Log of my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) postings
Page #9

Len: 220,092  102.

¶ +2024.01.10. How has the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology impacted classical philosophical theories about human consciousness?

This depends, I guess, on whom you ask.

AI has no impact whatsoever on Husserlian phsnomenology (German idealistic philosophy starting from Immanuel Kant) which is the go-to place for this kind of question, at least in my opinion. If you really want to deal with this, there is a book:

"Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and endings in phenmenology 1928–1938", by Ronald Bruzina, 2004, Yale Uinversity Press, which I suggest you read. But it's not easy reading, just like the quetsion itself is extremely difficult.

Prof Noam Chomsky says, and I concur: there is nothing intellectually interesting about current AI. It is just clever programs running on massively powerful processor rarrays accessing huge databaes.

I will leave you with a little diagram to think about, no, 2 diagrams. Of course they oversimplify, but not so badly as the naivete of many computer "scientists" who probably don't have a clue and therefore are extremely dangerous, like with ideas of implanting networked computer chips in everybody's brain to "enhance" them - -including themself and their mommies?

[ Two Venn diagrams of consciousness ]

¶ +2024.01.10. Do you have an idea for an offensive YouTube video about 911? What's it called and what's the full plot? Why is it offensive?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

Me? No.

But somebody here on Quora has been asking questions about producing a Musical about the Sandy Hook mass shooting. So why not a musical about 911?

Trump, the musical.

Bye, bye Biden, a lullabye.

I don't like "musicals" in general. People – and that already is a problem: persons need to take responsibility for themesleves as individuals, not cop out in group identification – people need to take serious issue sseriously and not waste their limited time and energy on fluff.

Maybe there could be serious art about 911. ther is very good music about Hiroshima, and the is an opera which was written long before the current Ukraine ware butwhich is perfect for it: Alban Berg's "Wozzeck". It is almos tunbearable to listen to and the plot is dreadful. Just like the war itself.

And when I say "to take seriously", I mean to dig into the causes of bad things, not to buy our govenment's (or anybody's) propaganda. 911 did not fall out of the sky. It wa aa response to things we had done. When did it start? The Balfour Declaration? In the late 1940s, a young man from Egypt came to the U.S. to study at a bakwater teacher's college in Greeley Colorado: Sayyad Qutb (sp?). When he say young Amerians dancing together he knew he had to do something about the moral degeneracy and founded "The muslim brotherhood" andit's been downhill from there.

There is an old saw: "Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice,, shame on me." 911 was the SECOND attack on the World Trade Center. We had time to fix things., but no interest in looking in the mirror.

[--------]

A Taliban Lullaby

[ Tora Bora ]

Tora Bora, Bora.

Tora Bora, die.

Tora Bora, Bora,

that's a Taliban lullaby.

Tora Bora, Bora.

Tora Bora, die.

Tora Bora, Bora,

Omar, don't you cry.

Tora Bora, Bora.

Tora Bora, die.

Tora Bora, Bora,

that's a Taliban lullaby.

¶ +2024.01.10. Is it the duty of art to ask questions and not necessarily give answers?

That's a very good point:

People get off on answering questions and this is important.

But what is the basis for all this? Answer: The auetsions they ask

If you don't ask the you are a victim of your social conditioning: "the obvoius".

But "theobvious" is always based on certain pre-suppositions, i.e., judgmentsbefore examining evidence.

So even more important than solving questions (except in edge cases i=like being caught in a burning building), is having the questions in the firt place.

And that's what artists (and scientits and engineers and other smrt and educated persons) can do.

There is a classic book here with a title that sounds offputting but it's a fun read for an intelligent and educated person even if they, like me, cheated to get thru high school physics:

"The structure of scientific revolutions", by Thomas Kuhn.

I once took a course from the professor who seems to have influenced Kuhn: Norwood Rossell Hanson. Hanson's life work can be pretty much summed up in a simple santence: "We can only see what our throretic al framework makes possible."

[ Duck rabbit ]

If you never heard about ducks you can't see the duck. Ditto rabbits. If you know about Gestalt Psychology, you see ometimes a duck, sometimes a rabbit and sometimes a duck-rabbit.

Ignorance is indeed bliss:

[ Homer eating a donut before giving his life for his country ]

¶ +2024.01.10. What is the potential development of self-aware machines in the future?

What naive people with advanced degrees in computer hacking mean by this is not possible.

They want to write a computer program that really thinks and undertands itself like humans can do (but many in fact do not do, alas!).

What may be possible? For scientists to cook up chemicals and electric circuits in a lab that produce Something the treally thinks based on silicon or germanium or whatever, not carbon. People do it every day. It's called copulation (or artificial insemination) and notbody has a clue how it produces either morons or Einsteins or anything in between.

Do the experiment: Get time on a robotic surgery machine at your friendly local hospital. Cut a hole in your skull bone and start poking around for your thoughts.

Alan Turing once wrote to his mother:

If we ever make a computer that really thinks "we shan't understand how it does it."

Current AI just omputes. But it uses programming clever enough and hardware powerful enough to SIMULATE human discourse. And this is not that hard since most of what most people say is canned cliches that they reproduce as needed to fit the situations of their daily life.

I guess the old cliche about "thinking outside the box" does apply here, just like Godel's Incompleeness Theorem, yes? The box, of coures, being the computer. I am old enough to have programmed them when they really were big boxes: room sized.

¶ +2024.01.10. How could anyone look at factual information and just completely refuse to acknowledge it?

There is a slur which is unfair to our porcine relatives. They are: "pigheaded".

I do not have an exact example but this comes close:

I am against the Ukraine war. I have been following the argun=ments of people suh as Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs for well over a year. hese persons are not comedians or hotheads.

I knew an emeritus university professor who wa very "liberal", at lest in his field: education. Ivan Illich? Polo Freire? Francois Rabelais? As a young person hehd even morored atround Europe in a Volkswagen bus. A cool cat!

His views about the war were off in la-la land and surely he had not studied any of it. So I tell him how bad the Ukraine war is. I give him specific references to study. What does he do? He SNAPS BACK that he does not need to learn anything from "Jeffrey Sachs or Vladimir Pozner". He did not say: Well let me look at what they say and I will get back to you. NO! He refused to look at the evidence. Had he avverred in his field of study that he did not need to look at the writings of people who disagreed with him, we would surely never have got tenure.

Now this is not an exception today. The pen has become a sword for partisan interests. Don't listen to me. I will conclude with two quotes.

"Phoebe Ellsworth, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, said that, when [Elizabeth] Loftus was invited to speak at her school in 1989. 'the chair would not allow her to set foot in the psychology department. I was furious, and I went to the chair and said, "Look, here you have a woman who is becoming one of the most famous psychological scientists there is." But her rationale was that Beth was setting back the progress of women irrevocably.'" (The New Yorker, +2021.04.05, "Past Imperfect: Elizabeth Loftus changed the meaning of memory. Now her work collides with our traumatized moment", Rachel Aviv; emphasis added).

"[After a professor told his class some idea he believed that is not generally acceptable to say: A]cademic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like.... / [T]he number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance." (Stanley Fish, Prof. of Law, Florida International Univ., "Conspiracy Theories 101", Op-Ed Piece, NYT, 23Jul06, p.WK13)

¶ +2024.01.10. Should schools receive more funding for early speech-and-language interventions?

Sounds good to me.

It's a general rule: Problems intercepted early can usually be fixed easily and at low cost. Later the situation may be hopeless. Example: A space rocket launched toward the planet Jupiter that is a little off course before it has got much beyond the stratosphere can have its course corrected with just a little nudge. By the time it is nearing its putative destination the SMALL initial deviation may hae tuened into many tens of thousands or miles or more and no application of force could bring it back where it was supposed to be, at lesat not the way it was supposed to get there.

A 3 year old with language problems will probably be far easier to help than a teenage street gang member who "speaks" by knifing people. Yes?

¶ +2024.01.09. What path should I take as a 16-year-old homeschooler who's into robotics and wants to major in it but has no experience with that field?

You need to learn about technology from a higher perspective: what is worth doing and why, and what is worth not doing and why not → not just how to do things (robotics). You should start by reading MIT Professor of Computer Science Joweph Weizenbaum's classic an easy to understand book:

"Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation" (WH Freeman, 1976)

The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done. (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

¶ +2024.01.08. What are the potential consequences of using a title that has already been used by another book?

My opinion is that this is in general a bad thing to do. I guess it's not "plagiarism", but it's something that does not sound good. Is it copyright infringement?

Can't you come you with you own title?

I'd say the main consequence is you are missing an opportunity to promote interest in **YOUR** book. The title of a book is a sales pitch. Title of this book: "[Something somebody else wrote before]".

OK. How about a: "A NEW Declatration of Independence" or: "A NEW Communist Manifesto" or:: "A NEW Bible", or a NEW whatever. That's a cop out but at least it says there is something NEW in the book.

Consider some titles with "punch": "Profiles in Courage", "How to win friends and influence people", "The origin of sodomy in Christian Theology", "The man without qualities", "The Greatest: My own story", "The fire next time", "The guns of August"

I presume you want people to buy your book? They don't have to. So try to convince them they want to. And I'm fairly sure publishers will likely reject many titles that are duplicates of existing titles for any number of reasons. "I want to buy a copy of: 'The whatsit?'" "Which one?"

¶ +2024.01.08. What is the meaning of "commercial use allowed"?

I never heard of this and i you ever do encounter it and want ot use it, consult a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property issues.

But what it sounds like is the person is saying: "I made this. You can evne use it to make money for yourself by using it." Normally either something cannot be used without permission or it is allowed to be used "for nonprofit educational purposes (or for personal use) only" or is in the public domain.

I've seen a lot and I've never seen "commercial use allowed".

¶ +2024.01.08. Isn't artificial intelligence just a fancy name for sophisticated programming running in fast enough computers?

That's what emeritus MIT professor and world famous linguist Noam Chomsky says. He says ther is nothing intellectually interesting about "AI". By "intellectually inderesting" he means thing sthat increase outr understanding of human linguistic behavior.

AI is just very large arrays of every fast networked processors hooked up to very large databases. It jus computes. But it can SIMULATE intelligent human discourse, jsut like Deep Blue could not play chss but it could compute powerfully enough to beat the World Champion chess player in chess games.

Naive lay persons may get fooled into believing the AI is really thinking. PhD computer scientists may also be fooled into imagining they are making prograss in making machines that really think, not jus tcompute. And why should theynot succeed someday with silicon in a lab instead of sperm and egg in a warm squirming human body (or test tube)? But not yet (at leat unless it's a secret military research

¶ +2024.01.08. Will cheating in a K-12 school in 8th grade affect college?

Only if you get caught.

¶ +2024.01.08. How do I study cultural anthropology alone by myself?

Of course you can read and learn all by yourself. There are problems (bbesides not getting a degree): There may be sources you do not know about and would not find by tracking down references in the books you do read. If you do not understand something you are out of luck; one of the most important reasons to study with others is to teach and learn from each other. Similarly, if you misunderstand something nobody will try to show you what you might not be seeing clearly.

Cultural anthropology is not a "______ Studies" area. It's not Black or Women's or Whatevers Studies but it certainly can include studying those people and what they do shice it is cultural activity (and, yes, you can study anthropologists too, including yourself). Cultural anthropology is analysis not advocacy, and that is not always popular today. Example:

"Phoebe Ellsworth, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, said that, when [Elizabeth] Loftus was invited to speak at her school in 1989. 'the chair would not allow her to set foot in the psychology department. I was furious, and I went to the chair and said, "Look, here you have a woman who is becoming one of the most famous psychological scientists there is." But her rationale was that Beth was setting back the progress of women irrevocably.'" (The New Yorker, +2021.04.05, "Past Imperfect: Elizabeth Loftus changed the meaning of memory. Now her work collides with our traumatized moment", Rachel Aviv; emphasis added)

If you want to learn something you may not know about, I highly recommend a book by Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, "Prisoners of ritual". People (anthropos) do some very disturbing things. I also see a lot of similarity between savages dancing around a totem pole and Senior Executives of multinational corporations dancing around their CEO's desk in Armani suits. I once saw something anthropologically interesting here in IBM

A very highly placed executive held a meeting where all the atttendees had important jobs but below him. He sat crosslegged on his plush desk chair ang blew bubblegum bubbles that burst on his mouth. Yes, it was repulsive. But he had a purpose: His behabvior made all those subordinate people very uncomfortable, so that agreed to anything he asked them in hopes of getting out of th room and away from the big guy's face with the bubble gum bubbles bursting on it.

More anthropology: U.S. President Lyndon Johnson did the same thing: He had inherited a lot of Harvard men from JFK. They wer very "proper". Johnson was not. So he held meetings sitting on the toilet and the Harvard men agreed to whatever he asked to get away from the potentially pooping President (He even held an interview with a lady reporter from the New Yorker magazine that way, and yes all this with the door open).

Antoropology can be interesting, yes?

¶ +2024.01.07. How will artificial intelligence affect jobs in the automotive industry? What types of positions will be replaced and which ones are safe?

I do not know. Ask an auto worker or better: union rep. But my guess is it may actually improve things as the workers move from mostly unskilled manual labor to highly skilled supervising the AI. But, of course, there will be fewer jobs: more throw away people thrown away by "the invisibla hand" wiithout a mind much less a heart or a soul..

But it need not be what it's probably going to turn out to be: more of more that wasnt't really worth working on anyway, and why bother? Answer: to pay the bills. (Alienated labor) I once saw a program on The Smithsonian Channel about the people who produce the A4 Alfa Romeo sports carr (maybe I misremenber the name but I can't spend all day checking it).

These cars which are not cheap but not in the 6 figure USD class, are mosty assembled BY HAND. The workers actually MAKE the cars, not an ass–-embly line. And men WANT the jobs. They caress the body panels. They put their HEARTS into the work. Actuality proves possibility.

But, of course, our sad planet is hyperoverpopulated because people can't control their hormones or maybe are brainwashed to want ot have the burden of children.... As the old Bank of New York ad slogan went:

"If you do something very well, you cannot do it for everybody."

So if we had fewer warm squirming bodies suffocating the earth, and people were not brainwashed about "entertainment" maybe we could have a producer not a consumer society (the word "consumption" used to refer to the chronic and usually fatal wasting disease: tuberculosis). AI could help persons to produce top quality things that would endure. Not annual model changes.

The automobile industry could be a place whre people who are not bright enough to be scientists and artists could find satisfaction in making things with their minds and hands together. It is even possible to provide a meaningful socially productive life for mentally retarded persons:

https://youtu.be/_J2VwFDV4-g

If it can be done for morons, why can't it be done for Everyman? With AI, fewer people will need to work at all. They should devote themselves to study in the humanities, not gawking at NFL and HBO on their two couch potatoes.. But those who do still need to work, and some always will, such are medical professionals and teachers and gourmet chefs (got that: gourmet, not Big Macs!) and my favorite: practical pottery. Instead of drinking Duncap Dunut coffee out of throw away styrofoams, people could have museum quality coffee cups to cheriah all their lives drinking – sipping not gulping – real expresso. A master potter does something personally rewarding and socially useful. Everybody needs plates to eat off of and they don't have to be paper or plastic throwaways or cheap stuff you don't care if you break it.

I am old (77 years). I am a living fossil: an atheist existentialist. I do not want life to "have meaning" because I want to RYO. But life an be very rewarding already if the objects of daily use are esthetic treaures, just like blue things are the color blue. Im my cofee cup is embodied part of that potter's soul. The ass–-embly line worker's soul is trashed, thrown away in doing his (her, other's) time on the line.

Anent work in the automobile intustry and elsewhere, go to: Democracy at Work (d@w) (http://democracyatwork.info) . As for life in general, read free on the internet: Individuality and Society (https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000046430?posInSet=1&queryId=d951b156-3253-4957-8a43-16f4bceb481a) (Jan Szczepanski, UNESCO, "Impact of science on society", 31(4), 1981, 461-466): Credo quia absurdum.

¶ +2024.01.07. How much time per day did/do hunters/gatherers spend on survival?

[ Sisyphus ]

I am not an expert.

But from what I've studied, the answer should make people think: Probably a lot less time than they themselves spend in the office or factory today.

¶ +2024.01.07. What do you think about the statement, "Writing can prevent us from getting senile"?

Who knows?

But I think it can help. Which would you rather do: (A) Go senile and not be aware that anything was happening? Or: (B) Know you are losing something? Aside: Some people never had anything to lose:

[ Homer eating his donut

Not exactly the same but admonitory: I had a job which was causing me to lose my mind and it had completely succeeded in causing me to lose the will to live (2010s computer programming work). By "losing my mind" I mean primarily losing the memory of 30+ years of study in the humanities.

Well, I have always been a prolific writer and I also keep a lot of stuff. I have files dating back over 40 years (I am now 77).

So one fine day I looked back at my doctoral dissertation. I was really impressed by it. I wondered: "Who was the intelligent and educated person who wrote this?" (I never plagiariaze anything.)

Fun, yes?

¶ +2024.01.07. If your child has an of account, would you subscribe to them in order to show your support?

That sounds like something parents often do: Praise things their choldren do beyond the objective merit if what the kid did, with the aim of boosting the child's self seteem. But then they demand the child obey them when they tell the child to do something, so the child can't have much value, can he (she, other)? "Yes, mommy."

My feeling is that parents should encourage their children to try things but also warn them to not do foolish things (going out for a school football team). And they should assure the child the child that if he fails they have his back. But also important: they should evaluate what the child doeds by strictly rational criteria so the child will learn the real value of things. And they should also tell the child that their opinions might be wrong so the kid needs to judge everything, including them, for himself.

