"The river of laughter in which we swim begins in infancy; it springs up simultaneously with the river of thought."

"Aristotle thought that human beings were distinctive because they were rational; Wittgenstein believed it was language that made us special; Sartre argued that our humanity flowed from the exercise of our wills. But the speed with which children embrace humor suggests that it, too, is fundamental to human nature. We laugh, therefore we are."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Why Are Kids So Funny? The emergence of humor so early in life suggests something important about human nature" (The New Yorker).

I think part of why little kids are funny is that they've got loving adults gazing at them all the time and responding with delight. The kids are playing to the audience. And the parents' reports are subjective. 

Then the other reason kids are funny is that they haven't been socialized yet. They're not holding back, worrying that something might be stupid or weird or disgusting. Adults need a little courage to be funny. We're inhibited and afraid of embarrassment and the loss of status. To be funny is to take some risk, but little kids are utterly blind to the risk. These are people who shit their pants on a regular basis.

"In the 19th century, virtuoso pianists, including Adolfo Fumagalli, composed left-handed works to wow audiences during encores. (Sometimes, Fumagalli used his right hand to smoke a cigar.)"

"'They were saying, "You think I’m good with two hands? Wait until you see what I can do with only my weaker one,"' McCarthy said. Around the same time, a disabled pianist was also trying to develop a one-handed repertoire: Géza Zichy, a Hungarian who had lost his right arm in a hunting accident as a teenager, transcribed pieces by his friend Franz Liszt, as well as J.S. Bach and others." 

From "Only 5 Fingers Playing Piano, but the Sound of So Many Hands/Nicholas McCarthy overcame rejection to make a professional career playing the surprisingly vast repertoire for left-hand piano" (NYT).

"The most important figure in the repertoire’s development was Paul Wittgenstein, a promising Austrian pianist, who fought with the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I, alongside his brother Ludwig, the future philosopher. Paul Wittgenstein was shot in battle, and woke up in a hospital to learn that doctors had amputated his right arm. Wittgenstein said later in interviews that he had never contemplated giving up music, and recalled drawing a charcoal keyboard on a crate when he was sent to a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp so that he could practice one-handed. In the decades after his release in a prisoner exchange, Wittgenstein used his family’s wealth to commission composers including Ravel, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev and Richard Strauss."

"Is there footage of this thing gasping for breath for two minutes before expiring? I need some light comedy before bed."

Says one commenter on "SC cop killer Mikal Mahdi chose upscale final meal before he was executed by firing squad" (NY Post).

And there is this, from Mahdi's lawyer: "Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi had chosen the lesser of the three evils.... Mikal chose the firing squad instead of being burned and mutilated in the electric chair, or suffering the lingering death on the lethal injection gurney."

Having given you 2 sides of the death penalty issue, I will take the liberty to turn the topic to grammar — the lawyer's grammar. You shouldn't say "the lesser of three evils." It's correct to say "the lesser of 2 evils," but "lesser" is used when there are only 2 things. If there are more than 2, you've got to use "least" — "the least of 3 evils."

That "the lesser of 2 evils" is a very common phrase and "the least/lesser of 3 evils" feels new is evidence of our tendency to see our choices as binary.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok:

"The book’s popularity seemed to be fueled in part by the recent re-election of President George W. Bush..."

"... many of whose critics viewed his administration, with its purported dismissal of what one Bush aide called the 'reality-based community,' as exemplifying the very blitheness about truth that Professor Frankfurt had described."

From "Harry G. Frankfurt, Philosopher With a Surprise Best Seller, Dies at 94/He spent his career exploring will and deceit. Then came a sudden success: a bluntly titled book that found that one strain of dishonesty with a barnyard name was worse than lying."

The headline makes it seem as though the NYT doesn't think it's "fit to print" that blunt title — "On Bullshit" (paid link) — but the title does appear in the first paragraph and the word "bullshit" appears over and over in the text of the obituary. The key insight:

"Museums are indeed the churches of progressive-minded people, since they celebrate just the qualities that fanatics and dogmatists want to quelch..."

