Motus Mentis

“As a child, learn good manners, As a young man, control the passions, In middle age, be just, In old age, give good advice, Then die, without regret.” – Inscription found in the Bactrian city of Ai-Khanoum in Afghanistan. Attributed to Clearchus of Soli, a student of Aristotle

Steve Sailer famously said that “political correctness is a war on noticing”. There are patterns to reality so stubborn and prevalent that they enable us to make more or less reliable predictions. This is “induction”: reasoning, from accretion of the particular, to general rules that we believe in with increasing confidence as the data accumulate. […]

“The teacher asked once what did we talk about when we talked about happiness. And then one student said that happiness is what happens when you go to bed on the hottest night of the summer, a night so hot you can’t even wear a tee-shirt and you sleep on top of the sheets instead […]

Here’s Marcus Aurelius, writing about the Clintons: “To my mentor Fronto I owe the realization that malice, craftiness, and duplicity are the concomitants of absolute power; and that our patrician families tend for the most part to be lacking in the feelings of ordinary humanity.” – Meditations, Book 1

There aren’t many public figures on the Left who irritate me the way the writer Chris Hedges always has. (Tim Wise is another.) Pallid, sneering, humorless, self-righteous, and full of that grotesque collectivist piety that has done more damage in the modern world than any other force of man or nature, the very sight of […]

In keeping with our ancient tradition, here’s this year’s selection from the searchphrases that brought readers to our doorstep in 2012: man in chicken suit flying on hang glider lwica lwica race map the boy who cried sheep thats a moray freedom go to hell ice tricks darkie toothpaste pelicans eating other birds no bikini […]

Here’s a timely collector’s item, if you can find one. (Hat-tip to my colleague Yaniv Sarig.)

lich: southern dialectal survival of O.E. lic “body, dead body, corpse,” cognate with O.Fris. lik, Du. lijk, O.H.G. lih, Ger. leiche “dead body,” O.N. lik, Dan. lig, Goth. leik, from P.Gmc. *likow.

I’m slowly recovering from whatever it was I had — some sort of virus, I suppose, that triggered a general shutdown of major bodily and cognitive subsystems. Between that and a slip in the snow Thursday morning that caused fresh and debilitating damage to a recent orthopaedic injury, I have spent most of the past […]

I’m old enough to remember Pan American World Airways, which throughout my early years was America’s foremost airline. I flew Pan Am on many occasions (including, once, all the way to Japan for a recording project), and through the misty lens of memory I recall the service and comfort being far superior to the cattle-car […]

If you are in New York City today, you can take in a twice-yearly astronomical phenomenon: Manhattanhenge. Learn more here.

If you enjoy this sort of thing, there will be rather a spiffy celestial display on Wednesday morning. Details here.

There’s an interesting little item in the news today: paleoanthropologists have found Homo Erectus footprints 1.5 million years old that record the earliest known example of anatomically modern human feet — feet that are designed solely (so to speak) for walking, and not for grasping. It is hard to imagine anything more evanescent than a […]

This will be of zero interest to any of you, but in my little corner of Gotham the corks are popping. Here’s why.

According to this story in today’s New York Times, Europe is looking to increased use of coal to meet its energy needs. As you might imagine, this news is not being received warmly by those who are concerned about levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, according to this item by Australian scientist-engineer Philip Chapman, we […]

There are a great many roadside oddities in America, often associated with equally odd people. One such dyad I’ve only just learned of is the Coral Castle, in Homestead, Florida.

I’ve learned a new word: whalefall. It refers to the effect of reduced buoyancy upon deceased cetaceans, and came up today in an interesting and educational context.

Readers of the New York Times will be familiar with Verlyn Klinkenborg, who contributes marvelous little essays to the editorial page. He lives on a small farm in upstate New York (“upstate” being a preposterously Gotham-centric term for the 97% of New York State that isn’t part of New York City or Long Island), and […]

Which animals live the longest? That’s right: clams. And according to today’s Physorg.com newsletter, we have a new champion. Learn more here.

I must say this is certainly NOT how I imagined that the early days of October would be. Five weeks ago I scribbled a post in which I gave thanks that the summer’s sticky warmth was soon to give way to the clear cool days of autumn. “The most beautiful months of all”, I said. […]

At least you aren’t a seven-legged, terminally constipated, hermaphroditic ruminant.

As regular readers will know, I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a pleasant, attractive neighborhood of tree-lined streets and century-old townhouses the adjoins lovely Prospect Park. The area has had its ups and downs; when Nina and I moved here in 1982 the neighborhood was just emerging from many years of decline. During the Sixties and Seventies this was a pretty tough district — an Irish and Italian neighborhood with a lot of gangs and petty crime; during that era the handsome old buildings were neglected and often even abandoned. Since then, however, Park Slope has ridden the city’s rising tide of prosperity, and nowadays it’s a very affluent area, with upscale shops and restaurants, and the streets nowadays are full of attractive young couples pushing children in strollers. This is all very nice; certainly our own humble abode has appreciated gratifyingly since we took it over many years ago. But there is a dark side to all this American Dream stuff: you can’t find any place to park.

I don’t do a lot of recording these days; the music industry having gone through rough times in the 1990’s, I took up software engineering, and now make my living writing code. I still do two or three albums a year, though, and I am occasionally reminded of one of the other reasons I was inclined to switch careers: the hours can be grueling. Yesterday’s session at Avatar — a new album for my old friend, the guitarist Steve Khan — started at ten a.m., and when I left sometime after one in the morning, Steve was still wrapping up a few loose ends in Pro Tools with our assistant, Brian Montgomery.