But unless the kid is Mozart, don't go telling him how wonderful his finger exercises on the piano are. Unless the kid is Albrecht Durer don't praise his scribbles. Some kids do amazing things. A lady I worked with stuck a painting her 12 year lld did on her office wall. I know art. I was so impressed by the painting I requested if I could take a photograph of it, and she said I could. But I would have been impressed with this painting had an adult professional artist done it too.

[ end of world painting ]

But even with this, is this child destined to grow up to be the next Anselm Kiefer?

Also, CELEBRITY is a bad thing. if the child is becoming some kind of "influencer" or otherwise "famous" he (she, other) needs to be clearly made to understand that followers no better than sheep but sheep do needs shepherds and if he can being in U$D in 6 figures each year, his parents can help promote his career and should get a reasonable fee for service but make sure most of the money goes to the person who is "earning" it, not be like Britney Spears's "daddy". Celebrities are a kind of prostitutes, but who wants to be a low wage white or blue collar worker?

¶ +2024.01.07. What makes "Animal Farm" relevant in today's society? What lessons can we learn from the book?

I think how people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who also goes by the acronym AOC (like Moses is Moses or Muhammad(PBUH) is Muhhamad(PBUH) or the Madonna who is not a virgin or Sting and all the otherSUPERIOR BEINGS who go by a single name...).... Lucky people like AOC like to put themselves out as progressive and being champions of the people and very conveniently for themselves thereby get to live in luxury the people who look up to them will hever enjoy: to be cahmpions of equality while being more equal than others. (How many of The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr' followwers wore a Rolex wrstwatch? But of course he did not wave it at The March on Washington, did he?)

Quote AOC unquote when she wanted a pet anamai, which in itself is not necessarily elitist, attends a SOCIETY BALL wearing a chic gown which her worshipful followers will never get invited to....

[ Tas the rich gown ]

And instead of going to the ASPCA, she BUYS a pure breed dog from a species with known genetic problems. For a Rockefeller of Bezos to do this is understandable if no helpful to the wretched of the earth, but for this lady to do it is rubbing their plight in their face. She even names it after the art movement of the decadent rich from the 1920s, DECO:

[ AOC and DECO ]

I forget who said it: Whenever there is a revolution, it results in a new governing class – i.e., the people who are more equal than others, such as quote AOC unquote. Oink! Oink!

¶ +2024.01.06. Do you believe that everything written and published on the Internet is monitored and subject to examination and scrutiny by the governments of the world, whether individually or collectively?

Long answer short: Don't worry about it. Assume you are always being monitored and you won't have any bad surprises.

Don't do anything you don't want to see tomorrow on the front page of the New York Times newspaper. Anything else, keep it to yourself.

[ Somehow I screwed up and lost a douple(sic) entries here ]

¶ +2024.01.06. Should elite institutions of higher learning return to their core mission of learning and free inquiry?

I'm not sure they've ever been there. Ther are exceptions, of course.

Learning? I had to do homework and take exams. Most of it just got in the way of my learning. And without true leasure a person cannot really think freely. Leisure is not time off task but untimed time.

I did encounter a couple situations where I was free to learn. Once my dissertation sponsor said that a proposal I submitted to him "might have a dissertatuion in it", the next thing he or the school saw of me other than tuition payments was the finished product with even the page margins to spec. The few times I wanted talk with a living person and not just read another book, I paid exprets in teh public domain, who were not associated wit hthe school, by the hour (they could not hurt me). I did it all by my ownsome (with the help of my pet cat).

And when it was all over I did have a little discussion with my sponsor. I told him I was jealous of another student with whom he had Friday nite discussions in his lovely faculty apartment with good whisky. But we decided I got the better deal, because I learned how to teach myself. Unfortunately after I got the degree, not disposing over independent wealth, I had to go back to work and things went downhill from there.

But one particular class was good, too. Before the first session I went up to the teacher and asked if I could get credit for writing an essay on a topic tangentially related to the course in which I had a passionate interest INSTEAD (i-n-s-t-e-a-d) of doing the course work. She (it happened to be a lady but it could have been anybody) told me to go do it.

Of course students do learn things in school. Although often it's just advanced job skills, not real deep reflection on important issues of living and dying. But taking 5 courses simultaneously is a recipe for not doing anything in depth, isn't it?

Consider: Mr. Socrates did not have a degree. He did not have to publish to not perish. He never gave his students assignments, never graded them, and they came and went as they pleased. What was wrong with those people? If something was right about them, why do kids read Mr. Plato's Socratic dialogues in classrooms as ass–-ignments and have to write paoers and take exams about them to get grades? All you do is talk the talk, not walk the walk, right?

The core mission of all of daily life, for persons who have enough money to pay their bills, should be learning and free inquiry or maybe it should be to watch Monday nite NFL or HBO. De disgustibus non disputandum est.

"...For all the ancient philosophers and sages have reckoned two things to be necessary for safe and pleasant travel on the road of wisdom and in the pursuit after knowledge; God's guidance and the company of men.... So, when you philosophers, with God's guidance and in the company of some clear Lantern, give yourselves up to that careful study and investigation which is the proper duty of man – and it is for this reason that men are called... searchers and discoverers... – [as men, you] will find the truth of the sage Thales' reply to Amasis, King of the Egyptians. When asked wherein the greatest wisdom lay, Thales replied: 'In time.' For it is time that has discovered, or in due course will discover, all things that lie hidden. [As men, you] will also infallibly find that all men's knowledge, both theirs and their forefathers', is hardly an infinitesimal fraction of all that exists and that they do not know."

...When [our guide] had concluded her speech she handed us some closed and sealed letters and, after we had returned to her our undying thanks, she showed us out through a door... where [she] summoned her people to propose questions twice as high as Mount Olympus.

And so we passed through a country full of delights... and at last we found our ships in the harbour." (Francois Rabelais, "Gargantua and Pantagruel", 1532-1534/1955, pp. 710-2)

¶ +2024.01.06. My friend's daughter is about to go to college and she loves music but parents hear computer science makes her money. Do you suggest she goes to computer science or violin?

Can she afford to have her hopes in life? Or does she need to undertand that she is going to be awage-slave (aka "employee") to pay the bills?

A lot of computer programming jobs are miserable today. Undocumented incomprehensible "apis" and the totalitarian oppression of "agile" / scum → typo there: "scrum": every morning confessing your misdeeds of the previous day in public. Does she want this? I got PTSD from it and lost my will to live.

But if she has to, she has to. She can always take pills....

Does she have real TALENT for the violin? If not, what's the point? The life of orchesra musicians can be depressing too. Many years ago I knew a lady whose father was in a major symphony orchestra. In the off season he painted houses to help pay the bills. A long time ago now there was an essay i The New Yorker magazie how many orchestra musicians never hear the music until they retire (well, people retired back then...)....

If she is not highly talented at the violin maybe there is something else she can do. There are jobs out there which are not all bad. My daughter graduated from college last year with a major in combined chemistry and physics but just middling grades. Two things: (1) she lucked upon a professor who liked her and became her mentor. Will she keep up with him? I don't know and I have no influence on her. But (2) she did find a job I do not really undertsand but it sounds like product testing of some sort and she does not complain about the work and the people sound nice and it's a 15 miute commute from home where she still lives which is very smart since she is not throwing her paycheck away on rent and her mother is not the sex-police.

I (age: 77) am seeing young persons who do not go to college by choice. One young man could have gone. he seems bright enough and his daddy is an exceutive in a big Ne York hospital, so he would likely have paid the kid's tuition. But the young man got a blue collar job with the municipal water utility checking the fire hydrants each morning. He is not stuck in a CUBICLE. Yes, sometimes he does have to work in snow, sleet and freezing rain or 3rd shift if there is a breakake of a water main. But he does not have a micro-manager watching over his shoulder all day and his job cannot be offshored.

Ir's not a good time to be alive (t least in USA), much less to be young. But don't fail to do your research because some choices may be not so bad or even good. She is only going to live once and her youth will not last forever, either.

"Take your time, think a lot, think of everything you've got, for you will still be here tomorrow but your dreams may not." (Cat Stvens, aka Yousef).

I was childreared by people who were grossly incompetent to raise not just rear-end me and attended a school where the teacher once in 7th grade even THREATENED me for showing intelletual initiative. I came from nothing and hoped for nothing and I really blew it. I went to Yale and flunked the one course which was not in the curriculum: NETWORKING 101. One of my classmates was President of The United States although he did nojt have much above the shoulders, and I had to waste my life being a computer programmer.

The one thing this young person needs to do whatever else she does , is NETWORK. Make connections. Because good jobs go to people who know people. NETWORK. and I'm also cynical: Female, maybe she can find a man who is a decent type and has a high paying job and then, especially if she does not burder herself down wit hpregnancies and children, even if she does not have much talent fo the violin, she can pursue her passion in life as well as with him. A young woman who has a husband with a high paying job and no children is free to go back to school and get a PhD in art history or some other fun field. Sign me up! And you?

[--------]

"I shall think of the sorrow of my children, and of the sorrow of my grandchildren for their children, in this harsh new world," Professor Freud wrote, "and I will leave the world with relief thinking of all that will have been spared me." (Sophie Freud, Sigmund Freud's last surviving randchild, New York Times obituary, Sam Roberts, Published June 3, 2022, Updated June 6, 2022)

¶ +2024.01.06. Throughout history, there are often moments that saw explosions of creative output. Which of those moments have influenced your own creativity?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

Well, I like the idea of the ad man who designed "I [heart] New York"

"We were excited by the very idea that we could use anything in the visual history of humankind as influence," Mr. Glaser, who designed more than 400 posters over the course of his career, said in an interview... (2004). (The New York Times, Milton Glaser obituary)

As psychoanalysts say but do not always mean (been there, done that): "Everything is grist for the mill"

But let's see:

Ancient Chinese military theorist Sun-Tzu.

Ancient Greece, esp, The Odyssey (NOT The Iliad, which is lockerroom crap!), Haraclitus, Diogenes of Sinope and Sophocles. Note Mr. Socrates is missing from that list.

1-th century Heian Japan, esp. "The Tale of Genji"

Obviously The Renaissance.

And early 20th century avant garde art and German idealist philosophy. Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Wassily Kandinsky....

Negative influences:

Mr Socrates who was one of the best self-promoters in history up until today's demegogues.

Rene Descartes who wasa mixxed bag.

Galileo Galilei who baited the Pope to persecute him and didn't pay child support for his two illegitimate daughters.

Peter Ramus the father of all school curriculum.

And my bete noire who inspires disgust in me every day since 1981: Architect Robert Venturi, the founder of clown architecture.

[ Vnna hous having its period and Robert Venturi ]

So ther you havve an example of how Marcel Duchamp has inspired and continues to inspire me: I cannot freehand draw anything. But I can cut and paste. But my big problem is that I am only semi-literate. If I had a full classics education and was fluent in ancient Greek, Latin, French, German and Italian and Japanese I could do a lot more. Cut and paste. Readymades! But it's not all grim like Mr. Venturi, who criticized modernist architecture for trying to raise the culturral level of the masses.

[ LHOOQ ]

Cut and paste.

¶ +2024.01.06. Can you provide information on the individuals who have won two Fields Medals and their stories behind this achievement?

No. But look u in the internet Prof. Andrew Wiles who solved Fermat's Last Theorem.

¶ +2024.01.06. Why do many baby boomers think that talent and passion translates into lots of money? Where do they get this idea in this present day economy?

I am not an expert but I have a guess:

Talent and passion did often translate into success when they were young.

This is not a lot of money but something just as valuable if not moreso. My dissertation sponsor was born around 1942. Before he finished his PhD dissertation he had a tenure track job in a major university in a humanities field.

In 1970 I had a job tha twa spaying $90 per week and I had a small apartment in a luxury high rise apartment house and was drinking VSOP Cognac at the xpensive price of $12 per bottle (Delamain).

Back then, a college degree meant something and it did not always come with a student loan debt.

Things were different then. Of course it helped to be white and male, but it's not eactly auspicious to be an "illegal" migrat farm worker today either, is it?

Or consider women. They had it better and worse: They were effectively free domestic servants: they stayed home and cleaned the house and babysat the babies (it was the baby boom as it wa called: young women wanted to prove they wre women by having as many babies as their mother did or more. Strollers were de rigueur on the sidewalks (of Levittowns). They couldn't get legal abortions but they didn't HAVE to work. either. Their husbands had good paying even if meaningless jobs often thanks to having gone to college on "The GI Bill"). It was Ozzie and Harriett time. All a man had to do was get a haircut to help keep America beautiful.

[ TV set with family ]

The 1953 Chevrolet had all new sheet metal styling! And tailfins wee coming in the near future! And daddy ws going to ger a PENSION when he retired at age 65 from lifetime employment!

¶ +2024.01.06. Is it considered plagiarism if we give credit to the original source when posting content from another website?

Did you go to the original source and are basing yourself on the original source not the intermediary? If yes to all the above then the original source is the correct place to cite but if you are like me and obeseeive about intellectual integrity you will also mention that you found the material in the intermediary place.

This may actually have an advantage for you. Suppose the source turns out to be wrong or the intermediary messed up somehow? Then if people come after you, you are to some extet culpable but the main burden of proof and defense falls on the intermediary and the original source. "MIT endowed chair Prof. John Doe said it in JAMA. Go argue with him. I thought that was a pretty good source and I'm just a graduate student."

¶ +2024.01.05. In a society where robotic clones handle all decisions and tasks, how can we ensure that humans retain agency and control over their lives and society as a whole? What mechanisms can be implemented to prevent over-reliance on robotics?

No. Robots take orders. Human give orders. And in a society in whcih robots APPEAR to give orders what that would really mean is tha tsome humans delegated to the robots to "give orders". But what orders" The orders the humans gave the robots to give.

The human will alwasys be in charge until the humans give orders to the robots to make slaves of them. But it will be the huans who will have done this to themselves. It's like if you take a poison pill that takes 24 hours to kill you. the poison will kill you, but only because you took it.

However! It's not quite so cdlean as that. In reality there are some huans (the bosses) who give the robots orders to do things to othe rhumans (the employees). Not all humans give orders, with ot without robots. Leaders give orders. Followers obey orders. With or without the MEDIATION of robots.

It can be different. Check out Prof Richard Wolff Democracy at Work (d@w) .Bu it won't be, will it? The humans who give orders will do heir best to td their worst for the rest of hte humans.

"Workers of the world unite; you hae nothing to lose but your bosses."

¶ +2024.01.05. Was Sir Thomas Dolby's video " She Blinded Me With Science " the first music video?

I am not an expert.

The first music video on MTV was a classic: "Video killed the radio star".

MTV: Music television until the sun burns out – or as it happened, until apparently the audience got tired of it and then they devolved into "reality television"

Video killed the radio star. In my mind and in my car, we've gone too fast, we've gone too far....

I actually met a real radio star once. He had been a victim of Joe McCarthy and it was unbearable to look at his face: One eye was mutilated and he was not hiding it. This was 1967 in a sociology class at Yale where the Professor was a real life latter day Wobblie who even had his own leftist political party: The American Party.

I am not an expert but I am not sure if what we would all the first music videos were even thought of as that by the people who made them. The concept "music video" did not exist. Maybe they thought they were making short movies? But unlike many inventions, maybe we can find whatever we want to call the first misic video if the tapes or film footage have been preserved. The people who did "Video killed the radio star" DID know they were making somehting like a music video but even here I do not know what they named it, if anything. Maybe this is a topic for a PhD dissertation or there already is one?

America has long been running on empty, running around (Jackson Brown)

[ Fuel gauge ]

¶ +2024.01.05. What do you make of Salman Rushdie in November of last year receiving the first-ever Lifetime Disturbing the Peace Award?

I did not hear of this.

But the man does seem to be a fool. He apparently did not take seriously the Ayatollah Khomenei's fatwa on him. Or he did and was foolish. He went out in public without his bodyguard. He got what he was asking for.

The only person I've seen recently who is even stupider than him is that dude Khashoggi. He was so incredibly idiotic that he went into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to get an early valentines day card for his true love and came back out in pieces in suitcases when he could have lived in sin with her on New York's upper east side for all his natural life. What a jerk!

And then there is Alexei Navalny who wants people to overthrow the Russian government because after they tried to poison him and we saved his ass he ran back to get them to hurt him more. Everybody should just ignore that man. He is getting what he wanted: An all expenses paid vacation in Siberia.

Three idiots.

And as far as literature is concerned, Mr. Rushie's books are good 2nd class work, aren't they? What a jerk. Mr. Khashoggi needed to go on a diet. I hope Dr. Putin can trade Mr. Navalny for somebody of some value.

Then there is the very worst of all. America's greatest export to Russia: Britney Griner. A freak of nature who was so self-important that she thought she could bring weed into Russia and no problems. Surprise, lady!

[ Britney Griner ]

¶ +2024.01.05. Is it possible to measure anything precisely without the use of a computer or calculator?

Is it posssible to measure anything precisely with a computer or calculator?

When do you think the official meter stick which is stored somewhere in Paris France was made? Answer: before digital computers.

It is not possible to measure anything precisely.

I am a failed intellectual. But there is an old principle of carpentry: If you want a 12 inch rod, you cannot require it to be composed of 2 6 inch pieces. Either you have 2 6 inch pieces as precise as you can meke them but when juxtaposed end to end they will deviate from you maximum precision for 12 inches or you can have a 12 inch rod as precise as you can make it but the two pieces that make it up will have to deviate from your maximum precision for 6 inches. You can't "double dimension".

By computers you presumably mean turing machines: digital computers. Digital technology can asymptoticlly approach the sizes of things in the analog world but things in reality do not have rational number sizes. Maybe if you could get down to the quark or just atomic level you could make two things have the same length but would the each then have any precise length or would they be twitching all the time? Ask my owner, Dr. Schrodinger, Meow.

