Antelope destroys bicyclist

 

Poor guy! His grunts sound kind of deer-like though. 

EV Grieve: Facing eviction, Village Scandal holding sale to pay for legal fees

via evgrieve.com

I'm a big fan of this store, and have bought two hats from them in the past. They have very good quality stuff. A 50% of sale makes me very jealous. You should definitely take advantage!

The Second Cartesian Error: Inability to bridge the gap between physical and mental

Descartes’ basic position in the Passions of the Soul is that the emotions are cognitive because they are activities of the soul or mind. One of his problems is distinguishing between other abilities or activities that could seem cognitive, like sensations and perceptions, which to him are not cognitive because they are activities of the body; they are always either focused on the body or objects outside the body.

After all, he thinks, any time you sense something, it’s either your body you sense, or some other object in the world. But you don’t sense your mind or your thoughts. He thinks the same goes for perceptions. In fact, in his earlier book, Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes said perception was ‘non cognitive’, because it provided little more than basic ‘shapes’ for the soul to interpret. However, he does change this in view in quite important ways in Passions of the Soul, and it will seriously affect his conclusions regarding the emotions.

The physical aspect

On Descartes’ account emotions happen in the soul, and therefore are “psychic events”. However, he also explains that they have a physical basis. Though the details of his physical account are now hopelessly wrong, the general idea was pretty interesting and we need to have an idea of how it works to see how he gets in trouble reconciling the physical and mental aspects of emotion.

Descartes explains that emotions are caused and continued by chemicals, which he calls spirits, coursing through the body. These spirits can literally cause the soul to move by flowing to and moving the pineal gland, where he thinks the soul sits in the body. The soul feels the pineal gland move, and these chemicals and movements are also how the soul is presented with images and ‘shapes’, for example, of a bear. If the soul determines a particular shape or set of shapes to be frightful, it excites the soul into a state of apprehension. This is not itself an emotion, such as fear, but the soul needs to be in apprehension for it to develop an emotion.

The soul will develop an actual emotion based on three factors, any one of which can be the determining factor in what specific emotion develops:

 

Interested? Read the rest at my dissertation blog!

After a Rating Downgrade, U.S. Treasuries Turn a Profit: So much for the whole S&P nonsense

The rating downgrade, along with continued turmoil in European markets and fears that the United States might be entering a new recession, caused a flight to safety among investors. And, notwithstanding the agency’s opinion, money flooded into Treasuries and the demand for American dollars grew.

Since then, Treasury bonds have been one of the few investments that have produced good profits. As can be seen from the accompanying charts, an investor in long-term Treasuries would have earned a double-digit return, counting the small interest earned and the larger capital gains from rising prices. Shorter-term Treasuries have also rallied, although by smaller amounts.

When S.& P. cut the United States’ rating from AAA to a still-high AA+, it went out of its way to praise France, which retains a AAA rating. Investors in long-term French bonds have not done badly over the period, with a gain of nearly 4 percent, measured in euros, since the S.& P. move. Unfortunately, however, the weakness of the euro has more than offset that return.

Among the world’s major currencies, the dollar has been nearly the strongest since the downgrade. Only the Japanese yen has outpaced it, and that by a small amount. The Chinese renminbi, whose value is set by China and allowed to rise gradually against the dollar, is also up, but that would have been true no matter what happened in other markets.

If the Chinese currency did trade freely, it would no doubt be much higher than it is, but it too might have had a bad two months. Many currencies from emerging markets had been strong until recently, in part because foreign investors were buying them to invest in their stock markets. But it appears some investors are fleeing those markets as part of the flight to safety.

Both the Korean and Indian stock markets are down significantly in local currencies, and their currencies have depreciated against the dollar. In Brazil, the stock market came close to holding its own, so long as you look at local prices. But the real has lost about a tenth of its value, so the performance in international terms has been poor.

China’s stock market has been among the worst in the world, losing nearly a fifth of its value over those two months. The American market, by contrast, has been among the best after adjusting for currency movements.

It is a feature of the modern world that many countries, less concerned about the loss of buying power for their own citizens, welcome weak currencies, hoping that will help their exporters. As a result, the recent rise of the dollar has itself been a cause of worry in the United States.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.

via nytimes.com

You won't hear this discussed by any conservatives. Unless its some sort of conspiracy theory explanation.

Get Rich Slowly offers 10 Career Lessons from Julia Child

I think this is an interesting idea for a blog post, and a series of blog posts. I'll give you the 10 lessons, but for explanation you should go to the source. 

 

1. Invest in yourself
2. Follow your passion
3. Doing anything well requires hard work
4. Expand your skillset
5. You are never too old to learn something new
6. Cultivate enthusiasm
7. Do not depricate yourself
8. Solicit feedback 
9. Subject your beleifs to the "operational proof"
10. Know your worth

 

Learn more about these concepts at Get Rich Slowly or get it (and more) straight from the source, April Dykman 

Wise words from Steve Jobs - Stanford Commencement Address 2005

The Second Cartesian Error and a discussion of Ad Hoc Hypotheses

After a long hiatus, my dissertation blog is back! Here's the latest post.

 

As I explained in the previous post, Descartes is fundamentally concerned with defending the position that theexclusive function of the soul is thought and that everything else is the function of the body – exclusive meaningonly the soul can think and the soul can do nothing but think.

I also told you that the Second Cartesian error is the irreparable separation of emotion from thinking, which forces Descartes to make up a way to sneak intelligence into emotions once he realizes he’s made it possible for emotions not to involve the soul. Over the next couple of posts, I’ll explain why it’s a very bad mistake, but I’ll explain that I started this whole project with the plan to show that it is incorrect to separate emotions from cognition.

I say its incorrect because I think emotions and emotional behavior clearly demonstrate thinking or cognition. And in previous posts I fleshed out a theory, which I called P-A-L, that treats emotions as a type of cognition while also accounting for the fact that they are also physiological phenomena. I also explained how Stoicismrose to challenge that theory and put forth the competing idea that the emotions are purely mental phenomenon, purely thought and have nothing to do with the body. Descartes’s goal is to further this project by adding a highly sophisticated attempt at a scientific look at how the body works. You could even go so far as to say that when it was written, Descartes theory of the emotions was state of the art for science and medicine at the time. Because of that, and even though it is hopelessly wrong in the specifics of physiology, we need to get some familiarity with what he thought was going on.

Interested? Read the rest at my Philosophy blog!

CNN asks: Did the Baby Boomers Break Government?

September 30, 2011

Did the Baby Boomers Break Government?

CNN: "Could it be that the reason our government is broken is because of which generation is running things?"

"Authors Morley Winograd and Michael Hais think so, insisting that the problem is that power is now firmly in the hands of self-righteous baby boomers who have spent their entire lives convinced that anyone who disagrees with them is morally inferior. Boomers won't negotiate anything, Winograd and Hais say, because they think every position they hold is rooted in something no less sacred than their values, and they're understandably reluctant to negotiate their values."

8 Comments

via politicalwire.com

I honestly think so. We're dealing with failed idealism, narcissism and greed...and most to the point, we're still fighting Vietnam-era culture battles. Obviously you can't really paint everyone 55 and up as "baby boomers" in the sense meant here, but it does capture something important.