Sittin’ on the dock of the bay

12 03 2015

My back is killing me.

Now, the initial reason has to do with introducing a new lift in my weight routine—my form was fine, but the initial weight was too heavy, hence the strain—but the strain is exacerbated by the fact that my current desk chair is. . . no longer adequate.

It’s been more-or-less fine for years, but over the years it’s moved more toward the “less” side of the spectrum. Because I’m working my second job from home, I’m spending a LOT of time in the chair, and thus have a lot of time to reflect on its inadequacies. And while I don’t expect a chair to fix my exercise mistakes, I also don’t want it to magnify the effects of those mistakes.

So: search for a chair. Search search search. Read the reviews read the reviews read the reviews, consider the features, select, delete, et cetera.

So: I’ve found what seems to be a decent chair. I like that the arms are padded (current chair? no) and flip back, I like (I think) the syncro-tilt, and I like the price.

The problem? There’s only one review. Positive, but still: one.

I’ve search for more reviews, but no luck. The price isn’t outrageous—130 bucks or so—but this is out of “what-the-hell” territory. There were a couple of other chairs I looked closely at, and the reviews were helpful in deciding to eliminate them: the negative/meh reviews were over twenty percent and a fair number of them were quite recent and about the same problem, while the in-depth 4- and 5-star reviews were all older. That there are negative reviews doesn’t bother me, but if out of 300-400 reviews a solid 25 percent are negative, well, I think I’ll look at something else.

(I bought a small vacuum cleaner recently, and in trying to figure out which of two to buy, that the negative reviews were recent and pointed toward the same problems with one machine pushed me toward the other. Which works fine, in case you’re wondering.)

Anyway, the specs on this chair seem decent, but then, so did those on the chairs I ultimately eliminated.  *Sigh*

I have to admit that were I to have the cash, I’d buy a Herman Miller. Not necessarily the Aeron chair—I’ve never sat in one, and you betta believe that before I plunk down a thousand bucks I’m plunking my ass in that chair—but this Eames lounge chair, and precisely because I have sat in it.

Sister, it is worth every penny.

When I was in grad school I took a course in human rights, which meant that, in doing research for my papers, I had to trudge from the Social Science tower over to one of the upper floors of the law library, where the human rights collection was located. It was there that I discovered this amazing chair, tucked in a windowed niche—and it was to there I returned, long after the class had finished, to sit and read and, on more than one occasion, doze.

(Sometimes it wouldn’t be there, and I’d find it had been dragged somewhere else on the floor. I clearly wasn’t the only person who liked that chair.)

I became a little obsessed, so much so that I finally flipped the chair over and ripped the fraying product manufacturer tag off. Then I went on a hunt through furniture store after furniture store—this was pre-internet—until a woman at a place in north Minneapolis said “oh, that’s a Herman Miller. There’s a store in [Edina? Hopkins? one of the nearby suburbs].” I then got on my bike (no car) and rode out to that store, frayed product tag in hand, and began the process of ordering myself a Herman Miller.

That was, oh, over twenty years ago, so it was nowhere near $1800 bucks, and that I’d buy it directly from this store  would mean I could probably get the cheapest version for less than 500 bucks. (I remember the person who worked with me as professional, helpful, and a bit bemused at the sight of this broke-ass grad student trying to figure out how to afford a freakin’ Eames chair.)

I didn’t buy the chair: incredibly, that I didn’t want the cheapest chair was kept me from following through on the purchase. No, I decided, I’d get a Herman Miller when I could [afford to] get exactly what I wanted.

I still have the product brochure, by the way, though the tag seems to have gone missing.

So, huh. Is there a point to this story? No, no point, other than, perhaps to point out (ha!) that I am willing to lay out crazy money for chair I know is comfortable.

But if I don’t know? Then 130 bucks seems a lot.


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Graffiti politti

11 03 2015

No, the letter from 47 Republican Senators (and since co-signed by Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal) isn’t treasonous, but it is both factually incorrect and, I would argue, not the most effective way for senators to influence foreign policy.

