David Erik Nelson's Blog, page 32

Noam Chomsky and a "Journalist" Walk into a Bar . . .

I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. In a departure from my normal tedious exegeses of gun statistics and local bridge policy, this latest column is based on a conversation I had with Noam Chomsky in early July. It begins something like this:

I’m interviewing Noam Chomsky in the bar of the Campus Inn a block from the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The bar is dim and entirely abandoned at 10 a.m. on a Friday morning. Because I’m highly distractible, I can’t help but periodically marvel at the symmetry of this: I only ended up interviewing Noam Chomsky at all because I’d Tweeted a link to a joke about Heisenberg, Gödel, and Chomsky walking into a bar [1], and Dave Askins (editor of this fine publication) had responded by noting that Chomsky would be speaking at the University of Michigan a week or so later, and essentially dared me to interview him.

I’d agreed, on the assumption that it would be impossible to land an interview with the man almost universally regarded as America’s foremost public intellectual. I was wrong [ . . . ]

. . . and goes downhill from there. Enjoy!

(For those more interested in Chomsky and less in my chatter, you can read the unedited transcript of the interview or listen to all 48 minutes of the audio.)

Epic Rap Battles of History: Doc Brown vs Doctor Who

I never really got the whole Dr. Who thing, but I love seeing George Watsky in the mix.

Doc Brown vs Doctor Who. Epic Rap Battles of History Season 2. - YouTube

Epic Rap Battles of History: Darth Vader vs Adolf Hitler

I like that STAR WARS is finally being acknowledged as a historical event, just like the Flood and Creation as depicted in Genesis.

If You Learn About Only One Bat-shit Crazy Thing Today, Make It Jeremy Bentham's "Auto Icon"

(cross-posted from my Snip, Burn, Solder Blog, 'cause it dawned on me that it was totally unfair for me to leave you dedicated Mojonauts out on something with pictures this great)

Listen: The father of Utilitarianism had his skeleton preserved and dressed in his favorite suit, in order to preside over meetings after his demise. Bentham did this. Bentham, in many regards the ur-Rational Guy, the philosophical father of our post-modern avatar of Rational Behavior.

But the preservation method for Bentham's head got screwed up, with monstrous results. It wound up looking like it was carved from meatloaf jerky, so they used a wax head instead, and positioned Jeremy Bentham's actual severed head on the floor between the philosophy scarecrow's feet--just because.

They (who? who knows?!) ultimately decided the severed head on the floor was either gruesome or an attractive nuisance, and so decided to store it in a box somewhere and replaced it with a replica, or sometimes nothing. Anyway, in the pic above, that's Jeremy Bentham's actual head on the floor, fronting all John the Baptist-post-Salome-style. Here's a close up of the head--the actual head of an actual famous philosopher who had this done to himself on purpose:

So those creepy peepers? Bentham carried those around in his pocket for much of his life, so they could wind up in his severed jerky head and attend meetings for all eternity.

This . . . I . . . damn. I guess dude believed this bizarre gesture would somehow maximize humanity's happiness and reduce suffering, although the mechanism for that escapes me.

In the end, though, I find the idea of those eyes staring at the inside of a dark box even *more* distressing than having them stare out a glass case from between Bentham's feet. Even though he can't see us, J.B. is still watching us, and likely finding us wanting. *shudders*

Jeremy Bentham - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bentham died on 6 June 1832 the age of 84 at his residence in Queen Square Place in Westminster, London. He had continued to write up to a month before his death, and had made careful preparations for the dissection of his body after death and its preservation as an auto-icon. As early as 1769, when Bentham was just twenty-one years old, he made a will leaving his body for dissection to a family friend, the physician and chemist George Fordyce, whose daughter, Maria Sophia (1765–1858), married Jeremy's brother Samuel Bentham.[18] A paper written in 1830, instructing Thomas Southwood Smith to create the auto-icon, was attached to his last will, dated 30 May 1832.[18]

On 8 June 1832, two days after his death, invitations were distributed to a select group of friends, and on the following day at 3 p.m., Southwood Smith delivered a lengthy oration over Bentham's remains in the Webb Street School of Anatomy & Medicine in Southwark, London. The printed oration contains a frontispiece with an engraving of Bentham's body partly covered by a sheet.[18]

Afterward, the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the "Auto-icon", with the skeleton padded out with hay and dressed in Bentham's clothes. Originally kept by his disciple Thomas Southwood Smith,[19] it was acquired by University College London in 1850. It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the college; however, for the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, it was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where it was listed as "present but not voting".[20]

Bentham had intended the Auto-icon to incorporate his actual head, mummified to resemble its appearance in life. However, Southwood Smith's experimental efforts at mummification, based on practices of the indigenous people of New Zealand and involving placing the head under an air pump over sulphuric acid and simply drawing off the fluids, although technically successful, left the head looking distastefully macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull.[18] The Auto-icon was therefore given a wax head, fitted with some of Bentham's own hair. The real head was displayed in the same case as the Auto-icon for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks. It is now locked away securely.[21]

(see also: Jeremy Bentham's Auto-Icon | Atlas Obscura)

Ever Gonna Retire? Learn this Phrase: "Diversified Portfolio of Low-Cost Index Funds"

This is well worth the watch, especially if you have an inkling that mutual funds are a screw job but can't get your head around the math.

Shortest possible version: Having and holding investments is a good strategy because your interest compounds over time[*]

Actively managed mutual funds charge fees (i.e., the "costs" in the title of this post). These fees--which seem really small, generally under 2%--*also compound.* Over 50 years, you'll loose 63% of your investment gains to fees.

That is not a typo. For real. A 2% load will eat up most of your earnings. Watch the video.

