Thursday, September 17. 2009
We buzzed through Nice on a round-about visit to Ese a couple of weeks ago. I bought a container of French framboises (smaller and less sweet than American supermarket raspberries, but possibly more intense flavor), and Mrs. BD bought some candied figs to snack on.
This is no cute Farmer's Market: it's the market. Meat and cheese and butter and breads and everything else you need to make a decent French meal. Here are the grapes and various varieties of figs:
A little more of beautiful Nice below:
Continue reading "My summer vacation: The marketplace in Nice"
 I am still catching up on some of the abundance of Maggie's posts from the couple of weeks while I was away. Did you read Dr. Bliss' My School, Part 1 and Part 2?
I just did. Interesting - and inspiring. You have to spend big bucks to get this sort of exciting and demanding secondary education in America, because the unions now own the public schools, and people like her Headmaster would or could never get a public school teaching certificate.
Why anyone would need college after that is beyond me. (Well, I know...you supposedly need the piece of paper.) College used to be "higher education" for the most highly-motivated, serious scholars who were totally turned on by learning and ideas. Am I Rip Van Winkle?
What happened while I dozed?
Photo: Old little red schoolhouse in Westport, CT, where the kids learned more than they do today.
Wednesday, September 16. 2009
Second in a series:
Rocky Marciano (Born 1 Sept. 1923), heavyweight boxing champion, was born Rocco Francis Marchegiano in Brockton, Massachusetts, the son of Pierino Marchegiano, a shoe-factory worker, and Pasqualena Picciuto. He was considered the roughest kid in the neighborhood, although he was not overly pugnacious. A star athlete who hoped to become a major league baseball catcher, he dropped out of school at age sixteen…Marciano then became a manual laborer while playing baseball on local semiprofessional teams. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 and was honorably discharged in 1946. Marciano kept his baseball dream alive until the spring of 1947, when a tryout with a Chicago Cubs minor league affiliate revealed that he lacked foot speed and a strong throwing arm.
Marciano had begun boxing competitively while in the army, mainly to avoid KP duty…. In 1948 Rocky participated in the Golden Gloves and advanced to the All-East championship tournament. He had aspirations to box in the Olympics, but he broke a thumb in winning a New England AAU (Amateur Athletic Union)tournament that served as a trial for the Olympics. He then decided to turn professional and gave up his job as a digger for the gas company. Experts considered Marciano too old, too short, and too light, at 5' 10" and 190 pounds, to become a successful heavyweight prizefighter….Marciano was [then] extremely well trained and took care of his diet.
Photo Courtesy of Michael N. Varveris, author of "Rocky Marciano The 13th Candle"
An out-and-out killer in the ring, instinctively swinging for blood on every punch, he is the mildest, friendliest and most loyal of men outside it.
Rocky's amazing record of 49 consecutive professional wins will probably never be exceeded, nor his KO percentage of 87.76%.
Marciano was the first and last champion in the heavyweight ranks to retire undefeated. And he only lost once in a 12-fight amateur career.
Marciano enjoyed life in the fast lane ("If you want to live a full life then live dangerously"), disliked routine, and was fascinated by the mobsters with whom he socialized and did business, such as Vito Genovese. He was a great hero to Italian Americans. Friends and acquaintances customarily gave him spending money, bought him dinner, and paid for his clothes. Parsimonious, Marciano never picked up checks. However, he was a poor businessman who made several bad decisions…
In the mid-1960s Marciano turned down $2 million to fight Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) when he could not get into fighting shape. In 1969 he participated in a computer tournament involving former champions that grossed about $1.7 million. For this endeavor he lost nearly 50 pounds, wore a toupee, and sparred eight hours of one-minute rounds with Ali to produce a marketable conclusion. Seven different endings were prepared, with the computer giving the victory to Marciano.
One day before his 46th birthday, on August 31, 1969, Marciano died tragically in a plane crash near Newton, Iowa, while on the way to a birthday party.
From the American Council of Learned Societies, Sport (January 1953), and the National Italian-American Sports Hall Of Fame
Tuesday, September 15. 2009
Nothing at all against eggheads. There is a place for them, but not in roles of power.
Academics and eggheads spend their professional lives insulated from the realities that most of us deal with every day. They play with ideas, and are not familiar with running a business and making a payroll, for example, while most normal folks spend their days dealing with tough realities and unsecure, demanding, worrisome, and often unpleasant jobs.
This from Why eggheads shouldn't be running things:
Making government policy from radical, unfiltered, untested ideas turns citizens into guinea pigs and puts the country at high risk for destabilization and other unpredictable consequences.
Part of what allows academia to produce radical ideas is the absence of failure. Their ideas are rarely applied to real world problems. You don't have to "go back to the drawing board" unless you have a reason to do so.
Academia isn't a mill for practical solutions. It is intended as an environment for expanding thought to open the mind to new possibilities unbridled by law, ethics, morality, practicality and other elements of civilized society. "Eggheads" in academia are on the far side of the spectrum from those who should make policy to govern.
