creases's New Writeups

English language (thing)

2009-08-21T15:27:16Z

William Blake called the English language "the rough basement". That has always appealed to me; I imagine a cottage cellar hewn from dark well packed earth, smelling of life.

I have the good fortune to know several native speakers of other languages who are ardent Anglophiles: one is Paraguayan, one a Swiss German, and one is Japanese. They all say the same things about English.

It's very musical. A sentence can be a song. It needs to be spoken slowly; it has a natural rhythm that warrants being let to take its own time to develop.

It isn't always logical, but there is something comfortable and commonsensical about it. It isn't always precise, but if you are willing to dig long enough for the right word, you can achieve a finesse of nuance not possible in other tongues.

It isn't always straightforward, but it is full of curios and knick knacks that make up in charm and surprise what they lack in elegance.

District 9 (review)

2009-08-18T00:02:49Z

tl;dr version: It's worth watching as a cool action movie that riffs on well-established tropes in a playful, by-the-books kind of way.

Mild spoilers ahead. Nothing serious. There isn't much to spoil, anyway.

2009. Directed by Neill Blomkamp. Screenplay by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell. Produced by Peter Jackson. Starring Sharlto Copley.

It's super gory. Bad guys get exploded all over the place.

The alien animations are very well done, very convincing, and used appropriately. The level of detail that went into them is marvelous.

As far as the story structure goes: The movie uses the technique of fake documentary to set things up, but drops this when it would interfere with telling the story in a conventional way, whereupon it adopts conventional techniques for dramatic exposition.

As far as the plot goes: It has one original conceit that forms the core of the back story and is revealed in the opening minutes of the…

Coase Theorem (idea)

2009-08-14T23:01:22Z

The Coase theorem is a finding in economics. It was first proven by Nobel laureate Ronald H. Coase, in his paper "The Problem of Social Cost", from the Journal of Law and Economics volume 3, issue 1 (1960), pp1-44.

To put it more simply than it deserves: the theorem has to do with "externalities", which happen when one person (the defendant)'s use of their property interferes with another person (the complainant)'s use of their own property. The theorem applies to cases where this gives rise to a lawsuit or a suit in equity, and it isn't clear whether this interference was wrongful, or rather within the defendant's rights. The problem which the theorem is meant to address, is whether judges, when faced with a property dispute of this nature, might consider the "economic efficiency" of deciding in favor of one party or the other. In this context, the "efficient" result is the one that provides the most value to consumers who may not be a…

April 17, 2008 (idea)

2008-04-17T03:40:22Z

The empiricist in me is very much attracted to a vision of the world as teeming and rich with spontaneous diversity, with differential intensities; ever partial and polymorphous; a miscellany, a multiplicity or manifold; striated, variegated, mixing, perverting; sometimes motley or piebald, sometimes confused; but other times tingling, quivering, quick, enchanting, bestowing mute and gasping affect.

I have a saying: I worship details. You know what they say about details – they say the Devil's in the details. What do you think that says about me?

But for the Romantic in me, this is only half of the picture. Without synthesis, no detail would never be part of anything greater than itself. Each detail can be isolated and appreciated for its own contribution to a tapestry of experience; but without its host of counterparts, a detail is bereft of its meaning. We have it within us to reach out and bring together what is manifold, through our own power of…

concept (idea)

2007-11-26T06:10:55Z

In the system of transcendental philosophy that Kant presents in Critique of pure reason, a 'concept' is a representation of many things at once, through common features. It is contrasted with an intuition, which gives an individual. Kant's German term is "Begriff", literally a seizing or gripping; this is the translation of the Latin technical term "conceptus", which literally means "taking together", in other words gathering up the universal properties of a thing in an act of the mind.

A concept is something we create in order to compare many phenomena to one another, or to distinguish them according to their different properties. In classical philosophy, that means that a concept is an act of the intellect, which is just the technical term for our power to understand things beyond merely sensing them. Concepts are discursive - that is, they do not give direct data of the things they…

Intuition (idea)

2007-11-26T00:38:09Z

In the system of transcendental philosophy that Kant presents in Critique of pure reason, an 'intuition' is a representation of an individual entity. It is to be distinguished from a concept. Kant's German term is "Anschauung", which is a translation of the Latin technical term "intuitio". Both words literally mean "looking-upon", denoting an instance of beholding something, or as we might say today, a perspective on something.

All of our intuition comes to us via the senses. In classical philosophy, that means that it must be a passively received impression, or a datum (which is Latin for "given"). An intuition gives an appearance of a thing to us. The senses, for Kant, include the five classical "outer senses", and also an "inner sense" whereby we can perceive our own thoughts and feelings. Kant describes intuition as a "manifold", and it seems likely that this means it's a confluence of sensible details, like colors, sounds,…