The Daily Sabbatical

In my valuable free time, I decided I needed to paste Hume’s Treatise into Wordl and generate a word cloud representing the frequency of words used in old Dave’s masterpiece. This needed to be done, and it is beautiful, if I do say so myself.  Click for the bigger image.

Six years ago The Notwist released Neon Golden, the best album of that year. Mixing beautiful songs with glitchy beats, they beat The Postal Service to the punch and, in my opinion, their songs have remained fresh while those of Gibbard and Tamborello have faded. A good part of the reason is that The Notwist uses guitars to excellent effect, both in establishing rhythm and in supplementing the melody. This summer sees the band return with more of what makes them great. Markus Acher’s songs are as strong as ever, with lyrics that remain intriguing by dodging the obvious and with tunes that have to be forced out of the head before they take it over. The Devil, You + Me doesn’t knock me over like Neon Golden, but that’s a lot to ask Expectations are high, and to be sure, music has moved on a bit since 2002, so there’s no revolution coming with this album. Nevertheless, it’s bound to be one of my favorite albums of the year, and I suspect that if its ranking is determined purely by number of spins in my player it will be a competitor for the very top place.

Gloomy Planets.mp3

I’ll probably be gettin’ me one of these T-shirts, and perhaps others to be found at amorphia apparel.  Some really clever designs there.

Thanks to Clayton Littlejohn for forwarding a Crooked Timber post on one of my favorite bad-asses.  David Byrne has a new installation in NYC in which he has hooked up an old organ so that it plays the building that houses it.  Plays the building?  Yep.  Pressing keys, pulling knobs, and pushing peddles turns on machines that rap columns, blow air through water-pipes, and tap on radiators.  There’s a description and a video on Byrne’s website.

Interesting result found on Scientific Blogging about how younger people are more susceptible to a common form of fallacious reasoning.  Young people are more likely to keep watching a bad movie if they’ve paid for it than if it was free.  Old people are as inclined or disinclined to keep watching whether they’ve paid or not.  Interesting, for sure.  The oldies come out as more rational.  I’m not sure I agree with the psychologist’s reasoning about the source of the disparity between young and old, though.  There’s another explanation waiting in the wings–the value of time for young people is less than it is for older people since they have more of it.  That probably doesn’t explain everything, but you’re much more likely to hear an older person say “life’s too short to watch bad movies.”

Sunk Cost Fallacy And Positivity – Why Young People Will Finish Watching A Bad Movie
Submitted by News Account on 10 July 2008 – 12:00am. Psychology

The economic and psychological term known as “sunk-cost fallacy” is a bias that leads someone to make a decision based solely on a previous financial investment. For example, a baseball fan might attend every game of the season only because he already purchased the tickets. But not everyone would force themselves to brave the pouring rain for a single game in one season simply because they previously paid for the seats.

So who is more likely to commit or avoid the sunk-cost fallacy and why? In a recent study, psychologists JoNell Strough, Clare Mehta, Joseph McFall and Kelly Schuller from West Virginia University found that younger adults were more likely to commit to a situation if they had already invested money into it, and that older adults showed a more balanced fiscal perspective of the same situation.

To get to this conclusion, the researchers presented college students and senior citizens with two vignettes to test how likely each age group would be to watch a boring, paid-for movie versus a boring, free movie.

The first vignette specifically read, “You paid $10.95 to see a movie on pay TV. After five minutes, you are bored and the movie seems pretty bad”; the other vignette did not include a cost. Participants then selected from five options regarding their projected time commitment—stop watching entirely, watch for ten more minutes, watch for twenty more minutes, watch for thirty more minutes or watch until the end.

The results in the July issue of Psychological Science, show the older adults spent the same amount of time watching the movie regardless of monetary investment. In contrast, the young adults chose to invest more time in the paid-for movie than the free movie in order to avoid wasting $10.95. The psychologists attribute the distinction between younger and older peoples’ decisions to differences in the way each group thinks about gains versus losses.

