Hey developers! New word:

Heterocoprophagy: The reuse of other developers' code.

Use it in your next code review!  ¶ 1:47 PM 0 comments

  In A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research Thomas Sheehan notes that there's no there in dasein.

Heidegger understands the Da not as "the there" but as "the open." As such, the Da is not only the same as Welt and Lichtung but is also equivalent to all the other terms that Heidegger used for die Sache selbst. The Da is the Es of Es gibt Sein: it is aletheia, Ereignis, and die Wahrheit des Seins selbst.

Welt is world. Lichtung is clearing. Es gibt Sein is "it gives." Aletheia is truth as disclosure. Die Sache selbst are the things themselves. Die Wahrheit des Seins selbst is the truth in being itself. And Ereignis is enowning.  ¶ 12:23 PM 0 comments

  Currently reading Q by Luther Blissett, who used to a mid-fielder for Watford and AC Milan, and has also written Handbuch der Kommunikationsguerilla, released a CD of Open Pop Stars music, and much more. The guy gets around. And Stewart Home likes him too, natch. Q is about the Reformation, during which many peasants and religious trouble makers were tortured and slaughtered. It's interesting because the whole Reformation is something I've never known much about. Not surprising because it happened in a bunch of middle-European towns I've never visited and was led by these religious types that keep predicting the end of the world and getting their heads removed. My favorite feature of Q is that it has short, and rarely sequential, chapters, which makes it easy to put down and pick up again.  ¶ 8:06 AM 0 comments

  In a defense of the Spanish Inquisition in Asia Times, Spengler repeats a line from an earlier essay:

The early Christian Church encountered a great extinction of peoples and their cultures through the rise and fall of the Alexandrine and Roman empires. Who now remembers the Lusitani, the Illyrians, the Sicani, the Quadians, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepidians, Herulians, Pannonians and a thousand other tribes of Roman times?

I didn't comment earlier, but since he's repeating it I feel compelled to point out that the Portuguese still refer to themselves as the Povo Luso, the Lusitani People. They remember.  ¶ 9:13 AM 0 comments

  I got the paperback of Da Vinci Code at Heathrow and finished it a few days later. It was quick. It's a thriller, one long chase scene. But while reading it I came across Nick Tosches's In the Hand of Dante, and picked it up. After the historical piffle in the Code, I felt like a dose from a master of reimagining history. In his novel Nick--ego bigger that the WTC--Tosches plays himself, stealing the manuscript to Dante's Inferno, while leaving a trail of corpses.

Reading the Code I had wondered if Bill Gates would show up, given that he bought a Da Vinci codex. And he does appear, in a factual aside about the sale of the codex. Let's don't slander the living!

In the Dante story, Nick trying to sell the manuscript and calls up various museums, institutions, and banks. He also tries the buyer of the Da Vinci Codex.

I call Bill Gates.

He does not take my call. He does not return my call.

F*ck Bill Gates.

What a hoot! A real gigantomachia of egos.  ¶ 4:16 PM 0 comments

  We're seeing less stuff along these lines "Microsoft Women Share Passion for Technology with Teens" since Mel Gibson's Jesus flick hit the via dollar-osa. Many folks have a passion for technology--they want to flagellate and crucify their PC.

For all their travails, Microsoft engineers do pull some amazing stunts in taming complexity. There's work to be done, but no one else has done better. Microsoft's "softer" departments are, well, not as "hard". The passion slogan was a dozy and appears headed for the dustbin of silly corporate campaigns, but they still have trouble trying to coerce the English language into meaning what some in the HR department "think" it means. With passion on the way out, commitment is on the way in. At first I thought they moved from the first century to the nineteenth and learned something from Kierkegaard about ethics, but no. They are adopting commitments because goals aren't specific enough. Goals not specific? You score a goal, you get one point. What could be more specific? I'm sure Microsoft's engineers know binary, but the HR department, who invents these things, are clearly trying to show their relevancy by coming up with their new insights-du-jour. Commitments are more specific than goals? "I'm committed to be faithful to Microsoft, unless I get drunk at the office party, and then all bets are off."  ¶ 5:24 AM 0 comments

  Typical misinformation from the BBC today: Shock death mars Portugal EU poll:

Antonio Sousa Franco, a former finance minister for the Socialist Party, suffered a heart attack after visiting a market in a suburb of Porto.

He imposed tight controls on public spending which made it possible for Portugal to adopt the European single currency as a founder member in 1999.

In reality he did not impose any controls on spending. Instead he cooked the books. When the socialists were defeated in the subsequent election the facts were revealed.  ¶ 5:57 AM 0 comments

  This review of Troy in the The New York Review of Books, A Little Iliad, does a good job of explaining what feels wrong about the flick:

What sets the climax of the Iliad in motion is the killing of Achilles' beloved companion, Patroclus, at the hands of Hector--another loss, but this time one that propels the sulky hero back into vengeful action. Fueled, no doubt, by a desire to expunge the vaguest hint of homoeroticism from the proceedings --by classical times, the debate wasn't so much whether Achilles and his beloved Patroclus were doing it, as rather, as in Plato's Symposium, who was doing just what to whom--Benioff makes Patroclus Achilles' 'cousin,' a bizarre choice that (particularly in an era when family ties have never counted for less) has increasingly hilarious results as the action progresses. Watching Troy, you'd think that there was no higher value for the Bronze Age Greeks than cousinage. 'He killed my cousin!' Achilles shrieks at Priam when the latter comes begging for his son's body at the end of the story. 'You've lost your cousin, now you've taken mine,' a mournful Briseis (in this version, Hector's cousin) tells Achilles. 'When does it end?' This film's notion that entire civilizations were destroyed because of excessive attachment to one's collateral relations is, surely, a first in world myth-making.

War is hell, but you got to fight for your cousins!  ¶ 12:57 PM 0 comments

  Neat genealogy of deconstruction in Dictionnaire International des Termes Littéraires

In Martin Heidegger's thinking, Plato, claiming the existence of an intelligible world beyond the realm of the senses, is responsible for the development of all the posterior metaphysical systems, according to which thought is the adequacy to eternal, rational realities, denied to the senses. Heidegger's aim was to recover the primitive meaning of logos, still present among early Greek thinkers, who employed legein as «to gather» and logos as a result of this process. Guided by this interpretation of logos and legein, he investigated in his later writings, the language of the poets, in whose words, as he believed, truth was hidden. According to Hölderlin, interpreted by Heidegger, poetry, the ability to name things, does not give them names already known. The poetical language has the power to produce essential words in which and through which the entities become what they are, a virtue lost in current language. Poetical language, a dialogue with being, creating everything, creates man himself.

Jacques Derrida, more radical than Heidegger, rejects all kinds of logos, center of the Western tradition, metaphysical and logocentric, including the author of Sein und Zeit. In Derrida's opinion, logocentrism attributes to logos the origin of truth. He adds Saussures's distinction of signifier and signified to the same metaphysical tradition. Opposing the habitual thinking, in which the order of the signified is always prior to the signifier, Jacques Derrida claims the liberation of the signifier from its dependence on the signified, the logos, origin of truth in the metaphysical, logocentric conceptions. He declares that writing, which Saussure understood as an external representation of the word, is not to be considered as a mere auxiliary form of language. Seeing that the signifier does not indicate absent signifieds, there is no meaning before writing. Meaning is the product of writing.

  ¶ 10:17 PM 0 comments