The Louis Armstrong childhood arrest that no one knew about

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H/T to Ricky Riccardi for this article.

In his 1954 autobiography, “Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans,” Armstrong writes that when he was arrested in 1913, he “had no idea what a Waifs Home was” — even though he had been sent to the home just three years earlier.

“This is mind-blowing,” said Ricky Riccardi, archivist at the Louis Armstrong House and Museum in New York City’s borough of Queens and author of “What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years.”

“I’ve been spending half my life researching Armstrong, and this is a breakthrough.”

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Neurons to Nirvana

brain science

Click poster for trailer:

A feature documentary about the resurgence of psychedelics as medicine. Psychedelics can be potent tools for getting to know who we are, who we can be. and for healing the trauma of a society that is addicted to greed and consumerism. This film dares to break the taboo surrounding psychedelic medicines, by examining and revealing their proven potential to heal and alleviate suffering on a global scale. Through interviews with the world’s foremost researchers, writers, psychologists and pioneers in psychedelic psychotherapy, the film explores the history and medicinal potential of five powerful psychedelic substances (LSD, Psilocybin, MDMA, Ayahuasca and Cannabis).

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A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 83

A Confederacy of Dunces

“Sure,” she whispered. “Look, you don’t wanna waste your evening messing with that character laying in the street. He’s some kinda bum. You look like you could use you some fun.” She stepped around the white mountain of smock, which was wheezing and snorting volcanically. Somewhere in fantasyland Ignatius was dreaming of a terrified Myrna Minkoff being tried by a court of Taste and Decency and found wanting. A dreadful sentence was about to be pronounced, something guaranteeing physical injury to her person as penance for innumerable offences. Lana Lee got close to the man and reached into her gold lame overalls. She squatted next to him and surreptitiously flashed the Boethian photograph cupped in her hand. “Take a look at this, baby. How’d you like to spend the evening with that?”

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Vernon Smith’s Foreward to Propriety and Prosperity: New Studies on the Philosophy of Adam Smith

adam smith, vernon smith

Here is the opening paragraph to Vernon’s Foreward to Propriety and Prosperity. I would urge anyone interested in situated cognition to read his superb Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms amazingly an unknown classic to those of an externalist non-Cartesian persuasion. Also worth a read is Vernon’s memoir.

vernon

This book is a welcome addition to the resurgent scholarly and practical interest in Adam Smith’s contributions to market economics and its antecedents in the social order of human culture. In Smith, propriety concerned the rules that govern human sociability by mutual consent in local group interactions. Out of this experience were fashioned the rules of property, justice and the liberal order of political economy, and thence to economic prosperity. It is a grand narrative alive with meaning for the contemporary world in which side-by-side with markets the demand for sociability has found new expression in the social media companies. No wonder that in a seminar Kenneth Boulding could refer to Adam Smith as the first great post-Newtonian scientist.

Distributed Cognition in the Analytic and Continental Traditions

distributed cognition

The Moviegoer – quotes and extracts – 13

The Moviegoer, walker percy

A regular young Rupert Brooke was I, —full of expectancy. Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it. That’s what killed my father, English romanticism, that and 1930 science. A line for my notebook:

Explore connection between romanticism and scientific objectivity. Does a scientifically minded person become a romantic because he is a left-over from his own science?

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Why things feel the way they do?

the "hard" problem

J. Kevin O’Regan on qualia.