¶ +2024.01.04. People say computer science is easy, is that true?

I have no idea. Metamathematics is not easy but is that "compute science"?

I do know one hting which is not easy and which a lot of computer programmer hav t odo to ge their pachecks: Write code to do complex things using undocumented and incomprehensible apis.Maybe that's what they teach you how to do in computer science school. If yes, it's well worth the tuition money.

Half a century ago I was pretty hot stuff. I was good at IBM S?360 assembly language programming. In IBM itself, they had one of htese programs which nobody wnted to touch and I asked to please have it.

But by th 2010s thes apis had beat me. Angular was bad but something called Django was even worser. I was literally losing my n=mind (my menory of 30 years of leraning in the humanities) and had lost all of my will to live I do not like to duffer. But each nite when I went to bed I hoped I would not wake up again.

¶ +2024.01.04. Can taking breaks and allowing moments of laziness contribute to increased creativity and problem-solving?

ABSOLUTELY! (Well, not laziness, but productive leisure. Some people come to work for no other reason than to schmooze around the water cooler; they are just wastes of time and spece and other resources like oxygen.)

But petty-minded micro-managers don't understand this. They want to see, as one 3rd line manager I had actually said: "Asses and elbows."

I woeked as a computer programmer. Mediocre programmers working very hard could produce spaghetti code that sort of did the job and would be a nightmare to maintain going forward and trying to make modifications to it. You may know the old principle: If the program works or at least people are not compalining about it, and you can't understand it, you try to make changes by patching the data before it goes in or massaging what comes back out. You try to let sleeping dogs lie. A really smart programmer may see an elegant way to do the task that is far fewer lines of code, runs much faster and is more easily extensible. (Warning: Clever code needs to be documented thoroughly!)

I once avoided dealing with a program which should have been a piece of cake. It formatted Dante's Divine Comedy. The previous person had done Hell and Purgatory. I was supposed to add Paradise. I looked at the mess and wanted to go some place else. But this should have been clerk work. They should have written a general framework into which you could plug anything. But no. Now suppose this person had been lazy and never finished their work? What could have been more productive that that? Then I would have been tasked with doing the whole thing from the ground up and hopefully I would have been able to "parameterize" it. This person accoplished a lot of trouble by working very hard. Thanks, dude.

If you can't do it right, better to not do it at all. As a trainee, I really did win friends in an insurance company. Their policy input program gave them no end of trouble. It wsa horrible. But I did get to rewrite it from scratch and the people in the department were so grateful that they went out of their way to provide me with information and test data. The original spaghetti coder still occupied a desk in the programming department.

Then there is the story from Ford Motor Company when they brought in the time and motion people to make everybody more productive. They were told to be on the lookout for one particular employee, whom they were told they would likely find with his feet up on his desk doing nothing. they were to leave him alone. Why? Because once he had had an idea which either made of saved (I forget which) the company a millions dollars, which was a lot of money back then,"with his feet in exactly that position."

I once met a man in IBM in 1980 who came to work sometimes and then at odd hourse, wore jeans and grew houseplants in his basement. Why was he on the payroll? Because he took computer chip design programs that ran for days and cut them down to run in a few hours. As an aside, he had never been to college.

Urgency is the mother of workarounds.

Leisure is the mother of inventions.

Productive employee:

[ Winnie the Pooh ]

¶ +2024.01.04. How many people work relentlessly every day, even 80 hours a week?

80 is pushing it. Do hospitals still work interns that hard? I certainly would not want ti be operated on by a physician who had been on the job already 14 hours that day ("Hey, nurse, another cup of black coffee, please!"), would you?

But 50 is probably frequent and 60 not unknown, especially for some young people who are "multitasking in fast paced environments" in the fast lane on Wall Street. If they are smart and squirrel it all away instead of spending it all, some of them get to retire at 30 and then they can live.

"5:00? What are you doing putting on your coat to go home, Sam?" Unstated: The boss get in at 10. Somebody said: "If you are working overtime, your manager is not doing his job."

I think studies have found Americans work more hours per year than any other country. I'm not sure about Japan. Do we live to work, or work to live?

I always sought not freedom of enterprise but freedom from enterprise to study in the arts and sciences. Back before World War I there used to some jobs where you got paid to not do much and could indeed spent a lot of time in the office studying. Now we are "lean and mean".

Companies do not care abou their employees and the latter reciprocate. IBM would never have shipped System 360 with throw-away engineers. The men (yes, they were mostly white males which was not their fault) who brought off that amazing achievement had lifelong employmens with the promse of a good pension; in return they gave their best to the company and even sang songs from The IBM Songbook (an oldtimer gave me a copy of the 1932 edition which I cherish).

[--------]

"Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.... in our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture – and ourselves." (Josef Pieper)

[ Winnie the Pooh ]

There is an old story from The Ford Motor Company. Back in the 1920s they brought in the time-and-motion people to make everybody more productive. But these people were given specific instructions about one particular employee: They were told they would likely find him with his feet up on his desk doing nothing. They were to leave him alone. Why? Because one day he had had an idead wihich either saved or made (I forget which) a millions dollars for hte company, which wa a lot of money back then, "with his feet in exactly that position."

Work smart, not hard.

1 viewAnswer requested

¶ +2024.01.04. What does "died from complications" mean in boiled-down layman's terms? There's more double-talk and ambiguous answers than simple easy-to-understand terminology when researching this question online. I'm not a doctor or a medical student. Anyone?

I am not an expert.

But my guess is that "died from complications" is often or at least sometimes a way of not telling the whole story about how a person's life ended. Sometimes it's true. But sometimes it's evasive.

I am going to go off topic here: There is recent evidence that George Floyd was NOT killed by that rogue cop pressing down on his neck. The cop may have been pressing down on his shoulder NEAR his neck and he died of complication of preexisting cardio trouble, drug overdose and Covid. He was complaining he could not breath before the cops got him out of the car he was in before they got him to the ground. Derik Chauvin may be innocent. Not what people want to hear, yes? This comes from two black University professors, one of whom is a New York Times OpEd writer.

¶ +2024.01.04. Has there been an increase in post-modernist thinking in academia? What could be the reasons for this trend?

I am ignorant of what is going on in academia today.

But is it still postmodernism?

Also, "postmodernism" is a label tht covers a wide rangs of things. Prof Noam Chomsky says that postmodern philosophy and allied studies are either nonsense or superficialities covered up in wilfully obscurantist jargon (intellectual mutual masturbation among the professoriat). So I'll let him speak about that.

What I know a bit more is postmodernist architecture. I have an essay: Nullius in verba | 1983 – There I give what I consider is a devastating critiqude of the foundational writings of the person I consider to be one of the great Culture Criminals of the 20th Century: Robert Venturi, AIA. I base my criticisms on his verbatim words with page references.

There is a book I highly recommend about postmodernism in the ivory tower:

Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul De Man, by Devid Lehman

ISBN 10: 0671682393 / ISBN 13: 9780671682392

Published by Poseidon Press, 1991

So postmodernism came after modernism which I will represent with two classic essays: Adolf Loos, "Ornament and crime", and Edmund Husserl's 1935 lecture "Philosophy and the crisis of European humanity".

Obviously postmodernism came after modernism. I think what is in academia now is something that has come after postmodernism, and it is ugly. To sum it up in 6 ascii characters:" "Wokism". It's all the new "____ Studies" stuff which replaces anthropology, ethnography, sociology and other legitimate human ities disciplines with partisan advocacies (I will repost a quote about that below)

Modernism aimed at universal enlightenment. Postmodernism mocked universal enlightenment. Wokism aims to destroy universal enlightenment. The reasons behind it? Some people want a free lunch and the people with the deep pockets don't have the backbone to stand up to them. And let me be clear "where I am coming from". I am not "right wing". I think maybe Leon Trotsky wa not radical enough. There is an alterntaive to all this rot: https://democracyatwork.info –Prof Richard Wolff.

Anyway, herewith a front page news article from he New York Times Newspaper. I actually still get the print version on Sundays. That one Sunday morning whtn I opened the paper and read this in the lower right corner of the front page I iamginge – fortunately only imagined – I had picked up an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) off the pavement and it had exploded in my face:

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color.

[--------]

But now for a statement about what academia should be, at least if you are not a bigot of some flavor such as an anti-racist racist who hates white males or an Islamist who decapitates school teachers (or maybe just don't give a shit about anything except some "identity" like being a LGBQWERTY or a "person of color" or a MAGA or a neocon or "politically correct" or a radical feminist or a Bandarist or maybe an Israeli "settler" or anything else that just needs to go away like a plague of locusts:

[After a professor told his class some idea he believed that is not generally acceptable to say: A]cademic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like.... / [T]he number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance.[9]

(Stanley Fish, Prof. of Law, Florida International Univ., "Conspiracy Theories 101", Op-Ed Piece, NYT, 23Jul06, p.WK13)

¶ +2024.01.03. About computer science I do not know but I never heard of calculus being used in computer programming. I worked half a century including in IBM mainframe operating system code developent and I don't think I ever did long division. I did do "integer division", i.e., 3 / 2 = 1 with no remeinder.

Information system managers do not do much math. They manage computer networks etc. Knowing things like internet protocols might be helpful but I never heard of any advanced math being involved.

An information systems manager doesn't necessarily need to know anything about computers because he (she, other) has a staff of technical experts and his job is to coordinate them and interface with management, customers, vendors, etc.

I knew of one U.S. Government Federal Agency that had a team where all the people were highly technically skilled self-starters and everybody including the manager knew and acknowleged he did not know about the technical stuff. He would go to upper management and get their requirements and bring them back to the team and the team would tell him what to do about it. I worked well. The technical people did not want to be harrassed by managment and the manger shielded them from it. That's how he earned his keep.

Is that relevant?

¶ +2024.01.03. Is a philosophy degree going to be useless in the future?

Philosophers have always been mostly either useless or downright offensive.

Mr. Socrates is a case in point. I do not like him and neither did some of hte Athenians. He goaded them into giving him a death sentence in court. I don't think hey really wanted to execute him, bu tthey did want him to leave towm, permanently.

Oh, sorry, Mr. Socrates did not have a degree. Uhhh?

¶ +2024.01.03. Can copyrighted characters, such as Mickey Mouse, be used for educational purposes? If not, what are some alternatives that can be used?

If you are really serious about this you need to contact a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property issues.

If you are thinking about doing it in a context that is connected with your employment this is especially important because they could be sued and that would not go good for you.

But in practice as a private citizen one can "get away" with a lot. Also there is "fair use" which covers a lot. And a lot of things ARE in the public domain.

I have [mis?]used lots of copyrighted material in my personal website for 25 years and nobody has bothered me. But:

(1) It is strictly nonprofit.

(2) I am not an "influencer"

(3) I often modify the stuff and/or reduce image quality to make what I use not worth anything anyway.

It would not be worth it for them to come after me. Corporate lawyers are expensive; they have better things to do than persecuting a "nobody", like fighting environmental regulations. And if they did take me to court, of course I would remove the offending material and replace it with a big sign explaining the situation.

I will not repost it here, but there is one very controversial photographin the sense of repruduction rights being very expensive I really anted to use. OK, so I run a bit rad slash through it. Are the copyright holders really going to fignt me for that? It may even be fiar use since I claim to have invented my own art movement: "Cancelled art" (a reference to political correctnessers).

So don't be stupid. Don't open a fast food restaurant chain with the name: MacDonalds and featuring Golden Arches. duh! And if you are a school teacher or an employee, if you felt you needed to ask the question, just don' t do it.

ON THE OTHER HAND: You can have fun trying to get permission to use copyrighted material. I got personal permission from R. Crumb to use one of his cartoons which I really love. So not only can I use it but I got a personal note from Mr. Crumb himself. And I wanted to use a certain publisher's mark. Well they go bought up by Brill and I had a long exchange with them and I got legal right to use it. So I have fun going out of my way sometimes to GET permissions. I have no better way to waste my time. I don't watch HBO or NFL on the tele: I seek permissions from copyright owners. Dig it?

¶ +2024.01.02. Can you explain the aphorism "if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough"?

This aphorism is simplistic but it has a lot of truth in it.

WhatI thin it is getting at is the person who is engrossed in some arcane study, so engrossed in ot that he (she, other) doesn't hav e aclue about what what he is studying relates to or does not relate to in hte real world. He is a fool in the sense of ht crew of the Ship of Fools in Sebastian Brandt's book of the name form 1497

[ Ship of Fools ]

Let's say he is a literary critic. He reads every book and only notices the references in one book to references in other books, not whether any of the books says anything meaningful about life. Let's say he he a chemist: He cooks up chemical compounds that have amazing chemical properties for fun but never wonders what they might be used for. Hs would invent Zyklon-B but not have a clue it mught be used to kill people.

So: What you are doing, whatever it is, has some place in the encompassing world of human social daily life. Particle physicists eat and defecate. So what are they doing in the lab? If they are fools they won't be able to talk about it with ordinary educated people. But if they do reflect on what they are doing, they may not be able to explain the details but they will have a simple explanation of the kind of thing they are doing.

A simple example: The mathematician Kurt Godel did an amazing discovery which is incomprehensible to almost everybody, hie "Incompleteness Theorem". But if he was not a fool he could explain to any reasonably intelligent person that mathematics is in a way like a flat earth: It has an edge and if you try to go too far, if you try to do certain computations, you will fall off the edge. So mathematicians, no matter how much they discover will always know there are things thay cannot know. These things are so weird that you, normal educated person, will never be affected by them. But it's important for mathematiianss to know about this so they don't foolishly think they can compute answers to everything and possibly become political totalitarian dictators. Could a reasonably intelligent person understand that?

¶ +2024.01.02. What is the recommended budget for home recording equipment to produce high-quality recordings for radio play?

I don't know.

But here is a long shot possibility: Recording studios every so often upgrade their equipment. You might be able to get a good deal buying their old stuff. In the opposite direction I knew a man who got a really great turntable back in the days of vinyl discs: He bought a major radio station's old turntable when they upgraded to a new one.

Tell every recording studio you can find that you would like to buy their old equipment when they decide to upgrade and maybe you will have a winner. (Or maybe not.)

¶ +2024.01.02. Why are people more creative in situations of distress and crises?

Necesssity is the mother of workarounds.

Leisure is the mother of inventions.

A person or organization that is cornered will try anything to avert serious harm or destruction. But transformative innovations are far more likely to come from secure leisure.

Once upon time the Ford Motor Company hired a bunch of Time and Motion people ("Taylorists") to speed up the production. They informed these people that they were likely to find one particular man with his feet up on his desk doing nothing, and they they were to leave him alone, because he once had an idea that either made or saved (I forget which) a million dollars for the comany which was a lot of money back then "with his feet in exactly that position".

Put a gun to my head to do something to try to survive. Write me a blank check and I will maybe – just maybe, because new ideas cannot be willed but only come when they come – come up with something really great, but not to a deadline. ("Deadlines", i.e., dead lines, are precisely that: they are lines of death: they kill; cross one and you are dead.)

You must know the old saw:

"My kingdom for a horse."

Let me try something a little different. If I had just bought a new $10,000 cmera and I saw a scene that I knew if I got the picture the camera would be destroyed but I could sell the picture for $15,000, I would sacrifice the camera.

But people are, let me use a colloquial word: "stupid" (s-t-u-p-i-d). I once heard something that, as the saying goes, I could not believe, i.e. , it was all too believable. It was in the mid 1980s in IBM's Armonk Headquaters, around the time the company started going downhill under the misguidance of John Akers. I was walking down one of the long corridors behind two men in blue suits. they did not know I was there and could overhear their conversation, and mayby they would not have cared if they did.

One blue suit said to the other, and let me preface this with a piece of background information: "Fishkill" was IBM's mission critical computer chip facility at the time:

"Fishkill is not coming in with the inventions on schedule."

If I was in line with that man and above him I would have fired him on the spot and sent out a memorandum to all employees describing what he did and what the constaquence for it was.

[--------]

"Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.... in our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture – and ourselves." (Josef Pieper; 20th century Roman Catholic philosopher)

¶ +2024.01.02. How can I correct a professor without angering him through Microsoft Teams? He has questions from an old version and there is a mistake in it. He uses the questions in the exam.

This quetion does not give enough details to suggest a definitive answer and I have no idea what Microsoft Teams is. But as the old saying goes, there is usually more than one way to skin a cat (Meow!).

The professor probably has office hours. He (she, other) probably has an email address. A telephone number.... Where there is a will there is usually a way.

But be careful: Some professors do not like being criticized. This is not exactly the situation described here, but I once took a non-credit program at Harvard and reported to the person in charge an error he had made in an assignment. I was right. Some time later I asked him how an application from me for certain graduate program might be received. I expected the usual noncommittal answer but no. He directly told me: "When we accept people like you they leave after a year without having to be asked to."

¶ +2024.01.02. Ethics of artificial Intelligence: As AI continues to advance, what ethical considerations should govern its development and integration into society?

I suggest you start by reading MIT Professor Joseph Weizenbbaum's classic book: "**Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation**" (WH Freeman, 1976). Also watch the old fun but profound movie "The Truman show".

"The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done." (Joseph Weizenbaum)

My opinion is that a lot of AI people are fascinated with the technology which Prof. Noam Chomsky says is intellectually uninteresting. AI does not have anything to do with human intelligence: it is neither intelligent nor stupid – it just computes. Just like Deep Blue cannot play chess; it just computes.

But Ai can SIMULATE human intelligence and emotions, like a movie can look like action. And since most humans are not very creative, an AI today might win a Turing test competition with many programmers, where all you can see are the words. In Japan lonely elderly persons are being provided companionship by robopets.

[ Mark Zuckerberg ]

As the old Clairol ad had it: "Only her hairdresser knows for sure."

