Saturday, January 28, 2017
Fifty years ago.............................
The Temptations...........................................You're My Everything
Friday, January 27, 2017
Temper........................
"He is happy, whose circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent, who can suit his temper to any circumstances."
-David Hume
Appropriate ways to celebrate..........
My Dad never stopped giving me guidance about how I should look at my life and career. By 1961 I had already established myself as a perennial winner and a major champion with two Masters titles and the 1960 U.S. Open.
But my father was determined that no matter how much I won, how successful I became or how much I earned, he wanted me to remain humble. He wanted me to stay grounded and to focus on my work and not get too caught up with all the accomplishments.
One of the best lessons he ever gave me came after I had won the 1961 British Open at Royal Birkdale. I had been dining with dukes and princes over the course of an entire week and came back to the United States the conquering hero. Naturally, I was feeling pretty good about myself.
When I got back to Latrobe, I was very excited about my victory and the chance to share it with my family. My dad greeted me with open arms. I could see how happy he was for me. But in his second breath he said, "Now, why don't you put down that Claret Jug. I need your help mowing the back nine."
Looking back, this was a very important marker to me. It reminded me that if I'm going to be successful, I must continue to grow with a balance of confidence and humble appreciation for all the people involved in making it possible. If I didn't understand where I had come from and how I had gotten there, then the chance were I was not going to be as successful going forward. And I would certainly not have the proper attitude about how to live my life and do the right things.
Did I mow the back nine for him? You bet I did. And you know what? There was a certain peace and serenity in doing such a familiar, simple task. It was satisfying in its own way. Looking back, it was a rather appropriate way for me to celebrate winning the Open Championship.
-Arnold Palmer, A Life Well Played: My Stories
Fifty years ago............................
The Five Americans...............................................Western Union
Opening paragraphs......................
The satellite radio was playing soft jazz. Lacy, the owner of the Prius and thus the radio, loathed rap almost as much as Hugo, her passenger, loathed contemporary country. They had failed to agree on sports talk, public radio, golden oldies, adult comedy, and the BBC, without getting anywhere near bluegrass, CNN, opera, or a hundred other stations. Out of frustration on her part and fatigue on his, they both three in the towel early and settled on soft jazz. Soft, so Hugo's deep and lengthy nap would not be disturbed. Soft, because Lacy didn't care much for jazz either. It was another give-and-take of sorts, on of many that had sustained their teamwork over the years. He slept and she drove and both were content.
Before the Great Recession, the Board on Judicial Conduct had access to a small pool of state-owned Hondas, all with four doors and white paint and low mileage. With budget cuts, though, those disappeared. Lacy, Hugo, and countless other public employees in Florida were now expected to use their own vehicles for the state's work, reimbursed at fifty cents a mile. Hugo, with four kids and a hefty mortgage, drove an ancient Bronco that could barely make it to the office, let alone a road trip. And so he slept.
-John Grisham, The Whistler
You might consider reading the Amazon reviews before investing in this one. Cannot confirm. Just read the first two paragraphs, although I liked them.
Thursday, January 26, 2017
It has rained a lot lately..............
You’re probably seeing the best persuasion you will ever see from a new president. Instead of dribbling out one headline at a time, so the vultures and critics can focus their fire, Trump has flooded the playing field. You don’t know where to aim your outrage. He’s creating so many opportunities for disagreement that it’s mentally exhausting. Literally. He’s wearing down the critics, replacing their specific complaints with entire encyclopedias of complaints. And when Trump has created a hundred reasons to complain, do you know what impression will be left with the public?
He sure got a lot done.
-Scott Adams, as lifted from Outrage Dilution
It does get confusing..................
To build God's kingdom it is necessary to organize the state on broadly democratic principles and allow absolute freedom of speech, and considerable freedom of religion. The whole point of government, Spinoza maintained, is liberty: "the object of government is ... to enable [men] to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice." The state authorities may interfere in religion - indeed, they must do so, since religion is too dangerous to be left in the hands of priests. But state intervention is justified only for the purpose of ensuring that all rites, ceremonies and "outward observance of piety" are in accordance with "the public peace and well-being." People's beliefs must be left an entirely private affair, and neither the priests nor churches (nor presumably synagogues, mosques or temples) are to be given any legal powers. Give priests power and they soon start persecuting anyone who disagrees with them. The result is always strife, schism and sectarianism.