"... the vigorous acceptance of uncertainty that lets us ask new questions and leaves us unsure about which way is up. Not knowing which way is up is indeed part of the point. 'If I turn the work around, I risk destroying it,' the curator in charge of the exhibition where the Mondrian was to be shown said... adding that 'maybe there is no right or wrong orientation at all?'... Abstract art was meant to interrogate premises... The reason that pictures of Mondrian’s kind are inestimably precious to the human spirit... is that they are the last place where individual purpose and human pluralism are so ferociously honored. The values that are most important—and ones which progressives are most inclined to honor—are those which empower the greatest range of people to self-expression with the greatest possible individuality."

Writes Adam Gopnik in "The Case of the Upside-Down Mondrian/A great work of art always produces a vital disorientation" (The New Yorker).

Why does Gopnik keep saying "progressive"? It doesn't sound like the so-called "progressives" in American politics today.

To view the "vigorous acceptance of uncertainty" as the central quality of progressivism runs directly counter to the idea Biden proclaimed in his speech last night. Am I progressive if I vigorously accept that we can never really know who won the 2020 election or am I a dark demon of chaos? Is Biden a fanatic or dogmatist for wanting to quelch those who won't embrace the "right" answer?

"A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that 55% of Republicans falsely believe Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election was the result of illegal voting or rigging."

"Additionally, 60% of Republicans incorrectly agree that the election was stolen from Republican Donald Trump." 

CNN reports, aggressively inserting the view that the people who were polled are wrong. I believe that's a very unusual way to report an opinion poll, with insistence that the opinion is wrong and apart from any factual reporting that makes it perfectly obvious that the opinion is mistaken. 

This displays a desperate fear of the opinion, and I don't think it does much good. The urge to stamp the opinion out will tend to make those who hold it grip more tightly: What are they afraid of? Are they trying to get me to move on, telling me there's nothing to see here?

CNN continues:

What is perfectly clear, however, is that Republicans' lack of faith in our current election infrastructure is a direct result of Trump's historic efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 results.

It's "perfectly clear" why people have this opinion? This is a news article, reporting a poll, and it's making an absolute assertion about why human beings believe what they do. That doesn't inspire confidence. It makes people suspicious, perhaps paranoid. 

FROM THE EMAIL: Cheryl writes: 

“Election infrastructure...” 

Seems like that word is being softened up to mean anything they want it to mean. Wonder why. 

Good catch. I'll boldface the word in the quoted text above. Cheryl's right. There's been a lot of talk lately from Democrats around the word "infrastructure." I was just saying: "It's a propaganda word to the core."

AND: Temujin emails:

"If you could speak to animals, which animals would you want to talk to?"/"Deep-sea fish."

From "The Stylist Embracing Messy Hair/Meet Dylan Chavles." Just a New York Magazine set of questions for a person, this one happening to be a hair stylist who stole the idea that I had when I was 10. I became famous in my own fantasy as the designer of The Mess-Up, the brilliant new approach to hairstyling done by messing it up.

And I'm also pretty sure that deep sea fish have nothing interesting to say. You know, they're under a lot of pressure, but they don't even notice.

ADDED: There's always Wittgenstein:



That's just the last 2 panels. Go here for the full story.

Let's explore ADHD with owls.

David Sedaris has a book title, "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls." The book has nothing to do with diabetes, but there is a chapter titled "Understanding Understanding Owls," which is about a book called "Understanding Owls," which he owns because his partner Hugh (a painter) needed reference photographs of owls. Sedaris and Hugh found the book title so funny that they had a routine, something like...

“You know,” I’ll say. “There’s something about nocturnal birds of prey that I just don’t get. If only there was somewhere I could turn for answers.”

“I wish I could help you,” Hugh will say, adding, a second or two later, “Hold on a minute…what about…Understanding Owls?”

But what if you really did think it was a good idea to use owls to understand some human disorder? I'm reading, "Scientists Study Barn Owls To Understand Why People With ADHD Struggle To Focus" (NPR).

