Not much happening here these days, huh? I know that I have fallen quite a bit behind on Brothers K, but I do plan to reattack it once the New Year has come and gone.

I really don't want to know what the advertising tagline for this is going to be.

In the chapter on Smerdyakov, Dostoevsky likens this character to a painting called "The Contemplator" by Ivan Kramsky (according to my translation). From Dostoevsky's description of this painting, I've found that it is "Meditator" by Ivan Kramskoi, and it can be viewed here. (I'd have posted it here directly, but it's a pretty big image.)

Appropo of Nothing....

I recently downloaded Mozilla and this site looks horrible. John Hardy, is this what you've been using all along and that's why it looks so dark and nasty to you? The comments look fine. I'll figure out what the story is tomorrow.

Via Newsweek: Trent Lott and the GOP's racial troubles.

It was just a quick stop, at a store on a campaign trip through the Northeast more than a dozen years ago. Trent Lott, then a Mississippi congressman about to make his move for the Senate, was visiting a state for a Republican candidate. When Lott walked in, he asked: “Why aren’t there any black people here?” a source who has spent time with him in unguarded moments tells NEWSWEEK. Nervously, someone explained that this was not the most diverse of regions. “Not even behind the counter?” Lott said. Warming to his punch line, Lott added: “We’d be happy to send you up some if you need any”—and then chuckled.

Is anyone else bothered by the current Republican meme of "I'm shocked ! Shocked! to find that gambling is going on here!"?

One of the most interesting things about 'Brothers K' to me is D's expressed intention to write a subsequent book about Alyosha which this book only prepares us for. Here's what I found on Google:

[Dostoyevsky] planned to write a sequel to 'The Brothers Karamazov' in which, twenty years later, his hero Alyosha would leave his monastery cell and become a revolutionary and die for his idealism. He "would have searched for the truth and in his quest would naturally have become a revolutionary," Dostoyevsky said. See Grossmann, p. 587 Joyce Carol Oates in note #8 in an article on 'The Dispossessed'

It is said that Alyosha was to have become involved with revolutionists and to have committed a political crime, - it will be recalled that during Dostoevsky's last years the terrorists were increasingly active and, indeed, his own death antedated by one month the assassination of the czar. The possibilities of such a novel as this projected sequel fairly dazzle the imagination. But there is no need to speak of might-have-beens. The work as it stands is sufficient to engage profoundly the mind and the emotions of the reader, and to leave him shaken by a sense of the large potentialities of the soul. Avrahm Yarmolinsky on the site Jaq recommended (end of the article)

In a russian book on Dostoevsky(printed circa 1960), which I have at home, it states that notes made by Dosty on the ideas that the sequel would include were kept by his wife after Fyodor's death. It was mentioned that the book was to take place in 30 years after the events of the first book and concentrate on the life of the now middle aged Alyosha. He was to change dramatically in those years after a long love with Lise, which was to be full of pain and unhappiness. Alyosha was to leave the church and fully re-enter the society. from this thread which mentions the title as being 'Life of a Great Sinner'

I believe the work you are thinking of is 'Life of a Great Sinner', in it's entirety it was planned to emcompass Alyosha's leaving the monastary, his later debauchery, and finally his conversion back to faith. I believe I read about this in Joseph Frank's brilliant biography...

In 1868, Leo Tolstoy had finished his epic novel, War and Peace. Readers and critics loved the book. Dostoevsky, inspired and perhaps also envious, began to consider writing an epic of his own. He wanted to write a grand book, even longer than Tolstoy's, that would give him room to express his philosophies regarding the spiritual dilemmas of the modern Russian man. This epic - first titled Atheism and later The Great Sinner - was to be "the story of a Russian skeptic who, after many years of moving back and forth among all sorts of theologies and popular sects, in the end finds the Russian Orthodox religion and the Russian soul" (quoted from Grossman's biography). The Great Sinner was originally designed to contain five volumes, connected by one hero. The five books would eventually be distilled down to one: Brothers Karamazov. again, from the Dartmouth site. (This article goes on to chronicle how D's plan's changed, inspired by an ideological murder, from which he wrote 'Demons'.

