Monthly Archives: July 2008
If Physical Theories Were… Read more
The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not… Read more
Yet More Shedding
Over the years, I have posted quite a few times about the amount of stuff I have, and have given up. An astute reader might be led to think that I have a fundamental problem in my relationship to things, a sort of binge and purge attitude towards possessions. That reader would be right, or at least would have been right. Along with quite a few other bits of my life that I had let (or more accurately secretly willed) out of my control, my relationship to things is currently coming in for some serious scrutiny. I blame George Santayana and his damnably reasonable naturalism. As a sort of Santayana inspired aside: If we are natural animals, in the world and of it, and we excrete as often as we eat, why do we spend so much time obsessing about one and simultaneously pretending as if the other never happened? I began this blog with a series of postings about things I considered unnecessary, which served as signposts to my own state of affairs and thinking about myself and my… Read more
You set up automatic updates to keep your machine up to date, but you need to get your work done before you reboot and the nag screen keeps popping up every few minutes? Start > Run > “net stop “automatic updates”" makes it go away until the next… Read more
The Animal Ingredients List A-Z for iPod is a handy, portable, quick reference for vegans on-the-go. Using the information provided by HappyCow.net, one can access the details of—and alternatives for—the many obvious, not so obvious, and downright hidden animal-sourced ingredients we encounter in our day-to-day lives… all on one’s… Read more
Animals Matter Because We Are Animals
Down the road of veganism I go, one philosophical step at a time. The first step in becoming vegan was, for me, realizing that morality is not, as is currently vogue to think of it, a business transaction. It is not an unwritten contract between two “moral agents” to agree to certain constraints and obligations. Morality exists regardless of the object of moral consideration being able to reciprocate. Anything else is patently ridiculous, as is elegantly reasoned by Joel Marks in the current issue of Philosophy Now. As he so succinctly puts it: “The moral worth of a being should depend on the nature of the being and not on our attitude towards it.” and the excellent ending: …so far as we know, the only valuers are animals, and all animals are valuers. Therefore animals move to the center of what ethics is all about. The discussion of nonhuman animals turns out to be not some special issue of ‘applied ethics’, but rather part of ethics’ core (we human animals are the… Read more
Beijing is flat and sprawling and smoggy and jammed with traffic and nearly all new, which is why an American friend who’s been working there for the last couple of years calls it “the People’s Republic of… Read more
Garden & Eating Update
Wow, it’s been a while since I posted anything about food or the garden or anything tasty, really. Life has had other plans for me than sitting around with the computer, but now that I am on a bit of a break before diving into new projects, let me catch you up: The garden continues to produce in abundance, though some crops were total failures. We have been covered up in green beans, flageolets, soy beans, yellow squash and cucumbers (though these did have a recent run in with pickle worms). I have been watching my calories for a while now, and have dropped about 14 pounds. Along the way I have discovered something: I can eat meat and dairy and be hungry by the end of the day, or I can eat only plant foods and have calories “left over” every day. This has led to a lot of soul-searching and reading and discussion, the upshot of which is that I can’t see myself doing much other than continuing right on down the path to being a vegan. ‘Tis a strange turn of events for an eater… Read more
I’ve recently been in search of new things to thrash about in the kitchen to. Outstanding finds include Velvet Cacoon and Wolves in the Throne Room. Serious Forest Wanker material… Read more