Notes

As someone who builds a lot on his own work, I rely heavily on links back to previous blog entries. I discovered today that many of those links are now actually stale! They refer to impenetrable bookmark numbers that when followed, lead me to the wrong blog posts. Not only is that a disservice to my readers (when I get any) but also to me this long after the fact. It's not so bad when the text for the link mentions the blog entry by name because I can search for that. But when I merely use a word like "elsewhere" to refer to one of my previous articles it helps me not at all! I just fixed up the links in the entry for De Officiis  by Cicero, but there are doubtless others there as well to do. There is also a handy stats section to give me some feedback on who is visiting the site when. I see I got a visit from someone searching for a summary of Cicero's De Officiis . I do not actually provide any article with such a summary. But my titular article about that book ca...

I remember a book in the SF Masterworks series that I read, Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. By the time the protagonist was an old man he was considered a god, but was paid "no great reverence." I decided to Google that exact phrase looking for the full passage for that quotation. Found I had to make it "him no great reverence" before I got correct results appearing. The top-ranked result is currently from a Tumblr blog. I can view the blogs on Tumblr, but I can no longer log into it. I had created a blog on Tumblr a long time ago but abandoned it after a while, yet when I returned I discovered my account had been terminated due to "spam or affiliate marketing"! It made me think of something strange that had happened to my Twitter account. I was galled to discover one day after I had not been there in a long time either that it was regularly tweeting spam. Some nonsense about how I had done some surveys and was making hundreds of dollars a day. I k...

The most beautiful feeling of nostalgia that I ever experienced was over ten years ago . I had been trying to resolve questions in my mind that had been left unanswered in my Masters thesis. I was using this blog as a notebook to help me do that. I lived in Newtown in those days, so it was a reasonably short walk for me to get to the University of Sydney, my alma mater. I wanted to go to their Fisher Library to get a library card to let me borrow books from their library again. I started at the Wentworth Building, and walked across the campus to the Fisher Library. While I was doing that, and looking at the buildings as I was walking by, the nostalgia hit. I felt all of the good things I had ever felt while studying there, and none of the bad things. And I just thought, if I actually felt  this way at the time I was actually here, I never would have left! But that's what nostalgia does: it protects you from the pain of the past. It let me, in the present day, simply enjoy this ...

Various books I have read claim that willpower is a limited resource . People who perform an exercise requiring willpower do worse on another willpower exercise immediately afterwards. This phenomenon is known as "ego depletion". But as I was perusing an APA article on willpower, I came across an article by Veronika Job contradicting this idea. Job suggests that the literature on the subject does not take into account individuals' beliefs about willpower. Furthermore, once those beliefs are taken into account (or manipulated with biased questionnaires) the results change. People who do not believe that willpower is a limited resource do not show signs of ego depletion. So put that in your pipe and smoke it! I was thinking of willpower in terms of trying to practise the ethics of Peter Singer consistently. Singer's views of social justice on a global scale are draconian. To do justice to the Third World we in the First World must reduce our standard of living to b...