October 2009
What’s Up With You?
(Via The Jaunt.)
You Spin Me Right Round
Amazing—though you have to wait until about the 1:35 mark for it to get good, but once it does, it’s totally worth it. Via Anthony Paul Smith’s Twitter.
The Philosophical Problem of Consciousness Itself
The seeming ineradicability of idealism then in this sense results from the fact that human beings are incapable of imagining anything other than this element of consciousness in which we are eternally submerged (even in sleep); incapable therefore of theorizing this phenomenon in the light of what it is not—by virtue of the law that identifies determination with negation (Spinoza). Such agnosticism is not a defense of idealism as a philosophy, but rather an acknowledgement of the limit under which it must necessarily place all philosophy.
—Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, p. 7
No Empty Space
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber […] a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death.
—John Cage
The GRE, and Other Bullshit
So right now I’m currently in the throes of standardized-test preparation, gearing up for what I hope to be an exciting exam that will negate years of strenuous academic labor in one swift, blood-curdling blow! But I’m optimistic.
Anyhow, I ordered two Kaplan GRE books, one the comprehensive GRE practice book, the other designed solely for improving on the verbal section, to prepare for the exam and to give me an idea of what sort of thing I might expect to encounter once I take it.
One incredibly annoying thing that I soon discovered Kaplan does, perhaps unsurprisingly, is recycle their GRE sample questions. Keeping this in mind, I somehow managed to get both identical questions wrong. How, you ask, might such an embarrassing oversight on my behalf occur? I will now venture an explanation!
The GRE practice question that stumped me twice is the following one, an analogy:
SHINGLE : ROOF ::
- rind : melon
- armor : knight
- feather : wing
- patch : cloth
- canopy : bed
The first time I took the practice test (in the general GRE book), I chose Answer #3, “feather : wing.” My reasoning was that if you strip a wing of its feathers, its naked and unprotected, just as a roof without shingles would be. Kaplan, however, disagreed. Here is what they write:
B. A shingle protects a roof. Let’s try the answer choices. A rind protects a melon. No; eliminate. Armor protects a knight. Yes; keep. A feather protects
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