Sunday, March 25. 2007
 Walter Turnbull, founder and conductor of the Boy's Choir of Harlem, died Friday at 62.
Judy Collins with the Harlem Boy's Choir. YouTube. That old Scottish bagpipe tune will get you every time - even though Judy's version is a bit too white bread for my taste.
Thursday, March 22. 2007
A case of mistaken identity, below, on continuation page. Don't waste your time with it. Plus I think it is 100 years old.
Continue reading "Dumb joke"
by our friend: 
Wednesday, March 21. 2007
Readers have asked about the equipment used for this week's Patagonia photos. It's a Canon 20D EOS body with a 70-200 f2.8 L series Canon lens, with Singh Ray polarizing filter.
 Here's a succinct description of the Prisoner's Dilemma, from this site:
In this hypothetical situation, two accomplices to a crime are imprisoned, and they forge a pact to not betray one another and not confess to the crime. The severity of the punishment that each receives is determined not only by his or her behavior, but also by the behavior of his or her accomplice. The two prisoners are separated and cannot communicate with each other. Each is told that there are four possible outcomes: - If one confesses to the crime and turns in the accomplice (defecting from a pact with the accomplice), his sentence will be reduced. - If one confesses while the accomplice does not (i.e. the accomplice cooperates with the pact to not betray each other), the first can strike a deal with the police, and will be set free. But the information he provides will be used to incriminate his accomplice, who will receive the maximum sentence. - If both prisoners confess to the crime (i.e. both defect from their pact), then each receives a reduced sentence, but neither is set free.
It's fun for two people to play this game repetitively, and see who wins over time. My idea was to write up something about that Prisoner's Dilemma game, but then I got lured away by the topic of the Tragedy of the Commons. Game Theory ties these subjects together, and so those subjects may need to wait a bit. My calculus is not what it used to be but, as an attorney, I still find that Game Theory has its appeal for me. Appeal, if not too much practical utility, because Game Theory tends to assume some degree of rationality, and humans are only rational on occasion. Indeed, one reason for hiring an attorney is to apply some degree of objective rationality to a situation. Still, I believe that formal Game Theory - as opposed to normal legal strategizing - can inform legal practice. Here's a nice summary of the book Game Theory and the Law, which has some good references at the bottom. People are often gaming things, aren't they? There's a survival instinct to make the most of a situation to best achieve your own goals. Only conscience, character, tradition, care for others, and the desire for the respect and trust of others stand in the way of humanity's being a pure gaming, calculating, scheming, strategic machine. We consider people who operate that way all the time as sociopathic. When I studied calculus in college, the teachers were all into game theory. Their heros were von Neumann, Morgenstern, and of course the great John Nash, who elaborated the Nash Equilibrium - and who can still be seen wandering around Princeton - about whom Sylvia Nasar wrote the fascinating book, and then Ron Howard produced the wonderful "Best Picture" Beautiful Mind. The spiritual home of Game Theory is the RAND Corporation, where very smart people work on interesting economic, military, and policy problems. I was interested to find that they have a graduate program. That would be one cool place to hang out for a while, in Santa Monica. OK, this is already long enough and, as usual with my occasional rambles, I arrived both nowhere and somewhere. I will do the Tragedy of the Commons - more accurately termed The Tragedy of the Unregulated Commons (since, historically, all commoners (those with the right of commons) were of necessity highly regulated either by tradition or by law) - sometime soon. And eventually work my way back into the Prisoner's Dilemma.
From our Maggie's Farm photographer friend. In case you wondered, she does not use a point-and-shoot. 
Tuesday, March 20. 2007
A JFK ground traffic controller, maintaining his sense of humor. Keep listening through the silent bits. What a job! The guy is a real New Yorker.
 A review of Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain, in The Daily Male Mail. A few quotes:
Many men find post-menopausal spouses suddenly cool, selfish and impatient - like completely different people. Pharmaceutically, we do become completely different people. As for menopause, here's what really depressed me: Between the ages of 42 and 52, 50pc of women lose interest in sex altogether. That's primarily because by 50, women lose up to 70pc of their testosterone, the driver of sexual desire for both genders.
and In the professional sphere, you often can't be both - perhaps that's why so few major companies have women at their helm. A woman's instinct to seek approval puts her at a disadvantage in a position of power. Women are driven to achieve consensus, and to keep social bonds intact at all costs. Thus, they always try to get their way through 'agreement', without telling people directly what to do. Brizendine points out that women assert themselves in the form of questions, which made me laugh out loud. Since reading this passage, I've started to notice how I compulsively email my editor with constructions such as "Why don't we do that?", or "Might it be better if we didn't do X, but Y?" I constantly round off a potentially harsh demand with a timid, solicitous 'OK?'
and Men want to be respected. Women want to be liked.
Read the whole review here. Funny how, if you say outloud the things that everyone's Mom and Grandma knew, you could get fired as President of Harvard. I think this book runs up against Cultural Marxism. Our Dr. Bliss wrote on this subject a while back: Cowboys and Cowgirls Image: William Blake's Adam and Eve
Monday, March 19. 2007
Steve of Hog on Ice wants to publicize his writing. We like him. We'll help. A sample:  GOD: Adam! It is I, your creator!
