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Currently at UW: 3.5, which is more or less the day's high. Warming trend's coming; it'll be a while before we see snowsquall warnings again.
It was two months ago now that I said the maple leaves were falling. They're still falling. For some reason, the first ones to fall were in the park, and they were red. The last ones to fall are on the street, and they are yellow. With large brown spots. Which is actually better than last year, when the tree in front of our building just went brown.
Finally, after a week of regrouping, back through the park to the library today. First time I've been to the park after the leaves are mostly gone, and coming back was the first time I've been in the park after dark. Big bloody sheep was, unsettlingly, standing there eating grass in the dark. On the way up, there seemed to be only seagulls left in the pond, but then I noticed some ripples coming out from under the boardwalk when I got to the shallow end, followed by six ducks. A lot of the animals are rearranged to accommodate a family of swans that's been moved into the pen where the fat goat and the sheep were. (I assumed the two adult swans were the swans from the pond--and I was saddened to think that those swans I've seen in the pond all summer were basically domesticated swans, maybe with their wings clipped--but then, on the way back, the swans were in the pond (and so were a whole lot more ducks), so who knows.) The alpacas are gone. The alpaca fur display is also gone, replaced by an incipient nativity scene. And the line of trees on the far side of the pond can no longer pretend it's a forest.
For some reason, I thought I'd avoid the Saturday night hordes coming back through the park, but of course the hordes are in the park, too, peeing on bushes and shrieking not to be pushed anymore on the saucer swing. ("What's that? You want to go faster?") This is something I've been meaning to put down here for a while: walking, at night, especially Friday and Saturday night, through uptown Waterloo and down toward the club that's almost across the street from us is ... frightening is a little much, but teeth-grittening, in a way that it never is at all--not even close--in Toronto (and, of course, by "Toronto" I mean Queen W.).
But it was much the same in Kingston, my first year there, when I was mostly walking the streets alone. It'd be easy to think it's a small-town (though neither KW nor Kingston is a small town) redneck thing, but that isn't it at all--it's the students who're teeth-grittening. (A few months ago, having my teeth grittened on the way home, I was thinking how it's funny that having a university in the neighbourhood is a great way to make the neighbourhood a lot smarter, and also a great way to make the neighbourhood a lot stupider. Probably, what smarter has in quality, stupider makes up in quantity.) The thing is, when I walk down the main drag from Waterloo to Kitchener on a Friday or Saturday night, pretty much everyone I see is going to be younger than me, which would not at all be the case in Toronto. There's something unhealthy about a city where the nightlife is made up entirely of people under 30.
I have resolved to bang away at Being and Nothingness until it's gone, because it has just gotten to, and past, the point where it's got to go. And having banged back 95 pages today, I have concluded that Being and Nothingness is just a tedious book that probably suffered badly from the fact that it was written and published in the middle of a war. I keep zoning out for pages at a time, but it never seems like I've missed anything because he says the same things over and over. (Though there's also the fact that this would be about the fifth time I've read the first hundred pages or so.) Anyway, he certainly does set up the bad faith chapter as if bad faith is going to be just a matter of fleeing freedom--he's going to examine bad faith as a way of fleeing freedom, though that doesn't mean that bad faith is only flight from freedom.
And more enjoyably, read Edward Royzman and Rahul Kumar's "Is Consequential Luck Morally Inconsequential? Empirical Psychology and the Reassessment of Moral Luck", which was published in Ratio in the same month (officially, anyway) as Domsky's piece in the Journal of Philosophy, and takes the same general strategy: the problem of moral luck can be chalked up to psychological biases, and if we got rid of the biases, we wouldn't have a problem anymore. (Though they're less certain about that than Domsky is, and some of their evidence suggests that it won't actually work that way: people remain biassed even when they're aware of their biasses and trying not to be biassed.) What they're doing is actually a lot closer than what Domsky's doing to what I'm doing in the bad-faith-and-moral-luck paper: they cite some studies by psychologists (and they think this is their important breakthrough, getting us beyond idle thought-experimentation, which seems like a crock to me, but the studies are interesting--more interesting than thought-experiments, sure--anyway) to argue that, e.g., people blame drunk drivers who kill people more than drunk drivers who don't because they're unable to shake the belief that the drunk-driver-killers actually were in control of the situation even though the scenario they're presented with stipulates that they weren't. (Which strikes me as reminiscent of what Gilligan has as the characteristically female response to the Heinz dilemma: the scenario stipulates that Heinz has to steal the drug or let his wife die, but Gilligan's girls won't buy the stipulation.)
