Claymation Plato Cave

Whatever problems one may have with the “Allegory of the Cave” from Plato’s Republic, this claymation is pretty damned compelling: I still have a measure of distrust for the notion’s scarier uses in getting people to believe funny notions about the world with no evidence save testimony (someone is always willing to claim that he has his own special access to ultimate truth, and [fill in pitifully unimaginative proposition here]; but being aware of the limitations of your own perceptions is a good thing. It applies to things like culture, or even relationships, not just to metaphysics and ontology and …

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Nutters in Bloom, and Comments From Today, and a Song

Nutters: Wow, people on the internet are crazy. I’m not going to taunt Happy Fun Freak any more than to say that, despite temptation, except to note that when one knows absolutely nothing about a topic but insists on talking about it and pretending he does know about it, it’s absolutely clear to the people who do know something how little one actually knows. Comments: A few comments from today which need to be preserved, from a meeting on student presentation proposals, a chat with a professor about the Ministry of Education, and a chat with a teacher in another …

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Two Videos From a Busyish Day

Today was kind of busy, so here are a couple of videos I found amusing, with comments as to why they caught my attention. [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/iC65ufGUvKM” width=”425″ height=”344″ allowfullscreen=”true” fvars=”fs=1″ /] Have I mentioned that at a high school variety night I performed a freejazz/fusion version of this song? Sort of. Same bass line, and I hollered some of the words into the mic before the atonal saxophone weirdness kicked in. (I played my tenor.) I was accompanied by a keyboard bassist named Jennifer Duggleby and a drummer named Mike Murza. I doubt anyone recognized the song. Maybe one or …

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Hiromi & FOTC

Music of the day, suddenly accessible as I reordered tags and crap on my iPod. It really sucks that everything is so dependent on tagging and so on — my cheaper-but-non-haptic MP3 Player is at least bright enough to pay attention to folder structures. Anyway, listen up: [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/ggL_2hk9DyI” width=”425″ height=”344″ allowfullscreen=”true” fvars=”fs=1″ /] It’s a bit, I don’t know… I don’t have a word for what I’m thinking. I used to life very “out” music, stuff that was atonal, free, wild; this music isn’t like that. But it’s really damned good for what it is, just the same, and …

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