So a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore is studying... what goes wrong in the brains of people with attention problems, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Why not study what goes wrong in the brains of people who set up an "owl lab" where...

Shreesh Mysore, an assistant professor... has a distraught bird perched on his forearm. And as he talks, he tries to soothe the animal.

He just "has a distraught bird." Did the scientist cause the bird to become distraught? Why are we entering this story in medias res?

The owl screeches, flaps and digs its talons into the elbow-length leather glove that Mysore wears for protection. He covers the bird's eyes with his free hand and hugs the animal to his chest.

The owl, no longer able to focus on the movements of his human visitors, goes quiet.

So the "hugged" owl who stops fighting has gone quiet because he's no longer distracted?

When it comes to paying attention, barn owls have a lot in common with people, Mysore says.

"Essentially, a brain decides at any instant: What is the most important piece of information for behavior or survival?" he says. "And that is the piece of information that gets attended to, that drives behavior..... When we pay attention to something, we're not just focusing on the thing that we want to pay attention to," Mysore says. "We're also ignoring all the other information in the world. The question is, how," he says. "How does the brain actually help you ignore stuff that's not important for you?"

Some things that are important to me are whether the scientist is harassing the owl, whether the owl has any dignity interests worth respecting, and whether preconceived ideas about the human mind are being projected onto the owl? And what is the human interest in having an "owl lab" at Johns Hopkins and how does it affect the questions asked in the previous sentence?

There's no simple way to study it in a human brain, Mysore says, but owl brains offer a good substitute. The birds have a predator's ability to focus, as well as keen eyesight and hearing. They also have a brain organized in a way that's easy to study. Because owls have eyes that are fixed in their sockets, the birds must swivel their head to look around. That makes it straightforward for the researchers to tell what they're paying attention to.

So you can use an owl to study a human because you can see what they're paying attention to because they have to swivel their heads to look at things. There's not much description of how the owl is subjected to distractions. The main thing I see is "an owl might be listening to bursts of noise coming through special earphones while a computer monitor shows an object approaching quickly."

I'd be interested in understanding owls if the owl could speak — and if, also, somehow I could understand what he was saying* — and I could understand how he felt about confinement in an owl lab, and being made to wear earphones** and subjected to bursts of noise and video images of quickly approaching objects and having a man in elbow-length leather gloves disable all of the things that make him great — his eyes, his wings, his talons. Do owls hate?

There's no simple way to study it in a human brain, but why is it considered simple to treat an owl this way? And, by the way, we do experiment with children. We give them drugs and see if it works, and we judge how it works from the perspective of adults who find certain children very annoying and inconvenient.
______________________________

* In one of the famous books written in prison, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." [Correction (via buster): "[T]he book Wittgenstein completed as a POW is Tractus Logico-Philosophicus. His remark about the lion appears in Philosophical Investigations, which he wrote while teaching at Cambridge."]

** A deliberate reference to "Ballad Of A Thin Man" ("You should be made/To wear earphones/Because something is happening here/But you don’t know what it is/u, Mister Jones?"). Maybe the owl, if the owl could write songs and screech them like Bob Dylan, he would sing something like that to the researchers in the Owl Lab... "You've been with the professors/And they've all liked your looks...."

"How much apes really do resemble us in their emotional range and mental capacity will probably remain a mystery for longer than many of us will live."

"But when it comes to Koko, that may not really matter. Our response to a creature at once so like us and so different was to seek out the similarities — to experience empathy and to trust that Koko experienced it, too. It didn’t matter that she didn’t speak English the way we did, or even that she wasn’t human the way we were. What mattered was that somewhere in Koko’s eyes, we saw ourselves."

From "How Koko the gorilla spoke to us" (WaPo).

Koko died this week, at the age of 46.

Here's something I wrote about Koko back in 2005:

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him. But people taught a gorilla to speak and she said the very thing – if we are to believe this new lawsuit – that drunken guys say to women at Mardi Gras. If a gorilla could speak, we would understand her all too well!

