jeneralize

Those of us of the Looney Tunes generation (Elmer Fudd in a metal bustier singing “I’m going to kill the waaaabbitt”) have a hard time taking opera seriously. And that’s a good thing. Opera is like wine – it’s wonderful unless there’s some wine pedant around yapping on about “an oaky sheen” and “a florescent bouquet”.

Così fan tutte played in Vancouver last night – Mozart’s opera about – get this – two guys that make a bet that their girlfriends will never be unfaithful, then dress up as different guys and seduce each other’s girlfriends, thus losing the bet, their girlfriends (sort of), and their general happiness and well-being. The fact that they’ve cruelly deceived and manipulated their girlfriends is not an issue – “Così fan tutte”, all women are the same. Continue reading »

This week’s readings and assignments for my Philosophy Lite course are on the topic: “Does God Exist”. Because this is Phil. Lite, we get to cut to the chase: Anselm’s Ontological Argument in eight easy steps; E.O. Wilson’s genetic explanations of religious impulses distilled into a quarter page. Can’t beat that – in my (limited) previous experience with readings in philosophy, the problem is not understanding the arguments, it’s ferreting the damn things out of the massive wodges of tortuous prose in which they’re buried.

The fondness for massive wodges of tortuous prose starts early. In Philosophy Lite, we have to write Term Paper Lite – five double-spaced pages (minimum) arguing a philosophical point. Five pages minimum. What if I am able to refute Liebniz in three-and-a-half pages? What if I can demolish Kant in a paragraph? Continue reading »

In this article in The Guardian an autistic savant describes the view from inside his own head. (“When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges.”)

Daniel Tammet can speak eight languages (including one he devised himself) and can calculate pi to 22,514 decimal places. And, unusually for a person with autism, he is highly articulate – he can describe the perceptions and processes that occur in his mind.

The Experts are Interested, to say the least. “It’s too early to tell, but we hope it might throw some light on why we don’t all have savant abilities.”

That sentence sends a chill up my spine, because the logical extension is: “By studying Daniel, we might learn how to enable savant abilities in the general population.”