The Plural of Value

I came across it casually on Tyler Cowen's blog.

We are, after all, ethical pluralists.

I find him a perplexing thinker, especially when he wanders into ethics. So I thought, "Aha! He's an ethical pluralist. Maybe that explains something - if only I was sure what that was."

Wikipedia calls it value-pluralism and offers an actual example:

An example of value-pluralism is the idea that the moral life of a nun is incompatible with that of a mother, yet there is no purely rational measure of which is preferable. Hence, moral decisions often require radical preferences with no rational calculus to determine which alternative is to be selected.

What strikes me in the above is the move from "no purely rational measure" to "no rational calculus". What gets dropped out is the "purely". Is that perhaps an important dropped term? Really, it makes me wonder what the "purely" is doing there in the first place. I suspect it's doing the work of separating reason from the person's own individual human needs and wants.

I see it as the Sound Of Music problem. The Mother Superior is happy as a nun. Maria will not be.

She happens to be a bad fit
for happiness in it.

Phlebotomized

Gave blood.
Slightly light-headed. Did not meet the floor with a thud.

The Peers Appear To Have Failed

Some "wunderkind" Dutch professor of psychology has been caught faking his data.

"We have some 30 papers in peer-reviewed journals where we are actually sure that they are fake, and there are more to come," says Pim Levelt, chair of the committee that investigated Stapel's work at the university.

Peer-reviewed,
but fraud-imbued!

I think a lot of people don't know what peer-review actually involves. It does not involve rerunning the other scientist's experiments. It involves reading the paper and sniffing to determine whether it passes the "smell test". In this case, there were some malodorous clues:

The data were also suspicious, the report says: effects were large; missing data and outliers were rare; and hypotheses were rarely refuted. Journals publishing Stapel's papers did not question the omission of details about where the data came from. "We see that the scientific checks and balances process has failed at several levels," Levelt says.

Note that some of these issues pertain to trends in his work as a whole, rather than being obvious in a particular paper. As noted in the article, his work seemed too good to be true.

So remember - if you're going to fake your data, do it in moderation!

Nothing succeeds like success,
but nothing exceeds like excess.

High Turnover Rate

I have to admit, I'm a little vague on how Kim Kardashian became a celebrity, but right now she's in the news for announcing that she's divorcing her husband after being married 72 days.

I figured this couldn't be a record, so I was glad to find this article from the ill-odored Gawker website, listing shortest celebrity marriages. The first one they listed was less than a day, but it wasn't a true break-up - it was a case where the actress hadn't legally dissolved her prior union, so her new marriage was never legally binding in the first place.

But the second one was pretty impressive, and involved Brittany Spears, who reportedly had a Vegas marriage that held together 55 hours.

To have and to hold,
until it gets old,
which could be real soon,
like the next afternoon.

Lyric Poems Vs. Song Lyrics

I've pondered this topic in print, but today Julia Keller at the Chicago Tribune had a thoughtful column on the odd cultural divide between song lyrics and poetry. Her launching pad is Stephen Sondheim, who doesn't like having his lyrics referred to as poetry.

Poems and songs weren't always on opposite sides of a chasm. Centuries ago, poems and songs were regarded as the same thing. Scholars of antiquity believe that early poetry was chanted or sung rather than recited, and most people listened to poems in crowds instead of reading the poems by themselves in private.

Well, the shift from an oral to a literate culture had a lot do do with that.

I suspect the public's lack of interest was also helped along by modern poetry's stylistic shifts.

Poets rushed off to find
new ways of writing.

But the public, left behind,
found it uninviting.

Lemon Squares

I did something new today. I baked something.

I don't mean I never put anything in the oven before. No doubt I have. I have assisted others in various steps of the baking process.

But I never, on my own, followed a recipe to make "baked goods".

Today I made lemon squares. I found an easy-sounding recipe, and followed it. I didn't make the crust from scratch. I used a roll of cookie dough for that. But I made the filling from scratch - grating and squeezing the lemons, whisking it in with the other ingredients, etc.

Somehow it they came out pretty good. Tomorrow, at the work Halloween party, I will urge my co-workers to sample my wares.

I will put on boastful airs
about baking lemon squares.

Just one thing will grieve me -
no one will believe me!

Reporters Without Borders

Chicago Tribune reporters are somehow more efficient than law enforcement - when it comes to finding fugitives who have fled south of the border.