Perhaps sensitivity to gorilla culture ought to have moved the women who worked with the renowned Koko to show her their nipples, but, America being what it is, they sued. Ah! Our litigious society! Should that be part of a job? Accommodating a gorilla? Make that, accommodating a celebrity gorilla! Well, there's no hope – exceedingly little hope – of convincing the gorilla that sexual harassment is wrong.

Being human, we love Wittgenstein's idea that the lion – or the gorilla -- would say something stunningly new. But the truth may be that the animal would just say "show me your t**s" – again and again. Oh, Koko! We once thought you were so profound. We believed we could make you human through language, but what have we done? Have we only reminded ourselves of our own lack of profundity?

Interesting, that bit about " accommodating a celebrity gorilla." It makes me think of Donald Trump's "And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy." Donald Trump, by the way, is not a gorilla. He's an orangutan.

Cornel West attacks Ta-Nehisi Coates with a side swipe at Toni Morrison, and Michael Eric Dyson tells West to shut up.

West put this up at Facebook:

In Defense of James Baldwin – Why Toni Morrison (a literary genius) is Wrong about Ta-Nehisi Coates. [James] Baldwin was a great writer of profound courage who spoke truth to power. Coates is a clever wordsmith with journalistic talent who avoids any critique of the Black president in power. Baldwin’s painful self-examination led to collective action and a focus on social movements. He reveled in the examples of Medgar, Martin, Malcolm, Fannie Lou Hamer and Angela Davis. Coates’s fear-driven self-absorption leads to individual escape and flight to safety – he is cowardly silent on the marvelous new militancy in Ferguson, Baltimore, New York, Oakland, Cleveland and other places. Coates can grow and mature, but without an analysis of capitalist wealth inequality, gender domination, homophobic degradation, Imperial occupation (all concrete forms of plunder) and collective fightback (not just personal struggle) Coates will remain a mere darling of White and Black Neo-liberals, paralyzed by their Obama worship and hence a distraction from the necessary courage and vision we need in our catastrophic times....

In other words: Coates, like Obama, is only a liberal, not a hardcore lefty, as he should be.

I got there via the Observer, which tried but failed to get Coates to respond and proceeded to get a response from Michael Eric Dyson, "a professor of sociology at Georgetown University who wrote a withering takedown of Mr. West in the April issue of The New Republic."

He described Mr. West’s Facebook post as an “acrimonious dirge,” a “bitter, nasty, sorrowful blue note,” and “despotically and willfully intolerant of the gifts and talents of those who may potentially eclipse him. It shows the vast ineptitude of professor West’s scholarship,” Mr. Dyson told the Observer in a phone conversation. “The point I made in my piece is that he doesn’t keep up, he doesn’t read the freshest, newest, most insightful scholarship, nor does he write about it in any serious fashion or teach it in his curriculum, and it shows here.”...

Mr. Dyson suggested that Mr. West listen to “the great Ludwig Wittgenstein,” who said: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

In other words: Shut up.

"Nothing seems to me to be rarer today than genuine hypocrisy."

From a list of 35 aphorisms about lying.

But none of the aphorisms on the list is the aphorism I am looking for. You know the feeling that there is an aphorism that's already out there for something you're trying to say in aphorism form. You can say it briefly, but not in the words that must be in the aphorism.

Here's as close as I can get to saying what seems to me to be a rough paraphrase for a reasonably well-known aphorism: He who lies about small things will lie about big things. Or: Little lies foretell big lies.

What I'm looking for is the "Where there's smoke, there's fire" of lying.

"I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called."

Wrote Fania Pascal, back in the 1930:

I croaked: “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” He was disgusted: “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.”

That's quoted in Harry G. Frankfurt's book "On Bullshit." Frankfurt aptly wonders if that really happened like that:

It seems extraordinary, almost unbelievable, that anyone could object seriously to what Pascal reports herself as having said. That characterization of her feelings — so innocently close to the utterly commonplace “sick as a dog” — is simply not provocative enough to arouse any response as lively or intense as disgust. If Pascal’s simile is offensive, then what figurative or allusive uses of language would not be?

Karl Pilkington!

