Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Are you aware teachers are poor?"

"It's not my fault you can't get change for a thousand forint bill in Budapest. " A-ha! Another business problem in Hungary that predates communism.

"Clever women, who in Hungary always outnumbered clever men, practically trained their husbands or other male relations, to spend a certain amount of time away from home."

and resolution; or does the function of lower levels vary?

"Act II is also a whole, a complete, self contained unit of dramatic (or comedic) action ". Is dramatic story fractal? Can you drill down through each level of story, act, sequence and scene, and find the same pattern of set-up, conflict,

"Understanding this concept allows you to play with the plotline so you can tell your stories visually, with narrative action rather than explanation." pg 141

"Dialogue serves two main purposes: either it moves the story forward, or it reveals information about the main character. If the dialogue does not serve either one of these functions, then take it out."

your receptive criteria not your productive ability set the standard... Pg 144

"...owing to the absence of any recognised general principles, liberty is often granted where it should be withheld..." so, rationalism in politics more important than liberty.

"where a mother tongue consonant interferes, I would include it as an intentional part of the practice. You can do this by assigning a symbol... and writing that symbol in it's own box beside the chart." pg 131, why not use a more complete IPA chart?

As Macintyre says he doesn't establish a universal principle, just argues from liberties that the English already enjoyed to restrict legislation.

Jelly Cooper in the dual-monarchy?

I was never told what a visionary Swift was: in Gulliver's travels to Laputa, he anticipates the significance of air power and the problems of an aging society.

"The second was an opinion directly contrary, to tax those qualities of body and mind for which men chiefly value themselves ; the rate more or less according to the degrees of excelling : the decision whereof would be left entirely to their own breast." I feel strangely at home in Laputa.

"A Mole! A Mole!"

So that was Lilliput, what's the rest of it about?

"but the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals." Is this the core of Mill's argument?

JSM anticipates Nietszche's criticism's of Christian morality, and the difficulties of policing debate on the Internet.

These days arguments about the liberty of thought and discussion are more to do with manufacturing consent that stifling dissent.

have to wonder what JSM would make of the modern world

Macintyre is right to criticise the linguistic philosophy of the 20th century for it's unsophisticated treatment of language. But 'untranslatability' is a scalar measure not an absolute one; it is the ease of translation that is of issue. With enough scholarship, paraphrasing and footnotes, we can get the meaning. As Macintyre himself does in the Greek chapters of this book.

"To be outside of all traditions is to be a stranger to enquiry", this is turning out to be a much more coherent book than After Virtue, problem is though we actually are situated in multiple, often conflicting traditions.

"Human good is heterogeneous because the aims of the self are heterogeneous. Although to subordinate all you aims to one end does not strictly speaking violate the principles of rational choice...it still strikes us as irrational or more likely as mad" pg 337 - what a chapter, went in a liberal Conservative, came out a conservative Liberal.

"In Taiwan they were telling me about some phonetic symbols as the answer and end-all to my pronunciation conundrum. Since all Taiwanese were required to learn them as children, everyone is adamant about their effectiveness..." sounds familiar

"she was originally from Switzerland, could speak 6 or 7 languages...her English and her Spanish were both difficult for me to understand, because she spoke with a very thick Germany accent." So far, the only thing that suggests that there are pitfalls to the polyglot project.

You gotta love Davey Hume: law based on long possession, government based on consensus. Have to wonder whether MacIntyre is making too much of Hume's commitment to property, afterall, government is funded by taxation, and taxation is a disruption of individual property rights.

Saul Green, sociopath: it's all going to come together, isn't it?

it's all gone a bit Marxian, and there seems to an ambiguity over the meaning of 'property'. What Hume seems to be addressing was 'amour-propre' rather than capitalism...not that that makes it any better for English culture :-(

A treasury of good ideas, but using gesture implies teaching students to understand what the gestures mean. Under what circumstances is the investment worthwhile?

Can't believe that all men of my father's generation had this sense of entitlement about women...even if he did.