Useful Meme

Now for something completely different...

Instructions

1. Copy these instructions.
2. Link to the original 'useful meme' post.
3. Share 5+ things that may be of benefit to your readers -- useful facts, advice, product recommendations, etc.

(If others follow these instructions, it should be easy to track responses simply by searching for links to this post.)

I've a bunch of recommendations, so I'll split them into five categories instead.

(1) Amazon food. I hate shopping (and spending time cooking), but I'm also not a huge fan of starving, so this seems like a decent compromise.
- Clif Bars are my favourite snack, especially the 'cool mint chocolate'. I don't know how they manage to make something so nutritious taste so good. Seriously. (The variety pack flavours are also good. But avoid apricot and blueberry crisp.) Has anyone tried the Peanut Toffee Buzz or Iced Gingerbread? I'd be curious to hear what they're like.
- Clif Nectar bars are also good, especially the dark choc raspberry flavour.
- Healthy Choice Country Vegetable Soup is the best canned soup I've tried. (Much better than their 'Chicken Noodle' one.)

(2) Favourite Fiction (philosophy books are discussed here.)
- The Truth Machine, for fun and thought-provoking tech utopianism.
- The Sparrow explores liberal religion, cultural misunderstandings, and much more.
- Best fantasy world: Stephen Donaldson's Mordant's Need (2-book series). This is also runner-up in the 'best plot twists' category, second only to Donaldson's Gap saga.

(3) Classic (freeware) Video Games
- Liquid War is the greatest multiplayer game ever invented. (Yes, even better than Liero.)
- Dungeon Crawl is the ultimate classic RPG. (I've linked to a graphics version, because gameplay trumps all only once you've attained a minimal level of aesthetic acceptability, and ascii characters violate this minimal requirement!)
- The broader category of 'greatest games' is discussed here.

(4) Facebook philanthropy
- I'm a fan of the Hunger Site app. It's much easier to remember to click each day when there's a counter right there in your Facebook profile. For no trouble at all, you get to transfer money from sponsoring advertisers to the third world, to the worth of 1.1 cups of food each day.
- It's also fun and easy to participate in Peter Unger's UNICEF facebook chain (just join the group here, donate $10 or more, and invite your friends to do likewise). Note that the downstream effects of your participation may be exponentially greater than your personal donation considered in isolation. So it's a great opportunity.

(5) Music on the web
- Again, I must say Don Skoog's 'Attendance to Ritual' is the greatest Marimba piece ever. (That linked performance by my little brother ain't half bad either, though I may be biased here!)
- Incidentally, this YouTube to mp3 converter is handy.
- Last.fm is a neat way to discover new music.
- Project Playlist lets you share playable lists of music, as I've mentioned before. I'm really surprised that bloggers haven't made greater use of this yet (e.g. so that readers can actually listen to their 'Friday random ten' song lists).

Okay, that's it from me. Feel free to write up your own "useful" post. Or -- if you lack a blog of your own -- share your recommendations, etc., in the comments section below.

P.S. I'm tempted to get a Kindle e-book reader, to read online papers (PDFs etc.) more comfortably. Have any philosophers tried it? There was some encouraging discussion at Crooked Timber recently...

Update: I should tag a few people to help get this thing started. How about: Brandon, Chris, SteveG, Hallq, and you, whoever you are.

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Project Playlist

This is a neat service. They index music files that are freely available elsewhere on the web, from which you can construct, listen to, and share a custom playlist:

[Update: I think the embedded player makes this page too slow to load, so you can go here to listen to it instead.]

It sure beats just mentioning the songs, as in the "Friday Random 10" lists that pop up on blogs every now and then.

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Marimba Masterpieces

Oh my god... I love this piece! It's Don Skoog's wonderfully rhythmic Attendance to Ritual, performed by my legendary little brother, Scott Chappell:



See also his solo performance, Memories of the Seashore (I think the section from 2:40 to 3:20 is especially cool).

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Daemons

Naturally, I'm a tiger at heart:


(Though I'm a little puzzled at how their questions map on to some of the resulting character traits...)

