Castling Kingside

It takes hours to build a sandcastle and seconds to destroy it. At this very moment, Tommy is involved in the former. There is no school this morning, so he came over to the playground after breakfast. Tommy loves building sandcastles; he visits the sandpit almost everyday. His mother is unhappy about having to vacuum the house everyday, but is reluctant to buy him Lego building blocks so that he won't go to the sandpit. And so he builds.

The Half-Blind Prince

An eye for an eye makes the world go blind, but two eyes for an eye leaves you with one, and in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king (inter caecos regnat luscus). This seems a sound strategy according to game theory, at least on the surface. But Hobbes tells us that even such a cyclopean king is susceptible to assassination by his blind subjects, so there will still be some degree of egalitarianism in this dystopia. However, blind subjects are perforce of lower economic value, both due to reduced capacity for labour, and reduced empathy as they cannot "see things" the same way as their liege. Also, what value does a one-eyed king have to a blind people? He might be able to do things better than them, but he would have less understanding of their issues, and there would be less social acceptance, even if he was clearly the best choice to lead.

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Thou Art

I sat next to some interesting people in the cinema the other day. One was a culturally knowledgeable woman, who was apparently trying to educate her teenage daughter. She commented on the songs playing before the advertisements started, the meaning and relevance of the French song playing during an advertisement, and then during the trailer for Fast & Furious 5 about the potential of film as an art form and how it is wasted on car chases. As if well-choreographed car chases are not a kinetic art form.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Dogs

I spotted a good piece of advice in a magazine: "Get a dog. Even geniuses need some unconditional love." Not that genius warrants much love anyway. But in one of those rare moments of clarity, a hybrid of epiphany and prescience, I saw how it will all turn out:

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The grand narrative of progress is shoved in our faces wherever we go. Since consciousness is bound to the illusory arrow of time granted us by thermodynamic entropy, the existence of psychological phenomena such as memory and (apparent) free will leads us to adopt that grand narrative. That presupposes a certain principle that guides free will toward progress, but the grand narrative itself reinforces the existence of that principle in a positive feedback loop. Such a tripartite Escherian structure cannot exist without any pillar; the grand narrative is necessary to justify der Wille zur Macht, that driving force of life, and der Wille is required for progress.

Spiderman innamorato

Once upon a time, in one of the rare moments of peace known during Charlemagne's reign, a knight-errant was roaming the land. He had not had any deeds to perform for years, and was contemplating returning home that day as he rode towards the village. It was an average-looking village next to an average-looking forest, and his spirits fell at the thought of the deeds he would not be performing in this village.