"The cow is over there," said Ansell, lighting a match and holding it out over the carpet. No one spoke. He waited toll the end of the match fell off. Then he spoke again, "She is there, the cow. There, now."

"You have not proved it," said a voice.

"I have proved it to myself."

"I have proved to myself that she isn't," said the voice. "The cow is not there." Ansell frowned and lit another match.

"She's there for me," he declared. "I don't care whether she's there for you or not. Whether I'm in Cambridge or Iceland or dead, the cow will be there."

It was philosophy.

– E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey

The Atlantic’s In Focus recently published this selection of historic photographs from the New York City municipal archives. There are some really amazing pictures from the city’s pre-war expansion. Interestingly, most of the selection focuses on bridges. The composition of these photos really captures the enormity of these constructions. Take these photos of the Queensboro Bridge:

And the Manhattan Bridge, gettin’ it’s dangle on:

This reminded me of a story I heard on RadioLab about ‘Sandhogs,’ or the urban miners responsible for digging New York’s tunnels under the Hudson and East rivers. They used shovels. To keep the tunnels from collapsing on the Sandhogs, engineers would pump the tunnels full of compressed air to sort of hold up the structure until it could be reinforced. But, getting the pressure just right was not always easily done. Sometimes a hole would form in the side of the tunnel and the air pressure would push everything, tools, materials, people, through that hole. There is one guy on the show who got sucked through one of these holes. Lucky for him, the pressure was so great that it pushed him through 60 feet of river bed, encapsulated him in an air bubble which pushed him to the top of the Hudson River, and then threw him hundreds of feet in the air. He landed back in the river, right alongside a police boat.

Safety standards for these colossal public works projects were generally pretty bad, I gather, but there is one iconic piece of infrastructure whose construction had an almost unblemished safety record: the Golden Gate Bridge. Joseph Strauss, the head engineer, was a fanatic for safety, ordering his workers to make use of such innovations as the hard hat and safety lines. He even had a giant safety net strung up underneath the bridge to catch anyone who was blown off by the frequent gusts. The net was almost as much of an engineering marvel as the bridge. Here’s a little video about it.

UPDATE: The entire NYC municipal photo archive can be found here. That’s 870,000 pictures for your viewing pleasure.

It’s only very occasionally that one comes across a real gem while doing archival research. Usually, archival material gives up its secrets slowly and piecemeal. But I found this entry the other day while going through the old minute books of the Moral Sciences Club, a philosophy society at Cambridge where presenters deliver a short paper, usually ten minutes, and then discuss with the other members for a few hours. From 1920 to 1950, a lot of exciting papers were given at the MSC by the likes of G. E. Moore, J. M. Keynes, H. L. A. Hart, John Wisdom, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

On the evening of February 23rd, 1939, Wittgenstein opened a general discussion with the question “Why do philosophers ask what is the meaning of a word? Is it because they have forgotten?” In the discussion that followed, the familiar claim that the meaning of a word can be found in its use came up. The “meaning-as-use” thesis is often considered one of the principle themes in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and is sometimes treated as if it had the status of doctrine in his later philosophy. Wittgenstein’s remarks on February 23rd make clear that no such interpretation of meaning-as-use can hold. A description of the use of a word itself always has a particular use, and thus ironically defeats any claims that trot out the phenomenon as a thesis. “Philosophical investigations are tedious and difficult, and slip the memory. Slogans are easy, and stick in the memory. If the use goes but the slogan remains, it is ridiculous,” Wittgenstein reportedly said.

The full minutes:

6th Meeting

Feb 23rd, 1939

*Doctor L. Wittgenstein

The sixth meeting of the term was held in Mr Smythies rooms in King’s. The Secretary was in the chair. There were two guests, Dr Ewing and Mr Braithwaite. Dr Wittgenstein spoke for a short time by way of opening the discussion. He put this question to those present: “Why do philosophers ask ‘what is the meaning of a word’, (a most common word)? ‘Have they forgotten the meaning of the term, etc.?