Editor's comment/addendum:
This discussion reminds me of a recent conversation with the Dylanologist about the history of cartography. In Medieval times, there were two sorts of maps of the known world: academic schematic maps with Jerusalem in the center, all circled by an ocean, and there were maps made by sailors. The former category represented an idealized view of the world, and were useless for travel. Idea-driven, not even intended to be fully realistic. The Hereford map is one of many examples:
The(se) maps were not used as navigation tools but instead served as visual histories, teaching objects, and illustrations of religious or philosophic ways of understanding the world and what was seen as God’s creation.
In fact, they were pursuing a "narrative" about the world.
At the same time, European sailors were producing practical Portolan maps to go from port to port. These maps, presumably ignored by, or a matter of of indifference to, the ivory towers, were useful and accurate. Here's a well-developed medieval Portolan map:
 Does anybody use these sorts of lens cleaning pens?
If not, what do you use?
Monday, September 14. 2009
Collect your best debating points here: Hawk vs. Dove on crime and punishment. Dalrymple.
As a retired prison shrink, Dalrymple knows whereof he opines.
At The Corner:
My friend By contrast, my friend Andy tells me that, after seeing his son off to college, he and his wife had to wait a week before receiving an unsolicited telephone call. "He was in the laundry room. He wanted to know what all the buttons on the washing machine were for."
Sunday, September 13. 2009
An outdoor souk (the Arabic word for the Turkish "bazaar" - "marketplace" in English) in old Tunis (the new Tunis surrounds the old Tunis):
Lots more below -
Continue reading "My summer vacation: Lots of random photos of Tunis, plus Tunisian lunch"
Saturday, September 12. 2009
 This has the makings of an ongoing series, ethnic firsts in pro sports. If you have ideas with links for me to follow up upon, please add them to the comments.
Photo © Peter S. Horvitz, Inset courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Cyberspace
[A]sk a group of die-hard baseball fans to name the first professional baseball player and you’ll either get blank stares or some good but inaccurate guesses.
Truth is, going by the strict technical definition of what constitutes a professional—being paid for what one does consistently and with a high degree of output and efficiency—then the mystery man is a Jewish guy from Brooklyn. The first salaried player of America’s favorite pastime was a powerful hitter and enormously fast runner named Lipman Pike.
A Dutch-Jewish New Yorker born on May 25, 1845, “Lip” Pike became baseball’s first professional player in 1866 when the Philadelphia Athletics engaged him at $20 a week to play third base. You won’t learn that in most baseball almanacs and other sports reference books…
In July 1866, his first year playing with the Philadelphia Athletics, the left-handed Pike established baseball’s first homerun record, hitting six homers in one game against another Philadelphia team, the Alert club….
Although homers were not common in those early years—the game was very different then, with its soft balls and huge outfields—Pike was still one of the homerun leaders of his day, sporting ten during his six-year National Association tenure. Also impressive was his cumulative .321 batting average.
In one of professional baseball’s earliest publicity stunts, in August 1873 Pike raced a famous trotting horse named Chronicle in a 100-yard dash. Even though Chronicle had a 25-yard head start, Pike is reported to have won the race in ten seconds flat and claimed the $250 prize….
In 1887, Pike retired from the game at the age of forty-two, thereafter living a quiet life working in Brooklyn as a haberdasher and attending his local synagogue, Temple Israel.
Wednesday, September 9. 2009
My friend the piano-man Jimmy Maddox played and sang this song for us last week - with heart, along with a few other tunes we requested (No Dylan requests, tho. He is more of a Hoagie Carmichael guy.) He's a darn good fellow, fun to talk to, seemingly full of good cheer and with keyboard talent to burn. Nice girlfriend too, who flew back with us to NYC.
Every guy has a pirate inside of them - plus his share of regrets, sorrows, and demons. The trick is to keep on keepin' on, and to try to stay on the sunny side of the street. With God's help.
 Turning a whaling yarn into a masterpiece: Vanderleun reviews my favorite and most-often re-read book (except for some parts of the Bible).
Can one regular ol' person really make a difference?
My answer is, "He can, if he really puts his mind to it."
An example is below the fold.
Continue reading "The Mission"
From our veranda, near the ship's bridge:
Just two more photos of Naples below -
Continue reading "Neapolitan sunset"
Tuesday, September 8. 2009
Some snaps of a glove shop in Rome. Mrs. BD thought our readers of the feminine persuasion might like these top-notch gloves, soft as a baby's bottom. It's Sermoneta Gloves.
Cool colors, I must admit.
More glove photos below -
Continue reading "My summer vacation: Gloves in Rome"
Monday, September 7. 2009
 Thanks to all Farmers for pitching in so energetically over the past couple of weeks to keep Maggie's fresh, entertaining, and informative.
Our frenetic writers can throttle back this week because everybody will be back on board.
I, for one, will begin a little series of snaps of my travels. The plan is to not make it dull. I know that other peoples' travel snaps can be. I aim for informative.
For some doggone reason, regardless of the camera used, my photo skills seem to have achieved a new low in quality while the places I have visited have been remarkable. So be it.
Photo is your Editor, perusing a hefty wine list last week. (As is too evident, I do not use fake bow ties when dressed properly for dinner.)