-Anthony Gottleib, The Dream Of Enlightenment: The Rise Of Modern Philosophy, as excerpted from the chapter, A Breeze of the Future: Spinoza
If one were to wonder about the general secular nature of Europe today, one might google European wars of religion or the Inquisition. Then throw in the two Great Wars.............
Hobbes, one more time...................
There is some truth to the idea that he was the enemy of religion, but only in the sense that Luther, Calvin and Jesus himself were all enemies of religion. That is to say, Hobbes was a reformer who rejected some of the dogmas of his day and proposed new ideas instead. Many religious pioneers are at first hailed as heretics or worse. Luther and Calvin were described by some Catholic writers as "atheists," which is what some Romans and other pagans in the first three centuries of our era called all Christians.
-Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream Of Enlightenment: The Rise Of Modern Philosophy
Unintended consequences................
A seven-stroke lead with nine holes to play disappeared on me almost in a flash. Bill started playing well at the same time, which contributed further to my anxiety and increasingly poor play. As for the playoff the next day, I tried as hard as I could, but I just couldn't muster any intensity, and my concentration was lacking, too.
Did it hurt? I won't lie; it hurt a lot. When pressed about it, San Francisco was the toughest, given the lead that I had. Especially with my mentality about winning, about feeling that I had to win, losing was a bitter pill, and this might have been the most bitter of all. But as awful as I felt after losing to Billy in that playoff, in many ways my life improved. In the aftermath of that lose, more of life came calling, and I continued on with a slightly different perspective. I was better for the experience.
I was a better person. I had a better perspective on things. I would never have felt good if I had not experienced losing, because losing is part of your life. But there was something else. For quite a few years I had received my share of fan mail, but after the loss at Olympic, the letters were different. People wanted to help. They were comforting and encouraging. It was just a different sensation entirely, and it meant a great deal to me. I looked at everything a bit differently because of that. I had always appreciated folks, my "Army" of fans, but their gestures of support in defeat meant more to me than any adulation I experienced in victory.
-Arnold Palmer, A Life Well Played: My Stories
The tourney in question was the 1966 U. S. Open
their God-given gift...................
Early in the twentieth century, an American philosopher, John Dewey, wrote that in Hobbes's day politics was by common consent "a branch of theology," and that "Hobbes's great work was in freeing, once and for all, morals and politics from subservience to divinity."
We should add two qualifications to Dewey's encomium. First, it was not Hobbes's goal to provide a purely secular understanding of politics. Although he believed that theologians and clerics were often a bad influence on statecraft, there was no reason to suppose that he wanted to elbow God himself out of the picture. Hobbes's account of government does not deny the divine right of kings to rule; it just does not rest on it. For him, political authority is legitimate when there is a tacit or explicit pact between citizens, which their God-given gift of rationality leads them to make.
-Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream Of Enlightenment: The Rise Of Modern Philosophy
We would do well to remember that context matters and that "Hobbes lived through England's civil wars, and several wars of religion on the Continent....And Hobbes was not the only thinker to be so badly shaken by sectarian conflict that peace came to seem the paramount goal of government, to be secured at almost any cost."
Fifty years ago....................
The Association...................................................Never My Love
Opening paragraphs..............
One of the hardest things for the human mind to grasp is the power of exponential growth in anything - what happens when something keeps doubling or tripling or quadrupling over many years and just how big the numbers can get. So whenever Intel's CEO, Brian Krzanich, tries to explain the impact of Moore's law - what happens when you keep doubling the power of microchips every two years for fifty years - he uses this example: if you took Intel's first generation microchip from 1971, the 4004, and the latest chip Intel has on the market today, the sixth generation Intel Core processor, you will see that Intel's latest chip offers 3,500 times more performance, is 90,000 times more energy efficient, and is about 60,000 times lower in cost. To put it more vividly, Intel engineers did a rough calculation of what would happen had a 1971 Volkswagon Beetle improved at the same rate as microchips did under Moore's law.
