What's the deal with

What's the deal with the skirt over jeans look? Is it just an SLU thing, or are kids doing this on other campuses?

Zazen again

I've done all the grading I'm going to do today, and I have sitting meditation in a half hour.

The last meditation session was unfruitful. I kept thinking about the zen slogan "form is sunyata and sunyata form" and developing the sneaking suspicion that really form is nothing like sunyata. This is a problem mostly because I am doing the sitting zen to clear my mind. Contemplating metaphysics is the exact opposite of what I want to do. I can do metaphysics at work.

To compensate, I began to repeat "Sunyata is nothing like form" in my head. A lot of meditation for me is subvocal chanting. It does an ok job of banishing all thoughts besides itself.

One nice thing about the zen group that I've been attending is that you are supposed to meditate with your eyes half open. If you sit long enough with your eyes unfocused you can start seeing shapes that aren't there. Last week, the light fixture across from me grew to look more and more like a winged beetle with preposterously long antennae. (The lampshades and the glare from the two light bulbs managed to look like two pair of wings; the long shadows cast by the stems looked like antennae. This is after 20 minutes with my eyes unfocused.)

Names

Common Gender Netral Names I Like

• Dana
• Cameron

Common Girl Names that I Like

• Sarah
• Heather
• Rebecca
• Rachel
• Jessica
• Lilly (extra credit for Christine Ranney if we use this one)
• Maggie (extra credit for Lawson Parker if we use this one)

Common Boy Names that I like

• Aaron
• Seth
• David Hume (only with the middle name!)

Uncommon Names (in the US) That I might try to slip past Molly

• Lakshmi
• James Robert Loftis V (for a girl only!)
• Mykel (for a girl)
• Shiva the Destroyer Hinshaw Loftis
• Socrates

Update:

I just got spam from someone using the name Modigliani O. Localized, which sounds pretty cool to me. (The spam was lame, though.)

Big Day for Tiny Caroline.

Tiny Caroline turned two today, and suddenly acquired competence with the first person subjective pronoun. All day she has been saying things like

"I wash hands with soap"

and

"I pooped"

Just yesterday she would have said "Washa handa me" and "Poopy me".

Not only that, look at that first sentence. It contains an adverbial phrase. An adverbial, prepositional phrase! Were you to diagram that sentence, it would have a main line, and a smaller line coming off of it, like a side track.

Not only that, she also said

“My pretty dress all wet”

(This right after she washed hands with soap.)

Look at her use of adjectives! She is so cool!

Published!

I'm published. I'm fucking published. I'm motherfucking published.

Loftis, J. Robert. 2005. "Germ-Line Enhancement in Humans and Nonhumans" Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 15 (1): ???-???

I'm one published motherfucker.

I did, however receive the first acceptance letter I have ever encountered that began with the words "I am very sorry"

Why is it that so many journals seem to have a policy of not informing authors of their decisions? I used to think it was me, that I'm so sloppy with mail that I simply threw out notices half the time from journals. I don't think it is me anymore.

Time to update my CV!

____
Dear Rob: I am very sorry; I was certain that you had been informed that we
would like to publish your paper in a special thematice issue on Justice and
Genetic Enhancement that we are preparing for the March 2005 issue of the KIEJ.
I apologize if you did not receive that notification, and am pleased that I have
good news for you.

The paper does need to be trimmed down, and the issue editor, Ronald M. Green
(at Dartmouth College), has made some suggestions, which I will incorporate into
my copyediting and will return to you for your approval or modification.

I hope to send the edited copy to you via email within the next two weeks.
Sincerely,
Carol

Semester post-mortem 1

Today was the last day of my environmental class. A student asked me to explain the prisoners dilemma. I started explaining it at length. Then I started expounding on a case, found by Axelrod, of a real life prisoners dilemma involving artillery units in WWI. Then a student interrupted me, saying "wait, class time is almost up, and before the semester ends, I wanted to ask you what you wanted us to get out of this course."

I realized that I had been talking too long about something not really germain to the course. I realized that I had made this mistake more often than I should be able to get away with in this course. I thought of all the nifty in class stuff I wanted to do this semester, but never got organized enough to do.

