Clicking around a little, I was pleasantly surprised.
Maybe they'll write my papers for me.
I like this question:
Is it unethical to move loyalty to another sports team just because the current team you're rooting for isn't doing well?
Really? I came to different conclusions, but I might have clicked differently. Velleman talking about math: not exciting.
I wasn't hoping for exciting, really.
Oh man! I had a really good joke about the relevance of the prior discussion about age-inappropriate sexual relationships to the Amherst philosophy department, but it turns out that the professor I was thinking of isn't behind this thing! Still, he should be ashamed of himself, even if he did wait until right before she graduated.
Re 4: That's Daniel J. V., not J. David V: the latter's brother, who is a math professor at Amherst and has published in the philosophy of math.
Not that this matters to your general point...
I just asked them a really nasty question about utilitarianism and measure theory, just to see how much effort they're prepared to put into this thing ...
dsquared--please provide a link, if they ever answer.
Someone must tell Heck about the moustache theory.
I think that was text's finest hour.
I wish that there were a way to make a living by being clever and witty without actually working. text would then be filthy rich on the basis of that moustache remark alone.
This is cool. I'm always having ethical questions of some sort of another, at the very least.
But mostly I just think philsophers are hot.
Heck has rather a lot of facial hair -- or at least did when I knew him -- so he may not be able to approach the moustache theory objectively.
Or, offering truth with a mustache.
Let's face it: Richard Heck is just a watered-down version of Richard Hell. I'll bet he doesn't even have any Voidoids.
Awesome, ogged.
I don't think that the moustache as a piece of facial hair is absolutely essential to text's definition. The opposite of a thing is that thing with some consistent small tweak. Isn't that a bit like handedness in chemistry (cheirality) The left-handed molecule is the opposite of the right handed, but they are really very similar.
bg demonstrates the elegance of text's theory.
AOTW, however, we have no direct evidence that bostoniangirl does not also have a moustache, so caveat emptor and all that.
Our local npr station KALW used to have a program Tuesday around noon called philosphy talk. It was a cpl philosophy profs from Stanford who sat around for an hour with another luminary and discussed a "philosophical problem" every show with listeners calling in with questions/comments etc. It was quite interesting, especially since they went with broad discussions and not narrow esoteric ones. The show is probly still on the air, I just stopped commuting around that time, the loss is entirely mine.
At my school, there's another guy who looks almost exactly like me, except without a goatee (one of which I am semi-successfully cultivating). Without exception, my friends all dubbed me the evil twin, on account of my facial hair. So I don't think it's limited to mere mustaches.
I don't, in fact, have a mustache, but it appears that I am completely incapable of punctuating properly. I forgot the stupid question mark.
My roommate in college had a mustache which she bleached. We were both Classics concentrators, but in most other respects we were opposites. Perhaps, this is further proof of the validity of text's basic premise.
apostropher, of course, has no way of knowing that I have no mustache, and my statement, were I not lying, could be read as the definitive proof that I have one, since it would just be lying combined with a mustache.
When I arrived as a freshman at UNC, way back in the mid-80s, I had a stunning number of people come up and call me Benji, before realizing I wasn't the person they'd expected and apologizing. It was terribly odd, since I don't have "one of those faces" that always looks familiar, plus, y'know, the giant red mullet.
Anyhow, I got on an elevator about a month into the semester, and a pizza delivery guy - with a big red mullet - got on with me. Surely, I thought, surely this is the guy, because hey, we have to be the only two fellas in town with the same hair.
About the third floor, he turned to me and said, "Hey, this is kinda weird, but are you named Benji?" I eventually met a redheaded guy at UNC who went by Benji and I can only presume that he was the intended, but we really didn't favor that much. And he was balding prematurely.
I guess we do all look alike to you crackers, after all.
"Hey, this is kinda weird, but are you named Benji?"
That is so great. I wonder if there was a rumor or story, rather than resemblance, behind the confusion.
It seems to me, however, that there is a vagueness problem with defining whether a thing has a moustache. I, for example, have a little bit of a moustache. When I assert this, other people tell me I'm being neurotic, or that it's not much of one, or that I'm crazy about the moustache thing but the eyebrow bush could really use some attention. It's not so much of an issue that I have ever been driven to bleach my lip hair. So if I meet a clearly moustached me, or a clearly clean-lipped me, have I met my identity, or my opposite?