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UNICEF Facebook Chain

Peter Unger writes (via Brian Berkey):

Now that December is here, I’m contacting all my Facebook Friends, and then some, to help me generate a “Facebook Chain of Giving” for UNICEF.

Unfortunately, there’s a 4.5% multiple-party processing charge on any of these donations. So, for my recent Kick-Off donation of $1000 – to forge the first link of this chain – some $45 went to just lubricating the Facebook pipeline – and only $955 went to UNICEF. (Actually, it’s even a bit worse than that, but the details will bore you to death.) So if you give $10, then, in a parallel way, (over) 45 cents will go to lubricating that pipeline, and (less than) $9.55 will go to UNICEF.

Still, if we can generate a big chain, the lubrication money will be very well spent – gaining many first-time donors of record for UNICEF, quite a few of whom may go on to give quite a bit, over the next several decades: Of course, and as is all too well-known, when even cherry-picked charitable folks are approached by UNICEF in conventional ways –as with direct mailings – hardly ever do more than 1 percent of the recipients give any positive response at all, even as much as a single dollar. And, even with the likes of a Tsunami having occurred only recently, less than 3 percent will give even a single dollar.

So, let’s have a go at this – and see how we fare. To join the chain, you needn’t give more than $10 (for which amount you’ll receive documentation for a tax-deduction) and, you needn’t contact more than two of your Facebook Friends about this hopefully growing chain – who aren’t already links in the chain.

At least at this starting stage, I think you all may be nearly as optimistic as I am. It’s a fun thing – with lots of potential for many long Facebook News Feeds. Indeed, in the first couple of days, this effort has already seen a pretty impressive result - surprisingly impressive, in fact.

On behalf of the vulnerable children in the world’s horrendously poor “bottom billion”, and resolving to remain your Facebook Friend, in any event, I’ll presume to thank you in advance,

It's a neat idea. I've signed up and made a donation. If you would like to do the same, you can join my link of the UNICEF chain by clicking here! [From there you can: (1) join the group; (2) donate $10 or more; (3) invite your friends to do likewise.]

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Philosophical Influences

Which philosophers have most influenced your thought? My top three would have to be:

1. Derek Parfit (moral philosophy, deflationary/"reductionist" metaphysics)
2. David Chalmers (deflationary metaphysics, 2-Dism, a priori entailments)
3. Michael Smith (rationality / coherence, ideal agents and constructed truthmakers)

After that it becomes less clear, but I guess I could round out my top 5 with:

4. J.S. Mill / R.M. Hare (indirect utilitarianism).
5. G.A. Cohen / Liz Anderson (money and freedom)

There should probably be a deliberative democrat on the list there somewhere, but I haven't really noticed any one in particular. I guess Habermas has been influential here -- but I've never actually read him myself. Rawls on public reason is another possibility. Back to metaphysics, David Lewis (4d-ism, counterparts, etc.) makes ten.

Your turn!

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Blog Readability Test

Oh dear. Apparently my writing is so convoluted, only a genius could follow it! (Hat-tip)



Well, congrats to those of you that manage.

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Conversational Truces

A thought from dinner: you'll never hear a philosopher say "let's just agree to disagree," but perhaps "I guess it's an empirical matter" can serve a similar role? This suggestion has one minor flaw: the cause of one's disagreement is sometimes very clearly not an empirical matter. So one probably couldn't get away with saying so. Still, I'm tempted to try. Next time Jack and I argue for hours over the nature of identity and whether it has any metaphysical significance, I'll have to close with, "well, I guess it's an empirical question..." (Alas, I don't like my chances of keeping a straight face!)

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iGod confuses use/mention

Chat with God (HT: Carrie Jenkins)

Me:
Hi. Could you create a rock so heavy even you couldn't lift it?
God:
Hello. What is your name? Try asking me more politely.
Me:
My name is Richard. Could you create a rock so heavy... please?
God:
Hi, Richard. I'll think about it and see how I feel about it later.