¶ +2024.01.02. What thesis topic do you recommend for a computer science student in Afghanistan?

Computer sciences or sociology of technology?

Studying the place of personal computers (and computers in general) in the country ruled by the Taliban should be a very interesting area of scholarly inquiry. What do they use computers for? Who are computer programmers and what is their life like? How do religion and technological education interact? Etc.

A book you might find of some comparative interest is Reactionary Modernism: Technology, culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, by Jeffrey Herf.

¶ +2024.01.01. Harvard president is not fired for plagiarism. Can Harvard students who were expelled for plagiarism sue the university to revoke the decision against them?

Ask a lawyer, and not just any lawyer, but one who specializes in this kind of thing., (he qustion does not say if the student is innocent or guilty, either.)

But know this is a nasty place.

I have my opinions about plagiarism. So consider this: Everybody's favorite civil rights leader, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther king Junior has beed found an an academic review board that he plagiarized on his doctoral dissertation. He sinned. BUT! The board said they felt "it would serve no useful puropse to pursue the matter further".

What does that mean? I think it means one or both of two things: (1) They like him and are covering for him. (2) They are afraid of backlash especislly from the black and leftist communities.

Now! Are you a beloved leader of the people who gets a pass for being a sacred cow?

Adn this lady at Harvard is being persecuted because some neo-McCarthites don't like students being against their sacred cow. If she hd the cops removing pro-Palesting demonstrators from Harvard's campus nobody would be investigating her "plagiarism" would they?

An what did she do? I have no ide. But here's a possibility: She's a slob among slobs. Mabe in writing her dissertation she read something she liked and jsut not-really thought "Oh I like this and I'll throw it in...." And maybe her committee had more [un]important things to do than wonde wher she got some lovely proce in her logorrheic document. Slobs.

I'm not sying that ws the case but it's possible. On my dissertation committee there was one Professor who caught some ZZZs during my orals and was glad when he could leave the room. Would he have caught plagiarism in what I wrote?

I did not plagiarize. Indeed, whan I quoted a big chunk of text I did not just provide citation information, I asked the publisher for permission to cite the material and I had a fight with them. I could probably have got away with just the citation. Because plagiarism is not citing wher something you wrote came from.

My attitude is in school, particularly pre-college, kids ge ta lot of ass–-ignments that jus tend up in a garbage can after the teach does a USDA on it: grades it. Why shouldn't kids "chaeat" when they are being cheted out of their lives by big time cheaters: their teachers?

But in the world of real academia wher knowledge shoud matter, then if I ever find a piece of plagiarism the person who did it will regret it, especially if they have a high position.

Finally, how to avoid plagiariam? Make sure students (and faculty) have no reason to want to do it. Example: In one course I went up to the teacher before the class began and asked her (it happened to be a female but it could hav been anybody) if I could get course credit for writing an essay on a topic tangentially related to the course in which I had A long standing PASSIONATE interest INSTEAD of doing the course work. She told me to go do it. HHow could I have plagiarized on things nobody I ever encountered had thought? Indeed I hd every reason to cite them scrupulously because I was attacking them. "Boy, did I have fun@!" Of course I did not plagiarize – that would have spoiled my fun even if nobody ever caught on. Are all your ass–-ignments like that?

My suggestion? If you plagiarize and get caught, don't try to fight it. Above sophomore year in college, just don't do it. Below that don't do anything to make your basd situation even worser. If you fight it they may double down on you. Better to be out in the cold than to be out in the cold with wolves pursuing you.

¶ +2024.01.01. Is it okay to be unoriginal or a non-genius?

Maybe.

What's not OK is to pretend you know more than you do and act on it. Poster child here: America's current President who had to repeat third grade, suffered 2 brain aneurysms each of which was credibly anicipated might kill him and now has incipient dementia and who himself says his competence is to carry a football → and he is leading or at least bossing around the most powerful nation in history with thermonuclear weapons?

(#91; Alfred E Neuman ]

Even persons who are mentally retarded can be productive and take real pride in their lives.

https://youtu.be/_J2VwFDV4-g

But most people are resonably inelligent. They can understand who they are, what they can do and given a chance have a satisfying life for themsleves and also do good for others. Win-win.

Again, what is not OK is to cause trouble. Busybodies. Micro-managers. Toadies You name its.

I once knew a man who was highly inelligent with an instructive background. It's easy to be bright if your parents are highly educated. The "genius" Richard Feynmann says he had an IQ of only 125. What made the difference? His father wa always challenging him with questions to find answers to and encouraging hi to think up more uestions for himself. Contrast: "Yes, mommy."

This person I knew came from an inauspicious beginning: His parents had 4th grade education and were "dirt farmers" in rural Appalachia. They knew what they were and they recognized that this child was different from them. They could not give him what he needed in life. But they did the one thing they could do. His mother told him and meant it:

"Tom, do what you believe is right. You will make mistakes. We stand behind you."

in other words, he would have to figure out how to raise himself, but if he tried something and failed they had his back. He knew he could come home, get himself together and try again. And he did. He became a big time government computer contractor. This from parents who could hardly read.

So is this real question? I had school teachers who should have asked it about themselves. I will end with a counterexxample to my friend's good mother:

[ Mike Rentko ]

¶ +2024.01.01. I did my BS in political science, but now for a master's, I want to opt for visual art. Is it possible?

Can you afford it $$$ ?

Sure it's possible. But will you be able to pay the bill$? And are you sure political science might not lead to interesting work? You could do visual art on the side?

But if you have a PASSIONATE desire to express yourself viaually and you have "things" you PASSIONATELY want to say, don't throw your dreams away unless you have no choice:

"Take your time, think a lot. Think of everything you've got. For you will stlill be here tomorrow but your dreams may not." (Cat Stevens, aka Yousef)

Political science? What could be more exciting than studying under University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer? Or how about industrial sociology? (Huh?) Long ago I heard two MIT professors who made me think that would really be cool: Seymour Melmen and Harley Shaiken. Speaking of which, I once had a philosophy of science teacher who rode a Harley and owned and piloted his own F8-F Bearcat fighter plane (Norwood Russell Hanson). "Philosophy of science" doesn't sound all that exciting does it? Vroom! Vroom!

Now visual arts. Most of it today is of little or no value, unlike in the early 20t century when a law student decided to change to being a painter: Wassily Kandinsky. Achitecture? Postmoderniam is at best Potemkin production (putting lipstick on pigs) and at worst destructive of humane values. Robert Venturi criticized modernist architects for trying to raise the cultural level of the masses. Do you want to be an ignorancer of humanity? The following is a private house designed by Mr. Venturi, not an automobile repair shop in a 3 Stooges skit:

[ Squirrel Hill ]

I personally like Anselm Kiefer's work. GIGO: Garbge in, garbage out. If I had money I'd buy a plot of land, dump a lot of Newark New Jerssy untreated waste on it, sprinkle on some sludge from the Gawanas Canal and maybe put a Barbie doll house on top of it and label it: "Shining city on a hill". But I could do that and still keep a day job.

I presume you are young. Do you really have a clue what you want ot do? Mozart did. But most kids don't. Until I ran a craft store after college I would never have imagined that is I had the talent I might wan tto be a master potter and make coffee cups. Oh? Yeah: they would have sold for over $1,000 each and I could have gone to bed each nite knowing I had produced things of lasting value not just done some stuff a boss told me to do to get a paycheck (EFT).

I went back ot school at age 38 years. I picked a doctoral program I thought would be easy because I am emotionally and physically fragile. I just wanted to learn. Before one class I went up to the teacher and asked her (it was a lady but it could have been anybody) if I could get course credit for writing an essay on a topic tangentially related to the course in which I had a PASSIONATE interest INSTEAD of doing the course work. She told me to go do it. Do you have such a teacher? If yes, cherish her (or him or other). Are you that kind of student? If yes, you are one in a million or at least one in a thousand, so cherish yourself.

¶ +2024.01.01. Why was the technology sector hit particularly hard by unhappiness in employees over the past three years?

I don't know if it was but I can guess some possibilities.

Many tech workers have more schooling than the average worker. Many computer programmers have masters degrees. They can be harder to bully and push around. High school grads might put up with being DEIed but persons with masters degrees may not want to be brainwashed and spoken down to, including by people who are less educated than they are.

Another thing that gave me PTSD in computer programming. The new stuff is not a much fun as the old. IBM System 360 was admirably documented andmostly easy to undertand. Some of the new "apis" are undocumented and mke no sense so it is not appealing to have to make them do tricks.

Then there is "agile" with scum – sorrr, typo there: "scrum", which is political correctness within computer programming work itself: every morning a North Korea style criticism and self criticism loyalty confession session I was never subjected to it but I would not have been able to stomach it.

And "multirasking in a fast paced environment" and other machinations of the current race to the bottom and workers are expendable economy. In the 1960s, IBM built System 3690 with employees so loyal that they sang songs of "The IBM" from the IBM song book. Pensions?

After work from home, a lot of people do not welcome being coerced beck into the office and commuting. I used to envy World War II Japanese kamikaze pilots who only had to make their commute once. And as for the office, the best part for me was when the vending machine restock guy came around he discarded snack packs past their eat-by date in a trash can and he did not object to me foraging in the garbage for FREE EXPIRED DORITOS! (You can see I had a good atitude!)

And the more meetings and the longer each runs the more one just wishes they would go away so one could get back to work becaue you don't get paid for listening to the boss run ihis mouth off but for doing your assigned work. Ultimate insult: when the dude threw out dog treats, i.e., Dunkin Donuts. Most oe ht people seemed to like them but I would be embarrassed to be seen eating one

[ Homer eating his donut ]

Might any of these things contribute to tech worker unhappiness?

¶ +2024.01.01. What created a genius?

Same thing that created a mentally retraded person: Sperm + egg.

¶ +2024.01.01. Can you provide some examples of tasks that cannot be performed using a calculator?

What counts as a calulator? Is it programmable?

If it's not programmable I don't think it can do recursive functions, can it?

Then there is the problem that if you get the number do you know if what you calculated makes sense? Long story short: Boeing hired a young engineer fresh out of college and gave him the task of designing a simple part to get him familiar with procedures. He did the design and took it to the machinists on the shop floor to make a prototype. They looked at his beautiful blueprint and asked him if he was sure it was right. Of course it was. They happily made his part for him. It was perfect except it was an order of magnitude too big.

¶ +2024.01.01. Are comedy movies better than drama movies?

What comedy movies and better for whom for what??

I was childreared by benighted people. My parents were ignorant and my school teachers, and this was after 1863 in USA, were my masters.

Two things I did not learn: **context** and **nuance**. Those are the key to many things. Did you do it? Yes or no. Just answe rthe question. But.... Yes or no! Just answer the question, or else!

You need to look at the specific movie and the context in which it is being shown. Who are the audience? What are their concerns at that moment?

Let's say you want to get some teenage boys to read. You could try Shakespear'e Macbeth. Or you could try one of his comedies. Both might fall flat. But give them Mad magazines or Hustler and you might have a winner. Oh, dear, but that's disguting or even immoral! Well did you want them to learn to read or to be castrato altar boys?

I cannot stomach Amerian comedies of the Ozzie and Harriett variety. Did you ever watch "Greaser's Palace?" Gone with the wind? Yawn. How about The Grand Illusion?

The current President of Ukraine is a comedian. I came acorss one of his old skits where he joked that the way to succeed in Ukraine was to be a Banderist and the audience laughed. Stefan Bandera was an infamous Nazi coolaborator in World War II. Ha! Ha! And on The BBC I heard Mr. Zelensky say that some British comedian or other was "more understandable than Monty Python" Not all comedy is the same.

Drama. Show Mr. Zelensky Sergei Eisanstein's "The battleship Potemkin" (available free on the Internet) and he would not like it unless at home he's different than on camera. Or let's try Frank Sinatra, whether he wa comedic or dramatic or anything else. Did you know that at home he made paintings that were in the style of abstract expressionists? Can you imgine his fans coping with that?

Context and nuance. One size does not fit all except in politics, religion, schools, childrearing and everywhere persons do not think critically. Two thoughts here:

(1) "There is more to the surface than meets the eye" (Aaron Back)

(2) "Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion." (Niels Bohr to his students)

Ask your question in the light of that guidance.

Comedy or drama: "The Truman Show"?

Comedy and drama: Patrick McGoohan's classic television series, "The Prisoner". Be seeing you.

¶ +2024.01.01. Do students need to give their permission or signature in order for a transcript to be issued?

This question should be addressed to the particluar school's student records office.

¶ +2024.01.01. How do companies know where applicants live?

Why is that any of their business? The business of business is business, not people's private "business". HR probably has your home address. It's only legitimate use is for business purposes like you receiving your IRS form 1099 each year.

¶ +2023.12.31. Is college more challenging for millennials compared to previous generations?

This is an interesting question and I do not have an answer but I have concerns.

My understanding is that freedom of speech, the freedom to express unpopular opinions may be in jeopardy, and I am not referring to "Israel" here. I am referring to what I call (you may call it something else): Wokism. I will end here, below, with a New York Times newspaper article which addresses this issue, albeit at the level of elite prep shools not "higher education" but the same problems are apparently there or even worse.

My second issue is $$$ and "competitieness". I entered college in 1964. I got into Yale and even a special program for gifted students there just by having straight "A" grades in a 2nd rate prep school and good but not stellar SAT scores (low 700s but 796 on the English achievement test). Otherwise I was pathetic. So pathetic that perhaps the most important thing Yale did for me was that in my freshman year a physician in the health service removed a mole from my chest that would otherwise likely have eventually killed me (melanoma). I was also accepted by The University of Chicago. I doubt I could get into Yale today with all the competition. But then there is part 2 here: Tuition plus room and board for a year was $4,000. Not cheap but my father was a first line manager in a mid-size company and I graduated with no student debt.

Third point: "The media". This was back in the days of typewriters and: WiteOut. There was no Internet. I do hypothesize that the Internet reduces persons' attention span. At the same time as I received my Selective Service System id card I was reading Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time" for fun. It was a lot easier to spend time reading big books back then and I really doubt anybody can read something like Kant's Crituque of Pure Reason or War and Peace on the computer. On the other hand, writing was tedious. Without computerized word processing, revising text was not fun. If you could not finess a change with WiteOut you had to retype a lot of unchanged text, so was the change worth the effort? Computerize word processing is the first tool to encourage critical thinking since the printing press, if not the phonetic alphabet.

Since money was no object, I could study in the liberal arts and not see a taxi meter staring me in the face all the time. The following would not have happened in 1964: I recently met a young man who works as a blue collar employee for the local water company. He is doing this by choice. His father is a big executive of a major New York hospital. His daddy would have paid his college tuition but he did not see the point in it. He is not stuck in a cubicle. His job can't be offshored or rightsized. He CHOSE to not go to college.

I was a known heretic. I was in the teachers faces. They either really liked me or thought I should not be in the school at all. If anybody tried to stuff DEI down my throat I'd probably tell them it's 1984 isn't it?And no, I'm not "conservative". I once decorated my living room by covering the wall with the pages of Granma (the Castro Cuban newspaper). It looked quite nice. When everybody was competing to see who could be te most incensed about George Floyd I might have been asking why they were not protexting against the beheding of a school teacher in Paris France by a religous bigot for teaching freedom of expression in a junior high school per official French education policy. Would that have made me popular?

Herewith that New York Times piece, and it was a front page news story, not an OpEd piece:

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

[ Political correctness cartoon ]

¶ +2023.12.31. Why did the House Education and Workforce Committee extend its deadline for Harvard to hand over documents related to the plagiarism probe?

I don't know but this is a witch hunt.

Some nasty people are out to get some people in academia who seem to them to represent threats to their way of life ($$$ and their right to brainwash their children).

If this lady plagiarized on her doctoral dissertation or other published work she should pay the academic price: potentially the end of her career as a professor. But all the people intimidating her should also think about something: It has been confirmed by a peer review committee that everybody's favoite civil rights leader, The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior, DID plagiarize on his doctoral dissertation. He sinned. BUT! The committee recommended no further action be taken in the matter "because it would not serve any useful purpose". Let me teanslate what that I think means: Either or both: (1) they like him and want to cover for his sacred cow image, or (2) they fear backlash from the black community. This lady connot have done anything worse so why doesn't she get a pass too?

The situation in Gaza has brought out the basest, most ugly, primitive emotions in a lot of people. They do not care about the facts. they want vengeance. It is well known that vengeance generally only .leads to counter vengeance. An escalation ladder, the top rung of which in this case is the end of all human and higher animal life on earth in themonuclear war. And you know what? Some people don't care if it does. They want vengeance ("Aut caesar aut nihil", "better dead than red". etc.). Their God promised them the promised land. Or they are sick and tired of bring brutalized by the Zionist regime and its plague of settler locusts for nearly a century now. So they witch hunt university presidents who don't expel from their school everybody who does not toe the Yahoo typo: Netanyahu, party line. They did learn something from the Holocaust: how to brutalize people. If Hannah Arendt was still around today she just might agree that Gaza is a concentration camp.

Finally, people are sloppy. I myself answer to a nigher power: intellectual integrity. I was so scrupulous on my dissertation that I had a fight with a major publisher because I did not just settle for a citation but asked for permission to quote. That was probabaly not necessary, but I did it. This lady may not have thought she wa doing anything wrong. "Oh, this looks cool, so I'll include it in my dissertation...."