It was two months ago now that I said the maple leaves were falling. They're still falling. For some reason, the first ones to fall were in the park, and they were red. The last ones to fall are on the street, and they are yellow. With large brown spots. Which is actually better than last year, when the tree in front of our building just went brown.
Finally, after a week of regrouping, back through the park to the library today. First time I've been to the park after the leaves are mostly gone, and coming back was the first time I've been in the park after dark. Big bloody sheep was, unsettlingly, standing there eating grass in the dark. On the way up, there seemed to be only seagulls left in the pond, but then I noticed some ripples coming out from under the boardwalk when I got to the shallow end, followed by six ducks. A lot of the animals are rearranged to accommodate a family of swans that's been moved into the pen where the fat goat and the sheep were. (I assumed the two adult swans were the swans from the pond--and I was saddened to think that those swans I've seen in the pond all summer were basically domesticated swans, maybe with their wings clipped--but then, on the way back, the swans were in the pond (and so were a whole lot more ducks), so who knows.) The alpacas are gone. The alpaca fur display is also gone, replaced by an incipient nativity scene. And the line of trees on the far side of the pond can no longer pretend it's a forest.
For some reason, I thought I'd avoid the Saturday night hordes coming back through the park, but of course the hordes are in the park, too, peeing on bushes and shrieking not to be pushed anymore on the saucer swing. ("What's that? You want to go faster?") This is something I've been meaning to put down here for a while: walking, at night, especially Friday and Saturday night, through uptown Waterloo and down toward the club that's almost across the street from us is ... frightening is a little much, but teeth-grittening, in a way that it never is at all--not even close--in Toronto (and, of course, by "Toronto" I mean Queen W.).
But it was much the same in Kingston, my first year there, when I was mostly walking the streets alone. It'd be easy to think it's a small-town (though neither KW nor Kingston is a small town) redneck thing, but that isn't it at all--it's the students who're teeth-grittening. (A few months ago, having my teeth grittened on the way home, I was thinking how it's funny that having a university in the neighbourhood is a great way to make the neighbourhood a lot smarter, and also a great way to make the neighbourhood a lot stupider. Probably, what smarter has in quality, stupider makes up in quantity.) The thing is, when I walk down the main drag from Waterloo to Kitchener on a Friday or Saturday night, pretty much everyone I see is going to be younger than me, which would not at all be the case in Toronto. There's something unhealthy about a city where the nightlife is made up entirely of people under 30.
I have resolved to bang away at Being and Nothingness until it's gone, because it has just gotten to, and past, the point where it's got to go. And having banged back 95 pages today, I have concluded that Being and Nothingness is just a tedious book that probably suffered badly from the fact that it was written and published in the middle of a war. I keep zoning out for pages at a time, but it never seems like I've missed anything because he says the same things over and over. (Though there's also the fact that this would be about the fifth time I've read the first hundred pages or so.) Anyway, he certainly does set up the bad faith chapter as if bad faith is going to be just a matter of fleeing freedom--he's going to examine bad faith as a way of fleeing freedom, though that doesn't mean that bad faith is only flight from freedom.
And more enjoyably, read Edward Royzman and Rahul Kumar's "Is Consequential Luck Morally Inconsequential? Empirical Psychology and the Reassessment of Moral Luck", which was published in Ratio in the same month (officially, anyway) as Domsky's piece in the Journal of Philosophy, and takes the same general strategy: the problem of moral luck can be chalked up to psychological biases, and if we got rid of the biases, we wouldn't have a problem anymore. (Though they're less certain about that than Domsky is, and some of their evidence suggests that it won't actually work that way: people remain biassed even when they're aware of their biasses and trying not to be biassed.) What they're doing is actually a lot closer than what Domsky's doing to what I'm doing in the bad-faith-and-moral-luck paper: they cite some studies by psychologists (and they think this is their important breakthrough, getting us beyond idle thought-experimentation, which seems like a crock to me, but the studies are interesting--more interesting than thought-experiments, sure--anyway) to argue that, e.g., people blame drunk drivers who kill people more than drunk drivers who don't because they're unable to shake the belief that the drunk-driver-killers actually were in control of the situation even though the scenario they're presented with stipulates that they weren't. (Which strikes me as reminiscent of what Gilligan has as the characteristically female response to the Heinz dilemma: the scenario stipulates that Heinz has to steal the drug or let his wife die, but Gilligan's girls won't buy the stipulation.)
