Born Under the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Posted: August 26, 2012 Filed under: Science, Uncategorized | Tags: armstrong, moon, science, space 1 CommentDespite the fact that I grew up a few miles from NASA’s Space & Rocket Center in Alabama, I knew appallingly little about Neil Armstong before learning of his death yesterday afternoon, apart from what every grade school student hears. But even so, his death has weighed on me in a way other celebrity deaths have not.
I’ve since discovered that Armstrong was an incredibly smart, lucid, humble man, who — in addition to being the first person on the fucking moon — was a professor of astrophysics and just an exceedingly nice human being by all accounts. For starters, this was his self-description:
I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer—born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow. As an engineer, I take a substantial amount of pride in the accomplishments of my profession.
And this video (via Ryan Cooper) of him describing the terrain of the moon and how distances appeared distorted is absolutely surreal and delightful.
After me, the flood
Posted: April 23, 2012 Filed under: History | Tags: it's not even past, the past isn't dead 1 Comment
Sorry for the shameless plug. I wrote a piece for Guernica about the pre-revolution French elites who, when given the choice to pay higher taxes to save the state, instead dug their own graves and rendered the nation ungovernable.
Playing the Odds
Posted: March 28, 2012 Filed under: Math | Tags: improbability, megamillionaire, not sports, numerology, yes i'm really writing about this 8 CommentsA colleague pointed out to me today that the NY MegaMillions jackpot is now up to $500 million. Of course after taxes, the most anyone could take home is a mere $375,000,002 (or $269,250,000 if the winner takes the lump sum option). And while the Forbes Top 400 no longer has anyone worth less than a billion on there, a half billion dollars is a totally absurd amount of money to make on a mostly unproductive investment.
Weekend Blog Roundup
Posted: March 23, 2012 Filed under: Weekend Roundup 1 CommentWhat is a blog you discovered recently? Or a blog that you find yourself constantly returning to?
Matt M: I stumbled across Brian Leiter’s Nietzsche Blog while trying to justify my decision to attend a law school that just dropped six spots in the 2013 US News rankings. As my comments on this blog make pretty clear, I’m really into Nietzsche, and, the older I get, the more I think that he is one of two or three philosopher-types who bothered to go to the trouble of being right about anything. Read the rest of this entry »
Animal Planet
Posted: March 21, 2012 Filed under: Animals | Tags: animal fight club, big issues 3 Comments
I spent my subway ride home yesterday reading this 2008 piece from GQ, Violence of the Lambs, in which “John Jeremiah Sullivan contemplates the coming battle between man and beast.” Exactly as the tagline suggests, the article spends a few thousand words describing how new technologies, human encroachment on animal habitats, global warming, and accelerated evolution have driven animals insane and led to an unprecedented surge in animal attacks. Read the rest of this entry »
Going Back to the Start
Posted: March 15, 2012 Filed under: Science | Tags: nostalgia, not coldplay, not nothing, nothing, science 3 Comments
I spent most of my childhood thinking I would end working up as some sort of scientist. This was the source of my motivation to learn most days. It was a conceit that led me to take the MCAT even when I had little interest in ever becoming a doctor. But more importantly, it was an interest that fueled my curiosity in philosophy, in nature, in myself, in other people. Nothing gave as full and unflinching a look at human origins and motivations and, in contrast to the preoccupations of our lives, the scale and overwhelming indifference of the universe. Read the rest of this entry »
Dog Shows and the Illusion of Order
Posted: February 22, 2012 Filed under: Animals, Sports | Tags: allergic, best in show 4 Comments
I spent two nights last week watching the Westminster Dog Show with several other contributors to this blog. There were a few conversations about how immoral and sometimes cruel dog-breeding can be and about all the other ways in which this spectacle might be offensive: You have to be a certain kind of rich to even partake. And it’s a kind of objectification that most of its viewers would find objectionable in any other context. The most analogous “sport” or contest I can think of has to be the child beauty pageant. But I won’t go into that or into the ethics of the breeding.
What I really want to write about is how this contest purports to sort and rank among the thousands of dogs that are escorted around that stage every year.
A love poem by Frank O’Hara
Posted: February 15, 2012 Filed under: Poetry | Tags: always coca cola Leave a commentIn honor of Saint Valentine. Only a few hours late.
Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt Read the rest of this entry »
On Ryan Gosling: A Provocation
Posted: February 10, 2012 Filed under: Celebrities | Tags: gosling, thespians 8 Comments
The New Inquiry ran a piece by Jesse Spafford today on Ryan Gosling called The Selfless Man. That’s selfless not in the sense of generosity, but selfless in the sense of being without a self—being willing to accommodate one’s persona and personality to whatever other people deem desirable.
Andy Warhol, Covert Papist
Posted: February 4, 2012 Filed under: Art, Religion Leave a comment
I somehow (mistakenly) came under the belief that Slavoj Zizek was Christian a few weeks ago. I tried to wrestle with how this fit with some of the other stuff I’d read by him. But after looking into it a little, it appears that whatever I’d read, I’d gotten completely wrong. Zizek is an avowed atheist. What he’s advocating, however, is a utilitarian approach to religious belief — building on the insights of St. Paul, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and likely the historical Jesus himself — that an authentic understanding of Christianity premised on universal brotherly love would invert everything about existing hierarchical societal orders. This is what prompted Dostoevsky to observe that, “The socialist who is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist.” And so it must have been in the context of those kinds of observations that I came to believe Zizek was Christian. He was just saying that for making the real world a better place, maybe secular liberals shouldn’t be so quick to rule Christianity out.
DUFL Press 