These are the numbers: Today, that Beetle would be about to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost four cents!
-Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide To Thriving In The Age Of Acceleration
I own two Friedman books. The first purchased, the second a gift. After the second, I was fairly certain that there would likely be no more Friedman book's in my library. Then he goes and sticks the word "Optimist's" in the book's title. Wavering here. Any advice?
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
Pondering this one..................
Peter Augustine Lawler has penned one of those essays that makes a reader go, "hey, wait a minute." A wee excerpt:
Neither being nice nor being brutal is being virtuous. And moral virtue is, after all, the foundation of the common life shared by all political beings inhabiting a particular part of the world. Both niceness and brutality are forms of domination and control. Both work against the consent of the governed who rule and are ruled in turn. We should, in fact, expect all Americans to be ladies and gentlemen, and to treat each other with equal dignity, free from condescension and contempt.
That means, if you think about it, that our courts and our bureaucrats should do less, and our legislatures should do more. The schoolmarmish soft despotism promoted by the experts driving our administrative state can be checked most effectively, of course, by majority vote. And the majority — in the name of virtue and dignified relational life — should be about resisting the experts both public and private who think of ordinary people as less than they really are. The idea that the nice should rule over the brutish is what, in fact, links together too much libertarian and progressivist thought about being on the "right side" of history and all that. That form of manipulation, thank God, is bound to fail them in the end.
The full essay, Our Country Split Apart, may be read here.
Life its ownself..................................
For a lot of players, golf is a way of making a living. For me, golf always has been a way of being alive. And nothing compared to the feeling of going for a victory. I never felt I like I had to win at all costs, but I went all out.
-Arnold Palmer, A Live Well Played: My Stories
Eye of the beholder...............
With fake new lurking everywhere, these have been some trying times for journalists who actually care about having a reputation for objectivity - "Just the facts, maam."
Academia, fortunately, has rushed in to help sort it all out. Messing around in the Intertunnel can end you up in some strange places. For instance, this paper "Social Media And Fake News In The 2016 Election."
To save you from having to read the whole paper, here is their conclusion:
In summary, our data suggest that social media were not the most important source of election news, and even the most widely circulated fake news stories were seen by only a small fraction of Americans.
I stopped paying attention when the authors reported that their sources for determining fake news were Snopes, PolitiFact, and BuzzFeed. Really?
If you Google "is Snopes.com biased?" you will be led here. What a hoot. You can look up the others your ownself.
My suggestion is that you talk with and listen - talk and listen, not argue - to many different people with different perspectives and persuasions. Its okay to watch both CNN and Fox News, just don't believe either one of them without doing your own thinking. This suggestion applies to both news purveyors and news consumers. Just saying.
Fifty years ago..........................
Stevie Wonder...........................................I Was Made To Love Her
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Rick Platt.........................
...............................is blogging again. If manufacturing and industrial development issues are important to you (they are to me), pay attention to Rick.
Gone, but not forgotten....................
Phil Everly............................................................Sweet Pretender
Aging like a fine wine.....................
Suspecting that this wee, small corner of the Intertunnel is inhabited by more than a few boomers, I offer the recommendation, that if you don't read anything else today, read this. Joseph Epstein at his finest, which is mighty fine.
Thanks Craig
Opening paragraphs...................
It had never happened before - a world in which many people, from Belgium to Botswana, have pretty good food and housing and education. We've not yet achieved, God knows, an earthly paradise. A little over seven billion people inhabit the planet. One billion of them still live in nations of economic hell: a loaf of moldy bread, some curdled milk, bad schools, bad shelter, bad clothing, bad sanitation. Most people in Haiti or Afghanistan live so, as do, in richer countries, many of the very poor. God knows that too.