I said, "I wanted you to get a better sense of your own goals in life and the role consumption and material wealth plays in it. And I wanted you to get a better sense of the social problems consumer culture causes for us as a group."

I shouldn't have talked at length about the artillery units in WWI. But there will always be a part of my brain that says "This fact you are relating to your students is simply interesting. It is in itself worth knowing. How could anyone be bored here?"I need to shut that part of my brain up.

I Heart Donald Rumsfeld

ok, I don't really heart him. He has cause the death of over a hundred thousand people (registration req.) by leading us into a pointless and poorly planned war.

But, you know, if someone is going to lead you into a pointless and poorly planned war, it should be Rummy, and I'm really glad he's on the team for the next term. We all know his success as a poet some of us even know his work as a lyricist. But really, his true art is dodging a question. Other people might have found this situation embarrassing. His own troops are asking why they don't have the material they need to run the occupation. Rummy's response "you go to war with the army you have."

It seems so commonsensical. Of course things aren't going to be perfect. There are always unknown unknowns. You take what you can get.

Notice, though, that his answer assumes we had to go to war, that there was nothing he could do about the timing of the war, and hence our preparation for it.

This is the kind of clever rhetorical move that gets written up over at the nonsequitur a lovely site aimed at first year logic students by my friend and fellow logic teacher Colin Anderson, which uses the tools of basic logic to take down some of the idiocies and slick tricks we see in the media.

Next semester I'm going to make my logic students symbolize Rumsfelds "The Knowns"

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.

Well, I have learned that this blog has, as yet, no readers. No matter. If I keep writing I will find a blog-voice, and from there, blog readers.

Ethical Reading

"We have stopped reading, we have not the time. Our mind is solicited simultaneously from too many sides: it has to be spoken to quickly as it passes by. But there are things that cannot be said or understood in such haste, and these are the most important things for man. This accelerated movement, which makes coherent thought impossible, may alone be sufficient to weaken, and in the long run utterly to destroy, human reason."

Félicité Robert de Lamennais in his Mélanges religieux et philosophiques. In 1819. Via this post at languagehat.

I know nothing of this French cleric beyond what is in the bio Languagehat linked to, but I love him. He lived in a time like mine, where things had been accelerating recently, so that one could no longer find the time to read the way one ought.

Here is how I read a book these days. I get it in my head that I should assign some book that I myself have not read yet. I think about the book in the abstract for a while, riding my bike or spacing out while watching the baby, not really knowing what is in it. Two weeks before the book order is due, I get a copy of the book to see if it is actually the book I was daydreaming about. I read the first chapter, the last chapter, and enough of the middle to at least know that it is a book worth assigning. In drawing up the syllabus, I assign parts that I haven't read yet. Those parts will be read one hour before class. If parts of the book go unassigned, they go unread.

There are variations on this routine. There is the version where I am reading for a book review. There is the version where I am reading to look for arguments or information useful for a paper I am writing.

I don’t want to read this way.

I want to read without an ulterior motive. I want to read whole books, from beginning to end. I want to read one book at a time. I don’t want months or years to pass between sittings with a book. I want to read books the way I read when I was fourteen.

This isn’t really a want, I think, but a duty. I don’t know the principle behind this duty. I don’t know who the duty is owed to: myself? The author? Pure reason?

Time isn’t the only problem. Discipline is another. I loose interest in too many books. Serious books become books for work. Light books get dull.

I’ve tried tricks. I’ve forced myself to read without pen in hand. I’ve purchased books that look like they will be too compelling to drop. Molly suggested that if I wanted to read like I was fourteen, I should read the same books I read then. Well, I’ve tried reading the same types of books, to no avail. Perhaps I should actually read the same books. But can I really read Ringworld again now that I know the author is a crony of Newt Gingrich?