Most "financial advisors" have no legal obligation to give you the *best* advice, just *good enough* advice, and almost anything qualifies as "good enough." (This goes for workplace 401ks, too, which can be loaded with actively managed mutual funds and weird annuities and whatever.)

So, unless you really dig monkeying around with investing and market research and whatever--if you just want a set-and-forget plan--then you want to say "Please put me into a diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds" and keep repeating it until they stop trying to talk you into other things.

The Retirement Gamble | FRONTLINE | PBS

Watch The Retirement Gamble on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

[*] e.g., If I have $10 in an account with a 10% return, then next year (or over whatever the compounding period is) I'll have $11 in the account, and earn interest on that, so at the next cycle I'll have $12.10, then $13.31, and so on. If I never add a cent to that account for my whole working life, and just let it compound away on its own, I'll end up with $1700-ish--which will grow by $170 in the next year. Cool, right? I mean, you can't retire on it, but you only put $10 in; it's free money.

But the point of retirement savings isn't to drop in a lump and wait; you keep dribbling in a few hundro each month, and that gets rolled into the compounding sauce over time, and snowballs. For a more realistic example, if you start with zilch, save $200 per month in a vehicle that earns 7% annually (not outlandish; index funds regularly beat that), then you will retire a millionaire at 70 (FYI, you'll only have a half-mil at 60--remember, compounding interest is *magic*).

#FACT: Galileo's Remains Reside in a Wine Glass, Eternally Flicking Off God

And in a science museum, no less!

Galileo's fingers, tooth and vertebrae are in the Florence History of Science Museum

Recommended Reading/Listening: "LizardFoot" by John Jasper Owens

A cappella Zoo 3: "LizardFoot," by John Jasper Owens - A cappella Zoo

If there's something not to like about this story, I frankly can't imagine it--and the audio version is *even better.*

Please accept my resignation as Grand White Pharaoh of the Order of Racial Purity, and the return on these here robes (enclosed) which have been patched by Missy-Bee before she run off, and dry-cleaned all the way up in Shilohville by authentic Koreans.

As y’all know, I never quite fit in with The Order. I have nothing special against black people (except for Highsmith Jones, who beat me out for running back when we were in school, and that was more of a personal thing). Plus, I have never actually seen a Jew, but if they do control all media, I remain angry with them for taking Katie Couric off of the before-shift television, where she was good-looking to wake up to, and putting her on nights, where I have had enough of women by then.

I have long suspected anyway I was only invited to join The Order on account of my Kingfisher pontoon, on which we all can get on to go fishing, and my extra large hog pit for barbeques. And likewise for being hitched to Missy-Bee, who has long spoke out against racial intermixing, and is Super-Grand White Squid of Paladuck County Ezekiel’s sister, and second runner-up for homecoming queen, and well-liked.

Well I suppose y’all are wondering why I am resigning, on account of y’all have not been mean to me lately in any serious way. Well, it is the direct result of our LizardFoot con introduced in order to make money from Yankees.

As y’all know, Yankees are stupid. . . .

UPDATE: Oklahoma Officials Revise Tornado Death Toll Down to 24

Oklahoma City tornado: Twister touches down 10 miles south of city. Live video.

Update Tuesday, 9:50 a.m.: I have no idea how this type of mix-up could happen at a medical examiner's office, but I don't think anyone's going to be complaining (this morning, at least). The Oklahoma City Medical Examiner's Office now says that the confirmed death toll has been revised down to 24. "We have got good news," Reuters quotes Amy Elliott, the office's chief administrative officer, as saying this morning. "The number right now is 24." She added, in an apparent explanation for the confusion, that "there was a lot of chaos," and that earlier figures may have included double-reporting of some casualties.

This Is Downright Hypnotic: 15-Minute "Hamlet Mashup"

. . . although it *would* be better if it included a 15-Minute Hamlet clip. Just sayin'

Hamlet Mash Up (2013) - YouTube

Snip, Burn, Solder Blog: Too Many Mundane Secrets: The Problem of Redaction

Snip, Burn, Solder Blog: Too Many Mundane Secrets: The Problem of Redaction

I ended up writing a lot more than I meant to about redaction this morning (you know, over on my other blog that's nominally about building kites and stuff). Thought you guys might be interested, too. The beginning part goes something like this:

. . . In the course of my research I sifted through a lot of FOIAed documents released by the CIA in the early 2000s (when they were forced to 'fess up to Congress about their involvement with Pinochet as a condition of getting their budget money). Predictably, most of this stuff was at least partially redacted--and since it was all stuff form the 1970s-1990s, what I was looking at were PDFs of scans of actual hardcopy from which the offending words and phrases had been excised with a hobby knife. These pages are then stamped "SANITIZED," which tends to imply something about the parts that were removed. (Here's a representative sample; I love that the "one thing" Jesse Helms has to say is specifically redacted. I met Helms once, when I was a grade-schooler visiting Washington, DC. At the time I thought he looked like Boss Hogg, but very affable.)

Anyway, what struck me about these documents, these secrets, is that some human--likely a low-level clerk--went through all of these *very sensitive materials* and cut out those words. All day? Every day? Was this her whole job? Did every day end with a garbage can packed with word salad? In any case, still, some specific human saw all of these secrets unredacted; she knows what Helms's one important thing to say to Kissinger about Chile and Pinochet was. She likely worked in a room *full* of people just like her, and they knew *all* the secrets. And they weren't the only ones: Someone typed up this transcript. For every secret that's deemed such by fat men in expensive suits, there's someone at the bottom who could spill those beans. She's wearing a cheap off-the-rack tweed skirt-and-jacket combo. Her blouse binds under her arms when she reaches up to fetch the next page out of her IN basket. She's going to sip a Diet Tab while sitting on a concrete planter during her 30-minute lunch hour. . . .