Until 1800, though, such a hell was what everybody except a handful of nobles and priests and merchants expected, year after terrible year. We have achieved over the past few centuries for ordinary people worldwide, materially speaking, unevenly, for the first time, a pretty good purgatory. The whole world's average income, for example, now approaches that of present day Brazil, or of the United States in 1941. Since 1800, in other words, and especially since 1900, the goods and service available to the average human being, and the scope for a full human life, have startlingly expanded. The event justifies its label, "the Great Enrichment."
-Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital Or Institutions, Enriched The World
Parenting..............................
 |
| Deacon and Arnold Palmer |
I've always had a fairly easygoing disposition. But in my younger days would wouldn't have known it if you'd seem me on the golf course. Something significant happened to me in 1946 that really changed how I went about my business on the golf course.
My mother and father were on hand to watch my match in the West Penn Junior finals. At one juncture I missed a short putt, something that infuriated me. (It still does.) In frustration, I flung my putter in disgust over the gallery and some small trees. I won the title, but you wouldn't have known it on the car ride home. I was met with stone silence. Finally, my father spoke up. "If you ever throw a club like that again, you'll never play in another golf tournament."
I knew he was serious. To Pap, there was nothing worse than a poor loser - except being an ungracious winner. ... I never threw another club again.
-Arnold Palmer, A Life Well Played: My Stories
Challenges..............................
Historians of science have often noted that at any give time scholars in a particular field tend to share basic assumptions about there subject. Social scientists are no exception: they rely on a view of human nature that provides the background of most discussions of specific behaviors but is rarely questioned. Social scientists in the 1970s accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality. Our article challenged both assumptions without discussing them directly. We document systematic errors in the thinking of normal people, and we traced those errors to the design of the machinery of cognition rather than to the corruption of thought by emotion.
-Daniel Kahneman, from his introduction to Thinking, Fast and Slowly. The article he refers to was one of his first joint papers with Amos Tversky
Fifty years ago..............................
The Turtles...........................................................Happy Together
Monday, January 23, 2017
David Warren...................
..............notes the criminalization of life its ownself, with this aside:
Moses gave ten commandments, by the way. Only three are currently enforceable, and those only in carefully specified cases.
Witches..................................
Hobbes was sceptical of tales about ghosts and witches, and this scepticism was itself regarded in some quarters as evidence of irreligion, or at least insufficient respect for spiritual matter. Denying that there was such a thing as a witch was almost as bad as being one. There were other enlightened thinkers who shared Hobbes's disdain for stories of supernatural creatures stalking the villages of England; but the belief in witches was a powerful force in his day, perhaps because these were unsettled times. A third or more of all the people executed for witchcraft in England between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries were dispatched in the mid-1640s by Matthew Hopkins, the self-described "Witch-finder General," and his associates, just when Hobbes was working out the consequences of his materialist philosophy.
-Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream Of Enlightenment: The Rise Of Modern Philosophy
If you want to read something scary, read this.
Gone, but not forgotten.................
Solomon Burke................................................................Cry To Me
Our power..............................
No dark fate determines the future. We do. Each day and each moment, we are able to create and re-create our lives and the very quality of human life on our planet. This is the power we wield.
Lasting happiness cannot be found in pursuit of any goal or achievement. It does not reside in fortune or fame. It resides only in the human mind and heart, and it is here that we hope you will find it.
-Tenzin Gyatso and Desmond Tutu, from their Introduction to The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness In A Changing World
Subtle...........................
Why scurry about looking for the truth?
It vibrates in every thing and every
not-thing, right off the
tip of your nose.
Can you be still and see it in the
mountain? the pine tree? yourself?
Don't imagine that you'll discover it by
accumulating more knowledge.
Knowledge creates doubt, and
doubt makes you ravenous
for more knowledge.
You can't get full eating this way.
The wise person dines on something
more subtle:
He eats the understanding that the named
was born from the unnamed, that
all being flows from non-being,
that the describable world emanates
from an indescribable source.
He finds this subtle truth inside his own
self, and becomes completely content.
So who can be still and watch the
chess game of the world?
The foolish are always making impulsive
moves, but the wise know that victory
and defeat are decided by something
more subtle.
They see that something perfect exists
before any move is made.