My twin is Toby. And it seems like he leads a much wilder life and knows much hotter women than I do. I'm tempted to just pretend to be him for a while.
Another question: what is the opposite of a mustache?
what is the opposite of a mustache?
A Canadian moustache.
The only Benji I know was a cute little terrier. I certainly don't recall any mullet or red hair.
The opposite of a mustache is a mustn'tache.
Real photo of Heck, for the record.
He's definitely evil. Also has unorthdox views on the question of whether or not demonstratives have Fregean senses, but fortunately for my sanity I can no longer remember what that question means or what his view was.
So far as I know, Philosophy Talk is still on the air.
Heck, "Do Demonstratives Have Senses?"
re 6 - I thought at first you were talking about a member of a different department, and the Smith student/fire alarm rumors. But realize I have no idea what you're talking about.
I want to explore generalizations of textian Moustache Theory.
Moustache Rides - The Opposite of Rides?
An Investigative Report by S. Bridgeplate.
Today, amid the flood waters in New Hampshire we learned that that all that was needed for the land to dry up was a big huge mustache that would soak up all of the water. Late Breaking News at 11 with a report from our special correspondent in the field Standpipe Bridgeplate.
Now Standpipe, tell us how it felt to witness ....
Thanks, BG. As you can see behind me, nothing remains of the flood that so threatened this town not hours ago. Instead you see hair: miles upon miles of hair, gleaming lip fur waxed to handlebar perfection. In this time of crisis, succor came to the people of Manchester from the sky and landed with a thunderous and decisive sploosh. Was it God? We may never know. The folks here are awestruck, but also, disgusted. It is not a good-smelling moustache. Back to you, BG.
re 42 --
I checked again. The person I'm thinking of actually is on the list. But it's not the fire alarm story. I do remember that one, though.
Was it "sploosh"? It's kind of Kermity.
Well, suppose SB is a person of color. Kermit is green.
According to ogged's dream I am not so much green as, say, umber.
(Listening to INEBG)
Sigh. I miss Jim Henson.
Have you ever seen the tremendously poignant cartoon, "I still miss you, Jim Henson"? In a just world it would be online but:
Bert sees Ernie say "Hi Bert!" "Ernie! It's so good to see you! There's so much that happened I have to tell you about..." But Ernie is moving farther and farther away. Then he's gone. Bert wakes up in his bed, with the Empty E bed next to him. There is a panel showing the empty bathtub with the rubber ducky on the edge. Then Bert is sitting on the side of his bed, his head hanging down....
I literally have tears in my eyes typing this summary.
Well, I believe we have assembled enough evidence to crown text as the pre-eminent moustache theorist of our time. He gets the office beside w-lfs-n and if we all work together, we can have the entire male construct covered by next spring.
Matt, that is so, so sad.
On further review, I misremembered the name--it's "I still think of you, Jim Henson," by Chris Aubry--and it was the back-up story for Cerebus 162, whatever that means. (Back cover for that issue?)
The link to the scan given here is broken but the words are:
E: 'Hey Bert'
B: 'Ernie, It's You !!'
B: 'Oh Ernie, I've missed you!! I have so much to tell you!'
B: Wha-? Ernie? Where ya going?! Ernie WAIT! WAIT!
[awakes]
[ducky]
[head hanging]
Is Cerebus more popular than I thought, or do you just have incredibly esoteric taste?
Someone had the Jim Henson cartoon taped up in the Pitt philosophy grad student offices a jibbity-billion years ago. Didn't know of the Cerebus connection until just now. (I saw a Cerebus comic book way long time ago, and was under the impression it was supposed to be funny. I don't think I can have read more than a page or two.)
I loved Jim Henson, and Kermit the Frog reporting from fairy tales was such a treat. Apparently they dropped him from Sesame Street once Jim Henson died. They ought to splice the old clips into the new episodes.
Speaking of Bert and Ernie, did anyone else own the album Sesame Street Fever? I was particularly partial to the song "Doin the Pigeon" which featured Bert rather prominently.