I am very sorry that we didn't get the chance to read what might have come.

Russian Icon: the Virgin Odigitria.

In keeping with The Brothers K, I did a little searching for Russian icons, since I noticed that Dostoevsky tells us several times about the elder Zosima bowing to the icon, and the like. I have to confess a bit of ignorance here: is an Icon a religious picture, held in Orthodox tradition to be spiritually significant?

I found a good site on Brothers K here.

My take on Brothers K: I give it a six. It's got a good beat, and I can dance to it!

But seriously, I'm enjoying the book quite a bit, although it's proving to be very slow going for me. My approach to Brothers K is rather like the tortoise's approach to beating the hare. (When my mother spied my copy of the book on my desk, she snorted and said, "You're going to be reading that thing forever!") I do have to keep reminding myself that it takes place in Tsarist Russia, but it's interesting to see some derisive remarks made about "atheistic socialists" in a book written years before the Marxist Revolution.

Thus far in the book (I'm just starting Book Three, "The Sensualists"), a major theme seems to be crime and what sort of state is best equipped to deal with criminals. We are told that an ecclesiastical state, in which the Church has become the State, is best, because in such a state men would know that by committing crimes they are not merely committing crimes against their fellow men or against their State, but against Christ himself; thus, excommunication becomes the most horrible of punishments. This seems to ignore problems of doctrinal differences that inevitably arise whenever two Christians inhabit a room, much less millions of them inhabiting a nation, and unless I missed it, nothing is said of how such a state would react to unbelievers, if they even admit that unbelief is even possible. So, what do we think of Dostoevsky's ecclesiastical state?

And for an interesting "compare-and-contrast" exercise, check out Den Beste's take on the foundations of law, posted just this week.

[I'm assuming that we should keep front-page posts about Brothers K to a single topic, and if we have something else we want to bring up, we should do so in a new post? Otherwise, the comment sections might get hard to follow.]

Glossy and Greedy: Real Page-Turners

Peter Carlson of the Washington Post writes "a magazine review about two magazine stories about magazines. If that's too ridiculously meta for you, quit reading now. My only defense is that these stories help explain why so many of America's big corporate publishers put out such lame mags."

Magazines do seem to have become ridiculously lame over the past few years. Do you all subscibe to any? Is there a remedy? Anyone else remember the foul-mouthed hard-ass Rosie O'Donnell that used to host a stand up comedy show?

For reference, here is a listing of the magazines that AOL-Time-Warner owns under Time, Inc. (scroll down).

I came late to the tax discussion below, but added a comment anyway.

Brothers K

So how is everyone doing on the book? Enjoying? Flustered? Not reading it? Where is everyone? Are we all at a point where we can begin discussion?

< /survey>

I'm finished with the first two books, and hope to be done with Book 3 by Friday-ish. I didn't read a single page over Thanksgiving though, so that kind of impeded my progress. What about you three?

