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High today, here: 23. Dewpoint then: 16. High dewpoint: 18.
High today in TO: 24. Dewpoint then: 17. High dewpoint: 18.
Low today on the balcony: 20.1. High: 24. Currently: 21.
Two home runs from Jason Giambi and his wonky back. It's a funny game.
Some feinting start on a Crito paper. Not much, but it means there will be a Crito paper. Sooner or later.
First day back at WLU in a couple of weeks, so a quick periodical tour. This month's Harper's Index notes that 90% of Americans think most Americans are overweight, while 39% of Americans think that they themselves are overweight. Maclean's has a pretty embarrassingly useless report on student satisfaction in Canadian universities. The cover says that it shows there's lots of room for improvement; the numbers show that surprisingly large majorities of students at just about every university that provided numbers are at least minimally happy customers. There's a bit on a day in the life of a York student; the York student lives in Vanier College residence, which the article says is "in the heart of campus", which is false--it's actually on the northern edge of campus--and so I say again: every article I ever read about anything I know anything about gets things wrong. Also, Andrew Potter waves his hand at an American study which, he says, shows that what makes a difference to your future earnings isn't what school you go to, but what school you're accepted to. Thus: if you're accepted to Harvard, but for some reason go to your local State U., you'll as likely as not end up making as much money as you would have if you'd gone to Harvard--because, the obvious reasoning goes, the main, if not only, function of universities is not to teach, but to sort. (Though I'm surprised that the Havard brand on your resume isn't good for a few extra bucks, on average, if it's really the case that it isn't.) And oh, can I ever believe it.
But that's just as far as their economic usefulness is concerned. In a separate piece, Potter--I guess they were scrambling to fill this issue out--says that grad school was a horrible thing for him, because he didn't really know what he wanted to do, and everyone should be discouraged from going to grad school unless they're absolutely certain what they're going to do. (Potter now teaches philosophy at Trent University.) Great practical advice, to be sure, and just the sort of thing that's filling the universities (by which, of course, I mean the humanities) with young professional zombies.
Read a moderately intriguing piece by Zizek in London Review of Books about the "liberal communists"--Gates, Soros, and all them. (Accidentally topical given Buffet's $30B "donation" to Gates's foundation, which reminds me that this month's Atlantic has an unfortunately timed cover piece on Zarqawi, which may be a good lesson in why it's unwise to pay too much attention to newsmagazines, which are always mostly a half-step ahead of irrelevance.) Zizek doesn't like the liberal communists, which is somewhat surprising to me, since I'd gotten the vague impression that Zizek is that sort of reconstructed leftist who hangs out on the left for the purpose of beating on unreconstructed leftists. In fact, Zizek hates the liberal communists, and admonishes us never to forget that they are the ones, with the exploitation and the degradation and the hey hey hey, who cause all the problems that they so charitably try to fix. Zizek quotes someone, Thomas Friedman, I think, saying that they go to show that you can have globalization, or capitalism, or globalized capitalism, or whatever, "without being awful", or something like that. For Zizek, apparently, it is still axiomatic that you cannot have capitalism without being awful. But, you know, it's amazing, ever since I read Schmitt--and at the time, remember, I thought there was so little to Schmitt, and really, there is so little to Schmitt--I keep seeing things through that simple Schmittian lens: the political division is prior to all other divisions; all other divisions are simply masks, rationalizations, for the political division, which is, simply, two strangers fighting. First we fight; secondly we find something to fight about. It's impossible to reconcile, because you're not fighting for a reason--the reason is for fighting.
And a disconcerting bit in, I think, the Atlantic about how US Supreme Court judges, apart from Stevens, all get their clerks to write their decisions for them these days. It argues that the clerks mostly ought to be let go, and the judges put back to work. It's disconcerting because, for instance, in the philosophy of law class I TAed a couple of years ago, we read a number of decisions from the Canadian Supreme Court, as well as one or two from American courts (though not the Supreme Court), and a lot of them are really fascinating as pieces of applied legal reasoning: there is a person there, working through something, judiciously weighing competing claims within certain constraints. If clerks are writing the decisions, then presumably the judiciousness is gone: the judge is reduced to a position (and of course the judge is reduced to a position, in contemporary American legal politics), from which anyone can work out the consequences in a given case. (Actually, this would be handier for an introductory philosophy of law class: first you learn the positions, and then you see them applied. (Which is also typically how ethics is taught.) If they're applied formulaicly, then you don't need to worry about individual nuances mucking things up (though in introductory classes these will tend to be read out anyway, if they're there).)
Finally: happened upon the second of a three-part series in the National Post about sleep. Today's part was about how a lot of high-powered people say they sleep less than five hours a day. A spokesperson for the Sleep Lobby rejoinders, firstly, that Studies Have Shown that, actually, people who say they don't sleep much actually sleep more than they think they do, and, also, that Studies Have Shown that no sleep hurt brain! Seventeen straight hours of being awake impairs your driving ability like two glasses of wine!--which I have to say seems like utter BS to me. (A mattress store is currently running ads during Jays games attempting to instil in people the notion that unless they buy a supermattress, they will die in a car crash, because they will be groggy, because their sleep will be interrupted.) One of the high-powered non-sleeper cases-in-point is Margaret Thatcher, who, the article notes, was noted for falling asleep in meetings.
The most high-powered person I've ever been personally acquainted with is Adelman. He sleeps three hours a night. He often seems dead on his feet, and he sometimes falls asleep in class. But when he gets up a head of steam, boy does he go--big brain, no hurt. I have sometimes thought that this might be the way to do it: be awake when wakefulness is called for, and sleep when it's not.
