Monthly Archives: July 2008

Venting.

What I have to vent about is my own fault. What is most pre­cious is prob­a­bly slip­ping away; what needs to be done is not being done well at all. I can con­ceive of things being a lot eas­ier. But they are a lot harder for many more peo­ple. I wish I could take that knowl­edge …

July 30, 2008 – 4:14 am | By ashok | Posted in personal | Tagged | Comments (3)

Addendum to “Justice’s Required Redeemer: On The Dark Knight” (spoilers)

Eliz­a­beth Wol­cott has noted that if Joker’s knives are his use of words, then we can account for Joker’s scars. Pre­sum­ably the scars came from a knife; given that he describes his father cut­ting him up and him cut­ting his wife or him­self up (I’m not sure of the lat­ter, I for­get what hap­pened), and …

July 27, 2008 – 2:42 pm | By ashok | Posted in movies | Comments (0)

Rant: How Do We Determine If Too Many People Are Going To College Or Not?

Note: I am aware of how hyp­o­crit­i­cal the end of this is, given that I’m work­ing to be a pro­fes­sor. I’m con­vinced any­one who stands for any­thing is prone to hypocrisy — the only way to avoid the prob­lem is to be shame­less. 1. Any­one who walks onto a US col­lege or uni­ver­sity nowa­days is …

July 24, 2008 – 10:46 am | By ashok | Posted in education, politics | Tagged | Comments (1)

Justice’s Required Redeemer: On “The Dark Knight”

Note: Spoil­ers galore ahead. The movie is well-paced, incred­i­bly dense, and very tense. Please do not ruin it for your­self if you have not seen it — this movie prob­a­bly can­not be hyped enough. How­ever: if you can learn what jus­tice is, why so seri­ous about a mere plot? for Peter Lund 1. Does jus­tice require redemp­tion? …

July 23, 2008 – 3:47 am | By ashok | Posted in batman, movies | Comments (7)

Quick Post, I Want to Get Back to Work: “Distracted from Distraction by Distraction”

This arti­cle is most cer­tainly alarmist, but has a few points worth con­sid­er­ing: To what degree are atten­tive­ness and being dis­tracted phys­i­o­log­i­cal con­di­tions? The author claims that knowl­edge of the brain tells us that if you’re dri­ving, and some­one is describ­ing some­thing over the phone that requires you to visu­al­ize it, a “visual chan­nel” will …

July 22, 2008 – 1:08 pm | By ashok | Posted in education, links | Tagged | Comments (2)