I try to provide citation information in speaking with friends and family (they don't like it). Or maybe she did know what she was doing. But none of this has anything to do with the real issues, the most important of which is that a liberal education needs to teach young persons to investigate everthing without fear or favor. It is not the business of scholarship to say the Yakoo or Hamas is right or wrong. It is the business of academia to expose to the light of day everything everybody does on all sides,so everybody can make optimally informed choices. I would be all in favor of the university prohibiting pro-Paletinean demonstrations, PROVIDED they also forbid pro-Israel demonstrations. But if we want to let pro-Israel prople spout their propabganda on campus then, if he was still live , so to should George Lincoln Rockwell. Do you know who he was? He ws the leader of he Amerian Nazi Party. No student or teacher should be require to take a loyalty oath that they are not pro-Hamas, just ike they should not be required to take a loyalty oath that they are not a Nzai or a communist or that they support affirmative action. What they must be prevented from doing are acts of material violence, and hurting people's feelings is not material harm to them. "Pink slips" are.

Remember: Even in the People's Democratic Republic of Korea, people have complete freedom of speech: to spout the praty line: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Stes of America...." or to Dear Leader or to Mein Fuhrer.... Or do we have freedom of speech here?

¶ +2023.12.31. I believe societal worth is defined by one's ability to work and contribute to the growth of society. What are your thoughts on this?

I think the entire dichotomic problematic of altruism and selfishness is at best misfurtunate. There is a third way.

Each act of society should contribute to the flourishing of the individual and exch act of the individual should contribute to the flourishing of society. It should be win-win. There is a fine essay free on the Intrnet which addresses this: Individuality and Society (Jan Szczepanski, UNESCO, "Impact of science on society", 31(4), 1981, 461-466). And here is a statement from the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein:

"Enjoyment is always bound up with gratitude; if this gratitude is deeply felt it includes the wish to return goodness received and is thus the basis of generosity. There is always a close relation between being able to accept and to give, and both are part of the relation to the good object [prototypically, the nurturing mother] and therefore counteract loneliness. Furthermore, the feeling of generosity underlies creativeness, and this applies to the infant's most primitive constructive activities as well as to the creativeness of the adult." (Melanie Klein, Envy and gratitude and other works, 1946-1963, 1975, p. 310)

Nobody asked to be born. The individual owe nothing to society. Society owes to the individual for having brought him (her, other) into being. Society (starting with parents an teachers) can earn the individual's desire to contribute into it per the above quote. Helping others should be motivted not by guilt feelings but by doing it bringing the person joy: For a teacher to see a student flourish is not a sacrifice but a reward. For a medical person to bring a sick person to health brings a sense of accomplishment. A psychoanalyst once told me a secret for being an effective therapist:

"You need to be well paid and well laid."

Society needs to satisfy the individual's needs to free him (her, other) to liberate the individual to contribute back to it. In cae of cabin depressurization, a mother is instructed to put on her oxygen mask BEFORE trying to put it on hier child because if she passes out she will not be able to help the child, etc.

"From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs."

And what does that mean? It means that a child who is a musical prodigy may NEED a Seinway concert grand piano and a child who is a budding Einstein may NEED time in a Particle accelerator, etc.

I was childreared and pedagogued by benighted people; at age 5 years my motther THREATED to abandon me for not loving her; in 7th garde my teacher THREATENED me for showing intellectual initiative. Somebody like John F. Kennedy could poiusly urge people to not ask what their country could do for them but what they could do for their country: because his coundtry had done so much for him.

Now, of course, some people really are selfish, just like some people really are altruistic, among them: Donald Trump on the one hand and Thich Quang Duc on the other hand. Both are exception cases. And fo all persons to be able to live fully human lives in the sense of which I speak may indeed reqiure the adcanced technologies which have been coming on line since World War II. Aristotle, 2500 years ago, said we would not need slaves if machines could do the work, which in his time they could not but today they increasingly can.

Ask what your country can do for you that will inspire you to want to do for it. And one need not be a genius to do this. It doesn't even take a human being. Many cats and dogs find fulfilliment in loving their owners not just in the good times but as the latter lay dying. But their owners loved them and fed them well, not just used them as human resources typo there: beasts of burden (employees).

Read Professor Szczepanski's essay. Or don't. To quote a line from a song by Yousef (Cat Stevens):

"Why am I dying to live if I am only living to die?"

[ Object presenting ]

¶ +2023.12.31. Why does our recorded voice sound different to us compared to how we hear ourselves speaking? Is this the same for other people's voices?

I do not know, but I sure do know what you are talking about.

I am embarrassed at myself to hear my voice played back. It's maybe likeyou do not see yourself in your visual field, and fortunate for me since my body is not aging well.

Everybody is Rosa Poncelle or Paul Robeson in the shower. It's not jus for prudery that people often have sex in the dark.

But here's my guess: If I had really been concerned about this, I suspect that with a little practice I could have made my recorded voice sound better to me, Just like an obese person can lose weight.

On the other hand, what would be the point of a person rising to the peak of silvery tongued oratory if they have nothing of value to say? Conversely, if they stutter badly but each sentence expands the listener's horizon of understanding in ways the latter could never have imagined, won't they put up with the stuttering to get the wisdom?

¶ +2023.12.31. What is the generation gap between Gen X, Y, and Z? How does it differ from one another?

People keep asking questions like this and I do not deny that there are probably statistical differences between age groups: statistical, i.e., ignoring individuality of persons.

But it is true that individuals within an age group may differ and individuals of differnt age groups may be similar.

I happen today to be 77 years old. My parents were born in 1920 and I never had anything in common with either of them. In adult life I came to know three persons born in 1902, 1914 and 1922, with each of whom I had a lot in common, and far more in common than with most everybody in my own age group. And even there two persons I was very close to of age similar to mine never went to college and I am a Yale graduate.

These kind of glib superficialities of pseudovariables X, Y, Z and whatever apply best to glib superficial people. All sheep are the same color in the dark and none are either goats or shepherds. Do you matter or are you an any bee in the hive?

To repeat: I am not saying this kind of taxonomic siloing does not have its uses. In Nazi Germany jews and other undesirables were differentiated from aryans. Some persons have infectious diseases and can make others ill and others do not. Neither The Selective Service System now Epidemiology study individuals in their unique individualities. But Adolf Hitler did differentiate among jews: He gave the SS a specific order to provide one jew, Dr. Eduard Bloch, safe passage out of Germeny. And on and on it goes.

I have my ways of sorting people: Like toadies, and "sports fans" and Wokies and MAGAs and some others. But the only age stratification I see as having much value is that young flesh is sexier than old so if you are young enjoy your body while you've got it.

What are you looking for here? Are you having specific problems in your specific life (or somebody near and dear to you is...) with certain persons or kinds of persons like maybe teachers or headhunters or street gang members?

Or are you just glib? Maybe you are a member of "The Pepsi Generation" or the LGBQWERTY generation? If I have offended you that shows you are so small-minded as to take offense when a larger minded person would have either been curious about why a person would express opinions such as I have presented here, or just have figured this was not worth him (her, other) expending any of his limited time on this side of the topsoil on. Why was it worth your time to ask this question, or is your time not worth much? Maybe you have a school ass–-ignment you don't want to do? Everybody gotta do somethin.

[ Homer eating his donut ]

¶ +2023.12.30. What are the benefits of studying printing technology at JU?

I have no idea about this.

But if you are interested in printing of books, there is a clsssic must-read book about the history of the printing press and the impact of printed books: "The Printing Press as an agent of change" by elizabeth Eisenstein (2 volumes in one, Cambridge University Press). It it a must read. Prof. Eisenstein also has a fine follow-on book: "Divine Art, Infernal Machine".

¶ +2023.12.30. Why do we still need teachers? We have the Internet, Vimeo, and YouTube.

Try to teach any manual dexterity skill on the computer. It can probably be done but is much more doffcult than grabbing the person's hands and teaching with their fingers.

People used to have shoes with shoe laces. try teaching that on the computer.

Try teaching surgery on the computer.

¶ +2023.12.30. How does free speech make free people, and why must free people defend free speech?

What is "free speech"?

If all a person knows is the propaganda they have been innoculatd with by their mother and father and motherland or fatherland, what does this mean? Freedom to spout the party line and wave a flag.

I would propose that "freedom of speech" is meaningless for a lot of people but it sounds inspiring and can be used to motivate them to get hormonal in pursuit of their social surround's socio-politial-religio-economic agenda.

So the first thing that is needed is to liberally educate persons to appreciate that the beliefs and social custome of their social surround are not the only ones and may not be the most applealing to them. Then they may come up with some things to say that their social surround (aka socio-political-religio-economic regime) may not want to hear. Instead of getting upset that people in Russia are not allowed to say: " Overthrow Putin!", they might want to shout: "Expropriate the Silicon Valley oligarchs!" Oh dear!

"Free people"? Might you be referring to the soldiers wasting their lives for the Kiev regime in Ukraine today? They have been socially conditioned to believe they are fighting for freedom agains the Putin Bogeyman who aims ot coerce them into darkness and hopelessness. Some of them are facing the prospect of average life expectancy of two days in trenches they share with 2 week old corpses because there are not enough people to remove the dead. And if they win they will just work for one boss not another. Russia toay is a lot like USA. BFD.

It gets worse. In America in the latter years of hte 20th century there was a big popular push for women's liberation. Of course this was generally good. If I was a woman I would not want to be an unpaid domestic servant and foetus factory. Women on the bad side of Sir Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain had more freedom. Abortions were freely available, not a metter of coat hangers. Etc. But the leaders of the feminist movement did not foreground the better conditions women had there, because it would have been placing "The Evil Empire" in a good light which one needed to be very careful to not do for fear of being cancelled before "cancel culture" existed.

I tried to keep my opinions to myself at work because I feared the consequences of letting people know what I thought. Once I slipped up and said to a coworker that it seemed to me The Boy Scouts were like The Hitler Youth. Of course I regretted this. What freedom of speech?

I will not go on further here. I will reprint a Letter to the Editor of the New York Times newspaper which deals with the next part of this matter: academic freedom is something different from freedom of speech even though few people understand the difference nor, obviously, make use of either one.

"[After a professor told his class some idea he believed that is not generally acceptable to say: A]cademic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like.... / [T]he number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance." (Stanley Fish, Prof. of Law, Florida International Univ., "Conspiracy Theories 101", Op-Ed Piece, NYT, 23Jul06, p.WK13)

¶ +2023.12.30. If Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold got a comedy stage musical, what should it be called? What would the plot be? What songs would you write for it?

Title: "Party time"

As for songs, I'd have to get up my gumption and ask some neo-Nazis about that and get back to you.

What's you angle, dude?

¶ +2023.12.30. What are some tips for being honest about performance reviews without being judgmental?

What do you mean by "judgmental"?

Anything that relates to the business a manager should come straight about. Respectful but clear. As Sgt. Joe Fridey used to say on the television show Dragnet: "Just the facts, Maam."

There are edge cases. Here's one: I worked computer programming. Once I wa in a group where one of th team members had severe Tourettes Syndrome. He screamed random obscenities at random times duting the day. If I was his manager, how could I avoid the invisible elephant in the small room? I would have to tell him that While I and everybody on the team sincerely sympathazied with him, it could be somewhat trying at times and the only reason we could keep him on the job was that we were strictly "back office" with no customer interaction. Which would have been true. I cnnot imagin ethis person i sales. But he wa a good performer on the job. So it was live and let live.

But then he did present a problem: He demanded to be promoted to manager. I htink his manager talked with her (she wa a young lady), and everybody ageed this person had no prospects as a magager. So I presume she told him that wa not going to happen. He quit. Later he wanted to come back. Again he wanted to be a manager. She had to tell him they would hire him back but again, as a technical employee, not as a manager. He apparently declined the offer.

Is that a helpful exsmple about performance reviews?

I don't (to use an old cliche) put much stock in performance reviews. everybody know what everybody is doing pretty much in real time without the adminisrivia. The only time I wa a manager it was a highly unusual situaiton in a small retail operation. I had been hired to liquidate the operation and the good people working there turned me aroundso that I becme their champion. What could I do for them? Employee discount: my wholesale price, not 10 or 20%.

But in business, I think I would be embarrassed to be bossing grown men and women (and maybe others) around. "All men ar created equal and endowed by their creator...." I'm JUDGING you? Who do I think I am? But if you are not doing what needs to be done and I can't help you get it done, than it has to bbe line in the military on an aircraft carrier when a plane is disabled o nthe deck. You gottq puch it over the side because the mission must go on.

When Iwas competent to do my job and I had a good manager, I don't remember perfoemrance reviews. We mus have talked about tomething. It's embarrassing.

I did have one manager when I was very young whom I failed and if I had to do it over again with what I know now I would have aced it and who knows where I would have ended up. He kept giving me more rewponsible assignments and would have promoted me as fast as I could do them. But I wa young and more interested in the computer as a techincal thing than in management so I failed to do a task where the challene wa not really for me to do the work but to get other people to do it.

What does a manager do with emploiyees who are far above him (or her ot other) in all dimensions of life and work? I knew one. I told his manager to study him very carefully "because you will not likely meet another such person in your life." Said manager did not receive that advice well.

¶ +2023.12.30. Is it a wrong practice for corporations to force employees to take longer lunch breaks to purposefully avoid having to pay them overtime?

This question is unclear but it answers itself. It appears to be an instance of questions in the form: "Is doing something wrong wrong?" Answer: "yes it is."

¶ +2023.12.30. What are the potential risks of widespread assisted species migration?

I am not an expert.

But the following always holds: Whatever we do will have unintended conwequances because we do not fully understnd the world because we did not make it.

This is not to say that the natural order of things is "good" by any definition of what is good. "Nutre lovers" don't foreground things like the Chicxulub impactor or things like the way a giant waterbug injects its venom into a frog, turning all its internal organs into a kind of smoothie which it then sucks out leaving the deflated frog skin behind or melanoma,,,, But whenever we intervent to help something we can't be 100% sure of what will be the outcome.

Look at modern medical science. Unless you are truly a "netura lover' don't you like that you do not live all your life in constant pain from impacted wisdom teeth which have nothing to do with wisdom, jus with our jaws being too small for our teeth? Would you like to be paralyzed with polio? But all these great and good medicl advances have also resulted in erth's population bloating from 1 billion to 8 billions in abou ta century. And all our vaccines whoich prevent various illnesses have eled to an increats in autoimmume diseases. I would rather have asthma then smallpox, but the people who invented smallpox vaccination did not do it to geive people asthma.

the road to hell is famously paved with good intentions. If we protect buffaloes from being eaten by wolves we may end up with buffaloes too genetically weak to survive in an environment were there too many of the eve if they were all very healthy to find grass to eat. I'm not saying don't do it. I am saying don't be stupid about it and think it's a "piece of cake".

A person gets gngrene of "flesh eating baceria" in his leg. We cut off his leg to save his life. So far a good tradeoff. but what life are wa saving him for? Similarly, if people would hav econscientiously used contraception we could have great public health without the pupulation hyperglut. But what next?

We should expect the solution to every problem to lead to new probleems which, hopefully, will be less terrible than the problems we fixed. And we can avoid doing "tupid" things. We can only do our best, but people don't do that very often, do they? So we make thing sa lot worse than they have to be. One bad thing is trying to be "cost effetive" instead of putting safety first.

ther was an old Wauaasu Insurance Company ad. A businessman has to catch a flight to a very very very important business meeting. Absolutely, positively. Mission critical. He hires an el cheapo taxi to take him to the airport. In the ad we see him standing ouside the cab on the side of a rutted road in some place m=like midday August in rurl Cuba. He is soaked in persopiration. the taxk driver is farntically trying to fix his cab from which steam is pouring from th radiator. The man looks up in the sky to see his flight heading for hte strosphere. voideover:

"The cheapest alternative is no always the least expensive"

Do you best. Prepare for he worst. When things are going great keep in mind they need not be. I once had a highly responsible job for which I ws not competent. But I never got in serious trouble. Why? Because before I changed anything, I always took a backup. If it broke, go back to the backup. Nothing is foolproof, bu tthat comes pretty close.

If you like to help with species migration, try to think what migh go wrong for he animals. I'm not saying don't do it. I am saying take care, for instance have a Plan B just in case things don't work out as you had hoped for.

¶ +2023.12.29. Why does Germany's architecture look so old?

I don't know the details but this question does merit some general thought:

People need to get over the notion of "newness". Everything that is new today will be old tomorrow or the next day so start practicing seeing the latest fashions as "yesterday's news". Every surprise ending is a surprise only once to you and it never was to the dudes who wrote the book except maybe in a "flash of insight" before the product was ever shipped.

All that is new is old; you just haveto be patient about it. I am not an atheist; I am an anti-theist, but I nonetheless strongly advise studying the Book of Ecclesiates in you Bible. There's a lot of wisdom in it and it's pretty short. Ther is nothing new under the sun, yawn.

But quality endures. People can quible about German versus Austrian. Nothing could be more avant garde than Adolf Loos's essay "Ornament and crime" or [shifting from arthitecture to philosophy] Edumnd Husserl's lecture "Philosophy and the crisis of European humanity", both of which antedate World War II.

And what is new in architecture? Postmodernism? Buildings that look like they have to fall down but somehow the structural engineers figure out a way to make them stand up? Clown architecture, at leat here in the U.S.A. where the rot may have started with the great culture criminal Robert Venturi's anti-intellectual screeds of the late 1960s "Complexity and contradiction in architecture" and "Learning from Las Vegas". What is there to learn from Las Vegas? How to lose your shirt in a casino? To become a pimp?

Germany. How about The Bauhaus? What does it and its products look old compared to? Not an architect but an artist. I choose Anselm Kiefer. And politics not architecture. Columbia University Prof. Jeffrey Sachs has said that had the U.S. made Germany neutral not NATO after World War II there would likely have been no Cold War.

Philosophy not architecture and in serious ways problematic. Martin Heidegger wrote an seeay on architcture the very title of which puts just about very building to shame: "Bauen Wohnen Denken": Build for dwelling for thinking. the telos of the architect's work should be to raise every person up to be a German transcendental idealist philosopher, not a boob tube gawker. The aim of modernist architects was to make domiciles "machines for living": to free persons from chores for THINKing, creating in the arts and sciences. Mr. Venturi criticized them for this. He condemned the [American] modernist architect Paul Rudolph for designing an apartment building for old people in which "their plastic flowers did not look good in the windows."

