Culture of Life

From Andrew Sullivan:

Bush himself, who said last week that "it is wise to always err on the side of life," didn't seem so concerned when he signed countless death warrants as governor of Texas, with the most cursory of legal reviews. He also signed a Texas law that gave surviving next of kin complete discretion to remove life-support from a terminally ill patient in the absence of a living will. Last week, an eight-year-old boy died after his tube was removed in Texas because his parents could no longer afford treatment, but the religious right seemed uninterested. As commander in chief, Bush has presided over the criminal homicides of 26 inmates in U.S. military care, after removing by executive memo the usual bans on cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. Culture of life?

Ouch.

More Bloodblogging

Just got back from my second double red cell donation, which was full of all kinds of new bells and whistles. Before we even started I got a red rubber wristband. I was overseas (and watching the Tour de France on TV) while the wristband craze began, matured, and metastasized stateside, so this was like getting a fragment of culture that had been lost in the mail, only delivered moths later. They used a new machine, one that sat up at abound head height so I could listen to the strangely soothing hum of the centrifuge and watch bags fill up with dark red fluid and think, "Hey! That's mine!" For those unfamiliar with the procedure, a double red cell donation involves taking double the normal whole donation out, separating the red blood cells, and pumping half of the remaining juice back in. This means there are alternating cycles were you can watch the ruby-colored rope coming out of your elbow pinken and eventually go to clear as outgoing blood is replaced by incoming saline. The coolest part is that the saline is room temperature; about twenty degrees colder than body temp. You can feel the difference up your arm and into your heart, and there's something thrilling about feeling cold in the deep plumbing of your body.

I impulse-bought a copy of Lessig's Free Culture in the bookstore a few days ago, so I brought it with me and read a few chapters. I'll post about that a bit more when I've had some time to digest it. Lessig was actually one of three speakers at a talk on IP and open source my roommate went to today wile I was donating, and maybe I can relay some comment from him.

On Realism

Today on World of Warcraft:

Random Player: "I'm playing this now because Halo 2 sucks"
Me: "Aw, c'mon. That's a fun game too."
RP: "I liked Fallout 2 more. It was more realistic."
Me: "fun > realism"
RP: "no, realistic games are better because because blah blah blah blah blah."
Me: "Right now, I'm playing as a magic troll."

Confusion Sells Breakfast Sandwiches

Have you seen the McDonalds commercial where the girl eats that guy's food while explaining how girlfriends are like McGriddle Breakfast Sandwiches? I do not understand this commercial. She may be listing the desireable properties of a good woman, as embodied in a McGriddle Breakfast Sandwich, in order to call male lead's attention to those same qualities in herself. Establishing shot of her reaching across the table supports this hypothesis, as does her evident frustration when he doesn't get it. On the other hand, she could be merely pretending to offer useful advice, as a pretext for eating this poor man's sandwich. This would emphasize the desireablility of the food, by showing how one is willing to manipulate one's friends when they are most emotionally vulnerable in order to obtain a McGriddle Breakfast Sandwich. It would also explain why afterward she continues her gastronomic imperialism, siezing male lead's coffee when the first similie leaves him bewildered. And besides, it's hard to imagine that the best way to position yourself as the rebound gal is to eat a vat-fried breakfast entree right in fron of him while talking. I mean, she polishes off that whole thing (off camera) in about fifteen seconds, without pausing for breath. You can just imagine great saliva-infused gobs of greasy, syrupy eggs and biscuit being ground up before male lead's eyes. Sexy, that.

Daniel Waterhouse

"Listen to me. I did not wish to be summoned by your Princess. Summoned, I did not wish to come. But having been summoned, and having come, I mean to give a good account of myself. That's how I was taught by my father, and the men of his age who slew Kings and swept away not merely Governments but whole Systems of Thought, like Khans of the Mind. I would have my son in Boston know of my doings, and be proud of them, and carry my ways forward to another generation on another continent. Any opponent who does not know this about me, stands at a grave disadvantage; a disadvantage I am not above profiting from."

From System of the World, pp 376.

Test Prep Mercenary

Got back from teaching my first LSAT class. I thought it went well, but now my hands are all covered in whiteboard pen. Out damned spot!

Also, I got back my grades for last quarter. My intro to neuroscience grade is based entirely on a fourteen page paper that I "researched" and wrote in one marathon session, as described below. I start out talking about brain scans of Buddhist monks, but it quickly becomes a paranoid rant about the Dalai Lama's secret plan to convert you to Buddhism without you even knowing it! This was the single worst piece of writing I have produced since I learned to reproduce alphabetic characters. I was seriously concerned that I would fail. But no. A-. I have no idea how that happened, but I won't complain. Having managed not to fail, I am now free to enjoy my six-month spring break.