The reporters determined the precise whereabouts of eight of the nine fugitives. Two agreed to on-camera interviews, while the other six declined to comment through their wives or other close relatives.

I wish I could say I was shocked, but I'm not. It's clear that it's still quite possible for many people to flee to Mexico in order to escape U.S. law enforcement.

My hat is off to the reporters involved, who did some hard work.

Over 18 days, reporters logged more than 3,000 miles in the area seeking nine fugitives. The region is dominated by a low-intensity drug war; reports of assassinations and kidnappings appear daily in local newspapers.

In case I ever need to flee,
I should brush up on my Spanish - ¡Sí!

If You Can Fake It Here

I had read about this a while back, but it has now been blown wide open.

The Long Island Rail Road disability pension scam busted Thursday was so breathtakingly huge that calling it a massive fraud scheme is a gross understatement.

This sort of thing is why, when people tell me Chicago is more corrupt than New York, I simply roll my eyes.

A billion bucks worth of bogus bad backs -
funded by some federal tax!

I love a good disability fraud,
but this one leaves me over-awed.

UPDATE: The quotation above was from the NY Daily News, but they have pulled the story from the web, so a commenter graciously provided parallel links from the NY Post - here and the NY Times - here.

Work Ethic

Quote from a guy Occupying Toronto:

It’s weird protesting on Bay Street. You get there at 9 a.m. and the rich bankers who you want to hurl insults at and change their worldview have been at work for two hours already. And then when it's time to go, they're still there. I guess that's why they call them the one per cent. I mean, who wants to work those kinds of hours? That's the power of greed.

Achievers should be upbraided for overworking,
and educated on the joy of shirking.

Occupy Snowdrift

There's an occupy thingie in Boston. And they may get their first snowfall this weekend. A similar situation obtains in Denver. What will the occupiers do?

Where owners or authorities will let them, the occupiers like to put up tents. Also, sometimes they sleep elsewhere and return in the morning. I mean, who is to know whether the tents are occupied?

Well,in London someone ran an infrared camera on the tents.

Just one in 10 of the tents at the Occupy London Stock Exchange camp which has closed St Paul’s Cathedral are occupied at night, it can be revealed.

I'm not sure what'll happen here in the Windy City. They are occupying some small stretches of the sidewalk on Lasalle St., across from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. But it's just a sliver of space really, and I haven't seen tents there yet. They are campaigning to acquire camping rights in Grant Park - in about the same spot as the famous 1968 Democratic Convention protest / police-head-bashing-fest. So far our mayor has been letting them set up tents in Grant Park during the day, but arrests those who won't leave the park after it "closes" at 11 pm. So far the arrests have been fairly friendly, according to the press.

If you're seriously going to occupy the worst sort of northern city weather, you're going to want a heat source other than your own bodies. You're going to want fire or electric.

Otherwise you will get froze
from your head to your toes.

UPDATE days later:

In New York City, which could see its first snow on Saturday, the fire department confiscated six generators and about a dozen cans of fuel at the Occupy site in Zuccotti Park. The generators had been powering heat, computers and a kitchen that activists set up six weeks ago.

Deathtrap Revisited

I've been rereading Deathtrap, the play by Ira Levin. It is an elegant piece, very spare in its style, which helps make the mind-boggling self-referencing plot slide along smoothly.

Somehow it comes across as not trying to dazzle you, but dazzling you anyway.

It's an air of modest charm
in a room that's set to harm.

UPDATE: Photo, bring back memories for me, of 3 members of the original Broadway cast, John Wood, Marian Seldes, Clifford Anderson:

Switched

It happened in the Ural Mountains, because one of the dads noticed his kid looked nothing like him:

A pair of 12-year-old girls who discovered they were accidentally switched at birth want to stay with the mothers who have been raising them rather than go to their real parents.

They were used to the trade,
and so they stayed.

Corrugated Crisis

I first started noticing corrugated cardboard signs in the hands of Chicago's beggars.

The signs were rendered with black marker scrawled on brown cardboard - telling tales of woe about how the panhandler was stranded in Chicago and needed money to buy a bus ticket out of town... or whatever. The usual stories.

I noticed it here after the City Council passed a law against aggressive panhandling.

I guess it's supposed to look like you're really down and out - you can't even afford poster board to get your message across.

