Miscellaneous thoughts about miscellaneous matters
From time to time, people ask me what I am writing, and I usually refuse to comment, and sometimes I tell why, and I did that today. The reason is simple, many stories have one good telling, so I better get it written while I can. A number of years ago I thought of a great story, and I went through and thought out every bit of it from opening to dialogue to the ending. One evening, before I wrote it down I told some friends the story in all details that I could think of. They all ...
Recently I was writing a story about Harry visiting Atlantis, and Plato entered into the story for obvious reasons, and that got me to thinking about using people and characters as characters. That was especially true, when I was trying to use Socrates as a character also, but that didn't work out, because his execution came too early in Plato's career. But that didn't stop me from wondering what Socrates was actually like in the real world. That was after I realized that I didn't think much of ...
After writing a little about Cynicism I started wondering about good and virtue, as used in relation to the Cynics. What are they, and should we care? That's what happens when one thinks about Ancient Greek philosophy. So what is "good"? There are many books by noted philosophers that comment on that question. Personally, I don't think there is a good definition, unless one circumscribes the word with so many conditions that it means barely anything. What's good for whom? ...
We have known for many years that photography is related to memory deficiencies, but it has not been demonstrated whether photography is the cause of defective memory, or if it is a result of having a defective memory, specifically an attempt to fill in for a natural memory, and it is possible that it varies from case to case. It must be a pleasant surprise to people who can’t remember much that there are devices to allow them to save images of persons, things, places, and events ...
Photography, a Symptom of Dementia There was a convention of photographers near here recently. It spurred me to think more about the mental aberration that causes people to take photographs, but even after considering the matter, I am not certain exactly why people engage in that behavior, but there probably are several reasons. The clearest rationale for photography is that photographers have poor memories. If they had good memories, then they wouldn’t even ...