Doctor Ewing thought the most important cases in which philosophers ask for the use of a word are cases in which they are doing something other than what they think they are doing, e.g., the case of physical objects. Mr Strachey suggested they were asking for definitions or at least trying to find out whether there can be a definition. Mr Braithwaite said he thought the philosopher was in a sense asking for an explicit description of the behavior of using the word.

Dr Wittgenstein then asked how a definition acts as a coherent account of the use of a word. He said one might say that a definition draws together the usages of words. Augustine when he asks for the meaning of a word collects usages of the word. He reminds himself. If a definition is an account of the meaning isn’t it queer that people should forget it (Prince [referring to the previous week’s meeting, delivered by Mr D. Prince, titled “The use of a word”]), for surely a definition is a very simple thing?

Dr Wittgenstein then asked what would be taken as the necessary qualifications for a definition to be an attempt at a coherent account of the use of a word. Must there not be a technique of working with symbols so that the definition seems to show the exact position of the word in question with respect to all these symbols. Suppose one defined number as Frege did, has one given a full account of the use of ‘number’ or ‘one’? No, there are actual uses of numbers which are not accounted for by it, e.g. counting people. Definition is one peculiar account of the use of the word. Only if you’ve mastered the technique of the language will you learn the word from the definition. In this sense a coherent account is not given by a definition.

Take the case of a physical object. Is it possible to define ‘cap’ by means of sense-data? Dr W thought it quite easy, but that it leads nowhere. Why do we want a coherent account at all? Philosophers only ask about certain words. Mr Braithwaite: They ask about words which are typical of a certain group, e.g. ‘table’, which is typical of a certain group. Dr W: Yes: but another thing is true, viz. if they do ask and they want a definition, they do not want the most natural definition, e.g. of ‘chair’ they don’t want the definition ‘something to sit on’. Why are they not satisfied with the normal definition of chair, or, to put the ma question in another way, why do they wish to ask for the definition of a physical object?

Mr Earle suggested they wanted to define it in terms of philosophers’ words.

Dr W asked whether one might say that the philosopher wanted to describe the relation between one type of word and another type of word.

Partly.

St. Augustine found it so immensely difficult to find out what time was. What did he want to find out about time? Someone might say that St. Augustine was not puzzled about the usage of the word ‘time’, which is something pedestrian, but was puzzled about the essence of time which does not seem so pedestrian. Why was he puzzled?

Mr Rush Rhees said puzzlement often occurred when there was a conflict of uses. Dr W: this is often called a contradiction. He cited a passage from Hertz’s Principles of Mechanics, in which the latter said that people ask about the essence of matter, etc., because a lot of defining criteria have been heaped on these notions, and these criteria are in conflict. This irritates our mind, and makes us ask ‘what is the essence of so and so?’ The answer is not given by giving further criteria, but by giving less [sic] criteria. When these contradictions are avoided, the question is not answered, but the mind no longer perplexed ceases to ask it. Dr W said he must confess that this passage seemed to him to sum up philosophy.

Nothing is more characteristic of philosophy than to ask oneself the same question a thousand times. One case is that a person never stops doing this. Another case is that a person stops. What is given to him you to make it stop? Sometimes a new analogy, which replaces an old analogy. He had often pointed out that a child is perplexed when a word is seen to have two different meanings. If this is to cease to be puzzling it must be surrounded by other cases.

Dr W then went back to last week’s discussion:

In a vast number of cases it is possible to replace ‘the meaning of a word’ by ‘the use of a word.’ In what way is this useful. Mr Lewy: It may get rid of the idea that meaning is a picture attached to a word. Dr W: How does sic the use and the picture hang together? Isn’t there an entirely parallel connexion, viz. between ostensive definition and use? Suppose I ask: What is a zebra? Does someone’s pointing to a picture of a zebra involve that he uses the word ‘zebra’ as we do? The connexion of image or picture and use is that as a matter of fact in an enormous number of cases to one particular image corresponds one particular use, and where it does not, which is also an immense number of cases, there puzzlement arises. Why is it in a great number of cases useful to ask for the use and not the meaning? Because meaning suggests one object, whereas use suggests a number of objects spread out in time.