Now the corrugated cardboard look has moved to political demonstrations - of the "Occupy - But Why?" variety. I've seen it here, I've seen it in photos from around the country.

I don't like the look. The signs are hard to read.

I'm thinking of starting a charity to provide
better signs to wave while they stand outside.

Sam Rosenthal at State Street Gallery

That's Sam Rosenthal, above, doing what he loves, namely painting, and painting on location - to really get the look of things right. He doesn't like to work from photographs because they look so flat, and the light colors look too white and the dark colors look too black. So he likes to look at the scene with his own eyes and devise a way to balance the colors so that it looks - to your eyes - like it really looks. The result is canvases with with a marvelous sense of depth and vibrant color compositions.

He has a big show going on at the Robert Morris University's State Street Gallery. When I say big, I mean both that he has a lot of paintings, and that a lot of them are huge canvases. Most of them are for sale, and the artist, who is outgoing and talkative, can often be found there.

His website is here. He writes:

People often go through their daily routines without noticing the beauty around them. Through my work, I share what I have seen, what I have sensed, and what I have felt to enhance their perception of all that surrounds them. Beyond the physical, I seek to convey the drama, mystery, and complexity of nature and humanity.

A few of his paintings reminded me of some of my mother's work in her 50's, which was kind of eerie. Partly it was the similarity of subject matter, partly some overlap of sensibility. This painting in particular struck me on both counts:



I didn't mention this to him, but I actually think I may have seen him painting this one. I recognize the corner - Clark and Van Buren - and I walk by it twice a day. I recall seeing a guy painting in that exact spot one evening.

And, I must say, that corner looks prettier in the painting than it usually looks to me!

Even things you see every day,
look different when the painter has his way.

Women Only Train

I went to see Women Only Train.
It's a show that's of hard to explain.

Well, I don't want to put any spoilers up here, because it's partly a horror play for the Halloween season.

As an audience member, you can choose to be part of the action - as a matter of fact, you can choose to be the lead character. You go on stage where there's no fourth wall at all:

You're an innocent on a journey
who may end up on a gurney.

I did it, of course. A friend of mine, who also did it, commented that it reminded him a bit of one of those point-of-view video games.

If you're easily scared,
be warned and prepared.

Next Tuesday

I'll have to check on the state of my checking account:

$10K asking price for photo with Michelle Obama at fundraiser

Seems high.
I think I'll wait.
By and by
It may deflate.

Boom Bust

I've been trying to figure out where the anti-boomer sentiment is coming from. A fair chunk of it is numerically inaccurate, in the sense of citing non-boomers as evidence of boomer failings.

But I think I've got it.

Our kids have grown up and are mad at us. Well, not my kids so much, but a lot of my fellow-boomers' kids are angry about the messy world they've inherited and they know it must be our fault. No doubt, in aggregate, some of it really is "our" fault. A few things are even "my" fault in particular. For instance, I have made some really awful puns in my life - puns for which I haven't yet been punished.

I think we're being unfairly picked on as a group. But I've decided it's pointless to defend ourselves. After all - who knows us better than our children?

Rather than trying to reason,
I'm simply committing treason,
denouncing my own generation,
in a spirit of self-flagellation:

The baby boom
is the cause of doom -
it has sucked all the oxygen out of the room!

Rodent Envy

Squirrel on the power line,
I think your balance skills are fine.

If I could balance as you do,
I'd hop on that high wire too.

Character Judgment

Last night we had an interesting discussion centered around the way heroic characters in Ayn Rand's novels deal with errors of judgment and moral failings. The interesting thing is that they don't demonstrate a quick inclination to moral condemnation, the way her later essays often do.

Is it the case that her attitude altered
towards those who faltered?

Pondering Uganda

We're sending troops to Uganda. Because some crazy rebels are killing people there.

Heading a movement based on a mix of religion and brutality, Kony a self-styled mystic and religious prophet, claims to be fighting on divine orders to establish theocratic rule based on the Biblical Ten Commandments.

An American general is quoted in the story. He's the head of "U.S. Africa Command". I didn't know we even had such a thing.

Which reminds me, one of the great thing about talking to foreigners, is you always learn about odd things the U.S. government is doing to their countries. It's always something the foreigner doesn't like - and usually something that you, as an American, have never even heard of.

It could be military,
it could be financial,
it could be imaginary,
or even quite substantial.