In other words, it is both legitimate and stupid.

This justification, however, is, tsah, I don’t even know what the correct epithet would be:

Republican aides were taken aback by what they thought was a lighthearted attempt to signal to Iran and the public that Congress should have a role in the ongoing nuclear discussions. Two GOP aides separately described their letter as a “cheeky” reminder of the congressional branch’s prerogatives.

“The administration has no sense of humor when it comes to how weakly they have been handling these negotiations,” said a top GOP Senate aide.

“Cheeky”? What is this, Biff and Tad pranking the dean?

And this pretty much sums up my beliefs about the latest Clinton scandale.

~~~

h/t for comic, Jonathan Bernstein


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Categories : Politics, Quick hits

Now make some dollars

9 03 2015

apple watch header

Nope.


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We are the champions of the world

8 03 2015

Might makes right—that is the basis of morality.

That’s not all there is to morality, but lack the might, and you lack the ability to determine the right.

(And as for God(s) as the basis of morality? What is he/she/they/it but Mighty? the Mightiest of the Mighty?)

Might makes right is also the basis of knowledge. Of course, what counts as “might” varies considerably across time and space: might could mean “ability to summon spirits” or “to discern the secrets of nature” or, of course, to point a sword or an axe or a gun at a person’s head and say “believe” or “recant”; it could also refer to people or resources or the production of results.

Thomas Kuhn referred, famously, to paradigms: scientists operate within a particular paradigm or set of theories of how the world works, and new scientists are inculcated with and succeed according to their ability to produce new knowledge based on elaboration of those theories. Over time, however, those elaborations may run into trouble: the theory leads to x result, but y is what is witnessed. There may be some way to accommodate these anomalies, but eventually the anomalies will overwhelm the paradigm; upon the presentation of a new theory which can account not only for the old knowledge, but also the anomalies, the paradigm will shift.

(Imre Lakatos attempted to meliorate the harshness of this shift (and to mediate between Kuhn and Karl Popper’s strict falsificationism) with a notion of “research programmes” and whether they are “progressive” or “degenerative”, but he, too, allows that new research programs may emerge.)

Older or established members of a field may not accept a new paradigm or research program, but, as Max Planck famously observed, “science advances one funeral at a time”. Einstein, one of the most intelligent men of the 20th century, perhaps ever, just as famously never accepted quantum theory (“God does not play dice with the universe”), but he couldn’t foil it; he is dead, and the theory lives.

What, then, is the paradigm or research program but a form of might? It declares what counts as true and false, what is considered evidence and how to make sense of that evidence, what counts as science—and thus knowledge—at all.

None of this is meant to be argumentative, but axiomatic. This doesn’t mean there is no knowledge or no true knowledge, but that what counts as knowledge and truth is bound up in the conditions of the production of said knowledge and truth. Knowledge depends upon what we say knowledge is (“intersubjective agreement”), and there are a lot of ways to say it.

I’m a fan of science, and consider its methods to be powerful in eliciting knowledge about the natural world. I don’t think it can tell me much about poetry, but if I want to understand how a fertilized egg can turn into a person, then I’ll turn to a biology textbook rather than, say, a book of poetry.

Even the most potent forms of knowledge—the mightiest of the mighty—have their limits (see: embryology won’t teach you much about rhyme and meter), and potency itself is no guarantee against the loss or overthrow of a particular form of knowledge, an insight long known by tyrants, torturers, and con men alike.

Knowledge, for all of its power (Bacon), is also fragile: because there is nothing necessary or autonomous about any one form of knowledge, it can be lost or shattered or tossed away—which means it must be tended, and, when conditions dictate, defended.

All of which is a very long way to saying that the notion of “Let the public decide what’s the truth” with regard to the existence of climate change is a terrible, terrible idea, and as an attack on science itself, deserves to to be driven back to the gaseous bog from whence it came.


