phantasmagorical

pwinn: A nice double-chart, demonstrating both who is paying...

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:59:55 -0500

A nice double-chart, demonstrating both who is paying taxes, and how much they’re paying.

So now you see that the top 1% pay 40.4% of all taxes, but you also see that 1.8% of those earning $500,000 or more pay no taxes at all. The bottom 50% pay only 2.9% of all taxes, but amazingly, 0.2% of households earning less than $10,000 pay something!

Who is Paying Taxes?

Designed by Travis Pitts. “… I knew I wanted to make...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:23:00 -0500

Designed by Travis Pitts. “… I knew I wanted to make a certain teen detective her canine companion into the sole survivors of a Monsterpocalypse for the threadless loves Horror contest.” via truk77

"The story of the Jews centers around— one might almost say that it stars—the hazards and accidents,..."

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:39:06 -0500

“The story of the Jews centers around— one might almost say that it stars—the hazards and accidents, the misfortunes and disasters, the feats of inspiration, the travail and despair, and intermittent moments of glory and grace, that entail upon journeys from home and back again. For better or worse it has been one long adventure—a five-thousand-year Odyssey—from the moment of the true First Commandment, when God told Abraham lech lecha: Thou shalt leave home. Thou shalt get lost. Thou shalt find slander, oppression, opportunity, escape, and destruction. Thou shalt, by definition, find adventure.”

- Michael Chabon, as quoted by Alan Jacobs.

The Ancient Hebrew Conception of the Universe. Via Boing Boing.

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:44:12 -0500

The Ancient Hebrew Conception of the Universe. Via Boing Boing.

Frank Miller’s take on Charlie Brown.

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:21:36 -0500

Frank Miller’s take on Charlie Brown.

"This is why I keep going back to the concept of a “centred set”: the church being defined by its..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:33:35 -0500

“

This is why I keep going back to the concept of a “centred set”: the church being defined by its centre, not by its boundary. Now of course, the centre of the church is Christ, but in this discussion we’re concerned with the centre in terms of the church’s confession of Christ. (I also apologise now for my unsettling use of British spelling for “centre” (sw).)

This allows us to be both very detailed in describing the centre, but also very broad in who we accept as Christians (even if we regard them as “off-centre” to a greater or lesser extent.

To put this in concrete terms: if I’m asked to say where I think the centre is, I’m going to use a definition that will not be accepted by everyone. I’m going to choose the teachings set out in Luther’s Small Catechism, which I regard as the best exposition of “mere Christianity” ever written.

That would justly produce howls of outrage from those who disagree with Lutheran teachings on the sacraments, were I saying it represents the boundary outside which no-one can be called a Christian. But I’m not: I’m saying this is where I believe the centre to be. I’ll leave it to God to decide where the boundary is and who is on or other side of it, and indeed who is closer or further away from the centre itself.

”

- John Halton. See also “The Church as a Centred Set”.

Biblioburro: a different sort of bookmobile. Via Text Patterns.

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:14:17 -0500

Biblioburro: a different sort of bookmobile. Via Text Patterns.

"The thing is, when three quarters of America are obese, when half are dangerously obese, like me,..."

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:25:30 -0500

“The thing is, when three quarters of America are obese, when half are dangerously obese, like me, years off our lives from all the fat—that tells you that this isn’t a will-power problem. We didn’t get less willful in the last fifty years. Might as well say that all those people who died of the plague lacked the will-power to keep their houses free of rats. Fat isn’t moral, it’s epidemiological. There are a small number of people, a tiny minority, whose genes are short-circuited in a way that makes them less prone to retaining nutrients. That’s a maladaptive trait through most of human history—burning unnecessary calories when you’ve got to chase down an antelope to get more, that’s no way to live long enough to pass on your genes! So you and Perry over here with your little skinny selves, able to pack away transfats and high-fructose corn-syrup and a pound of candy for breakfast at the IHOP, you’re not doing this on will-power—you’re doing it by expressing the somatotype of a recessive, counter-survival gene.”

- Cory Doctorow, Makers.

"[Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora Radio] likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in..."

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:28:54 -0500

“[Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora Radio] likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’””

- “The Song Decoders”, the story of Pandora Radio.

"For all their shortcomings, the Great Books—along with many other varieties of middlebrow..."

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:41:00 -0500

“

For all their shortcomings, the Great Books—along with many other varieties of middlebrow culture—reflected a time when the liberal arts commanded more respect. They were thought to have practical value as a remedy for parochialism, bigotry, social isolation, fanaticism, and political and economic exploitation. The Great Books had a narrower conception of “greatness” than we might like today, but their foundational ideals were radically egalitarian and proudly intellectual.

As Beam concludes, “The Great Books are dead. Long live the Great Books.” And, I might add: Long live middlebrow culture.

”

- Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor. This would have to be balanced by what Lewis said about people reading for its hygienic value, which is not true reading but mere status seeking.

Hand-binding the Pictorial Webster’s. Via Text Patterns.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:58:28 -0500

Hand-binding the Pictorial Webster’s. Via Text Patterns.

via Text Patterns

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:58:01 -0500

via Text Patterns

Via Inhabitatio Dei

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:11:24 -0500

Via Inhabitatio Dei

"We don’t remember everything that happened to us, just selective details. We weave our..."

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:44:06 -0400

“We don’t remember everything that happened to us, just selective details. We weave our memories together on demand, filling in any empty spaces with the present, which is lying around in great abundance. In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psych prof Daniel Gilbert describes an experiment in which people with delicious lunches in front of them are asked to remember their breakfast: overwhelmingly, the people with good lunches have more positive memories of breakfast than those who have bad lunches. We don’t remember breakfast — we look at lunch and superimpose it on breakfast.”