Amusingly, until just now I was the Internet's sole utterer of "jibbity-billion".
The Steelers win after all, and the world is just! It turns out that Lizish entered the wrong URL. Here is "I still think of you, Jim Henson." Do not click if feeling emotionally fragile.
(Given the amount of work it took to dig that up, and the time, you can tell how much I do not want to be preparing the week's lectures on Financial Statement Restatements. I am under such a mound of self-created backlog that I think my strategy is to skimp on sleep till I can't tell how screwed I am. Plus if I get myself into a physical state where it will actually harm me to fast on Yom Kippur, I don't have to! Perhaps I should not be posting this on the Internet.)
You probably can't read it, but the line below "By Chris Aubry" in the Sesame Street sign is "Ernie and Bert are (c) somebody else."
Yeah, it was pretty great. You're supposed to be able to download mp3's at a site called sesameseventies.com, but I can't get it to load.
Weiner--is the Restatement of Financial Statements really that awful? I took an accounting course at MIT, and I rather liked it. I ran into an Oxford grad student in a pub after evensong--I think his field was history--and I said that I thought accountancy (remember he was English, and we were in England) was really rather fascinating and profoundly philosophical. He looked at me as though I were mad, and asked me how that could possibly be. And I said, well, it's concerned with value and how we determine what something is worth--the very essence of at least one branch of philosophy. (Not that I know which one.)
I've decided to replace the comment I was writing with, "No, of course it's wonderful and I'm totally prepared for my classes too." Nothing inherently wrong with it, and kind of interesting to read about, but for some reason I'm having trouble getting myself to prepare the lecture. Are you working on that plan for getting us paid to comment at Unfogged?
OMG -- I totally had #63 when I was a kid. For real.
68: We just have to package it as a Web 2.0 business plan.
Is Cerebus more popular than I thought
I've read it, and I'm a middle-aged, out-of-touch guy who has read fewer than ten graphic novels (or whatever they're called) total.
You mean "middle-aged" in the ascendant sense--middle of one's biological life--rather than the waning "roughly in one's fifties," right?
Sorry, of course what I meant was uuuuuuuuukkkkkhhhh.
Right, by the actuarial tables, I'm pretty much halfway done. However, once you have two kids and two marriages, they waive the age requirement for qualification anyhow.
accountancy ... [is] concerned with value and how we determine what something is worth
I actually gave a paper on that once.
apo (71)-the whole thing? It's like 3,000 pages, I thought. I haven't read any of it, just an article about it in The Believer
Any big insights on restatements, slol? I'm working on "When Enron jumps through a bunch of hoops to justify taking something off the books, maybe they have a fundamentally deceptive purpose. Also, in order to smooth income volatility you ought to be hedging some actual risk."
apo (71)-the whole thing?
Indeed, though 3K pages goes a lot more quickly when most of the pages are illustrations and I'm a very fast reader. I have a friend who pretty much only reads comics and was convinced that I would be won over to the genre if I read Cerebus, so he kept feeding me one big bound set after another. I kept reading them, he kept giving me the next one.
I enjoyed it and did get caught up in the story, but wasn't won over to the genre.
Did you find it sustained itself? I've heard it gets really weird eventually, with a long misogynistic rant about lights and voids.
It starts out really weird; you don't have to wait for that. Also, the entire thing is pretty much a long, misogynistic rant.
I have a friend who pretty much only reads comics and was convinced that I would be won over to the genre if I read Cerebus, so he kept feeding me one big bound set after another.
Perhaps he was trying to win you over in another way with his big bound set.
I enjoyed it...but wasn't won over to the genre.
ATM.
restatements
Mostly I addressed the question of how you establish the value of a going concern, and how what appears to be chicanery under one system of value can in fact be legitimate practice under another, and during certain historical phases you can see the shift from one system to another abetted by wrangling over what is legitimate.
Whether this bears on the particular question of restatement, I'm not sure. Accepting the practice of restatement as a legitimate move rather than an admission of guilt seems to me to require accepting that ex ante assumptions about value can shift under the pressure of events. While this may in some cases be true, I think you wouldn't want to allow a rules-change as to how you book assets anytime it's convenient; the confidence of investors depends on the perception, if not the reality, that it's a rules-based game.
