Maggie's Farm

Via Quartz:

An average professional football game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, but if you tally up the time when the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes.

Around the world in a square rigged ship, 1938

The child of a distinguished Boston family, Richard Henry Dana Jr. (born 1815) dropped out of Harvard to try his hand at sea-faring. He sailed out of Boston on a merchantman, headed around the Horn to California (which was part of Mexico at the time).

The result was his classic Two Years Before the Mast.  It is written in a journalistic style. He went on to a career as a lawyer and in politics. 

As a friend of Herman Melville, who read his book, Dana suggested that Melville do a similar sort of book, but about whaling. Melville did.

The Great Books' 30-min. podcast about The Satyricon, allegedly written by Petronius around the year 60. Petronius was a Roman courtier and administrator. It is a satire.

Mutiny on Board the Whaleship Globe:

The notorious 1824 whaling mutiny and subsequent massacre of the crew by South Sea islanders, as told by the two survivors. 

Sea stories have a magical quality, at least since the Odyssey. 

Peter Jackson's 8-hour Beatles documentary (on Disney Channel) might be tedious to some. 

Here's a reason why it isn't: The Banality of Genius 

Have any of our readers seen it? 

I am not sure what "Asian" means. Are you?

Does it include people with parents from India, Japan, China, Pakistan?  

 Yes, by all means we must quash the overweening privilege of daughters of Bangladeshi cab drivers and lunch ladies.

Music: Live music is best, very high-end systems are a poor second, ordinary sound systems third, and anything else is so compressed that it is only suited for background sound. 

Yes, I do have a vinyl collection but they are so inconvenient. I have a ton of CDs and one serious system. Another not perfect in the bedroom.

The guy below makes a remarkable system - which of course cannot be appreciated through your computer. For the price of his machines you could go to great live music daily for a couple of lifetimes.

What's your opinion?

A lengthy documentary, but it is difficult to stop watching. Very well done. They created a civilization that makes Medieval Europe, 2000 years later, seem like a back woods barbarian place.

It is long, but interesting (or I would not post it). No images, just translated interviews with German soldiers.

1928, around Cape Horn. The ship is the Peking, now resting at NYC's South Street Seaport. Grew up on a Massachusetts farm, with the accent. Similar to Vermont.

The Gambler’s Fallacy and the Regression to the Mean

It's not, but it is sort of a tradition. Recommended: Imperial Caviar

Yes, it is expensive. 

I suppose one of the functions of education is to transmit the accumulations of a culture/civilization, but it's not that simple. If you can't do Persian arithmetic, or ancient Greek trig, you are in trouble in life. Western civilization  has always been open to interesting new ideas. Case in point: Christmas tree.

In "modern times", ie, say, that includes other world cultures too. Perhaps "modern times" in the West sort of began with the Roman Empire.

Modern Western civilization has borrowed much from the entire world, and made something wonderful out of it all.  Sometimes I wonder that Christianity could only have emerged from the Middle East with its hodge-podge of cultural and religious history. Mostly Jewish of course, but far more than that.

I think it's great to learn about other civilizations and cultures, but I think Western people need to know their own first. Like a language.  Or, including the language.

My feeling is that Western civ contains astonishing wisdom and thought - more than anybody's brain can contain. I include Jacques Barzun and Einstein in that.  Legal theory, math, literary adventures, philosophy, religion, etc. You can read about Canadian aborigine medicine on your own time but it's not so easy to get a grip on Biochem.

If the kiddies can't get it through their parents, they have to learn it all from schools.  The Greatness the Professors Denied

Joshua Slocum's is a classic, but Capt. Johnson's is good too, from the 1930s: Westward Bound in the Schooner Yankee

A classic by Charles Perrow: Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies

Accidents happen in all areas of life. Often, they are statistically-predictable. 

The War Against Academic Freedom

It seems crazy nowadays that you can get in trouble without aligning with Marxist theories. How many times have I posted about this?