- “Happy Meal Toys Versus Copyright” in Content: Selected Essays by Cory Doctorow.

"In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the..."

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:03:16 -0400

“In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear. For to him who does know, children can sometimes seem like innocent delinquents, sentenced not to death but to life, who have not yet discovered what their punishment will consist of. Nonetheless, everyone desires to achieve old age, that is to say a condition in which one can say: “Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse - until at last the worst of all arrives.””

- That Schopenhauer - he’s such a barrel of laughs.

"Thales is credited with the theory that everything is “really” water. What does such an..."

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 07:18:10 -0400

“Thales is credited with the theory that everything is “really” water. What does such an assertion mean? Why should it ever have occurred to anyone to say that everything was “really” water? On the face of it, the theory is a statement about the physical world as conceived by the Greeks of the sixth century B.C.: it means that, of the four “elements”, three are forms of the fourth: earth is solidified water, air rarefied water, fire (aether, the hot sky of the eastern Mediterranean) rarefied air or twice-rarefied water. But merely in these physical terms the statement is inexplicable: for not only does it contradict the evidence of the five senses, it also seems to lack any necessity. Why should earth not be earth, air air and fire fire, as they seem to be? Now the inexplicability is in the idiom; the novelty is the language of physics, and in order to see what is meant we have to translate it back into its original language, that of metaphysics. Translated in to the language of metaphysics, “Everything is really water” reads: The world we perceive is characterized by great diversity, but this diversity is not fundamental; fundamentally the world is a unity. But notice that this unity is precisely what is not apparent; what is apparent is the reverse, the diversity of the world, and the object of the hypothesis is to assert the apparitional nature of this diversity. In its last significance, therefore, “Everything is water” means: The world of diversity is an apparent world; in reality the world is one. Thus we find at the very beginning of philosophy the assertion that there exist two worlds, the “real” and the “apparent”, that everything is “really” something else and not what it “appears” to be. If we are willing to call the language of physics employed by Thales the content of the thought, and the metaphysical basis of this language the form of the thought, we can say that the difference between scientific and pre-scientific thought is not so great a gulf as it is often supposed to be; the content of the thought is new, but its form remains the same, namely that there are two worlds, the one perceived, the other a mystery. Only if Thales had said “Everything is really what it appears to be” would the form of the thought have changed.”

- R.J. Hollingdale, in the introduction to Essays and Aphorisms of Schopenhauer.

Do you snack while you read? If so, favourite reading snack?I don’t snack while I read but I...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:23:47 -0400

Do you snack while you read? If so, favourite reading snack?

I don’t snack while I read but I do often read while I’m eating meals. Except dinner, of course. I don’t think Rachel and Darcy would appreciate that.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?

It doesn’t horrify me as much as it used to, though I still don’t do it. When I want to make notes in books I use post-it notes.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?

Dog-earring is book abuse. Laying a paperback flat open creases the spine, which is also book abuse. I usually use receipts or scraps of paper as bookmarks. But not those bookmarks with yarn tails. Again, book abuse.

Fiction, non-fiction, or both?

A few years ago I was heavily non-fiction. These days it’s the opposite.

Hard copy or audiobooks?

Of course I’d love to have hard copies of all the books I’m interested in but budget constraints won’t allow it. Therefore I listen to a lot of audiobooks checked out from my excellent public library. I commute for one hour every day so audiobooks allow me to read much more than I normally could. They also keep my mind occupied on those rare occasions when I exercise. Prevents me from continually asking myself why I’m walking, with gusto, to nowhere.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?

At any point, though I’d rather make it to a natural break.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away?

Not usually. When I do, though, I usually use http://www.m-w.com/. I prefer that site because you can hear the pronunciation. I never really bothered to learn how to use pronunciation symbols.

What are you currently reading?

Wuthering Heights in hard copy. The Essential Edgar Allan Poe on audiobook. Also dipping into a volume of filthy limericks.

What is the last book you bought?

I bought several books last Friday at the Red Cross book fair. Some highlights: Folktales of England; Essays and Aphorisms of Schopenhauer; Finding Darwin’s God by Kenneth Miller; Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Jung; Indiana Folktale Reader; Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell; Bulfinch’s Mythology; Early Irish Myths and Sagas.

Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time?

Usually several at a time, a few of which I end up abandoning completely.

Do you have a favorite time of day and/or place to read?

In the mornings and during my lunch hour for print books.

Do you prefer series books or stand alone books?

Probably stand alone books. I’ve started several series and never finished them. If you can’t tell by now I don’t have the greatest attention span.

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over?

I’ve become an evangelist for Neil Gaiman this year.

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?)

Generally by subject. I reserve the right, however, to keep all my Penguin Classics together or have a shelf reserved for all my Wendell Berry first editions or whatever sounds good to me at the time. I’ve been known to reorganize my books during lazy afternoons.

Cover art for volume two of the Library of America’s...

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:33:31 -0400

Cover art for volume two of the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales.

Cover art for volume one of the Library of America’s...

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:32:48 -0400

Cover art for volume one of the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales.

I found out about the R.I.P. (Readers Imbibing Peril) Challenge from Stefanie and thought I’d...

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:12:31 -0400

I found out about the R.I.P. (Readers Imbibing Peril) Challenge from Stefanie and thought I’d join in the fun. I’ll start with the Penguin Classics Three Gothic Novels, which includes The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, and Frankenstein. I’ll read the first two and listen to B.J. Harrison read Frankenstein during my commute. Also, a few days ago I mooched Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark so I’ll try to read that. I’m next on the library request list for the Good Omens audiobook by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. If I get it in time I’ll start listening to it after Frankenstein. Sounds like a fun run up to Halloween.