This subtle perfection deteriorates when
artificial actions are taken, so be
content not to disturb the peace.
Remain quiet.
Discover harmony in your own being.
Embrace it.
If you can do this, you will gain
everything, and the world will
become healthy again.
If you can't, you will be lost in the
shadows forever.
-Hua Hu Ching: The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu
Verse 38
as channeled by Brian Brown Walker
On finishing..........................
If I was what you might call a "fast finisher," it was because I was always mentally receptive to a fast finish; I was receptive to the idea that there was always time to make up some ground right to the very last hole. I played to win even when common sense dictated that I no longer had a realistic chance. Even when I was playing my worst or when all the breaks seemed to be going against me, I approached each shot as an opportunity to get going again. That was my golfing personality.
-Arnold Palmer, A Life Well Played: My Stories
Fifty years ago......................
Frank and Nancy Sinatra.....................................Somethin' Stupid
Sunday, January 22, 2017
Learn........................
“Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.”
-Benjamin Franklin
cartoon via
Further proof............................
..........................(as if you needed any) that life is not fair:
Blessed with the instinct to chase squirrels, zero ability to climb trees.
On misreading history.................
.........................even when it occurred just a few months ago:
For much of the rest of the world, and even in the minds of many people in Britain, the result of last June’s referendum and the outcome of last November’s presidential election are part of the same phenomenon: a revolt against globalisation by a forgotten, provincial, working class.
I think this is misleading. While it is true that both revolutions saw the intellectual and financial elites given a bloody nose by the forgotten provinces, nonetheless Brexit and Trumpit have crucial differences. For a start, one was an unprecedented constitutional earthquake that resulted in the installation of a thoroughly normal prime minister. The other was a constitutionally routine democratic transfer of power that installed a highly unconventional president.
So writes my favorite optimist. As they say, read the whole thing.
On creeping determinism..............
In his talk to the historians, Amos described their occupational hazard: the tendency to take whatever facts they had observed (neglecting the many facts that they did not or could not observe) and make them fit neatly into a confident-sounding story:
All too often, we find ourselves unable to predict what will
happen; yet after the fact we explain what did happen with
a great deal of confidence. This "ability" to explain that
which we cannot predict, even in the absence of any addi-
tional information, represents an important, though subtle,
flaw in our reasoning. It leads us to believe that there is a
less uncertain world than there actually is, and that we are
less bright than we actually might be. For if we can explain
tomorrow what we cannot predict today, without any added
information except the actual knowledge of the actual out-
come, then this outcome must have been determined in
advance and we should have been able to predict it. The
fact that we couldn't is taken as an indication of our limited
intelligence rather than of the uncertainty that is in the world.
All too often, we feel like kicking ourselves for failing to
foresee that which later appears inevitable. For all we know,
the handwriting might have been on the wall all along. The
question is: was the ink visible?
It wasn't just sports announcers and political pundits who radically revised their narratives, or shifted focus, so that their stories seemed to fit whatever had just happened in a game or an election. Historians imposed false order upon random events, too, probably without even realizing what they were doing. Amos had a phrase for this. "Creeping determinism," he called it - and jotted in his notes one of its many costs: "He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises."
-Michael Lewis, as culled from The Undoing Project
Recommended...................
"The brain is limited. There are gaps in our attention. The mind contrives to make those gaps invisible to us. We think we know things we don't. We think we are safe when we are not."
-Michael Lewis, channeling Amos Tversky in The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two really, really bright guys, had this mental partnership - a mind meld if you will - working. Thinking out loud together, they combined psychology and economics in way that had never been done before - essentially creating what we now know as "behavioral economics." It is difficult to imagine, but they were the first academics to notice, in a scientific way, that us humans are not always rational actors. Assuming we are can lead to some faulty models (image that) and enormous errors in judgment.
Lewis is one of my favorite writers. I hope he is one of yours, too.
Recommending this book.
On vision.........................................
"A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said."
"It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place."
"A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior" if the behavior in question is, in fact, observed."
Amos Tversky, as quoted in The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
Fifty years ago......................
The Monkees..........................................................I'm A Believer
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