ADAM: Hi, Lord! You’re just in time for lunch! GOD: What’s cooking? Smells great! ADAM: [Turning a spit over an open fire.] That thing you gave me. The one that kept making that awful squeaking noise. GOD: What are you talking about? ADAM: You know. It looked sort of like me, but it was short and had a big rear end, and it stood around with its hands on its hips, squeaking at me from daylight to dusk. It kept telling me what to do, so I hit it with this big rock. GOD: Adam! You have slain the helper I gave you! I am mightily displeased! ADAM: Sorry! Was I supposed to keep it? It ate all my food, and it blamed me for everything, and when I lay down to rest, it lay down next to me and put its big cold feet on me. It was really annoying. And I noticed it had a lot of nice meat on it. GOD: What have you done to her? ADAM: I started with a nice cider vinegar and cayenne brine, and then I used a cumin-and-pepper dry rub, and now I’m slow-cooking her over mesquite coals. GOD: That’s not what I meant! And why are you eating meat? I gave you every fruit and every herb-bearing seed! ADAM: I got that covered, too. I’m roasting corn on the cob. GOD: I love corn on the cob! ADAM: And I found that if you take the leaves from a certain plant and dry them and put them in hot water with honey, you get this stuff. I call it “sweet tea.” GOD: I haven’t eaten a thing since breakfast. ADAM: Pull up a rock and sit down. There’s plenty. GOD: I really shouldn’t. My weight. ADAM: Go on! You look fabulous. GOD: I feel puffy. ADAM: Never! You’re fishing. GOD: Look, if I give you another one of these things, you have to promise not to eat it. ADAM: Why would I want another one? What is it good for? GOD: [Whispers] ADAM: [slaps God on the arm] Get out of here! That’s the craziest thing I ever heard. GOD: It’s more fun than it sounds. ADAM: Can you make one that doesn’t squeak all the time? GOD: No, that’s part of its nature. But if it starts to drive you crazy, light one of these and it will leave you alone. [hands Adam a box of cigars] ADAM: [holding a corona] Okay. Won’t be much of a fire.
Sunday, March 18. 2007
A cool physics teacher and a true American character. Synthstuff
Saturday, March 17. 2007
At Sippican Cottage. He must be at least half Irish to report this tale.
The Dubliners with the Pogues (h/t, Tangled). Damn good. The lyrics are here. Happy St. Paddy's.
 In New England it is traditional to put your peas in on St. Patrick's Day. I like to grow Snow Peas and Sugar Snap peas.
To do that enjoyable task today would entail literally planting the Snow Peas in the snow. They'll have to be late this year.
Friday, March 16. 2007
 The bogeyman Christian is gonna getcha. A quote from Sam Harris in the LA Times piece, titled God's Dupes (h/t, Villainous):
Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.
Dang. That clever Sam Harris figured out that we Christians really want a theocracy, and want nothing more than to behead all those who will not kneel to Christ and his right-wing mission in America. It is astonishing how much he understands about the covert machinations of the Christian faith, and our intentions for America. Who spilled the beans? Who was the leaker? Armitage? Rove? Bush himself? We do indeed hide behind nominal Christians like wolves in sheep's clothing - that is how diabolically sneaky we are. And Bush is our secret Dear leader, but shhhh - don't tell anybody about our ultra, ultra Secret Plan to sneak sharia God's law into the US, like hanging all gays and banning abortion and stoning for adulterers and all that other cool stuff. Read Sam's brilliantly penetrating, earth-shaking, Pulitzer-worthy expose of the dastardly Christian plot against good, old-fashioned, pagan, communitarian America here. My questions: Why doesn't he wonder what we evil ones are waiting for to institute the theocracy we desire? And why haven't we done it already, since we already have Bush as a dictator? And, third, what planet does this dude live on? Is Pluto still a planet? No, I guess not anymore. Tell me, Dr. Sanity, or Dr. Bliss - does this guy qualify as paranoid? Or just plain ignorant? His lack of tolerance for others seems positively hostile...
Live, right this moment, from our corner of Yankeeland. That's one of the dwindling woodpiles. The lousy camera doesn't pick it up, but it's snowing heavily and accumulating rapidly. Schools closed because the amateur bus drivers can't handle 7" of fresh snow: they don't use chains anymore (on the tires, not on the kids - we still use chains up here on the kids, when appropriate). Avoiding litigation, no doubt. To readers who don't get this white stuff where you live: eat your hearts out! It is a beautiful thing. Now it's time to add a log or two to the fire and worsen global warming or cooling or malaria or whatever. 
Thursday, March 15. 2007
 OK, it's a cold, sleety, soon-to-be blizzardy night in Yankeeland. Stoke up the fireplace or the wood stove, and ask the wife or hubbie to bring a keg over to the computer because this piece by Lanza in American Scholar (to which I recommend subscribing ) - h/t, A&L Daily - will take a few minutes to untangle and absorb. It is either an exercise in solipcism, or else very cool and fun. Lanza is a Professor of Medicine.