I actually once worked in a building that embodied at least some of the spirit of Heidegger's dictum, yes, here in USA not Germany. EEro Saarinen's IBM Watson Research Lab in Yorktown Heights New York (USA). Nobody had a window in their office, not even the Corporate Director of Research. You go in your office to THINK not to look at the scenery. But all the public corridors were brightly sunlit, and, each 30 or 40 feet, ther was a little alcove with a white board and a couple chairs and a small table where you could sit and THINK and look out at the landscape, or have an impromptu BRAINstorming session with a couple colleagues, and while it's not a good idea to count on anything in this world where nothing lasts forever, if you scribbled your thoughts on the whiteboard and stuck teh little "DO NOT ERASE" sign on it, it would still be there for you the next day. And in every stairwell there was a little box to submit suggestions.The building wa not jut called a "research center". the very design of the edifice encouraged THINKing, and since the only thing in thinking which never goes out of date is the processof thinking itself, not anything thought, nothing could possibly be more modern that that. If you think it is, you have just proved my case, bcause thar would be just another thought. I do not know german so this may be all screwed up, but another Heidegger dictum:"Nur das Bleibende im Denkens ist der Weg" Excuse my misspellings: What endures in thinking it the process of thinking. Build for that!

All that is new will be old. The past is a bucket of ashes (Carl Sandberg).

How young are you?Just hang on a few years and guess what you will become? Look around you. It's all past, isn't it? If you want something really new, always renew it or eve nbetter yourself again, and it you are an architect, you just might start with renewing the program of study in the architecture schools. Do you still have "charettes"? How new are they?

"Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.... in our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture – and ourselves." (Josef Pieper)

¶ +2023.12.29. Why are parents becoming so obsessed with sending their children to peer schools Duke, NYU, John Hawkins, Columbia, and Stanford?

Maybe because they want them to learn the engliah language? It's "Johns Hopknis" Odd first name, I agree.

And I never heard of them as being "peer" schools. we don't have "peers" here in the land of the free and the home of the brave: we have entrepreneurs, kids who, yes, are privileged to get into places like Harvard but then drop out to make billions of down to earth dollars in "The Cloud".

[ Zuckerberg ]

I don't know what is going on but things sound messed up to me.

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.12.29. What motivates people to apply to highly competitive colleges like Stanford, even if their chances of acceptance are low?

"Beats me."

I went to college in 1964. It was easy then. I had straight "A" grades in a 2nd rate "prep" school, good SATs (low 700s but 796 on the English achievement test) and I was otherwise pathetic: you would not find a kid as wimpy as me except in the funnies page of your local newspaper. I got into Yale and not only that but a special freshman program for gifted students ("W" was in the same class as me but he was a Boneshead not a budding young scholar).

I don't know what I would do if I was a young person today. Check out Washington College Chestertown Maryland. When I was in shcool it was Party Boys U for upper middle class parents to send their useless sons to "get a degree" but now they say they focus on teaching critical thinking. It can't be very competitive but maybe you can get a good education there. OR: Take a well paying blue collar job and skip the student debt "for what?" Also, I was a known heretic; I would not put up with being woked or MAGAed.

[--------]

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

[ Political correctness cartoon ]

¶ +2023.12.29. Why is there a shortage of means to resolve conflicts globally?

Because there is a shortage of wisdom and even good sense among the leaders, especially today Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu. They provoke conflict, not try to resolve it.

Ther are people who are trying to improve things but they do not have power, especially United Nations advisor and Columbia University distinguished professor Jeffrey Sachs (he has lots of videos on YouTube) He tells The White House that if they can't get Vladimir Putin on the telephone they can use his Zoom link but they are not interested. In the early 1990s he says he saved the Polish economy but the United States is not interested in being saved, nor is Mr. Netanyahu interested in saving the Palestineans.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words:

[ Boris on bicycle ]

¶ +2023.12.29. Can you answer this question: "What was the average amount of time people spent on computers before the Internet was created?

Back when I started computer programming (1972), **computer programmers** spent NO time "on the computer". They usually wrote their programs on "coding sheets", handed the coding sheets to a keypunch operator who produced a "card deck" and a clerk would take the card deck to the COMPUTER ROOM which was ecure and programmers were not allowed to enter. Eventually a large pile of paper would come back out of the computer room, maybe a day later and be brought by a clerk back up to the programmer. Most computer programmers never saw a computer.

I had a job where I had access to the computer room (and even could tell the operators what to do) and I also keypunched my own programs, which both impressed and relieved (relieved of work) the keypunch operator And you may guess that the programmers were white and the keypunch operator black. The prograppers were white collr and the computer operators blue collar. I had a more pedigreed education than anybody else (Yale), but I preferred working with the blacks and the blues to deling with most of the programmers and their managers. There were exceptions, of course, like a few programmers and managers who had never gone to college but did know their ass from a hole in the ground. One good manager had a sign on his desk;

We the unwilling, led by the unknowing,
Have done so much with so little for so long,
That now we are qualified to do everything with nothing.

He had a good attitude. Another had a bottle of Maalox on his desk. The 2nd line manager had a pile of Zap Comix in his desk for when he had to work 2nd shift (A different 2nd line had an open bottle of whisky in his desk and we all knew i; anothe r1st line, in a big FDIC bnk, was rumored to come to work with a concealed pistol – He had a rough commute; I never asked). I sometimes worked 3rd shift "to get time of the machine". Things were different in 1972.

¶ +2023.12.29. If a musical comedy movie about a mall shooting was made, what should it be called and what should the full plot be? Do you have any jokes for this movie? What songs would you write for this movie?

I suggest you hire as consltants parents of elementary school children who have been killed in mass shootings during recent years. They would have helpful advice for you.

¶ +2023.12.28. Is 50% a majority?

Long asswer short: 50% + 1 is a majority.

¶ +2023.12.28. How would you respond to Rebecca "Becky" Hill's apology for plagiarizing parts of her memoir about Alex Murdaugh's murder case?

I have no idea who you are talking about.

But in general, apologies are useless. Just don't have done it.

Two of the most useless words in the English language are: "I'm sorry." Example: I have two indoor only pet cats. If they ever get out they will probably die as "Lost cats" because they have no idea how to survive in the cold cruel world. My daughter leave the back door open. Fotunately I catch it. She says she's sorry. Being sorry will not save a lost cat. JUST DO NOT EVER DO IT AGAIN! One time was once too many.

Sometimes people really do make mistakes. But usually they hope by apologizing to get hemselves off the hook cheap. Example a true apolgy: A South Korean police chief made an innocend mistake which sent an innocent man to prison. He apologized.

[ Police Chief bowing in shame ]

(Credit: Yonhap, via Agence France-Presse – Getty Images) "Bae Yong-ju, a provincial police chief, bowed in apology for a botched murder investigation that put an innocent man, Yoon Sung-yeo [who was sentenced to life for a crime he did not commit], behind bars for 20 years in South Korea. He made a mistake, took it to heart, and publicly bowed in shame.

¶ +2023.12.28. What do you consider to be strange or even disturbing about art?

I am disturbed that a lot of art has been going downhill ever since the early 20th Century. Let me include architecture here. In the early 20th century we had Adolf Loos's manifesto of clar-headed modernism: "Ornament and Crime". In the 1960s we had Rober Venturi's manifesto of cynical kitsch: "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" (Followed by his "Learning from Las Vegas"). from culture to culture criminal.

And symbolic for me is the degereracy is that Mr. Venturi lived a long life smug and adulated by everybody . The humanist architect and educator Louis Kahn died like a stray dog of a heart attack in the men's toilet New York City's Pennsylvanie Railroad Station and his body was "tentatively identified form his passport" in the city morgue.

Postmodernist architecture is Potemkin architecture. I do not see where the visual arts have progressed beyond Marcel Duchamp. Indeed they too are mostly Potemkin. Duchamp's readymades were infused with playful eroticism. People like Andy the War Hole [ you fill in the blank here ].

Anselm Kiefer may be an exception to the degeneracy of contemporary art. He makes art out of garbage and today's world is largely worse than worthless. Not everything, of course. Instead of the woke and MAGA assaults on civilization today we could have built on The Bauhaus and Matisse and Duchamp and Kandinsky and Louis Kahn.... Mr. Venturi criticized modernist architects for trying to raise the cultural level of the masses and he mocked modernist architect Paul Rudolph against whom he apparently had a personal grudge for designing a home for olfd people in which "their plastic flowers did not look nice in the windows." Clown architecture. The following is a private home, not an automobile repair shop in a 3 Stooges skit:

[ Squirrel Hill ]

Film. I don't know what's going on there today. The last film I saw that I felt had value was Werner Herzog's "Lessons of Darkness" about Gulf War I. My favorites are Michelangelo Antonioni's films from arounf 1960 about the alienated Italian intelligentsia of the time. And we have today in reality Mr. Biden's anti-Russia war in Unraine. Watch Sergei Eisanstein's classic silent film: "The battleship Potemkin": "All power to the sailors' and workers' soviets [worker owned cooperatives]!"

In 1984, Laurie Anderson had a performance art piece: "America I-IV". That was the last time I ever attended a performance of anything, i.e., wher I was in an audience. Some of the lines I remember:

"This is your Captain speaking. Please place your seats the upright locked position. Fasten you seat belts. Put you head beween your knees. We are about to attempt a crash landing. We are going down. We are all going down together."

"I shall think of the sorrow of my children, and of the sorrow of my grandchildren for their children, in this harsh new world," Professor Freud wrote, "and I will leave the world with relief thinking of all that will have been spared me." (Sophie Freud, Sigmund Freud's last surviving grandchild, New York Times obituary, Sam Roberts, Published June 3, 2022, Updated June 6, 2022)

[ Homer eating donut ]

¶ +2023.12.27. What are the best or recommended books and websites to learn about giftedness, intelligence, creativity, and holistic learning?

There are a lot of gifted children who are sensitive and hurt by their parents (myself being one of them). There are really fine and clearly readable books with even the titles are clear about it: "The drama of the gifted child", "Thou shalt not be aware" and "For your own good", written by the psychoanalyst Alice Miller. And the punchline of this story I recently learned is that she herself was a bad mother but her son saved himself from her by reading her books.

Some children are luckier. The grat physicist Richard Feynmann at leas tsaid he had an IQ of only 125 – bright but not "gifted". But what nature had not provided him with his nurture did: He had a father who wa always asking him questions to solve and encouraging him to think up further questions himself to solve.

The worst thing a parent can do to a gifted child 9short of sending the kid to the hospital emergency room or the morgue) is to mess with the kid's head and try to make the child believe what they believe. Less worse a spanking than brainwashing. "Yes, mommy"

. Boss ]

Example of appropriate treatment of a young person by an adult: Dr. Sandor Ferenczi wrote, in an essay evocatively titled "The Adaptation of the Family to the Child": I am reminded of an incident with a little nephew of my own, whom I treated as leniently as, in my view, a psycho-analyst should. He took advantage of this and began to tease me, then wanted to beat me, and then to tease and beat me all the time. Psycho-analysis did not teach me to let him beat me ad infinitum, so I took him in my arms, holding him so that he was powerless to move, and said: "Now beat me if you can!" He tried, could not, called me names, said that he hated me; I replied: "All right, go on, you may feel these things and say these things against me, but you must not beat me." In the end he realized my advantage in strength and his equality in fantasy, and we became good friends.* (Sandor Ferenczi, "Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis", 1955, p. 75)

Gifted children need to be respected as peers of the adults in the world of he mind and emotions even though obviously the adults have bigger muscles than they do.

¶ +2023.12.27. What compromises have you made to stay cool during ever-hotter summers?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

Global warming, or as prefer to think of it: overheating, is not uniform. Where I reside we have had fairly mild summers the past 2 or 3 or maybe more years. I saw worse almost 30 years ago with unbearable August days over 100 degress f.. That does not mean that global warming is not a severe threat, just that not everybody is personally feeling it and so maybe not also taking it very seriously. As the old saying goes: when you neighbor is out of a job it's a recession; when you are out of a job it's a depression.

Second, we have air-conditioning. When Iwas a child my parents had several television sets in the house but not even a single fan. I was just a child. I suffered on summer nights, not being able to get to sleep in the overwarm humidity.

I like to think of it this way: The earth is close enough to our sister planet Venus to think about the latter's fate: Several decades ago now, the Soviet Union (remember tha tplace?) successfully landed a heavily shielded probe on the planet's surface. It even transmitted back to earth a few grainy photographs. But it was dead in an hour. Nobody has felt it worth going back a second time.

And even if we are not turning earth into an oven we are severely degrading the quality of the environment by killing off many species of fauna and flora. And hyperoverpopulation of the planet does not help either. In ancient greece they had real democracies because the city states had maybe at most 20,000 citizens. Today we hav representativocracies: democracies of representatives. I do not like being 1 divided by 365,000,000 or 1 divided by 8,000,000,000 whichever way you awant to look at it.

I happen to like some thing sthat pollute. One is salt glaze pottery. If there were only 10,000,000 people on the whole planet, "the solution to pollution is dilution" could apply to the kiln emissions of a few potters. Nature can absorb a certain amount of pollutants. But with hyperoverpopulation you have to have stringent emission controls.

As the old Joni Mitchell song had it: "We paved paradise and put in a parking lot.... Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till its gone...."

Why couldn't the buffaloes have roamed and nobody had a home there? One of the very last things people seem willing to give up is something which does not affect them at all in countries with old age social security benefits: the freedom to reproduce. Why do people in advanced countries reproduce instead of producing in the arts and sciences? Leave a legacy, not of more mouths to feed but of artworks, craft objects, writings, something of cultural value to enrich life not just clutter it.

"Less is more." (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architect)

[ Cover the earth ]

¶ +2023.12.27. If you won the lottery, would you choose to integrate into a much more "collectivist" culture or would you choose to integrate more into "individualistic" culture?

I would choose "none of the above". There is a third way. Read, free on the Internet: Individuality and Society (Jan Szczepanski, UNESCO, "Impact of science on society", 31(4), 1981, 461-466)

For details, and "practical" information: check out Professor Richard Wolff's webite: Democracy at Work (d@w)

Individualism and collectivism are a false dichotimy which the partisans on each side use the other side as a Bogeyman to frighten people into chooing their side (*You don't know how good it is until you eat some place else", old Ponderosa Steak House ad slogan). Prof. Wolff has the answer and it is even consistent wth "social democracy" (not Reagan/Thtacher/BorisJohnson/LizTrussistic) capitalism.

¶ +2023.12.27. What does Nietzsche think of horticulture?

You gotta be joking. He almost needed somebody to feed him if I understand rightly.

I'm sure that if you explained to him that plants grow in soil in response to sunlight etc. he would have had some sort of opinion about it. He had opinions about everything. But I don't think he gave much though to anything "practical" although he did think deeply about what practicality itself means.

Daily life for him was an object of study not something to be immersed in like "normal" people.

"The earth has becoms small, and on it hops the Last Man who makes everything small. We have invented happiness say the Last Men, and they blink. he Last Man lasts longest."

He's going to think about horticulture?

You probably know the story of the moment he went insane: He saw a man beating a horse in the street and could not cope with it. The underlying cause was probably Victorian prudery: he had probably visited a prostitute at some time in his youth because the adults repressed young persons' healthy sexuality and he had got syphilis. But "the straw that broke the camel's back" was seeing a person beating a horse in the steet. He would care about horticulture? "Overcome the spirit of gravity!"

¶ +2023.12.27. Why are people so pessimistic when it comes to new technology? A lot of people act like technological advancements equals a dystopia.

Ask the survivers of the bombing of Hiroshima japan September 1945. Ask the kids who were born to mothers who took thalitomide(sp? during their pregnancies. Ask the Gulf War victims of the burning a large quantities of poisonous waste (including our current President Biden's son "Bo" — sorry, he's dead).

Now. Ask Jeff Bezos. Ask Mark Zuckerburg.

The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done. (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

¶ +2023.12.27. How can you tell if a person who claims to be a programmer or developer but doesn't have any work experience, projects or portfolio is actually lying about his skills and experience?

Who is "you"?

Let me give an example: I once was a close friend of a man who was close to being a programming genius – not quite. Actually, two of them. These two were formidable figures. One went from IBM to CISCO to being an independent government consultant telling Federal agencies what they did not want to hear, and when he built a house he had the people who do HVAC for nuclear submarines install his air conditioning. The other one looked like a mentally rearded person and was legally blind and lots of other sad things but was HIGHLY respected by IBM Field Engineers. As for the first one, he had opinions:

"Some people are in need of retroactive birth control." "Lead, follow or get out of the way."

The other one was less couth. Once a secretary said something he did not like:

"If I want any more mouth out of you, lady, I'll squeeze your head." And as for a certain fellow employee: "If I am ever in line with him and above him I will fire him because he is a traitor."

These people can "smell" a fake in a very few miniutes if not seconds. And the faker would not likely try to fool them for very long before making a quick getaway.

Contrast: In IBM Operating System development I once had a manager who, straight not homosexual, came to work wearing socks with machine stitched images of Mickey and Minnie Mouse on them. All he knew was how to occupy office space.. It's easy to fool a fool.

Well, you may guess I was "something else" myself. For better or for worse I did things like turning a room size computer into a simple adding machine by punching cards and throwing them in to a card reader to "boot it up". I worked third shift a few nites in the basement of NASA Headquarters on the DC mall, where we launced peyroll not spaceships. I saw real 3rd shift operators play curling with 3330 disk packs on the raised floor and I new how to thread the tape drives when the autoloader failed.

