THANK YOU

To Marc and Howie.  Those of the first coherent explanations of friction I have ever encountered. That still leaves the question of Noam's beard.

IDLE THOUGHTS WITH NO REDEEMING SOCIAL VALUE

First idle thought:  I have raised this question before but have never received a satisfactory answer. Can anybody explain to me how friction works? When I put on an undershirt in the morning, it slides easily over my body, but if I try putting it on after a shower and I am still a little bit damp it sticks to my skin. This, I take it, is a consequence of friction. But how does friction work? Why does a little water on my skin make the fabric of the undershirt catch and not fall effortlessly down?

Second idle thought: I met Noam Chomsky roughly 70 years ago when he came to Harvard to take up a Junior Fellowship.  He was then a young, slender, clean-shaven handsome man, and he remained that way, at least to my way of thinking, over the next 65 years or so. When people asked me how I thought I differed from Chomsky, I would reply jokingly that he was better looking than I. But several years ago – I am not sure quite when – Noam stopped shaving and very quickly grew a full beard, so that in recent YouTube posted interviews, he looks like an old rabbi from an East European shtetl.  Does anybody know why he did that? The difference is really quite striking.

Third idle thought: every night Susie and I eat at the bar in the Pub, which is one of the three dining venues here at Carolina Meadows.  We are usually joined by retired general Jim Anderson, whom I have mentioned here before. The three of us were all born in 1933, so all of us turn 90 this year – Susie on January 16, Jim on April 3, and I on December 27. If I were to tell you that I had dinner last evening at a restaurant with three 90-year-olds, Your natural reaction would be how strange it was to be at the same counter with three such ancient characters, and yet that is not the way it feels to me at all. What unites us is not our age but the fact that we all like oysters. On Friday evenings, Carolina Meadows serves oysters on the half shell and they have a limited supply, so the three of us arrive early and among us eat almost half of all the oysters they have secured for the evening. The fact that we are all or about to be 90 does not come into it.  It is very strange.

All of this is what I think about as I wait impatiently to find out what the Fulton County District Attorney means by the word "imminently."

BLINDSIDED

I had planned to ramble on about chat bots and the next 20 years and one thing and another, but I made the mistake of watching the beginning of the video that was released of the beating death of the young man and it upset me so much that I cannot think about anything else. I have nothing profound to say about it. I am simply crushed by the endless repeated evidence of the pointless cruelty that we show to one another. I can offer deep ideologically encoded explanations with the best of them but now I simply want to hide under the covers and shut out the world. We inflict so much suffering on one another, needlessly, endlessly, not even in the pursuit of what could be called rational self-interest. I do not want to find clever ways of talking about it, I simply want it to go away.

GOOD NEWS, SORT OF

Ronna McDaniel just beat back a challenge to get reelected as head of the RNC. This pretty well means that the RNC winner take all primary rules will not be changed, which in turn means that Trump has a much better chance of being chosen as the Republican candidate in 2024. Which in turn means that the Democrats will win the presidency. You have to take good news wherever you can find it.

BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN

It is all set. I will begin my series of lecturees at UNC on the use and abuse of formal methods in political philosophy on Monday, February 20.  Six two-hour lectures are planned, but we shall see whether that much time is required for what I have to say.  The lectures will be videotaped and posted on YouTube, probably in one hour segments.  I am looking forward to it.

GOD EXISTS (WITH APOLOGIES TO MICHAEL LLENOS)

I lay down to rest after lunch today and nodded off to sleep with the television set on. I awoke to reports of classified documents found in Mike Pence's home.  All that was missing were angels with harps singing "Nearer my God to thee."

ODDITIES OF NEUROSCIENCE

I have, I think, made reference from time to time to what is called “senior moments.” By and large, it is proper names that I have difficulty calling up – at one time, as I have remarked, I simply could not keep in my mind the name of the great soprano Kathleen Battle. Yesterday I had a quite bizarre senior moment when I was talking with Susie. I was trying to recall the word that one uses for damage to the lining of the stomach or the intestine caused by stomach acid. I simply could not recall that word.

 

Then I remembered that in one of the 35 or so hour long lectures that I have posted on YouTube I use the word. I recalled that it was in the four lecture series on The Thought of Sigmund Freud. I recalled that it was in the first of those lectures. I recalled exactly where in the lecture I used the word. So I went to YouTube, called up the first of the Freud lectures, almost immediately found the place where I use the word and heard myself say “ulcer.”  “That is it!” I cried and told Susie the word I had been trying to recall.

 

I mean, that is weird. What is going on in the brain that blocks my recollection of a particular word but allows me to remember exactly where I used it in a recorded lecture?