It's about consciousness and the real world, which is a subject which tends to require a touch of alcohol - or should I say ethanol, these days? Is reality a biological epiphenomenon? It begins with this quote from the great Loren Eisley: While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. “He doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.”
and ends thus: Physicists believe that the theory of everything is hovering right around the corner, and yet consciousness is still largely a mystery, and physicists have no idea how to explain its existence from physical laws. The questions physicists long to ask about nature are bound up with the problem of consciousness. Physics can furnish no answers for them. “Let man,” declared Emerson, “then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind.”
Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer. Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience. We can never have any experience that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of animal logic that mold sensations into objects. It would be erroneous, therefore, to conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process, as existing in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it a spatio-temporal order. The situation, as we have seen, is like playing a CD—the information leaps into three-dimensional sound, and in that way, and in that way only, does the music indeed exist.
Go ahead and read the whole thing.
 I would never criticize an author, because producing a work of fiction that anyone will pay money to read is an astonishing achievement.
Cooper was prolific as hell, but all I have read is The Last of the Mohicans - a long time ago. Mark Twain, of course, has the bona fides to critique a fellow author. I have heard of his famous humorous and devilish critique of Cooper ("Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"), but never read it until Right Wing Nation posted it today. It's a powerful manual on what not to do in fiction writing. Thanks, RWN.
Wednesday, March 14. 2007
 Kirsch reviews Clive James' new book, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, in the NY Sun. A quote:
Mr. James is one of those rare writers who convinces you that criticism is not necessarily a handmaiden in the palace of the arts — that it can be transformed, Cinderella-style, from drudge to princess, given the energy and style of a first-rate fairy godmother (or godfather). In a time when criticism is dominated by the theory-sick monographs of academics, and when the future seems to belong to amateur and professional blurbists, it is more than entertaining to read Mr. James's lucid, passionate, erudite essays. It is heartening, and seems to promise that the critical role once played by a Samuel Johnson or an Edmund Wilson is still possible in the 21st century.
Whole review here.
I wish this wonderful Abbott and Costello routine were on YouTube, but it doesn't appear to be, at least not yet. Just reading it is a kick, though. Much funnier than "who's on first?"
 Stumbling and Mumbling takes a look at Dalrymple's piece on The Proletarianization of Doctors.
Indeed, the de-professionalization of physicians is happening all over the US, and not just in countries with socialized medicine. I most recently became disturbed by this when I was told that docs in a certain charity clinic that I am familiar with have been asked to punch time clocks when they come on duty. Of course, it's all about money and power. When physicians become employees with no independent function as professionals, they can begin to lose their identity as professionals. It already happened to public school teachers when they unionized, but docs, being generally made of sterner stuff, do not fold so easily. Fact is, this charity clinic I refer to (which has family practice/general practice, OG/GYN, dental, and psychiatric staff) is staffed by docs who want to sacrifice some of their time to the poor, but they have been told that if they all were to quit, they would be replaced overnight with docs from India and Pakistan who would not view the job as charity at all, and who have a different view of medicine that the traditional American view. Money and power. It all began in the US when hospitals began to be run by managers instead of by doctors, in the 1970s. Hospital boards with an eye on the bottom line wanted compliant employees instead of cranky, demanding, patient-devoted docs running things. We should have seen it coming when insurance companies replaced the line for "physician" with a line for "provider." Provider? I am no provider. As a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, I am quite the opposite: I am a demander, if anything. A demanding friend, whose time is worth a lot. Not a caretaker or care-giver, most of the time. And that is why I am willing to be paid to teach, but am not willing to be paid to work by anyone other than my patients. Medicine is a fraternity/sorority, and a guild, and a priesthood with daunting responsibilities which extend far beyond the technicalities of medicine into the realms of friendship, love, the soul and the spirit. If that doesn't matter to people, they will live to regret it.
More photos of the church here. 
Monday, March 12. 2007
 Our hunter friend has opened a new restaurant in NO. Their last one was Katrina-ized. Good review.
Give it a try, if you are down there, and say Hello to Vincent.
Quoted in a piece on dealing with rejection at Dr. Helen: Legendary psychologist Albert Ellis pioneered the "shame-attacking exercise" in 1933 at age 19, when he decided to approach every woman who sat down alone on a bench at the New York Botanical Garden. "Thirty walked away immediately," he told the New York Times. "I talked with the other 100, for the first time in my life, no matter how anxious I was. Nobody vomited and ran away. Nobody called the cops."
And Ellis learned he wouldn't die from rejection. Of the first 130 women he went up to, he got only one date, he said, but "with the second 100, I got good and made a few dates"—and, eventually, got to be "one of the best picker-uppers of women in the United States."
It's the second day in a row with temps above freezing, so it is either a global warming issue or early Spring. Worth a trip to Florence: Botticelli's allegorical La Primavera.  And for a cute springtime photo of an old bridge over the Seine (possibly not OK for work unless you work in a sawmill), see continuation page. You will like this one, Bruce:
Continue reading "La Primavera"
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