There's a little article about this hilarious man in today's NYT:

Karl Pilkington has debated the merits of eating a kangaroo's penis for breakfast, envisioned a wristwatch that counts down the time left in a person's life and proposed a new population control system in which elderly women give birth at the moment of their deaths. He has mused on topics ranging from caveman "bear pants" to dishwashers on Mars, and reported "news stories" about the triumphs of chimpanzees as bricklayers and television talk show hosts. In so doing, Mr. Pilkington, a 33-year-old unemployed radio producer from Manchester, England, has become the object of a global Internet cult, a Guinness world record-holder and the unlikely harbinger of a technological revolution.

Mr. Pilkington is the breakout star of "The Ricky Gervais Show," a podcast presided over by Mr. Gervais, the British comedian behind "The Office" and "Extras," and his co-writer and co-director, Stephen Merchant. In its brief, 12-episode run this winter, the program, available on the Web site of The Guardian (guardian.co.uk/rickygervais), has racked up nearly three million free downloads, the most ever for a podcast, according to the Guinness book. While these numbers reflect the international popularity of Mr. Gervais, the program's title is a bit misleading. The show is almost entirely devoted to the esoteric ramblings of Mr. Pilkington, whom Mr. Gervais has called both "the funniest man in Britain" and "that little bald-headed Manc idiot."

Of course, you've listened to these podcasts, haven't you? If not... you're so lucky! You have so much fun ahead of you. Gervais alone is great, but Gervais talking to Pilkington -- sublime!

I love the way the two are so completely dumb and smart at the same time. Like, in the 12th podcast, when they start talking about Wittgenstein's remark that if a lion could speak, we wouldn't be able to understand him. Gervais restates Wittgenstein's point so crisply that it's clear how smart Gervais is, and Pilkington starts down a thoroughly Pilkingtonesque line of thinking: it would depend on the lion, maybe you could understand a lion in the London zoo, better than a worm at least, what could a worm tell you, even if it is English, etc. It's so purely stupid, yet you'd have to be quite brilliant to be capable of saying it.

...

Somewhat related: I talk about that Wittgenstein quote, Koko the Gorilla, and Mardi Gras.

"Fat is sinfully complicated."

That's the title of my new post over on GlennReynolds.com. Someone emailed to denounce me for ignorantly ripping on the Atkins diet, which I found amusing, because I'm always using the Atkins diet. I love it for precisely the reason stated in the post: it's excitingly transgressive!

UPDATE: If I had to judge from the email I'm getting -- and I would be very sad if I did -- I'd have to say people don't seem to understand much of anything about why I wrote that post. People keep emailing me to inform me that the best way to lose weight is to eat less and get more exercise! And here's something someone wrote me about the Monday post over there (the one about Koko the talking gorilla): "You as a law professor at worst have encouraged this gorilla tit problem. At best ignored it." I'm not entirely sure what that means. I know it's a criticism of me, but it certainly made me laugh quite a lot.

AND: I had to change the link to a page in the Wayback Machine. MSNBC let the link die, so I'm going to reprint the entire thing here to assist in preserving it.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him. But people taught a gorilla to speak and she said the very thing – if we are to believe this new lawsuit – that drunken guys say to women at Mardi Gras. If a gorilla could speak, we would understand her all too well!

Perhaps sensitivity to gorilla culture ought to have moved the women who worked with the renowned Koko to show her their nipples, but, America being what it is, they sued. Ah! Our litigious society! Should that be part of a job? Accommodating a gorilla? Make that, accommodating a celebrity gorilla! Well, there's no hope – exceedingly little hope – of convincing the gorilla that sexual harassment is wrong.

Being human, we love Wittgenstein's idea that the lion – or the gorilla -- would say something stunningly new. But the truth may be that the animal would just say "show me your t**s" – again and again. Oh, Koko! We once thought you were so profound. We believed we could make you human through language, but what have we done? Have we only reminded ourselves of our own lack of profundity?

Meanwhile, a lion seems to be roaming about in California. It's not a talking lion, and it's surely not a reading lion, but it is lurking somewhere in the vicinity of the Ronald Reagan Memorial Library.