The American Dental Association, The National Institutes of Health,The National Academy of Sciences, The US Public Health Service, andthe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention all agree thatfluoridating our water supply to combat tooth decay is a greatidea. They may be right, but I think there are good reasons to checkout the wardrobe of this emperor.Fluoridation No! Seat Belts Yes!February 27, 2008
What happens to ugly fruit and produce? (Video)Not everything that farmers grow is cosmetically perfect. But rather than let produce with noticeable imperfections go to waste, companies like Misfits Market and Imperfect Foods will bring previously unwanted produce directly to your door. Correspondent Serena Altschul reports.
the ugly slaves to the decay rar
Richard-- you saw all the snuff films??? Yeeks!I don't disagree that-- with all our problems-- we live in a blessed country at a blessed time, and that much of the darkness we find in the arts can be attributed to decadence and puerile adolescent cynicism. It's easy to see that some of these trends are pure affect.Still, even rich and healthy individuals can be haunted by personal demons or have their hearts broken or be psychologically damaged. Even during a generally sunny social era, individuals can be traumatized by epic misfortune, or they can perceive truths about the human condition that they need to express. These conditions are of great interest and artistic validity, for what they reveal about all of us-- even the most bovine among us.Alfred Hitchcock chose to make films about horror, but critics agree he was one of the greatest directors in history. Horror was just the vehicle he chose for a variety of reasons. Francis Ford Coppola chose to make films about crime and death, but again his dark subject matter didn't hinder the quality of his art. How are we supposed to tell the difference between great art about dark subjects and bad art about dark subjects? Well, that's the trick, isn't it? That's the challenge of all art. I wouldn't presume to tell people what filter to use for separating wheat from chaff, except to say that disqualifying "ugly" subject matter is clearly not the right way to go.
chris bennett and Kev Ferrara: "What compels us to put our heart into it?That is a damned good question." One possibility is that art is a tiny rebellion by organic matter against the entropy that will ultimately finish us. Regardless of what Kev believes about the end of the universe, surely even he acknowledges the second law of thermodynamics, which says we are moving inexorably from a state of uniquely low entropy to states of increasingly higher entropy-- that is, to states of increasing disorder where complex life systems will be increasingly untenable. That one way trip is why the dimension of time only permits us to move in one direction, while we can move back and forth freely through the three dimensions of space. We can't walk backward from scrambling an egg (to use the popular example of entropy showing that the increase in disorder is irreversible.) I'm not suggesting that people are compelled to make art because they've studied theoretical physics (although even children realize that all the king's horses and all the king's men can't put Humpty Dumpty together again). I'm suggesting that, as each of us is a bag of physical particles that has been gifted with consciousness which includes awareness of our inevitable personal end, it's not much of a leap to suggest that embedded in that same consciousness is an implicit awareness of the destination of entropy and the end of all life. Under this scenario our little efforts to arrange matter in pleasing designs and patterns is a temporary exorcism of disorder, a pocket of resistance (or at least admiration) which gives us pleasure down to our conscious protons. What Thomas Mann called the touching sympathy of organic life for what is destined to decay.
Don't feel bad about not having heard of mathematism. It has only been a centerpiece of western civilization since Pythagoras successfully reduced quality to quantity in the 6th century BCI would never dispute the greatness of Pythagoras and Aristotle or the mathematics community, generally, nor the importance of the contributions. But their ideas are not the predicate of our civilization.Heavier/lighter, less/more, stronger/weaker, higher/lower, balanced/unbalanced, supported/unsupported, straight/curved, wet/dry, hot/cold, fast/slow, smooth/rough, moving/still, surrounded/unconstrained, ugly/beautiful, natural/unnatural, tasteful/grotesque, etc. are qualitative assessments requiring no calculations.Scientific Logic stemming from empiricism and sensible judgment is the technical predicate for western advancement, the industrial revolution, and the modern age. Imaginative and symbolic Modeling of the structuring of force flows, constraints, tensions, affordances, etc is the main assistant to this, with diagramming being the method of symbolizing the models for inspection, with math sometimes used in conjunction with the modeling and diagramming, mostly lately. But historically, not so much...Water Power.Steam Power.Light.The earliest diagrams or treatises on bridges, aqueducts, farming, hunting, furniture construction, ventilation, smithing/forging, boats, laying stone foundations, framing and roofing, glassmaking, medicine, explosives, dentistry, surgery, bacteriology, and so on... show no numeric calculations. (I do not consider basic formulations arrived at through trial and error or the sensing of resonance or fitness to be calculation. Nor do I consider equalizing or differentiating amounts or using a ruler to be mathematics. Basic tool use is not math; there is nothing special about dragging an arc or a circle with a string attached to a stake. If it can be eyeballed or intuited, it isn't a mathematical calculation.) And one cannot quantize quality, one can only quantize the amount of a quality. The more odor molecules waft toward one's olfactory sensory neurons, the more forceful the smell on some magnitude scale. That still tells you nothing of the sensation of the smell itself, as distinct from any other smells.
Wes-- I agree the search for certainty has a "long and tortured and exhausting history,"but isn't our persistence a noble thing? Subjective realms of morality, religion and emotion are responsible for most of the wars, atrocities and hatred in history (along with art, literature, etc.). It's difficult to point to progress in this realm. On the other hand, the realms of objective science and math have been so successful, why wouldn't we continue to look for similarly reliable, objective ways to resolve our moral feuds? Wouldn't it be lovely if there were some kind of rational basis for arbitrating what is fair or even good? That goal has obsessed moral philosophers from Socrates and Plato through Kant and Hegel and up to the present day.In the 20th century, the need has become all the more pressing as the gap between progress in the physical sciences and the lack of moral progress has become all the more alarming.The problem I see with your vaccine analogy is, if you had a car where the steering worked 95% of the time, how often would take it on the highway?Finally, you put a lot of blame for this on poor Plato, but Plato is a prime example of the mind/body dichotomy discussed in earlier comments. He drew a bright line between the world of the senses (which Plato says is an illusion, mere shadows on the wall of a cave) and the world of ideal forms. Plato for example would say for example that Kev Ferrara is one of the slaves in the cave when his stubbed toe defines the reality of the world.
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