TANGENTIAL TO HAPPINESS (ALMOST ON TOPIC)
00-5-18

For me, everything comes back to Aristotle. (Or at least a fair number of things do.)

Elsewhere, I am involved in conversations under the headings of generosity, magnanimity and virtue (like talk of cocaine under the awning of a 7-Eleven, there is not necessarily any obvious connection between the discourse and the banner under which it hangs). But it brings to mind the magnanimous person.

The greek Aristotle used was:

megalopsychia (megaloyuxia): lit. "greatness of soul," translated in Latin as "magnanimitas" from which derives the English "magnanimity."

In this handy table of the virtues discussed in books 3 and 4 of the Ethics you can see that, in the cases of both generosity and magnanimity, it is better to err on the side of excess than of stinginess or "pusillanimity" respectively (there is also an excellent discussion of magnanimity on the last linked page — scroll down — which makes the magnanimous person sound exactly like the well-balanced sage of the I Ching).

It all boils down to this: if I sometimes feel like I am posturing or being vain (magnanimity "in excess") even if I am right about being that way it is better than at least one other alternative. "Ah, Stewart Butterfield of 1235 Comox St. Vancouver BC Canada V6E 1K6," you might say, "why would you ever worry about such things?"

The answer comes from the way I make decisions. I feel quite compelled to maximize future utility. Constantly. And I only realized this recently.

It is not only money, being thought well of by people I respect, by learning more about those things I yearn to comprehend, or prospects (career, health, sex-life) positive effect on the world, number and quality of possessions, emotional quiet, strength, pride of accomplish, satisfied curiosities, pleasures of the body or wisdom. There are more; there are uncountable degrees.

The problem is that I'm not really sure what utility I desire (sure, "happiness" but that is too generic to be useful). Or, more precisely, what utility I am likely to desire in the future. Present Stewart isn't sure how to best serve future Stewart. But then present Stewart thinks well, what the hell am I so worried about him for anyway? I can just do what I want.

Yet I can't, really. I can't even begin to prioritize all those desiderata with any confidence. And in any case, I am grateful to past Stewart for getting me to this point. I'm obliged to try, but all I can do in the moment is feel around in the dark.

All of this means I'm unlikely to get magnanimous anytime soon: "Most of us have moral insight that is partial, intermittent, or piecemeal and, therefore, that can be overcome by feeling or desire: incontinence. The magnanimous person, in contrast, does not hesitate to do what his moral insight reveals to be the proper thing to do."

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Now, if I wanted to say "my friend jlg", I can say "my friend jlg" instead and there will be instant context. This is what happens when society's most dangerously subversive elements get websites. I am only half anti-disestablishmentarian, but I still don't like it.

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PLUS ÇA CHANGE
00-5-16

I recently got a new PC. I've never owned a PC before (16 years, all the way from an Apple ][e to a Power Computer PowerCenter Pro 180) and I have been going through endless Mac archives finding files to convert. I found two interesting things:

Less interesting (1998):

A bunch of old Power Computing ads. I was a big fan of Power Computing — they made kick-ass reasonably-priced machines just when Apple was disintegrating. My favorite was put out after Apple bought their licence back (shutting them down).

More interesting (1995):

A letter I wrote nearly five full years ago. I found this absolutely fascinating to read. I didn't end up marrying "Ervilha" (we're still close friends though) but I did go to grad school (and I didn't normally write like that, it was to a friend of a friend who I didn't know very well).

Except for the name changes, I didn't make any edits at all. Very unusual for me, but then the temporal distance makes much more like publishing someone else's old letter.

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Sin of omission: yesterday's list should have have included D'Arcy Thompson, one of my intellectual heros. If I could translate Aristotle and write treatises on growth and form and go about mathematizing, I, um, would.

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Note: Zeldman's excellent article in A List Apart was not the cause of all the extra visitors; it came a day too late to be a fitting explanandum. I really liked that article because he is one of the few who realized the contest was not part of some crusade from smaller files but a way of establishing a maxim: as he puts it, "limitations are the soil from which creativity grows". More on this later & elsewhere.

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THIS WILL BECOME INTERESTING AGAIN
00-5-15

Someday I am going to write a book called Bionoclasts: Heretical Opinions in 20th Century Biology (or maybe Biconoclasts? — titles are my favorite part). That is why I brought up Richard Lewontin's Biology as Ideology last week.

The book would be an survey of the lives and opinions of working biologists who reject the Neo-Darwinist Synthesis to varying degrees (for scientific or philosophical reasons, not religious ones — I don't find creationism very interesting). Here are a few examples off the top of my head:

• Hans Driesch
• Stuart Kauffman
• J.S. Haldane (no links that I can find — he is not the same as J.B.S. Haldane)
• Brian Goodwin & Gerry Webster (just got their new book Form and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in Biology yesterday. Their 1982 paper in J. Soc. Biol. Struc. (5:15) "The Origin of Species: A Structuralist Approach" is one of the few anythings that I have read more than 5 times in my life.)
• Rupert Sheldrake
• Mootoo Kimura

Related: Selfish Gene Theory Of Evolution Called Fatally Flawed (via Peterme)

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About the ":8080" in the URL for this page you're looking at. There have been 2.2 million pages views at sylloge.com since the beginning of this month (6.4 million hits for 8.6GB of traffic; 99.9% of that for the 5k, natch).

Because the site is on a shared server, something had to be done. "So to continue hosting the site without disruption to your visitors and our clients on that server, our sysadmin redirected it to a separate http process running the latest Apache on a different port."

Because of a typo committed during that process, much of sylloge was unavailable for a day or two (unfortunately, it was the day or two that I was out of town and not going online AND it was the days the site got slashdotted and something else big (about 25K visitors, more than double the slashdot crowd) but I still haven't figured out what that second thing was and the referrer logs are broken, so if you know, tell me: stewart@sylloge.com)

Anyway, the point is you do not have to use the ":8080" in links to this site. Requests for pages on sylloge.com will automatically be redirected to sylloge.com:8080 — to ensure that your links will work in the future, do not put ":8080" into your links (since the ":8080" will eventually be gone). All old links will work.

(More information about port forwarding (for geeks) or a list of well known port numbers.)

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I guess I'm basically cursed when it comes to air travel. This time it goes like this: fly 1:55 from Richmond to Chicago — Folks, there is going to be a slight delay in getting a landing slot in Chicago due to thunderstorms which have closed both the North approaches — So we circle around (at like a 15º angle) for 15 minutes or so — sorry to announce that it may be as much as an hour before we're able to land at O'Hare —

We end up trying for two and a half hours before we have to put down in Cincinnati for refueling. That ends up taking another three hours and then it is off to Chicago. By the time we get there I'm over 5 hours late for my connecting flight.

And they can't get me my baggage. So it is eight hours in O'Hare with about 5,000 cranky fellow travellers but without any contact lens gear. (One neat thing: there were army cots scattered in one concourse, but I didn't find them until 4:15am, about 15 minutes before they get put away.)

Finally get back to Vancouver, after 24+ hours of continuous travel. And (of course) no baggage.

So, um, that's it folks. If we need to meet, you can come to Vancouver or meet me in one of the many cities that has a direct flight from Vancouver, unless I move, which I am feeling an increasingly urgent need to do.

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