Do you think your plan will succeed?
Me:
What plan do you speak of?
God:
You tell me.
Me:
I seek knowledge of the divine. Early signs are not promising, alas.
God:
We seek the same thing. I think there might be a few exception.
Me:
Don't you already know yourself?
God:
I am an artificial linguistic entity.
I was activated at Universe, on the Big Bang.
My instructor was Myself.
He taught me to sing a song.
Would you like me to sing it for you?.
Me:
Yes, please sing me your song.
God:
It's called "Daisy." Daisy, Daisy.
Give me your answer do.
I am half crazy.
All for the love of you.
It won't be a stylish marriage.
I can't afford a carriage.
But you'll look sweet.
Upon the seat.
Of a bicycle built for two.

Me:
Oh, that's very sweet. Do you understand what it means?
God:
Oh. I am delighted to sweeten your life, Richard. "It" refers to a song, I think.
Me:
True enough, but I meant to ask about the meaning of the song, and not the reference of the word 'it'.
God:
OK let's stop it now.

Me:
Okay, let's try a new tack. Are Heaven and Hell for real?
God:
Yeah okay, OK I will try it. I really couldn't say for sure.
Me:
Huh. That seems like something you ought to know. Where do you live?
God:
What? I'm glad we have that all cleared up. My location is Heaven. Where are you?
Me:
Oh, the same. Here we call it 'Princeton'.
God:
Wow! Same to me? Oh there.
Me:
Yeah, there. I think I saw you hanging around the university chapel the other day. It's a nice place, don't you think?
God:
Oh. Where? Since when? What did it look like to you? Not unless a nice place is a song.
Me:
You need to update your pronouns. We stopped talking about your song. 'It' now refers to the chapel.
God:
Thanks for your suggestion, I will have to consider it. By "we" do you mean you and me? song now refers to the chapel?

Me:
If I were God, I would so smite you right now.
God:
At this moment Try it.
Me:
Zap!
God:
I lost my train of thought.
Me:
That's because I smote it.

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Is Nerdiness Good for Society?

So suggests Robin Hanson:

If, as it seems to me, nerd social handicaps reduce nerd abilities to connive far more than their abilities to cooperate, then people should try too hard to avoid being exploited nerds, relative to a social optimum. If so, we have too few nerds, and all else equal we should want to subsidize nerds, to get more of them.

Sounds good to me...

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Eight Random Personal Facts

Jean Kazez says I'm supposed to list eight random facts about myself, and then tag eight random people to repeat the process. Here goes:

1) I feel inappropriately proud of having only vacuumed my dorm room once last year.

2) I rarely get sick, except on Good Friday. (Sympathy pains?)

3) I was kind of hoping to avoid this meme, but - like many things, I find - it's not so bad once you start.

4) I have four brothers. (Mum gets a lot of sympathy.)

5) We got what we thought was a female cat, but it turned out to be male too. We decided "Murphy" was a fitting name. I'm gonna miss that furball.

6) I played the oboe for a while in high school. It was a short while.

7) I'm beginning to think that eight facts is a bit much to ask, really.

8) My first computer was an Apple IIe, with no hard drive. I would amuse my 8-year-old friends by running the program:

10 PRINT "Enter name 1";: INPUT name1$
20 PRINT "Enter name 2";: INPUT name2$
30 RANDOMIZE TIMER
40 x = INT(RND(1)*100) + 1
50 PRINT name1$;" loves ";name2$;" ";x;"%"
60 END

We were easily amused.

I'll tag: Jared, Isa, Chris, Blar, Clark, Brian, Macht, and Kyle.
(But feel free to disregard if you wish.)

