Monday, May 14, 2007

Will at Imagethief offers a disquisition of importance:
Granted that there at least two main types of censorship. One is loud censorship to set an example. Here is where the boundary is. Don't cross it. Kill the chickens to scare the rhetorically inclined monkeys. A second type is the quiet, subtle censorship that influences ideas in the public domain that you never here about. This is the informal guidance to editors that is never revealed, the changes to school curricula to ensure contentious ideas are removed, and the stories and books that never make to the public in the first place and that thus don't have to be noisily suppressed later.
What we can't know is already overwhelming.
That we willingly compound that by forbidding, or hiding, what we might know is our great shame.
--ml
tags: ,

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

A Quarter for a Truism

Walker at Maxspeak:
Economists are trained to type in the assumptions that will maximize the career-utility of their results.

Too bad inflation has rendered the reward so small compared to the merit of the thought!
--ml

Update 5/13/7-- It at last penetrates the thick carapace in which I preserve the odd goo I call a brain from sulliment by coarse, unreasoning reality: The above might be construed as a cretin's sneer at his betters, i.e.: Economists. The furry little scene inside the camera obsura of my imagination -- more obscure than camera -- was quite other. The thought was that we are all so limited to what pays in our assumptions that it is little wonder actual new paradigms are so singularly thin on the ground. Most people have the well commended opinion that only fools re-invent the wheel. That in the face of what a clumsy contraption we make our contrivance.
tags: ,

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Creates Chaos

Ac-c-k-k!!!

The monitor died!

Let's see. This was the open box special I bought to replace the DAK 386 monitor the cats learned to play soccer with.

In the middle of the night.

That was seven years ago.

As my Father-in-law so justly said :

"That's amortized itself three times: it doesn't owe any body nothin'."

--ml
tags: ,

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Chaos Creative

Dum Luk's Central: Where it all began one not so dark afternoon.
In the lower left corner is Judge Dee, The legal arbiter of Dum Luk's as knit by Diana out of her own pea brain.
--ml
tags: ,