Happy birthday to the wonderful Buddy Guy.
Buddy Guy @ 80
Happy birthday to the wonderful Buddy Guy.
Oakeshott on friendship
Friends are not concerned with what might be made of one another, but only with the enjoyment of one another; and the condition of this enjoyment is a ready acceptance of what is and the absence of any desire to change or to improve. A friend is not somebody one trusts to behave in a certain manner, who supplies certain wants, who has certain useful abilities, who possesses certain merely agreeable qualities, or who holds certain acceptable opinions; he is somebody who engages the imagination, who excites contemplation, who provokes interest, sympathy, delight and loyalty simply on account of the relationship entered into. One friend cannot replace another; there is all the difference in the world between the death of a friend and the retirement of one’s tailor from business. The relationship of friend to friend is dramatic, not utilitarian; the tie is one of familiarity, not usefulness; the disposition engaged is conservative, not “progressive.” And what is true of friendship is not less true of other experiences – of patriotism, for example, and of conversation – each of which demands a conservative disposition as a condition of its enjoyment.
— On Being Conservative, Rationalism in Politics
Largest Private Collection of Islamic Art
It’s one of those delicious cultural ironies (of course there are a few other examples) that a significant amount of Islamic art preservation (and more besides) is down to one Nasser Khalili, a Jewish Iranian-born academic and former art dealer.
Ownership is nothing but a myth, we are only a temporary custodian of what we believe we own
Walker Percy Wednesday 94
Is this an age of belief, he reflected, a great renaissance of faith after a period of crass materialism, atheism, agnosticism, liberalism, scientism? Or is it an age of madness in which everyone believes everything? Which?
Like many Californians, she knew how to expand the particular into the general, turn a hobby into a religion, and what’s more make it credible. It was easy to believe her and see her in the surf, a blond not-so-young Juno, waves foaming at her knees, her swim-coach tank suit well worn and dry, the hem slightly frayed over her strong dark marbled legs, launch happy babes into the Pacific, the Aquarians of a new age. Who knows? Maybe she was right: going back where we came from, back to the primal sea. That was her California principle, leaving the sad failed land life behind and leaving it soon enough and young enough before it screwed you up for good, and going back to the original environment, the ocean (which had the same salt content as blood and the amniotic fluid where we were happy), and, age ten months to ten years to a hundred, frolic like porpoises in the warm Cretaceous sea.
Something was happening. Suddenly, with a little surge of satisfaction under his belt, he knew what it was. Everything had the look about it of coming to an end. There was nothing more he wished to say to the Cupps. There was nothing more for them to say to him. Things do come to an end.
It was the very sort of place, a nondescript weedy triangular public pubic sort of place, to make a sort of love or to die a sort of death.
The silence of the cloud seemed to press in upon the house like cotton.
Did you not then believe, old mole, that these two things alone are real, loving and dying, and since one is so much like the other and there is so little of the one, in the end there remained only the other?
Silence.
Complexity Explained
With my good chum Péter Érdi at The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers mega shindig. Check out Peter’s excellent book (the title is as bold as Dennett’s Consciousness Explained) and now that Peter is head honcho for Cognitive Systems Research consider submitting something to them — it’s a very ecumenical journal with a nice balance between the philosophical and the empirical.
Nick Lowe @ the Beeb
The immensely talented, subtle, dignified and classy Nick Lowe performing live for BBC4. Nick’s Christmas show last year was the most satisfying live show I saw last year. Catch him if you can — real musicianship, not bread and circuses.
Deirdre McCloskey and Don Boudreaux on ‘Bourgeois Equality’
I’m a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian libertarian.
That description would flummox the regressives’ crude social ontology and their perversely illiberal hierarchy of victimhood. Anyway, it’s well-worth listening to the very kind and deeply talented Deirdre McCloskey whom I had the good fortune to meet in person some six years ago at a San Diego conference and who recently (and surprisingly) remembered me when we resumed our correspondence. Deirdre is frank, funny and quite scathing — always enriching listening to her and of course learning from her work.
Scottish equality vs French equality — I guess that’s an ongoing tension within Western political economy.
Website (everything you wanted to know about Deirdre but were afraid to ask)
Chuck Norris vs Communism
Very roughly analogous to the corrosive effects that the internet has been to our out-of-touch and typically regressive gatekeepers, so too was VHS the corrodent to the Romanian communist state. Now, as then, these gatekeepers entertain the shallowest of insights into the dynamics of situated moral psychology, deluded by their lazy rationalistic disparaging of “low brow” culture, the elites of all political persuasions are now caught like deer in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. The words “hoisted” and “petard” spring to mind. Here is the homepage for the film — a film that stands as a timely reminder of a very recent illiberal past, an illiberalism that has now morphed into a homegrown trojan-like rabidly recreational censorious swarm behavior of faux outrage and cheap virtue-signaling.
Eric Ravilious 1903–1942
Born on this day — IMHO one of the greats.
(b London, 22 July 1903; d off Iceland, 2 Sept. 1942). British watercolour painter, printmaker, and designer. In addition to paintings, his highly varied output included book illustrations and book-jackets, and designs for furniture, glass, textiles, and the Wedgwood pottery factory (notably a mug commemorating Edward VIII’s coronation; this was withdrawn following Edward’s abdication, but the design was used in revised form for the coronations of George VI and Elizabeth II).
He was one of the outstanding wood engravers of his time, his book illustrations in this medium making striking use of bold tonal contrasts and complex patterning. In 1940–2 he was an Official War Artist, and he produced some memorable watercolours of naval scenes off Norway (Norway, 1940, Laing AG, Newcastle upon Tyne). His plane disappeared on a flying patrol near Iceland, in 1942, and he was officially presumed dead the following year. His wife Tirzah Ravilious (née Garwood) (1908–51) was a painter and illustrator. She gave up her career for motherhood (they had three children), but she started work again after Eric’s death, even though she was already suffering from the cancer that caused her own early death.
— The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists
The Emergence of Groups and Inequality through Co-Adaptation
The title of this post denotes a newly published open access paper. Especially of note is section 2 The Stigmergy Game. Good to see more and more applications of stigmergy to the human-human dimension. I’d be interested to hear from my economist chums on their take on this paper since I have mentioned economics as a star example of a stigmergic system here — Stigmergy 3.0: From ants to economies and here Stigmergic epistemology, stigmergic cognition. Speaking of which, here is another plug for our recently published special issue on Human-Human stigmergy that features the open access Stigmergic coordination in FLOSS development teams: Integrating explicit and implicit mechanisms and as such has become the most downloaded article from Cognitive Systems Research in the last 90 days.
