March 2012
35 posts
Pedantic
1: of, relating to, or being a pedant (see pedant)
2: narrowly, stodgily, and often ostentatiously learned
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Maxistentialism: David Foster Wallace, Laughing with Kafka: We all know that there is... →
maxistentialist.tumblr.com
David Foster Wallace, Laughing with Kafka:
We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it - to point out, for example, that Lou Costello is mistaking the proper name ‘Who’ for the interrogative pronoun ‘who,’ etc. We all know the weird antipathy such explanations arouse in us, a feeling not so much of boredom as offense, like something has been blasphemed.
This is a lot like the teacher’s feeling at running a Kafka story through the gears of your standard undergrad-course literary analysis-plot to chart, symbols to decode, etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty. (A more grad-schoolish literary-theory-type machine, on the other hand, is designed to yield the conclusion that one has been deluded into imagining there was any scent in the first place.)
As someone who’s spent the last couple months wondering what makes humor work, I’m not sure I’m totally on board with Wallace on this one. This is what philosophers do, right? Some of them, at least, try to determine the nature of some phenomenon. I don’t know why humor shouldn’t be analyzed in the same way as any other phenomenon. I’m of the opinion that understanding how a joke works does not deprives it of humor, any more than understanding the olfactory system makes flowers smell less pretty. I actually think revealing the general structure of something like a joke opens up new exciting possibilities. An anti-joke doesn’t work without at least a cursory understanding of the structure of jokes, right? Maybe I’m equivocating. Maybe explaining how a particular joke works does kill it, humor-wise.
Punny Philosophy Paper Titles
“Scents and Sensibilia” Clare Batty (doubly punny)
“Critique of Pure Vision” - Churchland, Ramachandran, Senjowski
There have to be more.
Krista gave up coffee for her “Easter resolution” this year. She successfully gave it up, drank black tea, then green tea, then nothing. Today at the mall she treated herself to some iced caramel macchiato with toffee nut something-or-other (I think that was it, actually). She has been dancing to disco music by herself for the last 20 min. She’ll tire herself out soon, right?
St. Patrick's Day!
- Q: how many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman?
- A: Zero
Story time.
Ten or fifteen years ago, Quine was giving a lecture at Rutgers. After he finished, Jerry Fodor stood up and asked a question. He asked “Now that you’ve reached the end of your life, does it at all bother you that your entire life’s work was based on a giant mistake?” Quine reportedly turned to the man standing next to him, and asked, loudly enough for the microphone to pick out his voice, “Who is that motherfucker?”
fin.
Whenever my cat comes around I always like to ask him, ‘Hey, what’s up dog?’ I don’t think he gets my sense of humor.
I Tell Ya, Until I've Had My Morning Coffee, I Am Just A Rapist →
theonion.com
Like I always say, “Just hand over the coffee and nobody gets sexually assaulted!”
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“C’s get you degrees”
—One of the fine motivated students I have the pleasure of tutoring
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SpeechJammer: A System Utilizing Artificial Speech Disturbance with Delayed Auditory Feedback →
arxiv.org
Abstract: In this paper we report on a system, “SpeechJammer”, which can be used to disturb people’s speech. In general, human speech is jammed by giving back to the speakers their own utterances at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. This effect can disturb people without any physical discomfort, and disappears immediately by stop speaking. Furthermore, this effect does not involve anyone but the speaker. We utilize this phenomenon and implemented two prototype versions by combining a direction-sensitive microphone and a direction-sensitive speaker, enabling the speech of a specific person to be disturbed. We discuss practical application scenarios of the system, such as facilitating and controlling discussions. Finally, we argue what system parameters should be examined in detail in future formal studies based on the lessons learned from our preliminary study.
WTF?