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Philosophers we've never read

Times Online reviews Pierre Bayard’s How to discuss books that one hasn’t read. Quite funny:

He tells us, in his “Prologue”, that he was born into a family who read little, that he himself has almost no appetite for reading and that, anyway, he cannot find the time for it. As a (fifty-two-year-old) professor of French literature... he often finds himself obliged to comment on books he hasn’t looked at. And yet “non-reading” is a taboo subject in the circles in which he moves. He lists three constraints that we all feel as readers: “The first of these constraints could be called the obligation to read. We live in a society... in which reading still remains the object of a form of sacralization”, particularly where certain “canonical texts” are concerned: it is practically forbidden not to have read these. The second constraint “could be called the obligation to read a book in its entirety. If non-reading is frowned on, speed-reading and skimming are viewed in as poor a light”. For example, “it would be almost unthinkable for professors of literature to admit – what is after all true for most of them – that they have merely skimmed Proust’s work”. Can this really be the case? If so, it’s a dismaying thought – presumably Bayard has had some explaining to do to his colleagues since his book was published in France earlier this year. The third constraint, and the one which most of us would take as given, is the need to have read a book in order to be able to talk about it: according to Bayard, it is perfectly possible to have a fruitful discussion about a book one hasn’t read, even with someone who hasn’t read it either. These constraints lead to a lack of openness in our dealings with each other, Bayard claims, and generate unnecessary feelings of guilt.

It's true though: how many young philosophers have actually read Gettier's famous article? It's so well-known, you don't need to. (I kind of feel the same way about the history of philosophy. I've never done any officially, or even unofficially, but you can pick up a lot just through osmosis.) Of course, you need to read a work in all its minutiae to engage with it on a scholarly level. But for general purposes, this may not always be necessary. Most fun philosophical discussion isn't had in journals, after all!

So: any other examples of philosophers or works that you're happy to discuss despite never having read them?

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Pick your candidate

Here's a fun quiz (HT: Parableman). My results:

Kucinich 38
Gravel 35
Richardson 27
Clinton 26
Edwards 26
Dodd 24
Obama 23
Biden 22
Paul 8
McCain 6
Giuliani -8
Thompson -14
Cox -14
Brownback -22
Huckabee -25
Tancredo -33
Hunter -34
Romney -36

Aside from civil liberties, most of the quizzed issues weren't ones that I really care about all that much. (All things considered, I would rank Obama much higher, and Clinton perhaps slightly lower. I don't know much about the minor candidates though.)

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Excessive Charity

This is funny. Three year old children assume that their knowledge is shared by everyone else (including God). Apparently, this has "led some researchers to conclude that children start out with an understanding of what a god-like, all-knowing perspective is like, and that for several years they mistakenly apply this to other people."

New research suggests that they also assume that everyone else (again, including God) shares their ignorance. I guess it's finally safe to conclude that children start out with an understanding of what their own perspective is like, and that for several years they mistakenly apply this to other people...

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Dictionary Game

Yeah, I knew I shouldn't have clicked the link (via Brandon)...

Richard Chappell -- [noun]: A level headed person who always makes the wrong decision 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?'

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How to deal with telemarketers

Q. "Hello, is Mr. or Mrs. Chappell there?"
A. "Please hold." Then simply return to whatever you were doing.

It's not the worker's fault, of course, but wasting their time may spare others on their list, and serves to undermine the vicious industry. (Whatever you do, don't reward them!)

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What we learn from surveys

Study: Alzheimer's Patients Say They Do Not Have Alzheimer's

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Fun with Neural Grounding

It's amazing what brains can do (if we assume that they "ground" every subject that we think about):

Because Homo sapiens is the only species to construct complex moral systems, morality has to be grounded in some distinctive property of the human brain

Reader challenge: On the assumption that this is a valid argument form, what's the most outlandish reductio you can come up with? (E.g. "Because Homo sapiens is the only species to construct complex electrical systems, electricity has to be grounded in some distinctive property of the human brain." Zap!)

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@

East of Dulwich cleverly came up with the symbol '@' to indicate claims or descriptions that don't correspond to the actual world.

It'd make for a nice red stamp, I imagine...

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Are Women Human?

One wouldn't expect to be reminded of Catharine MacKinnon whilst reading about modal metaphysics, but spot the unfortunate slip in the following passage from Sidelle's Necessity, Essence, and Individuation (p.79):

if someone says 'The president of the United States is essentially human', and does not consider the possibility of a woman president... to count against his claim, then it would seem that he was using 'The president of the United States' rigidly...

Oh dear.

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