High today in TO: 24. Dewpoint then: 17. High dewpoint: 18.
Low today on the balcony: 20.1. High: 24. Currently: 21.
Two home runs from Jason Giambi and his wonky back. It's a funny game.
Some feinting start on a Crito paper. Not much, but it means there will be a Crito paper. Sooner or later.
First day back at WLU in a couple of weeks, so a quick periodical tour. This month's Harper's Index notes that 90% of Americans think most Americans are overweight, while 39% of Americans think that they themselves are overweight. Maclean's has a pretty embarrassingly useless report on student satisfaction in Canadian universities. The cover says that it shows there's lots of room for improvement; the numbers show that surprisingly large majorities of students at just about every university that provided numbers are at least minimally happy customers. There's a bit on a day in the life of a York student; the York student lives in Vanier College residence, which the article says is "in the heart of campus", which is false--it's actually on the northern edge of campus--and so I say again: every article I ever read about anything I know anything about gets things wrong. Also, Andrew Potter waves his hand at an American study which, he says, shows that what makes a difference to your future earnings isn't what school you go to, but what school you're accepted to. Thus: if you're accepted to Harvard, but for some reason go to your local State U., you'll as likely as not end up making as much money as you would have if you'd gone to Harvard--because, the obvious reasoning goes, the main, if not only, function of universities is not to teach, but to sort. (Though I'm surprised that the Havard brand on your resume isn't good for a few extra bucks, on average, if it's really the case that it isn't.) And oh, can I ever believe it.
But that's just as far as their economic usefulness is concerned. In a separate piece, Potter--I guess they were scrambling to fill this issue out--says that grad school was a horrible thing for him, because he didn't really know what he wanted to do, and everyone should be discouraged from going to grad school unless they're absolutely certain what they're going to do. (Potter now teaches philosophy at Trent University.) Great practical advice, to be sure, and just the sort of thing that's filling the universities (by which, of course, I mean the humanities) with young professional zombies.
Read a moderately intriguing piece by Zizek in London Review of Books about the "liberal communists"--Gates, Soros, and all them. (Accidentally topical given Buffet's $30B "donation" to Gates's foundation, which reminds me that this month's Atlantic has an unfortunately timed cover piece on Zarqawi, which may be a good lesson in why it's unwise to pay too much attention to newsmagazines, which are always mostly a half-step ahead of irrelevance.) Zizek doesn't like the liberal communists, which is somewhat surprising to me, since I'd gotten the vague impression that Zizek is that sort of reconstructed leftist who hangs out on the left for the purpose of beating on unreconstructed leftists. In fact, Zizek hates the liberal communists, and admonishes us never to forget that they are the ones, with the exploitation and the degradation and the hey hey hey, who cause all the problems that they so charitably try to fix. Zizek quotes someone, Thomas Friedman, I think, saying that they go to show that you can have globalization, or capitalism, or globalized capitalism, or whatever, "without being awful", or something like that. For Zizek, apparently, it is still axiomatic that you cannot have capitalism without being awful. But, you know, it's amazing, ever since I read Schmitt--and at the time, remember, I thought there was so little to Schmitt, and really, there is so little to Schmitt--I keep seeing things through that simple Schmittian lens: the political division is prior to all other divisions; all other divisions are simply masks, rationalizations, for the political division, which is, simply, two strangers fighting. First we fight; secondly we find something to fight about. It's impossible to reconcile, because you're not fighting for a reason--the reason is for fighting.
And a disconcerting bit in, I think, the Atlantic about how US Supreme Court judges, apart from Stevens, all get their clerks to write their decisions for them these days. It argues that the clerks mostly ought to be let go, and the judges put back to work. It's disconcerting because, for instance, in the philosophy of law class I TAed a couple of years ago, we read a number of decisions from the Canadian Supreme Court, as well as one or two from American courts (though not the Supreme Court), and a lot of them are really fascinating as pieces of applied legal reasoning: there is a person there, working through something, judiciously weighing competing claims within certain constraints. If clerks are writing the decisions, then presumably the judiciousness is gone: the judge is reduced to a position (and of course the judge is reduced to a position, in contemporary American legal politics), from which anyone can work out the consequences in a given case. (Actually, this would be handier for an introductory philosophy of law class: first you learn the positions, and then you see them applied. (Which is also typically how ethics is taught.) If they're applied formulaicly, then you don't need to worry about individual nuances mucking things up (though in introductory classes these will tend to be read out anyway, if they're there).)
Finally: happened upon the second of a three-part series in the National Post about sleep. Today's part was about how a lot of high-powered people say they sleep less than five hours a day. A spokesperson for the Sleep Lobby rejoinders, firstly, that Studies Have Shown that, actually, people who say they don't sleep much actually sleep more than they think they do, and, also, that Studies Have Shown that no sleep hurt brain! Seventeen straight hours of being awake impairs your driving ability like two glasses of wine!--which I have to say seems like utter BS to me. (A mattress store is currently running ads during Jays games attempting to instil in people the notion that unless they buy a supermattress, they will die in a car crash, because they will be groggy, because their sleep will be interrupted.) One of the high-powered non-sleeper cases-in-point is Margaret Thatcher, who, the article notes, was noted for falling asleep in meetings.
The most high-powered person I've ever been personally acquainted with is Adelman. He sleeps three hours a night. He often seems dead on his feet, and he sometimes falls asleep in class. But when he gets up a head of steam, boy does he go--big brain, no hurt. I have sometimes thought that this might be the way to do it: be awake when wakefulness is called for, and sleep when it's not.