Times changed. But by the 2010s I was getting PTSD from undocumented apis, the worse of which was something named "Django". I got made redundant (employment terminated without case in a reduction in force) from a big tech company and then tried to get ahother job. I got interviewed even though some of the people in the potentially new place had worked with me for over a decade, so they knew who Iwas. They asked me to code up something on the spot. Flunked that one. Then they asked me to flow chart a program to detect palindromes in arbitrary character strings. Flunked again (I did figure out this one a few weeks later Ha! Ha!). You may guess I did not get an offer.

Here's my very best story. Back around 1980 I once met a man in IBM who had been a delivery truck driver. For some reason or not they gave him the Programmer Aptitude Test and he did indeed turn out ot be a programming genius. I am fairly confident he never went to any college. He came to work sometimes. Wore jeans. Grew houseplants in his basement. Why was this dude on the payroll? Because he took programs for computer chip design that had run for days and cut them down to run in a few hours. Would Mickey Mouse have recognized the "diamond in the rough"? Would my two "heavies"?

¶ +2023.12.26. What is the acceptable percentage of plagiarism in a master's dissertation? Can a dissertation with 80% original content and 20% from other sources be considered acceptable?

You might get away with it. Just like you might steal something else and not get caught. Many bad deeds go unpunished.

What is acceptable? You know the answer to this. Every teach will tell you: zero. But they may make assignments to students that the students have no other reasonto do than to get a grade, so what should they expect?

If you have a job where you have to get that degree or be homeless what "should" you do and what should you do?

But if you would follow in the footsteps of Erasmus of Rotterdam or Dr. Francois Rabelais, you would only study things that are meaningful to you and you would not plagiarize because you would be engaging in discussion with persons you quote, not stealing from them.

Then there is reality. It has been confirmed by an academic review commission that everybody's favorite religious leader, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior did plagiarize on his doctoral dissertation. BUT! The committee recommended no fortuer action on the matter "because it would serve no useful purpose". I translate that as: We like the dude so we'll cover it up.

If you are not a beloved religious leader of your community or some other teflon coated being, you should not count on getting away with it. And furthermore:

Maybe Mr. King didn't even think he was doing anything wrong. maybe he was just a sloppy person in a sloppy place. But since you asked the question, clearly you can't hide under the excuse of ignorance, can you?

Unless you like being a martyr, sometimes you have to do things you know are not right to make ends meet or save your neck. But when you get to the point in your life (if you ever get there) where you are not worried about how you will pay the bills, then you should thank the Lord you are free to answer to a Higher Power (that is the ad slogan of the Hebrew National hotdog company): intellectual integrity.

Martin Luther said: "Here i stand I can do no other." I don't know how much money he had in the bank.

¶ +2023.12.26. Imagine a mathematics graduate who wants to advance his studies at the Faculty of Engineering. What advantage will he have because he knows mathematics?

I am not an expert, but long story short:

If his specialty is things like metamathematics or number theory, no advantage. If his specialty is differential equations he may be a prize catch for the school.

Built structures sand up or fall down due to differential equations, don't they? But not due to Godel's incompleteness theorem, true?

¶ +2023.12.26. What are some ways to preserve the local cultural and natural heritage in your community?

This is a very misguided question.

I state this as as close to an immutable fact as anything can be: Local cultures and natural heritage cannot be preserved. Period.

What can be done is to continue to act out what are the external appearances or the folkways of the local culture, or, if by natural heritage you are referring to forests and wild animals, etc., you can set aside wildlife preserves. the people can continue to put on native dances for and sell cheap knock offs of their traditional arts to tourists.

But "civilization" by its essential nature destroys all local cultures and all of nature. As fo the former, there is the famous line from an old song which is very well known to all the people who earn their living trying to keep local cultures alive (e.g. the Hassidic jews):

"How are you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree [Paris France]?"

Answer: Keep them in ignorance of Parisian life even if they live off secular state welfare within the city limits (worst offenders here: Muslim immigrants to France from North Africa, like the people who beheaded school teacher Samuel Paty for teaching freedom of expression in a junior high school classroom).

If kids find out that there are the distractions of advertsing out there, many will not willingly stay in the shtetl.

But it goes a lot deeper than that. As soon as a person becomes aware they are doing something [anything whatever!] they can no longer "just do it". They then have to choose to continue to do it or maybe they choose to do something else of nothing at all. They are no longer just doing it, whaever it was: they are now choosing to do it. And that "spoils it". If you study sociology of religion i's hard to believe in any religion any longer.

Now! In practice this is often, let me use a shorthand word: "bad". What to I mean by that? Example: Petty selfish loggers – little Bolsonaros – who are destroying the Amazon rainforest to make a few bucks off wrecking the earth, come across a tribe which had never before heard of "the white man". These bad actors reduce those helpless people to poverty. Tthey may have been "poor" in terms of consumer goods before these evil people found them, but they were living successful lives as they were. No longer: now they get diseases that were not native to the jungle and become alsoholics and wife beaters. Consider the "Conquistadores", who conaquered "the new world" (new to them, of course) not with their guns but with their smallpox germs, and they were so myopically selfish that they melted down the gold and silver ornaments they stole for bullion whereas had they preserved it all as exotic art it would be even crassly economically worth far more. Pearls before swine.

Maybe "the white man" should never have adventured anywhere. But we could have done it a different way: Scholars and scientists could have visited the native peoples and engaged with them in mutual respect. The savages would have learned all the good things about the arts and sciences (e.f., modern medicine) and probably have wanted to ADD them to their lives. They would not longer have been what they were. No longer natives,, no long er savages (or whatever). But it could have been to their advantage, not esploiting them.

And the scholars form Europe would have learned more about the possibilities of human life on earth. The "local culture" would have been "destroyed" in a differnt way: Not savaged (pun here!), but overcome ("dialectically transcended"). But even this way, the "local culture" could not continue because the people would now be aware of what they had been. You can't "be" what you are aware of: after that you have chosen to continue to do it, so its"heart", its "spirit" is gone. When people realize they made God and not the other way around as they naively lived before, it's game over for their religion. Etc.

My opinion is that obviously "we" should neer have "raped" the world's native peoples. That was as criminal as raping an individual woman. But, following out that analogy, somebody did a study and found 80% of women don't even know they have a clitoris. I think it would be a good idea to educate them to the pleasures their bodies could offer them. But they won't be the people they were once they realize what they have that they didn't know they had before. And it goes beyond that:

In some primitive cultures, some local cultures, they rip out little girls' external genitalia because they love them: female genital mutilation (FGM). They do this in all sincerity, naively believing this is good for them. The white man could spoil (aka: enrich) this way of life by sharing his knowledge of female anatomy.

And at least once something remarkable happened. One tribe, when it encountered the whaite man ("civilization"), the elders got together and studied the situation. They looked critically at all the social customs and beliefs they had neively lived before and also what the white man offered them (e.g., modern medicine). They self-accountably reshaped their form of social life to keep what they felt were the good parts of the old and add good parts of the new and to discard other parts of the old and not adopt other parts of hte new. One thing they threw old: they stopped ripping out ligttle girls' external genitaila (FGM).

A book to read here is Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, "Prisoners of ritual".

"Local cultures" cannot exist in the modern world. Fakes can, and a kind of mendacious neo-tribalism seems to be having its day today in USA in the self-conscious play acting out of old ethnic practices (especially "African") in the name of honoring their ancestry. My biological ancestors are half Christian Polish peasants and half white trash from some place in the British Isles. The ancestors I identify with are found in printed books.Cogito ergo sum. And you?

¶ +2023.12.26. What's on your mind today in 2024?

Not 2024. What's on my mind there is America's President Biden who is doing his "best" to destroy America and maybe the whole human and higher animal species on our suffering planet with his neocon adventurist wars. And, of course, also: the alternative which will be no better or even worser: Mr. Donald Trump. The Wokies and the MAGAs.

But for right this instance 26 Dec 2023 07:50ET:

All the bad actors on the Internet who are out to make a buck by harming honest users, need to be executed by firing squad with the execution featuredon the front page of The New York Times, The Wathington Post and The Wallstreet Journal newspapers, and live on CNN and Fox News.

I am endless frustrated by having to remember and enter passwords becasuse of these despicable pieces of [ fill in the blank ].

I just now got a notice from [name redacted here] that my contact information was wrong in a minor detail and whcn I tried to enter my password it did not work. I have these problems often and, to borrow a phrase from "The Junior Senator from Wisconsin" out of context: one of them is one too many. All the bad actors on the Internet need to exterminated: brought to justice like the people who ran Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Kids having fun trying to break into corporate and government networks and Phishers of whatever nationality need to be removed from the ranks of the living before they try it a second time.

That was not on my mind this morning until half an hour ago because I had not yet been inconvenienced by these loathsome miscreants yet today. A couple weeks ago one of them really did get pretty far in tricking me. I think the problem may have started with me dialing a phone number that had probably one digit slightly wrong so instead of reaching support for a computer manufacturer with whose product I was having a problem I got one of these criminals who very effectively pretended to be a representative of that corporation.That person should have been asphyxisted by tying a plastic bag tightly around their head or some other fitting denoument to the misfortune of their having been a live birth.

I am a peaceful person. I need others to either help make my life better or at least not make it worse than it already is.. I had an intrusive mother. RRose Selavy. Alternatively: Meow!

¶ +2023.12.26. In an age of constant digital stimulation, how can we effectively manage our screen time and maintain a healthy relationship with technology?

You do what you do. Each person does what they do.

I used to read very long books, lots of them. The computer has changed that, and probbly not for he better.

But I think I do make constructive use of it and tha ta lot of people don't.

I reply to people's Quora questions. I feel ths is like time in the bullpan for a baseball pitcher: keeping in shape for the game.

I watch hig hquality material. ExampleWilliam Lemessurier lecturing on the structural engineering problem wit hthe New York CitiCorp building, or Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs on the Ukraine war. This stuff is as high quality as high quality books.

And #3: I don't buy it. I do not approach it as a comsumer (athough of course I do that also). I look at all of it as potential material for me to use to make my own creative work in writing and graphics. If I watch an advertisement I wonder if ther is anything in it I can "cu and paste" to put in a picture I will myself make. Some are less successful than others, but the point is I allruach it as a producer not just a consumer. I watch a movie. I make a story using what was in it. Example: I did not like my parents. I do like the character Monica Viti plays in Michenalgelo Antonioni's films. Yes, I like the films: I would like to hav the life f hte charactrs in his films. Bu I had written a one act play of Monica Vitti rescueing me as a toddler from my parents and fouying me on Alatalia to a better life in upper middle class 1950s italian intelligentsia.

As for politics, example:

[ Boris pineappletop ]

Or:

[ Cities on the plain with fuming Zelensky ]

This picture of Mr .Zelensky accompanies a little story about Ukraine today being like Sodom and Gomorrah – the cities on the plain – in the Bibie....

Whatever i do, I try to: add value to it. (Of course I don't always or perhaps even usually, succeed, but more people don't even try, do they?)

[ ----- ]

Sorry, I reread the question. Isn't the obvious solution to stimulation to have an orgasm? Rrose Selavy! (Look that up on wikipedia if you do not understand it)

¶ +2023.12.26. Why is employee retention as important, if not more so, than customer retention in organizations?

This is a wrong-headed question.

Bad employees need to have their employment terminated. Good employees need to be treasured.

Bad customers need to be terminated. Good customers need to be cultivated.

A good company has good employees and good customers, both of which stay with the company over the long run.

Bad employees do all sorts of things that do not help the company they work for, like trying to do something to get ahead and then hopping to some other place where they again do something to get ahead and then jump to the next place....

A good company wants repeat customers: people who keep buying and recommending the company to others over time.

Killer deals are just that: ecnomic murder.

I have not here, obviously, definded "good" or "bad". That is left as a homework exercise for you, my reader.

My father was a salesman and then a sales manager. he probably could have sold anything to anybody but he was a highly ethical person. He treated "his men" as a sales manager so well that after his death one of them came to me and told me how he almost worshipped him – the praise was something I would never have expected rrom any employee of anybody. This man who had worked for my father told me that my father said:

"We do not close deals; we open accounts."

He was in the game for the long run, not a Jack Welsh or Donald Trump or other bad actor.

Both "employee retention" and "customer retention" are dependent variables. The independent variables are: Quality of employees and Quality of customers (and also, obviously, Quality of ownership and Quality of management). I knew of a man who owned an automobile repair shop. He would not accept as a customer wnybody whose car he dhd not think was good quality or who did not take good care of it.

¶ +2023.12.26. What will be the consequences for Harvard University if it is found that Claudine Gay did commit plagiarism?

This will depend on whether they have the "guts" to stand up for academic freedom and integrity, or capitulate to MAGAs or Wolkies or AIPAC or rich donors or whoever.

If the captain of a ship is screwing up, you fire him from his job and appoint a new captain. If the new captain screws up up replace that one.... The ship sails on.

Harvard needs to stand up for freedom of speech and freedom of research. Any person who would be found mentally competent to stand trial in a court of law should be able to speak at Harvard, including if they would advocate Adolf Hitler or anything else anybody might not like to hear.

What must not be tolerated aare credible treats of material harm to anybody, including, but not limited to, obviously, jews, blacks and asians (another hot group these days, appagently). But if George Lincoln Rockwell was still alive – he was sometime had of The Amerian Nazi Party – he should be allowed to speak at Harvard, provided he would also be willing to engage in rational discourse with his critics too. Hurting a person's feelings (or "insulting" them) is not material harm; throwing acid in their face or causing them to lose their job is material harm.

If Harvard caves in to MAGAs or Wokies or Netanyahoo bigots or some potential donor waving a $1,000,000,000 check in their faces, They chould change their motto from "Veritas" to: "Pimps" or something like that.

I end with a definition of academic freedom, which apparently not many people understand:

[After a professor told his class some idea he believed that is not generally acceptable to say: A]cademic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like.... / [T]he number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance. (Stanley Fish, Prof. of Law, Florida International Univ., "Conspiracy Theories 101", Op-Ed Piece, NYT, 23Jul06, p.WK13)

¶ +2023.12.25. => Do you agree with this statement, '' People shouldn't be afraid of failure, they should be scared of regrets ''?

I agree.

Persons should be very much afraid of doing things they will later regret. You can't undo undoable harm once you have done it. The two most useless words in the English language are: "I'm sorry." Simple hypothetuicl exmple: I have two indoor onnly pet cats. I daughter leves the door open the cats can get out and they may never find their way back because they have been sheltered from "the cold cruel world" all heir fluffy ittle lives. For her to say: "I'm sorry" will not bring a lost cat back. JUST DON'T DO IT EVER AGAIN! And, f course, you shouldn't have done it the firs ttime.

But not being afraid of failure may be easier said than tdone. I will present two opposed examples:

(1) I knew a man whose parents were almost illiterate dirt farmers in Appalachia. He is close to a genius. They wer totally incompetent to propery raise him. Bu the turned out to be a big success in his life. How did that happen?

Because hie moter did the one thing for him that she and his father were competent to do. She told the child, and really meant it: "Tom do wha tyou believ eis right. You will make mistakes. We stand behind you." It was easy for him to try things and fail, because his parents "ha his back". He could go home, heal his wounds and go try again.

(2) Me. My parents were totally incompeten tto raise me but they were intrusive. they made it very clear to me that if I did not plesae them there would be consequences. Since I got the message I never found out. I could not risk makin a mistake because it might be the end of any hope for me for hte rest of my sad little life. I am now 77 yeasr old with an earned doctorate and I still fear ending up as roadkill – literally. I am always "confident" that if I take a risk ad it does 't work out well iwill end up in even worer condition than if I had not tried.

So there you are: Nurturing parentss and teachers who practice (not preach) high ethical lives and who encourage not threaten their child should pouduce persons who are rationally afraid of doing things they would regret (like maybe torturing small animals or setting fire to buildings or engaging in accounting fraud....) and who will also not be afraid to try things knowing they might not succeed in the effort because they are always confident (on the basis of evidence not words) they will have a rewarding life.

Let me end with something about childrearing. It is imperative to never try to influence what a child thinks of feels other than by rational discourse like you might engage in with your boss at work, including if he or she 0r other is you child and they tell you thay hate you and mean it (you may guess where that is coming from here). respect them! But if the child DOES materially bad things, not just thing sthat you don't like, but things like torturing small animals or setting fire to buildings or engaging in accounting fraud,you ahve to stop the behavior:

Example of appropriate treatment of a young person by an adult: Dr. Sandor Ferenczi wrote, in an essay evocatively titled "The Adaptation of the Family to the Child": **I am reminded of an incident with a little nephew of my own, whom I treated as leniently as, in my view, a psycho-analyst should. He took advantage of this and began to tease me, then wanted to beat me, and then to tease and beat me all the time. Psycho-analysis did not teach me to let him beat me ad infinitum, so I took him in my arms, holding him so that he was powerless to move, and said: "Now beat me if you can!" He tried, could not, called me names, said that he hated me; I replied: "All right, go on, you may feel these things and say these things against me, but you must not beat me." In the end he realized my advantage in strength and his equality in fantasy, and we became good friends.**(Sandor Ferenczi, "Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis", 1955, p. 75)

¶ +2023.12.25. I want to become a contributor to your space. How can I become one?

Me? I am not an "influencer" so why would you be interested to contribute to "my space"?

But who knows? I have a very large personal website: Nullius in verba | index . I am interested in all sorts of topics from Lot's wife to Volodymyr Zelensky, from Heraclitus to Heidegger. Dada poetry to building demolition. You tell me something that significantly eniches my undertanding of any of a large number of subjects and you can contribute. "Everything is grist for the mill, as psychoanalysts say but don't really mean all the time. All you gotta do is teach me something I will feel is of value.

