I posted this exactly a year ago, it is so beautiful I decided to post it again
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Anna Maria Jopek & Pat Metheny Cichy Zapada Zmrok Into The Dream
I posted this exactly a year ago, it is so beautiful I decided to post it again
Friday, January 24, 2014
I Recommend Toby Laboutillier's Down Memory Lane
While the best program in the history of Maine radio is the great Humble Farmer, another pretty good program was Toby Laboutillier's Down Memory Lane. Every Friday Afternoon at 2:00 PM, just about everyone I knew who could tuned in to listen to his survey of popular music going back as far as he could find the records and the contemporary rankings. Going way back into the acoustic period. I usually tuned out before he got to the mid-1960s and 70s, having already heard that stuff too much.
Like The Humble Farmer, he was taken off of Maine Public Radio by the evil management. Unlike Humble, the protest was enough so they had to give him the option of putting out a weekly podcast. If I can I listen at the same time as before, if not whenever I can. A lot of it is what I'd never choose to hear but it's always interesting to hear what I never have. I've learned more about the history of popular music from this show and Toby's other shows going back into the early 1970s than from anything else.
Like The Humble Farmer, he was taken off of Maine Public Radio by the evil management. Unlike Humble, the protest was enough so they had to give him the option of putting out a weekly podcast. If I can I listen at the same time as before, if not whenever I can. A lot of it is what I'd never choose to hear but it's always interesting to hear what I never have. I've learned more about the history of popular music from this show and Toby's other shows going back into the early 1970s than from anything else.
Arm's Giving Me A Lot of Trouble
I don't know what I'm going to do if I can't go back to work for another month. I can't begin to imagine how to teach music without showing them how to do it.
On the other hand, the recorder's good for a bit of distraction. I'm working on improvising with it, inspired by Tali Rubinstein's example. I recommend music as a distraction from life's troubles, if you can't do anything about the troubles. And it's so much more than that.
Also, while the first impulse was to snark about love not being able to keep The Captain and Tennille together, I read that the real issue is that he's got Parkinson's and he would have to blow all of their combined savings before he could get help paying for extended care. Pop music of the 1970s is mostly good for a bit of a laugh but there's nothing funny about that. I wish them the best.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
I Wasted Time on Alternet And So Does Time Waste Me
Got to rush, but there was this from an exchange I had on Alternet:
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
I Love This So Much
Carla Bley
Ictus/Syndrome
Gary Burton Quintet
Update: I believe that the last bit is a piece by Carla Bley called "Wrong Key Donkey", though I haven't looked at the lead sheet in a long time.
Ictus/Syndrome
Gary Burton Quintet
Update: I believe that the last bit is a piece by Carla Bley called "Wrong Key Donkey", though I haven't looked at the lead sheet in a long time.
Modernist Superstition The Absurd Faith That There Can Be Objectivity In Observing Behavior
Ethology (from Greek: ἦθος, ethos, "character"; and -λογία, -logia, "the study of") is the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, and is a sub-topic of zoology. Wikipedia
Just a quick word today.
In a dispute I had over an old NYT report about some neo-haruspical study of baboons and how that's supposed to tell us something about people, an odd habit of thinking among the behavioral scientists came up. I said I was skeptical that the reported analysis of observations made by someone indoctrinated in some school of ethology was 1. reliably not influenced by the ideology that the observer had been trained in, 2. that his observations and analysis could be anything but a fully human one, and so biased, 3 was relevant to any other species.
The other party to the dispute was outraged that someone could think that his observations, as a trained ethologist, could be anything but entirely objective. That is the establishing conceit of all research into behavior, that people can be taught to make reliable and objective observations and analyses of behavior and, more far fetched, that their analyses of that behavior will be objective, having the reliability of observations of physical phenomena of the kind that science was invented to study.
When you think about it, that is about as amazing a line of nonsense as has been successfully sold in the past hundred-fifty years. Especially when you look at the openly unscientific nature of so much of the past practice of that, Freud, of course, but others as well, and that most of the behavioral "sciences" are conducted through schools of thought which are thoroughly ideological and, especially in a professional context, political in nature. And in no case is that clearer than reporting on the behavior of animals, which cannot report to us their own motivations, ideas and perceptions as people can with such varying reliability.
