But where have we strayed to?

Currently at Toronto Pearson: -3. High today: -1.

"But where have we strayed to?" is a line from Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology"--I think after an excursus on Aristotle's four causes. It's one of those lines that bounces around in my head because the prof in my third year Postmodernism course--Deborah Knight--found it amusing. Deborah Knight was also the source of two other things that bounce around in my head: "It's like Greek wine: it may not be good ... but it's Greek"; and "This is really. deep. shit." Both of those lines, I think, she'd herself gotten from someone else--like another line that bounces around in my head sometimes, that I got from my highschool music teacher (Mr. McKay; I don't think I could come up with his first name--I heard a nobel laureate on the radio last night referring to a highschool teacher of hers as "Mr. [Something-Or-Other]" (and I also heard her saying Larry Summers was right (but not "Larry Summers was right")--you know about what)), that he got from a music teacher of his, talking about Bach: "Look what the old guy did!" Really. deep. shit, what the old guy did.

But, in general, my favourite line right now is: "Oh boy, a stupid magic show!"

So hey, guess what, we're not moving to Coe Hill, having chickens, and running an art gallery and tackle shop. It's OK. I'm still gonna get me a bandsaw and make whirligigs. Just no pickup truck.

What have I been meaning to tell you? Damned if I know, except that I find it curious that the word "fewer" seems to be gradually dropping out of the English language in favour of "less"--curious, because, first, "fewer", with the "-er" ending, looks like a more standard comparative adjective than "less", and second, intuitively, it seems like plural count nouns are more common than mass nouns, though I have a feeling that intuition might be completely wrong. (Someone comments on a grammar-geek blog, last month: "If the word 'fewer' disappeared tomorrow, the language would be none the poorer. The less/fewer distinction has no purpose other than to allow members of a certain in-group to recognize one another.")

Also, I was reading a bit of Leviathan today (looking for the bit about making decisions, which is actually about "deliberation", almost directly due to the Coe Hill Question), and it struck me how Hobbes's 17th-century comma usage seems strikingly similar to that of those of my students who have evidently never been taught how to use commas. It could just be because he deliberately puts commas in places where they accidentally put them, but it makes me wonder whether some people might be intuitively tapping into the logic of comma-use--whatever exactly it was--that was current in Hobbes's time.

And: I never noticed in my entire life until two weeks ago that the ratio x:y is not really straightforwardly representable by the fraction x/y like they told me it was in Grade Whatever. If the odds of winning are 1-in-4 = 1-out-of-4 = 1/4, then the odds of winning are 3:1 (although the ratio of total chances to chances to win is 4:1 ... ). This is astoundingly obvious once you think about it even slightly, and I have shame that I had not thought about it even slightly before. I started thinking about this due to reading some Intelligent Design stuff. This term I am testing the proposition recently floated in comments on Leiter's blog that philosophy of religion is the stupidest part of philosophy. (I will refrain from telling you what I had previously supposed was the stupidest part of philosophy.)

Oh, Vernon Wells, yeah, I don't know. I always liked how he talked without moving his face. I'll miss that.