Seems Men’s Health spoke too soon in impugning Outback Steakhouse’s Aussie Fries (see earlier post here).
Armour brand pork brains in milk gravy contain more than 1000% of your daily recommended intake of cholesterol. On the other hand, it is brain food.
(Hat tip consumerist.)
(more under the fold)
I was reading a book on the Crusades, that jihadist period of European Christendom, to learn more about the events that doomed Asian Christianity.
Basically, Christianity had more adherents across Asia and Africa than in Europe until about the time of the Crusades — meaning that the heretical Jacobites and Nestorians outnumbered the followers of the orthodox Catholic and Orthodox churches. Jenkins suggested that the fall of Asian Christianity was due to the emergence of hardline Muslim leaders across Asia who weren’t as tolerant of the other Peoples of the Book (Christians, Jews) as prior leaders had been. These leaders emerged at a time when the Islamic world was troubled by repeated Christian invasions from the West, and existentially threatened by Mongol invasions from the East. It appears that when the Khans converted to Islam, they became the most intolerant rulers of all.
But back to the Crusades. Professor Tyerman’s description of crusade recruiters made me think immediately of modern motivational speakers. Only, instead of motivating their audiences to sign up for a follow-up course, they were trying to motivate them to pick up arms and travel for several months so that if they survived the trip, they could engage an enemy, on said enemy’s territory, surrounded by said enemy’s allies. __(’Read the rest of this entry »’)
I’ve encountered a major fallacy in two fields, relating to the incorrect application of a steady-state assumption. So I’m making it a category.
I’m going to say arguments suffer from a steady-state fallacy when they improperly assume that a present-day circumstance will carry over unchanged into the future. Because over time, most circumstances do change. People get older. New technologies emerge. Empires fall, and new ones rise. And so forth.
A few examples below the fold…
…until at least the weekend. Workday priorities and such.
Meanwhile, the following phrase from Christopher Tyerman’s Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades struck me as postworthy:
Ironically, for all its political success, the Albigensian Crusade failed to eradicate the Cathars, a task effected by the more pacific and reasoned methods [?!?!] of the Inquisition. (p68, hardcover edition)
The more pacific and reasoned methods of the Inquisition? __(’Read the rest of this entry »’)
This semi-recent New York Times post is about DVD’s being unreadable four years after they were recorded. It ties into one of my musings over the years — whether a medium’s information density is inverse to durability or recoverability. Or phrased differently, is the high storage density of electronic media a crippling strength, because the data becomes too “fragile”?
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The sturdy clay tablets of Sumeria have lasted thousands of years.
Paper and animal hide can store far more information per kilogram, but rarely last as long - if the Nag Hammadi Library or the Dead Sea Scrolls were stored in an area with any appreciable moisture (say, Vancouver, BC, Canada) they probably wouldn’t've survived the nearly two thousand years until rediscovery! Fortunately, copies are easier to make.
And electronic storage is the densest — but least durable — of all. (Four years?!) __(’Read the rest of this entry »’)
There is a Zen koan which goes like this:
Show me the original face you had before you were born.
The idea of koans is to jolt the listener out of their preconceptions and perceive reality directly — to get past the transitory mental frames in which they live (as baker, parent, grandchild, recreational hockey player, Canadian, etc.) and perceive their true nature. Or so I think.
In Part 3 of A Fair Country (”The Castrati”) Saul argues that if our elites could understand what it is to be Canadian — as opposed to what it is to be not-quite-American (or not-quite-British, as was the case back in the day) — they could advance our country and culture, confidently. As it is, they represent our interests self-consciously, timidly; as if they’ve got empire envy.
To adapt the Zen koan, if they knew their original face — an open, Aboriginal culture in which a bedazzlingly diverse array of peoples live together and thrive together in peace and harmony — they wouldn’t be brow-beaten by an Imperial Inferiority Complex. Like a lion confused it’s a sheep, re-discovering its lionhood (lionness? __(’Read the rest of this entry »’)
) would allow it to return to its full potential.
Part II of John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country is titled Peace, Fairness, and Good Government.
It’s a play on the phrase Peace, Order and Good Government which appears in the Confederation-enshrining Constitution Act of 1867. The phrase — an eminently pragmatic aspirational ideal — appears in many Commonwealth Independence documents.
A major point of Part II is Saul’s argument that the phrase was originally and consistently Peace, Welfare and Good Government. That’s the welfare-of-the-people, as in the English wellbeing, the French bien-etre, the classical Greek eudaimonia. Saul notes this spirit is reflected in First Nations expression of the common bowl — an earthier analogue to the English term of the ‘commonwealth’. __(’Read the rest of this entry »’)
Infovore that I am, I love reading over the holidays. More so than being acquainted with unfamiliar facts, I treasure being shown their context, and how they came to be. To paraphrase from my Facebook, I like knowing what; I love knowing why.
I finished John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country: telling truths about Canada a few days ago — a thickly-enriching read, as he always is. Happily, it was an easier read than Reflections of a Siamese Twin, his previous tome on the Canadian identity. This may be because he spent less time on the decades leading up to Confederation this time around (a grey area in my schooling), or he drew that historical arc more tautly, or it may even be that I’m more familiar with that period now. :)
Saul’s goal (as evidenced by early references to the work as “three new myths about Canada”) is to re-envision Canada as:
He richly succeeds with the first two points; hopefully, he will be shown prescient on the third.