Sunday, September 6. 2009
 I loved The Avengers.
This episode is a classic, linked via SDA.
It recently came to my attention that not everybody knows what I am talking about when I refer to the famously eccentric Collyer brothers.
Get educated!
There are people out there, similar to these guys, in almost every town. Probably quietly psychotic, or with folie a deux, or some personality disorder or dysfunction, or, maybe, just messy people. OCD? I doubt it. Eccentric is the best word.
Cleaning up is a hassle, isn't it?
Hoarders, whether of money or of things, miss out on all of the joys and adventures of life. They "plan" for a future which will never arrive, and then they die. Very sad to waste a life that way - a life which is a gift of God. God invited us to trust Him, and to accept His abundance. Hoarders (and I do not mean ordinary, wholesome, prudent folks) reject His offer of "life in abundance," and thus reject Him. It's a big mistake.
And I know I will get to that Aug 2008 New Yorker one of these days, when I get the chance. A photo of the Collyer brothers' house in NYC:
 When it comes to the possibility of life on other worlds, there are three categories to consider:
- Life of any type
- Intelligent life of any type
- Intelligent carbon-based life forms
For practical purposes, the third category is really the only one that concerns us. The first type might be nothing more than a colony of microbes. Sure, it's "life"... but so what?
The second type might be 'intelligent', but most likely we'll never find out. It could be anything from some parachute-shaped beings floating around in an atmosphere of pure methane to some formless creature living 10,000 feet below a sea of hydrochloric acid.
We've been so brainwashed by Hollywood that I'm sure the first impulse of a great number of people would be, "Just build a voice translator and we'll be able to understand them perfectly!"
Sorry, it just doesn't work that way.
Nor, after such a long journey, are we going to be equipped to fly through an atmosphere of pure methane or dive 10,000 feet beneath an ocean of hydrochloric acid.
Again, it just doesn't work that way.
No, for our purposes, we really have to be talking about carbon-based life forms similar to us, and from a world similar to ours, if we want to have a real chance of communicating with them.
And that's really what it's all about. If we sent back a signal to Earth declaring, "We've found alien life forms floating around in an atmosphere of pure methane!", well, everyone's going to find that pretty exciting for a minute or two, then it's back to the daily grind.
If we can communicate with them, however, then there's a real chance that we'll learn something that will vastly improve mankind, such as a new, pure form of energy or a transgalactic space drive.
So, what are the odds of there being intelligent carbon-based life forms out there living on a world similar to ours? Let us construct such a scenario step by step and see.
Continue reading "Life On Other Worlds: By The Numbers"
A re-post from 2007 -
Paul Davis, author of Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life, has an opinion piece in the NYT: Taking Science on Faith. It begins:
Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.
The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.
The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?
Read the whole thing. Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex in a piece titled The Faith of Scientists expands on the topic, referring to the ideas of philosopher V.W.O. Quine. A quote:
When Quine came up with his holistic version of knowledge, he also demonstrated that our most necessary scientific principles are actually the least provable. For example, most scientists, when asked what constitutes the starting principles of reality, will probably say something about one of nature's fundamental laws, like gravity or the theory of natural selection. But these are precisely the same things that we will never see directly. (As Gertrude Stein once wrote, "The laws of science are paper laws, they make believe that they do something.")
Read this whole thing too. The notion that the laws of nature have no existence seems obvious, but it turned on a lightbulb for me. The point, as I see it, is not to discredit the scientific method or scientific theorizing, or to glibly equate science with religion: the point is that we must have humility about the depth of our knowledge.
Photo: Starburst Galaxy NCG 3310 "blazing with star formation", from the Hubble site.
Friday, September 4. 2009
Re-posted from 2006: This dropped in over the transom:
Sales: "You want answers?"
Finance: "I think we are entitled to them!"
Sales: "You want answers?!"
Finance: "I want the truth!"
Sales: "You can't handle the truth!!! Son, we live in a world that requires net license revenue. And that revenue must be brought in by people with elite skills. Who's going to find it? You? You, Mr. Operations? We have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom.
You scoff at the sales division and you curse our lucrative incentives.
You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what we know:
That while the cost of business results are excessive, it drives revenue. And my very existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, drives REVENUE! You don't want to know the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at staff meetings ... you want me on that call. You NEED me on that call!
We use words like upgrades, another round, top-shelf, medium-rare, on-the-rocks, cabernet, Cohiba and foursome. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent negotiating something. You use them as a punch line!
I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to people who rise and sleep under the very blanket of revenue I provide and then question the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you" and went on your way. Otherwise I suggest you pick up a phone and make some sales calls. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to!"
Finance: "Did you expense the lap dancers?"
Sales: "I did the job I was hired to do."
Finance: "Did you expense the lap dancers?!"
Sales: "You're goddamn right I did!"
Thursday, September 3. 2009
Regular readers know how much I love Stats. Peter Donnelly is wonderfully fun here: How Stats fool Juries. I don't think the lawyers understand the stats either, but you can in a few minutes. (H/t Bird Dog via the Right Wing Prof)
|