“In a great number of cases it is advisable to put ‘use of a word’ for ‘meaning of a word’”, is a slogan. Sometimes it is ridiculed: sometimes it is boosted. Both wrongly. If one does philosophy it is natural one should come to certain sorts of step which is advisable to take. Philosophical investigations are tedious and difficult, and slip the memory. Slogans are easy, and stick in the memory. If the use goes but the slogan remains, it is ridiculous. Dr W said that although he had often used the words of the slogan, he had never had need to call it anything.

It is a colossally important fact that all objects around us have one name. What is this a principle of?

Theodore Redpath (Honorable Secretary)

—Cambridge University Archives

And here is some entertaining marginalia found in a library copy of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

Look under “More about…”

via MDM

Last week, I escaped the inter-term somnolence of Cambridge for the brilliance of Istanbul. Tickets purchased only days before, I handed in my paper for the term and rode the train south into London through the rain with a coursemate. We would arrive in Istanbul at 4 am and meet another coursemate who had jumped Cambridge the day before and a good friend of mine traveling and writing in the region. Istanbul is a striking city, even at 4 am and taken in without sleep and wearied by in-flight drinks.

For one, it is enormous. The city is growing tremendously. New highways and metro lines connect the bunches of high-rise apartment blocks stretching west of the old city. The metropolitan area extends in all directions and technically encompasses (and administers) areas as far from historic walls of the city as the Prince’s Islands, 20 km southwest of the central neighborhood of Sultanahmet in the Sea of Marmara. We stayed in a wonderful hostel in Beyoğlu, a populous neighborhood across the Golden Horn from the tourist-laden Sultanahmet. The main pedestrian drag, Istiklal, was packed with people every night. On our second night, the local football team, Galatasaray, beat Fenerbahçe, a team from across town. Istiklal was quickly filled with fans who were mostly content to parade down the street. Things got tense briefly when a Galatasaray supporter noticed an unfortunate kid wearing a Fenerbahçe jersey and rushed at him. To the credit of Galatasaray fans, several Galatasaray supporters intervened and whisked the Fenerbahçe kid (probably 12 years old) into the back of a nearby shop where the crowd couldn’t get at him.

Our merry band of four travelers initially did a good job seeing the sights. We spent a sunny afternoon in Sultanahmet, visiting the Blue Mosque, Haghia Sofia, and Topkapi Palace (though we twice missed the museum’s opening hours). A was excited to have the chance to pray in some of Istanbul’s many, breath-taking mosques. We non-faithful were happy to sit outside and enjoy the sights.

The Haghia Sofia (Ayasofia) was really quite strange. It’s ancient, and feels like it. The building has been added to over the years, accumulating new wings, minarets, and flying buttresses as empires changed and the building grew beyond its original structural capacities. While it is aesthetically coherent, in person you can see the different ages of the various parts of the building, giving its permanence an uncanny countenance. Inside the roof is decorated with Byzantine icons. I took especial note of the four cherubs decorating the pendentives. Cherubs really are quite ghastly creatures: six-winged, four-faced creatures “resembling living fire.” The Ottomans covered the faces of the four Cherubs in the Haghia Sofia, but one has been restored. Tremble:

We also happened to pay a visit to the massive Turkish Military Museum on the day the Turkish state commemorates the battle of the Dardanelles. Thus, we scored free admission and had the added cultural benefit of witnessing the considerable number of museum visitors, giving some sense of the meaning of the holiday to contemporary Turks. The museum exhibits consisted mostly of Ottoman-era weaponry and armor. There is also a good amount of space dedicated to the founding of the republic, as one would expect, and a few rooms about Atatürk. There is something like a state-sponsored cult of personality around Atatürk, and I confess I gathered no sense of how this narrative sits with contemporary Turks of any political leaning. I did hear mention of Kemalists, though I do not know how big of a section of the Turkish political spectrum this is, or what their relationship is to the current nationalist government.