steven den beste is the captain of the starship uss clueless
steven den beste is on again about the landmine treaty
steven den beste is catching up
steven den beste is a mind reader and faster typer
steven den beste is correct about the "netscape engineers are weenies" phrase
steven den beste is back
steven den beste is right when he says that yasser arafat is now in a no win situation and arafat will be lucky if he survives to see 2003
steven den beste is once again writing some of the best stuff about the world in general
steven den beste is suspicious of people who post under pseudonyms
steven den beste is in top form with his essay on the tactics of delay over an iraqi invasion
steven den beste is a man of few words today
steven den beste is quite wrong to describe american liberal democracy as the greatest rival to what he calls "transnational progressivism"
steven den beste is back and has a lot to say about the kyoto protocols
steven den beste is actually a real name? i could look
steven den beste is often political
steven den beste is agreeing with me
steven den beste is not the only blogger unafraid to kick the apple herd of sacred cows
steven den beste is spot on in this analysis of why we were attacked
steven den beste is a prolific
steven den beste is going to "channel the shade of diogenes"
steven den beste is very seldom "clueless"
steven den beste is one of the internet's most popular "bloggers"
steven den beste is in favor of war
steven den beste is actually discussing something else
steven den beste is shutting down his forum
steven den beste is incorrigibly brilliant as always
steven den beste is wonderful
steven den beste is just plain wrong
steven den beste is a retired software engineer who now spends his time writing for his web site
steven den beste is arguing that the culture produces murderous thugs
steven den beste is prepared to argue in favor of string bikini as feminist icon
steven den beste is back from holiday
steven den beste is linked everywhere and people always take his pronouncements on the middle east as wise and informed
steven den beste is one of the brightest bloggers out there
steven den beste is linked everywhere
steven den beste is gone
steven den beste is back from vacation
steven den beste is not any more thrilled with this than i am
steven den beste is an infinitely more intelligent guy than pejman "i am manufactured consent" yousefdeh
steven den beste is one of the few
steven den beste is a software engineer
steven den beste is out of the board business
steven den beste is gloating because the un weapons inspectors are adhering to kofi annan's
steven den beste is one of the internet’s most popular “bloggers”
steven den beste is on a roll
steven den beste is one of those who find it lacking

So how about you?

Update: In the name of Radical Honesty, I thought I'd better own up to something. I originally posted this and then immediately thought it was a little too frivolous. So I deleted it again. The problem was that I didn't realise that I had already published it and, by the time I did, people had already left comments about it.

So I've gone and posted it again and here are your original comments.

Sorry for the balls up.

Radical Honesty is a kind of communication that is direct, complete, open and expressive. Radical Honesty means you tell the people in your life what you've done or plan to do, what you think, and what you feel. It's the kind of authentic sharing that creates the possibility of love and intimacy.

I came across this book at Borders and it really interested me.

Be sure to read the FAQ for some concrete examples.

What would happen if we told the whole truth all the time?

Caption this photo!



Source: Chicago Tribune, November 14, 2002

It used to be "pistols at dawn", but now we've got "tax plans at dawn".

Two blogs I follow have posted their thoughts on how to fix the US tax system in the last couple of days. First up is William Burton's tax plan, from a liberal perspective. He wants to keep the estate tax firmly in place, close up the corporate loopholes, restore the progressive brackets to something more like they used to be, and stop differentiating between payroll income and capital-gains income. Then we have Jane Galt's tax plan, from the libertarian perspective (at least, that's what I think her perspective is -- I read her blog sporadically, but her alias suggests a libertarian view). She wants to eliminate the corporate income tax, eliminate the estate tax, and end all deductions. The two agree that capital gains should not be treated any differently from other forms of income, they both agree that their respective views have zero chance of ever being enacted in the current political climate, and both concede that to tax Warren Buffett at twenty-five percent would not have nearly the same effect on his standard-of-living as the same percentage taxation would on, say, a family of three with a total income of $30,000 a year. (There are other points the authors discuss, but they are on tax details that I don't know anything about. I also don't get the impression, though I may be wrong, that the authors are aware of each others' proposals.)

So, what constitutes fairness in a tax system? And to what degree is "fairness" even desirable in a tax system, in the first place?

When I first heard the word palimpsest, it sounded to me like a nasty skin condition.


The death of Archimedes
taken from the article Proof, Amazement, and the Unexpected

Fellow Collaborators will recall that the word had been floated by Jason as a possible name for this blog. It means "twice-written" which when you think about it is a pretty cool name for a collaborative web log. In Latin it means literally means "scraped again" and this refers to the medieval practice of scraping clean old parchments so that they could be reused a second or more times. Parchments were generally made of animal skin, so I guess the nasty skin thing wasn't that far off.

