grin”
synonyms: tacky, cheap, tawdry;
*informal
corny, cornball
Monsieur Vert would say…
Hubby has flown the coop to bond with old high school friends, and I use those adjectives advisedly, and to paraphrase my kids, I am heading to Baketown.
That was weird, and that is one of their more approachable songs. This is more like it.