About E.T.

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So far E.T. has created 45 blog entries.

August 2014

People Are Talking About ALS Now. It’s About Time.

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00August 25th, 2014|Life, Tech|

My grandmother was a strong, stubborn woman, part Irish and part Pennsylvania Dutch, raised amid the worst of the Great Depression. She didn’t take kindly to anything that slowed her down, and this included the early symptoms of ALS.

By the time the formal diagnosis came, the disorder was moving very quickly. In rapid succession, she lost the ability to climb down stairs; to walk; to sit up; to talk at all. During one of our last visits, I can remember marveling at the steely determination she showed as she raised her hand and pointed.

She became good at pointing. She pointed when she wanted something done; she pointed when she wanted you to know she loved you. The effort she summoned to make this small gesture was the same amount a healthy person might muster to climb a mountain.

She died in 1998 of an unrelated cause, shortly after she lost the ability to swallow. To the end, she remained sharp. It was only her body that failed her.

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June 2014

Losing the War

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00June 7th, 2014|Gold|

Excerpted from “Losing the War,” by Lee Sandlin

Whenever people talk about the meaning of history somebody brings up that old bromide from Santayana, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But that’s nonsense. The circumstances that created an event like World War II couldn’t be duplicated no matter how many millennia of amnesia intervened.

To the extent that the war had an intelligible cause, it was in the rancors left over from World War I, exacerbated by the Great Depression — and those rancors existed only because of decades of hatred and infighting among the colonial empires of the 19th century. But the brief dominion of the Japanese “coprosperity sphere” lasted just long enough to wreck the colonial system in Asia, and the final convulsion of war bankrupted all the great powers of Europe, leaving the former rulers of the world in abject poverty — food rationing in both Germany and England lasted well into the 1950s. The first new historical trend of the postwar era was the systematic shedding of colonial possessions, and the just-created nations were immediately absorbed into new alignments of power demanded by the triumphant global empires of the atom. The old architecture of the world devised by Europe was as harmless a memory as a dissipating storm front. Like most big events in history, World War II obliterated its own causes.

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New York, or the Feeling That Something’s Missing

2016-12-28T21:37:56+00:00June 4th, 2014|Life|

It’s very easy to make fun of New York and the artists who flock to it.

Ironic fixed gears; misappropriated plaid; male cutoffs and career baristas; an excess of profound utterances and an absence of thought. Add to this well-practiced angst, deep-rooted entitlement, and basically most of the shit on Girls.

But of course, this is a stereotype. While it carries a kernel of truth, it’s also a mean-spirited exaggeration, levied by certain groups of people against something alien and unknown.

It also comes from a place of fear: financiers and everyday breadwinners and government-minded folks like me, residing in a world of material cause and effect, do not want to allow the thought that these people with their heads in the clouds have found a way to live life better. We can’t allow the thought, at least without also questioning whether our own paths are the right ones.

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May 2014

Time, and the Lack of It

2016-12-28T21:37:56+00:00May 17th, 2014|Life|

Where does it all go? This is a question I suspect many people ask themselves as they get a little older. It’s certainly something I’ve been asking myself.

There was a point, not very long ago, when the college rhythm of constant coursework and extracurricular commitments seemed about as tough as it could get. With the exception of the occasional superhuman, most folks approached undergrad like some giant juggling contest, where you couldn’t necessarily be sure of everything you had in the air at any given time. You could be fairly confident, however, that things would work out in the end.

The time after graduation – and entry into the working world – is different. You’re no longer in a bubble, where a few dropped balls and SNAFUs kind of come with the territory. Now, you’re playing for keeps. If you make a commitment, you better follow through, or have a damn good reason why you didn’t. If you follow through but half-ass it, the consequences can be even worse.

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April 2014

De Amicitia

2016-12-28T21:37:56+00:00April 6th, 2014|Gold|

From roberto, via The Listserve, April 1, 2014

Over the course of my life, I have had a handful of deep friendships that came suddenly and surprisingly and without any warning.  They have been with people of different nationalities, ages, and backgrounds.  Three are with men, and two with women.  In each case, I was meeting with someone for the first time, usually for accidental or inconsequential reasons, sometimes standing in for a colleague.  Each meeting I expected to be short and businesslike but each morphed quickly instead into a deep conversation between the two of us.  Bertrand Russell described a similar experience in his first meeting with Joseph Conrad:

“At our very first meeting, we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire. It was an experience unlike any other that I have known. We looked into each other’s eyes half appalled and half intoxicated to find ourselves together in such a region. The emotion was as intense as passionate love, and at the same time all-embracing. I came away bewildered, and hardly able to find my way among ordinary affairs.” (“Autobiography.” Routledge, 2009.)

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March 2014

The Philosopher vs. The Priest

2016-12-28T21:37:56+00:00March 6th, 2014|Gold|

From Prof. Daniel N. Robinson’s “Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition” (The Great Courses Series)

Something momentous takes places when a culture takes the position that the problem of knowledge is essentially a religious problem and invests its credulity in a denominated group of official interpreters whose judgments on matters of this kind are taken to be incorrigible.

…

Once one confers on a select and denominated group ultimate epistemological authority on core questions arising from the problem of knowledge, the near inevitable result is philosophical paralysis.

What is more likely to happen is that positions will become quite hardened and the only thing left for scholarship is to interpret the words of the wise. So the entire debate now is not about the nature of truth, but about how a text or holy maxim is to be understood.

What the leaders of thought in the ancient Greek world might be inclined to say is, “This may be the best way to get to heaven – but surely not to the moon.”

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January 2014

The Heritage IS Hate!

2016-12-28T21:37:56+00:00January 31st, 2014|Culture|

Originally published (in a superior layout) on Medium.

This is a story about rednecks, the Confederate flag, and the time everyone thought my school was going to get shot up. It’s all true and I wish it wasn’t.

Chances are you feel a couple different things when you see this particular flag on display.

Historically, it exists as an artifact of America’s divided past. In the modern day, it stands as a symbol of choice for the nation’s political fringe. Above all else, it’s a reminder that certain groups of people were once beaten, hunted, and dehumanized, all because of the color of their skin. They suffered these wrongs beneath the banner of the Confederate Flag.

Of course, make these points in certain parts of the country (the parts I’m from) and you’re liable to be shouted down. “Heritage, not Hate!” the cries of protest go. There is a strong and enduring counternarrative that the flag is just that — a flag — easily divorced from its racist roots and screed.

This argument is also bullshit. To disentangle it, let’s start from the beginning. (more…)

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Regarding Science, Conflict, and Regret

2015-01-23T03:57:32+00:00January 30th, 2014|Gold|

From C.P. Snow’s Science and Government, 1961:

[Discussing disagreements over the equations used to determine percentage of German city destruction in the British strategic bombing campaigns of World War II]

Let me break off for a minute. It is possible, I suppose, that some time in the future people living in a more benevolent age than ours may turn over the official records and notice that men like us, men well-educated by the standards of the day, men fairly kindly by the standards of the day, and often possessed of strong human feelings, made the kind of calculation I have just been describing.

Such calculations, on a much larger scale, are going on at this moment in the most advanced societies we know.

What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of some of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity?

They will have the right.

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