“Younger adults show a negativity bias,” Strough explained. “They weigh negative information, such as the lost investment, more heavily than positive information and so they try to ‘recover’ the lost investment by investing more time.”

On the other hand, older adults are more likely to view the positive side of situations; therefore, their decisions reflect a more balanced view of gains and losses. According to the psychologists, older adults’ more balanced view may help them recognize that, once made, this type of investment cannot be recovered simply by committing more time to the activity.

It might be true that we learn something new everyday, but most of those things are boring and trivial. Not so for me today. Lanie and I finally have a contract on our house, and today was the day for inspections. Turns out that we had to get the cats out of the house for this process because they were bringing termite sniffing dogs into the house! I knew about dogs and drugs, but dogs and bugs—no idea. Turns out those little wood eating bastards produce a terrific amount of methane. (Apparently the methane is produced by micro-organisms in their digestive tracts, but whose counting?) The dogs can detect this scent through concrete, drywalls, and floorboards with 97% accuracy. I’m pretty impressed. I’m also a little worried. We rid ourselves of termites several years ago, but our Terminex contract just expired…

Turns out dogs can smell landmines and truffles as well. Check it out.

The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry, has got to be on a very short list for the best novels published this year. I will be shocked if it doesn’t receive several awards, and justice will have failed if it doesn’t bring its author a very large new audience. There are some books that favor a particular taste, but the appeal of some books is—or should be—universal. This is one of the latter.

Barry’s book follows two diaries: one written by a very old woman in an Irish mental institution and the other written by the institution’s chief psychiatrist. Their motives for writing dovetail: the patient, Roseanne, wishes to document her life before she passes on, and Dr. Grene wishes to discover why, exactly, Roseanne—who seems astonishingly sane and even uplifting—had been in an institution for most of her life. As Dr. Grene pursues his mystery, therefore, it is slowly revealed by his patient’s diary. This is an intriguing enough literary gambit, but as the doctor’s investigations develop, the reader is confronted with various conflicting accounts which make him an active decoder of the mystery. This is a delicate balancing act, but let’s set the stakes even higher. Roseanne’s story shows a particular corner of Ireland during its difficult twentieth century, shedding light on how internal factions had devastating and unpredictable repercussions within the private lives of the citizens. What’s more, Dr. Grene has his own travails with a wife who is herself mentally ill, and he winds up turning more and more to the inspiring Roseanne during his dark hours. And, there’s a satisfying twist to the story that I won’t spoil.

Needless to say, it is very difficult to pull this much off, especially in a relatively short book. Barry does it expertly, and with language that rewards rereading. Roseanne’s Irishisms are not overdone, instead they flower on the page, and the doctor’s more distanced poetry is no less compelling.

This book has everything. It’s a simple as that.

More lists! This one is bound to have many unread greats on it, especially for Anglocentric jackasses like myself. One through twelve below, and the rest here.

1. Raymond Queneau – Exercises in Style (Barbara Wright, 1958)

2. Primo Levi – If This is a Man (Stuart Woolf, 1959)

3. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa – The Leopard (Archibald Colquhoun, 1961)

4. Günter Grass – The Tin Drum (Ralph Manheim, 1962)

5. Jorge Luis Borges – Labyrinths (Donald Yates, James Irby, 1962)

6. Leonardo Sciascia – Day of the Owl (Archibald Colquhoun, 1963)

7. Alexander Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Ralph Parker, 1963)

8. Yukio Mishima – Death in Midsummer (Seidensticker, Keene, Morris, Sargent, 1965)

9. Heinrich Böll – The Clown (Leila Vennewitz, 1965)

10. Octavio Paz – Labyrinth of Solitude (Lysander Kemp, 1967)

11. Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita (Michael Glenny, 1969)

12. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 100 Years of Solitude (Gregory Rabassa, 1970)

Dawkins can certainly get tiresome, but this conversation with Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg (at the University of Texas, by the way) is quite good.  It provides the simple reason why design and fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God, even on their best days, get you nowhere.