X-Box Live is Awesome

Set it up last night. Played most of today. It's a ton of fun, but our teamwork needs improvement.

A: "Oh shit guys they're over here?"
B: "Where is that?"
A: "HERE!"
B: "Dude, we can't see you. Where are they?"
* bang! *
A: "Damn, now I'm dead."
* bang! *
B: "Yeah, me too."

Closure

Stanford finally deigned to give me notice of my rejection. Sure took them long enough.

The Return From Harvard

So I fly JetBlue back from Boston, so I finally see what all the fuss is about. It was pretty nice. TV makes the flight seem a lot shorter than it is. Roger Fisher gave me a copy of Getting to Yes at lunch, so I read that for a bit on the plane, but then I found the West Wing marathon on Bravo. Older episodes, meaning they were good ones. At any rate, Washington certainly doesn't look like Hollywood for ugly people on TV. Never mind Rob Lowe's Sam, whose job description at the White House must be, "look pretty, bitchwork." Amy Gardner is hot. Smart, confident, knows what she wants and how to play hardball to get it. As Short Skirt/Long Jacket as you can get in the public sector.

More substantively, some of the speeches and dialog make you wonder how the country would have reacted if there had been a President Bartlett on 9/11 who promptly launched a Global War on Terror™. Sometimes I feel like everyone's positions on whether it would be good would be the inverse of what they are now, just because a Democrat and not a Republican would be in charge of the thing. I wonder if Sorkin could write about an idealistic, charismatic, and good-looking (naturally) Republican administration. Showing a staffer conflicted when they personally disagree with a piece of policy that doesn't quite fit their ideals is a recurring plot device; it would be interesting to see what those conflicts would be in a "do-gooder" GOP White House. I'd watch that. I bet other people would too. I mean, the person next to me was watching McCauley Caulkin and Ricky Lake play poker. There's an audience for anything.

Breakfast

It is now shortly past eight. I have just returned from eating breakfast in the club, the first time I have done so all year. Normally I sleep through breakfast. So why am I up early today? I'm not. I'm still up late from last night. Now I just have to crank out a page and a half more essay quickly, so I have enough time to sleep before the basketball game comes on.

Also, breakfast is delicious. I should stay up this late more often.

Thirteen Pages to Go

Whoever scheduled finals week during the Tournament is an evil, evil person.

Three Stories

Continuning with finalsboging. The last question on my take-home Intro to Semantics final asks us to describe contexts in which the sentence "You will be home by midnight" could play three different conversational roles: a prediction, a command, and a promise. A few hours after the final went out, an FAQ email explained:

Q: For question 3(a), is it enough context to say "Sentence (1) could be uttered in response to to perform a commissive speech act" or do we need to provide a full scenario?
A. You need to provide a full enough scenario. If your to which an utterance of sentence (1) responds provides a full enough scenario, that's all you need. Otherwise, spill a little more ink.

It always bugs me to get this do-however-much-you-need non-answer. And as you may recall, I respond to disagreeable prompts in unpredictable ways. Spill some ink, eh? I could have some fun with that. It was time to do something silly. The responses I wrote follow.
Prediction:

Ben squinted at the map and took a long, bubbling pull at the dregs of his root beer. Neglected, his double-double began to slowly congeal beside him. He began to speak. “What I don’t understand, dude,” he carefully began, “is how you managed to get this far off course. I mean, we’re in Westwood. Why didn’t you just stay on the five?” The stranger merely shrugged and grunted something about a gas station. Ben shook his head. “So, San Diego, huh?” Grunt. Ben began again. “Well just take a right out of the parking lot, and then left at the third light. Take that all the way until you see the onramp. Just be sure to get on the southbound this time man.” Another grunt. “How long? Well it’s what, quarter past? Yeah. You will be home by midnight.”

Command:

Anyone could make his voice carry an edge. When he wanted to, Jack could make his carry a claymore. He reached out and laid a pawlike hand on his daughter’s shoulder, his muscles slithering into terrible new geometries with tectonic menace. He knew he had to do this. Nicole had been looking forward to the dance for weeks. Months maybe. Christ. He shot a quick sideways glance at the skinny kid. Forgot his name already. Standing there in a rented tux, hair dyed blond at the tips. Clip-on bow tie. Punk. Jack was pleased to see he was sweating. He gently squeezed Nicole. Look her in the eye. His voice began with the low rumble of distant thunder, quietly, but with the silent strength of mountains. Still just loud enough for skinny to hear. “You will be home by midnight.”