In other words, I agree with your position that it might amount to fundamental deception.
That's probably too long-winded for a blog-comment and not long-winded enough to be academically helpful. Ah, the sweet spot we all aim for.
Well, the restatements here are not changing the rule for the new statement (as I believe Halliburton did)--they're retroactive restatements. In other words, public admissions that the previous statement was wrong. I'm working partly from a GAO document that shows restatements increasing from 1997 to 2002, and trying to figure out why there were so many errors requiring restatement.
I think what you're saying goes along with a point I've been trying to make all along--even if the accounting principles are somewhat arbitrary to begin with, once they're in place they have moral significance. It's a convention for conveying information, and manipulating that convention can be deceptive. Last week (as I mentioned) I tried to explain act- and rule-utilitarianism in this connection, but that may not have been my brightest idea ever. (And please don't go looking on my site for the Kant in 15 minutes lecture slides.)
I remember dealing with a literature among economists / sociologists / poli sci types about the importance of preserving rule-based regimes in systems like these. But I don't, unfortunately, have citations to hand. You might however go looking in JSTOR for literature on "rule-based" systems. I think there was, specifically, a set of articles arguing that the preservation of arbitrary rules is what made Bretton Woods successful.
Most puzzles about accounting go away once you remember that the primary statement is the profit and loss account (not the balance sheet) and that the purpose of the profit and loss account is to be a summary record of the transactions which took place over the period (not the change in the value of the company).
the primary statement is the profit and loss account
Doesn't that depend on the purpose in question? For regulation, for example, the government might want to calculate a "fair return on capital" or some such phrase. This would require a valuation of physical assets such as you'd find on a balance sheet, right?
dsquared--In the US I believe that people tend to call it the income statement. Sure, but you have to account for depreciation and things like that. That's a value question. (Straight-line versus accelerated depreciation.) What is the use of a truck/lorry worth in different years?
Should we account for the cost of goods sold using LIFO or FIFO. Which is more accurate?
I think the UK p&l is the US cash flow statement.
Not net income? Hmmm It's been a while since I looked at the stuff.
I could be so wrong, too. But note also the US afternoon is the UK night and so dsquared has probably gone to dinner, telly, or bed.
It's 8 PM. He usually logs late at night from home.
D-squared's question as of yet remains unanswered.
It's been answered now.
Also, it seems that Tamar Gendler reads one of Alameida's other blogs.
Isn't that a w-lfs-n Discretion Error?
We're allowed to allude to the fact that Alameida is you-know-who, I think, we just can't use her real name ("Maureen Dowd") in Googlable form.
This misdirection is clever, but we all know Alameida really is _____
Well crown me with a lily and call me Agnes!
It's not you bridgeplate, it's standpipe. Standpipe is just...in a weird place right now. Standpipe needs to get standpipeself's own shit together, before standpipe can be in a real relationship. You understand, don't you?
i'm stuck with lousy ol' 102...*sniff*
I suppose someone had to flip out eventually, and I'm just glad it wasn't me.
You'll always have posted by: and and me
I notice that "standpipe" continued to use "bridgeplate@gmail.com" as standpipe's email address.
Maybe it was me. What just happened?
Re: "And I said, well, it's concerned with value and how we determine what something is worth--the very essence of at least one branch of philosophy. (Not that I know which one.)"
Axiology, i suppose. Would be the branch.
Oh no! Unfogged has become sentient! Get to your underground bunkers, quick!
I don't think that it's established that it's become sentient. Irritable, maybe, but we knew that.
Besides, all it will do is mumble about how stockholm.edu.sw was into really into it, but it didn't want to break her kernel. It might also throw some ethnic slurs towards a few top-level domains and/or make a lewd joke about GUI with XML (Asynchronous Transfer Mode).
Are you asking whether Unfogged has qualia?
I want to know whether Unfogged has ganglia.
Massive coolness alert: I just got an e-mail from Chris Aubry, the author of the cartoon I linked in 64 (see also 55/58). He saw where I blogged the cartoon and wrote to say he was glad that the cartoon had a life of its own. Thought I should share.