This semester hasn’t been so bad. I read all of Huxley’s Island and The Aesthetics of Natural Environments (Carlson and Berleant, eds, review forthcoming in Environmental Ethics). By the end of the semester I will have reread Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. They were all read for reviews or classes, though.

nuevas imágenes de maltrato

Was this picked up by the major american news outlets and I just missed it? More torture pictures have come out. The AP found them...using Google. They show lots of stuff we are familar with: hooded male prisoners wearing women's clothing, soldiers smiling and giving the thumbs up sign. Other pictures are weirder. I'm not sure what is going in the picture of the person bleeding from the neck. Is he a prisoner? Is this a raid?

The AP story has few details and shows none of the truly ugly pictures. The NYT is runing the story but not the photos, and is not putting it on the front page. Fortunately the Spanish paper El Mundo has the story and some of the pictures.

This page also has them. The language guesser at Xerox says that the page is in Turkish, as does Languid

This page has one picture of a person being choked that is not on the others.

via boing boing and the memory blog

My mom is the best

...Especially at managing small children. Normally it is my job to give Tiny Caroline her bath and put her to sleep. I'm the primary breadwinner, and away at the office all day, so when I get home in the evening, it's my turn to watch the baby. I always thought I was pretty good at getting Tiny Caroline to bed. As a college professor, putting young people to sleep is a part of my job.

While we were visiting my folks over thanksgiving, though, I saw a true bedtime master in action. One evening Caroline was wailing like a banshee, refusing to get in the bath. My Mom stepped in, "Do you see this penguin, caroline"

Caroline: "Waaa, yes, snif, waaa"

Mom: "Does the penguin want to get in the water?"

Caroline: "Snif, yes"

Mom: "Can you show the penguin how to get in the water"

Caroline: "ok"

And in the tub she went. It was amazing. Later Mom got Caroline asleep in a mere 10 minutes reading Dr. Suess's Sleep Book.

Meanwhile, my attempts to be a Sensitive Dad are worsening. Yesterday we were at the midwife's for our first appointment regarding tiny unnamed fetus. The midwife was discussing the circumstances in which she would order a C-section. Important stuff. Here's what was going on in my thought balloon:

"You know what would be really cool? A zombie movie set in a hospital. Like, patients would come in, and the doctors would have to decide if they had the zombie disease. Yeah...but what kind of society would be left? Maybe the doctors would have to argue with the local warlord who acts as their patron..." I was really quite a line of thought. I nearly wrote a whole screenplay before I remembered that I was supposed to be acting supportive.

introducing...the tiny unnamed fetus!

ok, the big news. Molly is pregnant. Child number 2 is due mid June. So far, everyone is happy and healthy.



Right now we are in the 9-10 week stage. I was going to scan and print some composit pictures of fetuses at that stage by Alexander Tsiaras. I was even going to make a thing of it, posting new pictures as the baby developed. But I realized the time involved was preventing me from simply making the announcement. So instead I have a picture from utah.edu, above.

So far, tiny unnamed fetus is tiny and unnamed. I'm open to all sorts of names; Molly is more of a traditionalist. My name is officially James Robert Loftis IV. I am into the idea of passing on that name, but only to a girl. She could go by Jamie. Molly nixed this for the person now known as Caroline, but there still may be hope for the name if tiny unnamed fetus turns out to be a girl.

more linkage

This site attempts offer a primer on diversity within the evangelical movement, although the author himself seems very right-wing. The author seems thoughtful, but looking through his discussion of the various kinds of eschatology in evangelicalism, I didn't really see much diversity. From my perspective, there were four views on how many angels could dance on the head of the pin, and here I am not believing in angels.

via mr. butt massage on HBO

Linkage

I've been at my parents for T-giving and then got swamped with job market stuff. I might blog about that later. Right now, since I figure my primary audience consists of Google spiders, I should post some links to things that need to be more widely known.

First, via pharyngula, is this disturbing report on the content of the abstinence only sex education books that the Bush administration is pushing. I taught abortion as part of my medical ethics course in Alabama for four semesters running, and I was always surprised at the strange and false ideas my students had about abortion and sex in general. This furthers my suspicion that they were getting their bad information from abstinence only sex ex.

Next, my pal Amy has posted a bunch of cute pictures of herself reflected in a toaster