The WAY in which allegedly scientific observations are made of animal behavior is taught by those teachers belonging to one of those schools, on which their academic identity depends. How to do it the right way is, in itself, the product of that kind of ideological training. And even more, the analysis and reporting of those observations will typically be accepted or rejected on the basis of their conformity with the vocabulary and means of expression that are acceptable within the school in whose context it will be published. And, very importantly, the grad student and post-grad researcher will know what is expected and what will get them in trouble.
There is no such thing as an objective observation or analysis of behavior, not among human beings, certainly not between species. People reporting on their own behavior, of which they are the most intimate of experts, open themselves to being doubted and refuted, that happens hundreds and thousands of times a day in law courts, billions of times a day within families, when people know each other more intimately than any ethologist will ever know a baboon or even a bonobo. And if people can deceive themselves about their own behavior, they can certainly see what they want to see in other animals.
The idea that ethology is science is one of the most absurd of contemporary superstitions among the educated. In terms of my blogging, it is incredible that so many atheists are totally sold on it, led there by some of the biggest names in atheism today. And all while holding the superstition that atheism, materialism, is some kind of magic charm against superstition, guaranteeing objectivity and magically conferring an ability to "see the universe as it really is". Which is complete and total hogwash which what is now very old physics should have dispelled almost a century ago. Yet that superstition is one of the most commonly held today, both among the materialistic and atheistic and even those who are not materialists and atheists. It is ubiquitous among those who congratulate themselves on their rationality and sciencyness. You don't know whether to laugh or cry when you hear them going on like that.
Just a quick word today.
In a dispute I had over an old NYT report about some neo-haruspical study of baboons and how that's supposed to tell us something about people, an odd habit of thinking among the behavioral scientists came up. I said I was skeptical that the reported analysis of observations made by someone indoctrinated in some school of ethology was 1. reliably not influenced by the ideology that the observer had been trained in, 2. that his observations and analysis could be anything but a fully human one, and so biased, 3 was relevant to any other species.
The other party to the dispute was outraged that someone could think that his observations, as a trained ethologist, could be anything but entirely objective. That is the establishing conceit of all research into behavior, that people can be taught to make reliable and objective observations and analyses of behavior and, more far fetched, that their analyses of that behavior will be objective, having the reliability of observations of physical phenomena of the kind that science was invented to study.
When you think about it, that is about as amazing a line of nonsense as has been successfully sold in the past hundred-fifty years. Especially when you look at the openly unscientific nature of so much of the past practice of that, Freud, of course, but others as well, and that most of the behavioral "sciences" are conducted through schools of thought which are thoroughly ideological and, especially in a professional context, political in nature. And in no case is that clearer than reporting on the behavior of animals, which cannot report to us their own motivations, ideas and perceptions as people can with such varying reliability.
The WAY in which allegedly scientific observations are made of animal behavior is taught by those teachers belonging to one of those schools, on which their academic identity depends. How to do it the right way is, in itself, the product of that kind of ideological training. And even more, the analysis and reporting of those observations will typically be accepted or rejected on the basis of their conformity with the vocabulary and means of expression that are acceptable within the school in whose context it will be published. And, very importantly, the grad student and post-grad researcher will know what is expected and what will get them in trouble.
There is no such thing as an objective observation or analysis of behavior, not among human beings, certainly not between species. People reporting on their own behavior, of which they are the most intimate of experts, open themselves to being doubted and refuted, that happens hundreds and thousands of times a day in law courts, billions of times a day within families, when people know each other more intimately than any ethologist will ever know a baboon or even a bonobo. And if people can deceive themselves about their own behavior, they can certainly see what they want to see in other animals.
The idea that ethology is science is one of the most absurd of contemporary superstitions among the educated. In terms of my blogging, it is incredible that so many atheists are totally sold on it, led there by some of the biggest names in atheism today. And all while holding the superstition that atheism, materialism, is some kind of magic charm against superstition, guaranteeing objectivity and magically conferring an ability to "see the universe as it really is". Which is complete and total hogwash which what is now very old physics should have dispelled almost a century ago. Yet that superstition is one of the most commonly held today, both among the materialistic and atheistic and even those who are not materialists and atheists. It is ubiquitous among those who congratulate themselves on their rationality and sciencyness. You don't know whether to laugh or cry when you hear them going on like that.
Monday, January 20, 2014
The Greatness of Martin Luther King jr.'s Thinking Won't Be Heard on TV Today
While you're hearing about the dream and the claims to him made by people who hated him while he was alive and who are trying to bury him ever deeper beneath distraction, The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. prophesying.