Any way, we didn't go with the name but at the time I remembered hearing about the discovery of a palimpsest that contained a previously unknown work of Archimedes. It had been found as traces left on a 10th century parchment which had been roughly scraped clean, cut in half, bound into a book and overwritten with a 13th-century Greek prayer manual. The manuscript first came to light in 1906 in Constantinople but was almost immediately lost again (some say stolen) only to resurface on the block of a Christie's auction room in 1998. It sold for two million dollars.

Scholars have since had a chance to examine it and using ultraviolet photography and digital imaging have been able to read beneath the prayer book's lines and decipher Archimedes' text and diagrams. What they have found is was quite remarkable particularly in light of our current understanding of the development of mathematics. Copied and recopied by scribes over a thousand year period since the time when Archimedes lived, this is the largest existing tract of words by the man himself. He puts together in a treatise entitled the Method of Mechanical Theorems a series of proofs which, amongst other things, appears to anticipate the invention of calculus by more than eighteen centuries.

Calculus is an indispensable tool of modern mathematics and was invented by Leibniz (and independently by Newton) and, as you may recall from high school, is all about chopping things up into an infinite number of pieces that are themselves infinitely small. It's this kind of thinking about problems that is conventionally assumed to have been beyond the pale for the ancient Greeks who are said to have avoided dealing with infinities and always preferred to stay with the finite and the rational. Not so, apparently, when we come to Archimedes.

Modern scholarship always assumed that mathematics has undergone a fundamental conceptual shift during the Scientific Revolution in the 16th century. It has always been thought that modern mathematicians were the first to be able to handle infinitely large sets, and that this was something the Greek mathematicians never attempted to do. But in the palimpsest we found Archimedes doing just that. He compared two infinitely large sets and stated that they have an equal number of members. No other extant source for Greek mathematics has that.

The Origins of Mathematical Physics: New Light on an Old Question

See also:
Ancient Infinities
The Archimedes Palimpsest Exhibit at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore
Scholars decode ancient text, shake up pre-calculus history

You can find a full translation of the text and diagrams from the palimpsest here. As an example, this is an excerpt from Archimedes' Letter to Eratosthenes

Since I see, however, as I have previously said, that you are a capable scholar and a prominent teacher of philosophy, and also that you understand how to value a mathematical method of investigation when the opportunity is offered, I have thought it well to analyse and lay down for you in this same book a peculiar method by means of which it will be possible for you to derive instruction as to how certain mathematical questions may be investigated by means of mechanics. And I am convinced that this is equally profitable in demonstrating a proposition itself; for much that was made evident to me through the medium of mechanics was later proved by means of geometry because the treatment by the former method had not yet been established by way of a demonstration.

This is a game called "Landlord's Game", which was a precursor to the classic Monopoly. The classic game is the current feature of NPR's Present at the Creation series.

"Balance" is a fetish in news reportage circles -- the idea that both sides of a story must be equally described. In reality, it's a chimera -- one side always gets more airtime, or is otherwise favoured. You pick a moderate on one side, and an extremist on the other, assert that it's a balanced debate -- and you've just shifted the centre ground towards the second faction's territory.

Much has been written recently about the growing disconnect between American and European attitudes on world affairs. Science fiction author Charles Stross has a particularly interesting take on the phenomenon, which he has titled The Manufacture of Dissent. Stross feels that attitudes, for better or worse, are being shaped by biases both hidden and unhidden in the media on both sides of the Atlantic. I can't help but think that he's on to something here. I don't know much about European media (Stross is from Scotland), but I see this kind of thing very definitely playing out here in the United States, where commonplace belief now holds that our news media is relentlessly biased toward the liberal end of the political spectrum, despite all manner of evidence to the contrary.

This image, of a distant galaxy, confirms that at the center of this galaxy two black holes are on a collision course.

I love astronomy and cosmology for many reasons, not the least of which is the way they regularly provide things to which the only appropriate reaction is a Keanu-like "Whoa...."