Promise:

Ashley ran. She knew if she stopped, if she let herself cast one backward look or even allowed one thought to reach back and touch him… Don’t think about him. That would be the end of it, because once you think about him you’ll stop and turn around and go back and throw away everything that is or could be just to spend a few more minutes with him. And for every second you were there, you’d swear it was worth it. But fairy magic was cruel. Ashley couldn’t stop, couldn’t look, couldn’t think. So she ran. She sprinted past the valet, bare feet now splashing through puddles in the street. She’d left the slippers, abandoned them. Had to run. The driver was ahead, holding the door. Ashley dove in, and before she could say a word he was up front and behind the wheel, looking like he’d always been there. Seatbelt fastened. They were bastards, but you had to admit they had style. The engine let out a circus lion roar, protesting its controlled ferocity. “Don’t worry miss,” he said with a fey twinkle in his eye. “You will be home by midnight.”

I think the second one turned out best. Who esle gets to say, "muscles slithered into terrible new geometries with tectonic menace" or "with the silent strength of mountains" on a formal linguistics final? In the end, though the third was more fun to write. As soon as I realized I'd be making "You'll be home by midnight" into a promise, I knew it had to be a Cinderella story. I'm definitely doing way too much in that passage - dropping hints that this is a retelling fo the fairy tale while I'm busy trying to re-imagine it, and trying to maintain some manic tension throughout the exposition. It never would have worked. But it was great.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love J. David Velleman

I am currently writing my term paper for Philosophy of Action, a paper due in 16 hours. Only four pages to go, so I should finish on time even given my usual exponential decay of productivity. Anyway, at first I was very suspicious of Velleman's account of agency and action, saying that the constitutive aims for belief and action at the center of that theory "felt like a giant hack." I'd like to think I've changed my mind because I have come to more fully appreciate the logical force of his arguments, but it could very well be that I've just been seduced by passages like this one:

One further drawback [of conventional Davidsonian accounts of make-believe] is that the desire-belief explanation fails to account for children's ability to invent and to understand novel ways of pretending. An especially imaginative child may come up with his own way of pretending to be an elephant, but not by considering which behaviors would be most suitable to an elephant-act, as if he were an impressionist honing some zoological schtick. Rather, the child's method is to imagine being an elephant - weighing a ton, walking on stumpy legs, carrying floppy ears - and then to wait and see how he is disposed to behave.

The image of a child trying, Method-style, to put himself in the mindset of an elephant, and then waiting to see how he is disposed to behave - that's something straight out of Calvin and Hobbes. And that phrase in the middle! "as if he were an impressionist honing some zoological schtick," ah, to write like that! Velleman continues:

Similarly, this child's playmates do not appreciate his inventions by recognizing that they are especially similar to the behavior of real elephants, and hence good choices for an aspiring elephant-impersonator. On the contrary, success at pretending to be an elephant need not involve behavior that is really elephant-like at all. What it requires is rather behavior that's expressive of elephant-mindedness - expressive, that is, of vividly imagining that one is an elephant.

All this and more in the essay On the Aim of Belief, page 257 of The Possibility of Practical Reason.

UPDATE: V-man blogs over at Left2Right.

UPDATE 2: Hey, look. One of my professors is a Left2Right co-blogger. I took Competing Theories of Justice from Debra Staz sophomore year. I got a B.

Some Preliminary NCAA Tournament Thoughts

I never would have pegged Washington as a #1 seed; the PAC-10 actually seems to be getting more respect than due it this year. East coast bas nothing. Interesting that so much weight was put on the conference tournaments throughout the selection process. We've always regarded them as purely mercenary, just out to squeeze a bit more revenue out of the whole student-athlete money machine before the season ends.

With a potential second-round matchup against Duke, Stanford looks to extend its leave-in-the-second-round-or-earlier streak. But after the way the team has adapted to a new coach after starting slow, and kept its performance up after repeated personnel losses, nobody can complain.

On the topic of Stanford, it's funny the women's team didn't pull a #1 seed, but those seem to be bad luck on the farm anyway.

The ESPN guys all think Vermont will upset Syracuse, but they're wrong.

Blogging has been and will continue to be light, as it's finals week. Not to worry, there's lots of stuff in the queue.

Is Hillary Clinton the Next Trent Johnson?

Discuss how Ted Leland's hiring practices may be a model for the Democratic Party's nomination process over at BLawG and Economics. Me, I'm off to the Washington State game. Beat the Cougs!

Thank You, Jessica Grant

This is the third incarnation of this blog. I originally started it when I was studying abroad in Berlin for six months, to have a place to keep copies of the letters I was sending home to my family and friends. I deleted it a bit hastily, but fortunately had all the good stuff archived. Anyway, I was inspired to start again when Jessica told me about reading those letters aloud to her family at the dinner table. So thanks Jess for that piece of validation. I've put the letters up in the archives. Enjoy.

Disclaimer

Update 9/1/09: I am a lawyer. However, I am still not your lawyer. You are still not my client, and I am still not giving you legal advice.

I am not your lawyer. You are not my client. I am not giving you legal advice.