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Where are you

8 03 2015

Dammit.

Where are my grad files?

I was going to write a post wherein I quoted something from a paper I wrote on Habermas, but when I went a-hunting for that paper, I found nothin’.

Nothin’.

Yes, I’ve tossed out a lot of files since I moved into lovely Prospect-Lefferts Garden, so it is just barely possible that in the frenzy—well, okay, not frenzy, but maybe in my zeal to unburden myself—I pitched all of my Minnesota papers, but I doubt it.

I mean, I still have the files from my undergrad years, so it is highly unlikely that I would have been cavalier toward my grad work.

Almost everything that I did recycle was stuff that could be replaced, namely, scholarly articles; the rest was meaningless.

As much as I didn’t like like grad school, I don’t consider the work I did without meaning, and I can’t see myself getting rid of work that helped me to form my thinking. An article copied from Political Theory can be called up online; the papers I wrote in the class on Marx cannot.

SO WHERE ARE THEY?

It could be at my parents’ house, in the attic, but why would I leave my grad work in the attic and haul the box of undegrad work to Brooklyn? It’s not that everything I do makes sense, but that makes more non-sense than, well, hauling a box of undergrad papers to Brooklyn.

I’ve searched in the usual places and a few of the unusual. There’s are a limited number of places those files could be; perhaps I’ll find them stuffed in some suitcase in my coat closet, or hidden beneath something I’ve already checked, I dunno.

But they’d better be there, somewhere. Dammit.

 


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And I said, nothing

4 03 2015

A desire to write something + grading + fatigue = one-sentence blog post.

 


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Then we take Berlin

2 03 2015

Yet another procedural, but with a Euro-twist: Crossing Lines.

I know, pathetic. I did start watching Once, and liked the main character well enough and LOVED the bad gal, and maybe I’ll go back to it, but the whole kid-who’s-sussed-it-all-out trope is a bit much.

And I started Continuum, which is proceduralish, but I’m not crazy about the main character, and, having looked ahead in the plot synopses, I see they they fuck hard with the timeline—and that does not suit me.

I hate it, really. I mean, I liked the timeline-fucking episodes in Star Trek: Voyager and Stargate SG1 but those tended to be stand-alone things, not upend-everything-you-know-forever-with-nary-a-glance-backward (Fringe!). I was actually pissed when Eureka shifted timelines, but they handled it well enough, insofar as the five main characters had to come to terms with the shift, and do so repeatedly.

Why do I hate timelines-shifts? I (irrationally—do I need to put this in here?) take it personally, as if the producers are saying Oh, you got all invested in those characters and their relationships and that whole world? Psych! It also seems cheap, like We ran outta ideas, so. . . , but mostly I feel cheated.

Back to Crossing Lines. It’s got the same set-up as approximately 40.372 percent of all procedurals out there: one man brings together a disparate group of individuals, each with his or her own ISSUES!, and molds them into super-group of crime fighters. And the set-up itself is ludicrous on its face (which, oddly, makes it easier for me to ignore): the International Criminal Court authorizes this super-group to investigate cross-border crimes, apparently on the belief that Interpol and Europol are not up to the task.

Like I said, ridiculous, but the crimes are less pervy-gory (Criminal Minds) and more sober-serious (trafficking trafficking trafficking—except for that one episode about roadside forced-fight club), and the settings are awesome! The Hague! Paris! Prague! Rome! London! There was even an episode set in New York, which, while screamingly wrong*, was still enjoyable, largely because it featured Carrie Anne Moss.

(*As in, prominent shot of the Bergen Street 2-3 train in Manhattan—only there is no Bergen 2-3 stop in Manhattan, and the 3 was in a green rather than red circle. Green is for the deservedly-much-maligned G-line.)

And have I mentioned that Donald Sutherland lords over all of this, enjoyably pompous and given to uttering ridiculous lines with such grave sincerity that, once again, I find it easier to be charmed than put off?

There are only two seasons currently on Netflix, and I only have two episodes left. Who knows, maybe after these I’ll finally fire up Orange is the New Black—which is, it should be noted, not a procedural.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.


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