Just a couple days ago I was skimming thru dozens of pictures on various things on PInterest and all of a sudden I saw a picture of the front of a house which I instantly recognized as the key to designing a house for a certain empty lot on Sumner Street in Cambridge Massachusetts that I've been trying without success to figure out for over 40 years. So you may be able to make a big contribution to me even with a single jpeg.

¶ +2023.12.25. How can I reach out to professors in universities as a high schooler for research opportunities?

Do you know anybody who knows somebody? If ye, you ask them to make a connection for you.

If not, then you have to "cold call" them, i.e., email or telephone them and try to get their attention and interest. This is not "hopeful", but you can have a better chance if you find out wha tthe professor's own research interess are and "hit him" with a specific request to do research on precisely what he (she, other) is interested in.

"Hello. Professor John Doe. I have read that you are studying such-and-such. I passionately want to study that very thing and in particular I am interested in this-specific aspect of it which you are working on. I am looking for an internship and I feel I can help your research and you help me learn more about this matter which excites me. Can I have a chance to talk with you about your research and how I might contribute to it, Professor?"

Not: "Do you have any research opportunities?"

You have a product you are trying to sell: YOU. You have to convince a potential buyer they want to buy the product you are offering: YOU. They don't have to, so you will need to be an effective salesperson.

¶ +2023.12.24. What societal changes can we expect in the future regarding diversity, equality, and inclusion?

Expect? The future does not seem clear to me.

Hope for? To get over it. It should be an obvious given that in civil society all mentaly competent persons should be treated with respect as peers and society or some members of it need to assume fiduciary responsibility for those who are not mentally competent, most importantly children before "the age of reason".

But this should not be a "big deal". And nobody should be expected to like anybody else, just act with respect and treat them with dignity (no matter what you think of feel abou them). If I met the Abrahamic Deity or Shakespeare or a homeless person I would treat them all with equal respect and carry on depending on whether they reciprocated or not. If either of the first two wanted to be worshipped I would try to just be on my way.

What should be important is for each person to contribute to the fullest extent of their abilities to the further development of universal culture and cultivation in the arts and sciences. All "identtifications" are less than fully human[e]. There is even a book from the first half of the 20th century with an apposite title: "The man without qualities" (Robert Musil). He (his name in the book is "Ulrich" but it could be anything) has many qualities but he IDENTIFIES with none of them. Each person should be what the primitive people who wrote the Bible projected onto the Deity they imagined: Exodus 3:7 "I am that am", or the philosopher Rene Descartes famous "Cogito ergo sum". everything else, in the Cartesian lingo is "cogitationes", i.e., things thought. And nothing has meaning, including your ancestors. The only meaning is in th act of creating new meaning – in the very act –, which, of course can make use of all the meanings that people have ever had in all human history, as semiotic raw material, like mineral ore: refine it and make something from it.

"The past is a bucket of ashes." (Carl Sandburg?)

"Yesterday don't matter since it's gone." (The Rolling Stones)

Here is a very short essay, available free on the Interne, that is more eloquent than I: Individuality and Society (Jan Szczepanski, UNESCO, "Impact of science on society", 31(4), 1981, 461-466)

Nor is all this completely pie in the sky. For almost half a century I paid the bills by working as a computer programmer in corporate offices. Banks, Tech Companies, Insurance, Government contractor.... There were all sorts of people. One man was such an orthodox jew that he couldn't even drive an automobile. There was a muslim. A black man. Numerous persons from India and of Chinese ancestry.one man had severe tourettes Syndrome so at random times he SCREAMED obscenities. A homosexual. In the insurance company (which was la creme de la creme of its industry), 1972, there was one young lady whose skirt did not come more than an inch below her buttocks. One man who looked mentally retarded and was legally blind and more but was a stellar worker highly respected by IBM Field Engineers.... You name it we probably had one. But we all got along togather for two reasons: We all wanted to do a good job at our work, and we all had at least college degrees and many had masters degrees. And I never ever heard of such a thing as DEI, and to put it in simple language: If anybody had tried to mess with my head I would have started looking for a job some place where they would not try to brainwash me. My very favorite thing in the office was when the snack machine restock man came around, he would discard snack packs past their eat-by date in a garbage can. He did not object to me digging in the trash for: FREE EXPIRED DORITOS! Of course I did no go around flaunting my superiority to everybody else for being a gourmand of expired Doritos, and they didn't try to convert me to anything else, either.

Metaphor for Wokies: In physics, white is not a particular color; it is merging all particular colors to produce light which can show each color in its true and comparative hue. If, for instance, black is a beautiful color, then it should show most beautifully in non-tinting white light, not in the distorting coloration of light from any one prejudiced component of the spectrum. Example: How does green display itself in red light? As always: All sheep are the same color in the dark, but none are goats or shepherds.

[ spectrum of light ]

¶ +2023.12.24. "Have you ever collaborated with a genius"?

I see someone else has maybe had a similar experience to mine, O onee worked with a perosn who was probalby smarter than me and certainly more accomplished. And he knew and learned from a third person who maybe really was a genius. We were all in computer programming in IBM. The genius had been a delivery truck driver but they gave him the Programmer Aptitude Test. What did he do? He reduced computer chip design programs that ran for days to run in a few hours. This was 1980. He wore jeans, came to work sometimes and grew houseplants in his basement at home. #2 also "came from nothing" but had supportive parents. I once told his manager that he [the manager] should study and learn from this person "because you will not likely ever meet another such person in your life." The manager did not appreciate my recommendation. Ah! And there was one more exceptional person, who at one point was even my manger and then a friend for 40 years. He looked mentally retarded, was legally blind, partly crippled did not hav e college degree and whet else wrong? But he was highly respected by IBM Field Engineers. he was also AN ETHICAL GIANT. He once said to me: "They put me off at the wrong stop when I was born." He had one good thing in his life and it was a biggie: A wife who was his guardian angel.

¶ +2023.12.24. Does a violation of citation and quotation marks in President Claudine Gay's academic work equate to plagiarism?

This lady seems to be caught in nasty culture wars with MAGAs and Israel-Palestine partisan position "rabid" hostilities. The trial needs to be moved to a neutral venue.

Let me note that an academic review board has confirmed that everybody's favorite religious leader, The Reverend Martin Luther King Junior, did plagiarize on his doctoral dissertation. However! The committee felt it would not serve any useful purpose to pursue this matter further. I think that means they like him and don't want to tarnish the radiant glorification of a "sacred cow". I can think of someone else who apparently plagiarized on his doctoral dissertation but I won't help abet all the people who hate this other person and find every opportunity to ignorantly slander him.

I did not plagiarize on mine; I was so scrupulous that I got in a quarrel with a noted publisher when I probably could have got away with just providing the citation and not asking for trouble by seeking permission from the publisher to use. On the other hand my conscidentiousness also got me legal rights to use the logo of a famous but now defunct publisher who got bought up by Brill.

In general, if you use something somebody else said or wrote and you do not properly cite it, even if you reword ot, that is plagiarism, period. I am contraian: I think one should cite the source even in intimate settings, among friends and family, at cocktail parties, and even in your own self-talk in your own head. When in doubt err on the side of too much not too little citation, period. "People" often find this "offputting" and "condescending" but that just says something about them, doesn't it? As the Hebrew National hotdog company's ad slogan goes: I answer to a higher power. Do you?

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion." (Niels Bohr to his students)

¶ +2023.12.23. How seriously do professors take ratings on RateMyProfessor? What factors may influence their level of consideration for these ratings?

I am ignorant about this. Except for getting reelected, now much do politicians care about ratings anywhere? Always remember: Some people will take criticism as confirming they were right (because they will dismiss the criticism as groundless).

Consider this example: My daughter is very bright and works very hard at her studies. A teacher gave her a "D" in a course.

"D" is not really a grade but a judgment: You are either stupid or lazy; you are worthless. Now my daughter may not have deserved an "A" in the course (it's chemistry and I'm a humanities person, so I can't judge) but she studied and she tried and she generally does well in all her other courses. "C" OK. that means not exceptionally good. OK But "D" means disgrace. So my daughter complained about it. the school's response: That teacher wll be leaving next year. BFD.

Oh I forgot: Some teschers take the ratings very seriously: They are the SuperStar lecturers and their egos are bigger than the door to the dirigible hanger in Lakehurst New Jersey: It's amazing they get their swelled heads, fiurther swolled by all those good ratings , thru the lecture hall door.

¶ +2023.12.23. How seriously do professors take ratings on RateMyProfessor? What factors may influence their level of consideration for these ratings?

I am ignorant about this. Except for getting reelected, now much do politicians care about ratings anywhere? Always remember: Some people will take criticism as confirming they were right (because they will dismiss the criticism as groundless).

Consider this example: My daughter is very bright and works very hard at her studies. A teacher gave her a "D" in a course.

"D" is not really a grade but a judgment: You are either stupid or lazy; you are worthless. Now my daughter may not have deserved an "A" in the course (it's chemistry and I'm a humanities person, so I can't judge) but she studied and she tried and she generally does well in all her other courses. "C" OK. that means not exceptionally good. OK But "D" means disgrace. So my daughter complained about it. the school's response: That teacher wll be leaving next year. BFD.

Oh I forgot: Some teschers take the ratings very seriously: They are the SuperStar lecturers and their egos are bigger than the door to the dirigible hanger in Lakehurst New Jersey: It's amazing they get their swelled heads, fiurther swolled by all those good ratings , thru the lecture hall door.

¶ +2023.12.23. What would you do if it were your final act?

The concern here may be a kind of muddleheaded notions.

Leaving aside for the moment edge cases, I would proplse ther for any people there is no final act even if hey are aware tht something is happening which is labelled "their final act"?

If her is an afterlife then it's not the final act but goingthru a door to another life.

If the ris no after life, i.e., not life after death, then when you die as they call it, you won't know you are there – you just won't be there, like before you were conceived.

I mean this literally: execpt for edge cases, as far as the person themselve sis concerned, the person does not die. Period. They either keep on moving into the afterlife or nuthin.

So the quesion becomes how should I spend the next minute of he life I do have? Well, I believe it's going to go on for a while so I will pay my bills. If I thought I wa going to die in 5 minues you think I would pay the American Express bill or pay the mortgage? I'd take a chance on my education in the humanities and my esthetic sensibility and (1) put Wanda Landowska on he CD player, (2) pour myself some find=e Spanish brandy and once more (3) savor a certain piece of pottery made by a master potter that I've had for 40 years and I always enjoy to feel it and to look at it. There won't be any end of me (if it's fast like a massive stroke). But I need to keep thinking clearly to not succumb to the foolish notions of the many, an I was childreared so a lot of my thoughts are not really mine but social conditioning. Satan get thee hence!

¶ +2023.12.22. What are some potential consequences for universities when their academic leaders face allegations of plagiarism?

This should be simple. Intellectual integrity is paramount.

Set up a faulty committee with maybe also outside experts to study the accusations.

If the accusations have subtatntive merit, fire the person.

If the accusations do not have substntive merit then the investigation needs to turn to the people who made thE ACCUSATION AND EXPOSING THEM AND, IF THEY ARE EMPLOYED BY THE university, firing them.

In either case make a full public disclosure.

Isn't it that simple?

¶ +2023.12.22. How would you interpret "Giving your son a skill is better than giving him one thousand pieces of gold"?

This sounds like the old story: Give a hungry man a fish and he will need another from you tomorrow, but give him a fishig pole and he can catch his own dinner from henceforth without needing any more handouts.

There is much truth to it. But like all other things, there are proably eceptions. Suppose the lad has entrepreneurial savvy and needs some capital to do what he very well knows he wants to do and will likely be productive at?

But in general, most kids probably have no purpose in life and many wil waste money. I personally knew a man who as a young person was a waste of time and space: everything his father gave him he dissipated. And it was sad because his father was a great intellectual who could have taught him very special things. In later life the boy did mature but he had wasted his youth. Giving him a thousand pieces of gold when he was young and he might have bought a Bugatti automobile. Vroom! Vroom!

Give a young scholar a thousand pieces of gold and he might build a great library.

Give a budding young entrepreneur a thousand pieces of gold and he might increase it 10 fold.

But most people ar not much of anything, are they? They are "consumers" not producers. So ive the kid a skill and maybe he will be able to produce something: add value not just consume resources.

The word "consumption" used to refer to the chronic and often fatal wasting disease tuberculosis. Be a producer not just a consumer. Find meaning in making something not just being a mmber of the audience. You like listening to some celebrity singer? Write some songs yourself. Etc.

¶ +2023.12.22. Is it common in academia not to attribute passages lifted from another scholar's work by flipping the order of words and making minor adjustments?

Only if you are foolish or unethical or some other bad thing.

Acadenia is not a high school classroom where all the students' writing has no value except for the teach to put a "grade" on it like the USDA does dead animal carcasses. The dead animal carcasses get eaten; the student writing goes directly in a trash can thereby bypssing the alimentation part of the process. My initials are "BMcC". I went to school.

[ USDA ]

I am ignorant here but my guess is such petty shenanigans may be less frequent than outright simple cut and paste. Recently a review board found that The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior did plagiarize on his doctoral dissertation but presumably because everybody likes him they decided it would serve no useful purpose to pursue the matter further.

If I ever found any such malfeasance, may the devil help you because I don't think God (if He, She or Other exists) will. And if you do do it and "get away with it" you still may be in for trouble: Suppose you do this in your doctoral sidderttion and one of your exminers is so naively impressed by your brilliant insight that they ask you to please elborate on it in your oral exam. If you were only being lazy, maybe no problem, but if you did not understand in depth wat you copied, you won't get your degree. And if you did understand it in depth why did you copy it instead of elaborating it with your own further insight? The whole [urpose of academia is to extend knowledge: to see further than others by standing on the shoulders of [often flaewed...] giants, not trying to impersonate them or their hemmorhoids.

Fool your high school English teacher if you can. It's you against them. But in the real world of learning, this kind of thing matters.

The real querstion here is: Why did you ask this question?

¶ +2023.12.22. Has the internet left you behind, are you using it less?

Yes and no. I worked almos 50 years as a computer programmer including in IBM. I had a big website in 1997.

But cellpnones and "social media" have left me behind or maybe I have left them behind or something that I do not like or use them. And this actually hurt me once recently when an important person tried to reach me on Instagram. What the f*ck is Instagram? I stlll like to use the telephone. My opinion of social media:

[ Zuckerberg ]

I do use Youtube a lot: To listen to lecures by university professors and watch old movies for free including silent ones. And, obviously, I reply to Quora questions.

I use the Intenet all the time, but I hope I am not a bird-brain, i.e., a Twitter tweeter, or apparently it's now called "X"? Cross it out!

¶ +2023.12.21. Are there ways to turn mockery into a positive motivator for personal growth?

Sure: Take it seriously. If somebody is mocking you ther probably is a grain of truth in it or else you would truly jus tlaugh it off. If I tell you you really must have something wrong with you fo havin g4 eyes and 3 faces, would that bother you?

But if you are (like one manager I actually had in IBM) wesring socks with macnine stitched images of Mickey and Minnie Mouse on them and I ask you ifyou are a "Mickeymouse", that just might "hit home", yes? Thank people for mockery that "sticks" and get on with improving yourself.

¶ +2023.12.21. Can you explain the distinctions between personal ethics, professional ethics, and business ethics?

There should be no difference.

What there is a difference between is ethics and politics. Many political leaders who are venerated by the people are mass murderers.

There is even an amusing story here:

During World War II, the chief of British Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, aka: "Bomber Harris", was driving down a road one night. A policemen, who had no idea who it was, pulled him over for wreckless driving. The officer said to the man (again, the officer did not know who he was): "Sir, the way you are driving, you could kill somebody." Harris coolly replied:

"I kill thousands of people every day."

Only Germans were tried at Nuremburg. U.S. General Curtis Lemay, who saturation bombed every major city in Japan until he ran out of targets, and probably killed more civilians in the 19 May(?) 1945 incentiary bombing of Tokyo than either atom bomb, himself said that if Japan won the war he expected to be tried as a war criminal.

Ethics are for "little people" (like me, even if not thee), and political leaders an other superior people only in their private not their public lives, although U.S. President Donald trump did assert that if he shot some random person on the street the would not be held accountable.

¶ +2023.12.21. How can one develop resilience in the face of mocking or ridicule?

This should be simple. Ask yourself: "Am I such a small-minded and insecure person that I care what people who probably don't know what they are talking about but are just disgusting low-life say about me? Am I as pathetic – as stupid and ignorant – as they are? Sticks and stones can break my bones but words are just character strings unless they are acts, like 'pink slips', for example. Why waste my precious time on people who are not worth anything?"

Nobody can insult me and if they say obscenities about my mother they may be in for a surprise: A lecture providing them with details to be more precise next time. (As an aside, every man who has at least tow children by his lawfully wedded wife is a: "motherf*cker", isn't he?)

It's not matter or resiliance but of your sense of smell.

¶ +2023.12.21. How can we gain knowledge about the external world if observation requires measurement?

Sort of a silly question, because: Guess what masurements are? observations.

But there is a point to be made here. We can never acquire true knowledge of the "external world" because we did not create it.

The 18th century British philosopher David Hume pointed out that we can never know the causes of things. We can only observe "constant conjunctions". If I drop a meatball ofr the top of the famous leaning tower of Pizza pies 1,000 times and it falls down to the ground instead of floating away in the sky all 1,000 times, that does not prove anything except that heavy objects always fall down as far as we have seen to date, so we expect – without good reason – that they will continue to do so in futre.

All of experience could be like the old fun but also profound movie which I highly recommend you watch or not): "The Truman Show".

The eniment physicist Niels Bohr insstructed his students:

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion."

+2024.01.30 v297
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