Our fearless touring and the just-ended Cambridge term soon caught up with us, however, and we spent a lot of time in Istanbul relaxing in the sun. Many glasses of tea were drunk, several books were read, panoramas were taken in, and lots of games of cards were played. It was a wonderful respite.

You all should go if you can.

Last night, Cambridge got its once-annual snowstorm. This morning the town was covered in a half-foot of snow and everyone was out and about with cameras to capture the scene. It was very pretty.

Parker’s Piece in Cambridge is like the Midway Plaisance in Hyde Park. A wide open, windblown green space that some poor souls have to trek across daily. There was a joke that Satan was at the end of the Midway, blasting it with the cold wind from his wings. Parker’s Piece kind of feels like that.

As counterpoint, and also because it is obligatory when photographing Cambridge, here is a picture of King’s Chapel.

Next, we snuck into St. John’s back quad. It was a very pretty scene, despite the snow phallus some mature undergrads had constructed. Perhaps the ghosts that supposedly haunt this bridge will teach those kids a lesson.

During World War II, the story goes, Hitler chose not to bomb Cambridge because he so adored this building. I’m almost certain the tale is totally spurious, but there is a pretty fierce looking eagle above the building’s main portal. Fishy.

And here we all are, a little dehydrated and tired, but happy at the end of our trek.

Advancing the Twitter-as-literature genre by leaps and bounds, the Chicago Fire Department’s new Twitter account, @CFDMedia, has burst onto the scene with a flurry of postmodern tweets that are somewhere between the clipped reports of a police scanner and baffling personal appeals. I think it captures the (non) audience of Twitter perfectly. They also appear to be sent from a BlackBerry. City of Chicago standard issue.

The tweets remind me of Felix Feneon’s Novels in Three Lines, a collection of the several line long news entries Feneon wrote anonymously for Le Matin at the turn of the 20th century. Feneon had a real talent for suggestion, irony, and pathos. For example:

"A complaint was sworn by the Persian physician Djai Khan against a compatriot who had stolen from him a tiara."

"No more briar pipes. Their makers, in Saint-Claude, have stopped work until they are paid better."

""If my candidate loses, I will kill myself," M. Bellavoine, of Fresquienne, Seine-Inferieure, had declared. He killed himself."

I’m not saying @CFDMedia is like Feneon, and I think the facile Twitter/Novels in Three Lines similarity has been pointed out before, but its worth following this account.

Saw this photo today, titled “Autumn in Chicagoland” –

David Quinn took the photo “in the Palatine or Rolling Meadows suburbs” of Chicago. It reminded me immediately of Jason Lazarus’s photograph “Standing at the Grave of Emmett Till, Day of Exhumation, June 1st, 2005 (Alsip, IL)” –

I think both photographs capture something uncanny about Chicago’s suburban spaces. Both show a scar through manicured, humanless landscapes that look remarkably like backyards. One is a golf course, the other is a cemetery.

This post is long overdue and too brief. I arrived in Cambridge, England just about two weeks ago to begin an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History at, of course, the University of Cambridge. The program(me) has both taught and research components, though the focus is largely on the student’s research. This will be a substantial change from what I got used to as an undergraduate, but it’s a welcome one. I would write ad nauseum about what I’ll be researching ad nauseum, but the program has an evaluation scheme whereby papers are read without knowing the authors, and any tips as to who will be writing what are unwelcome. So, in the interest of academic integrity, and most likely in the reader’s general interest as well, I’ll keep my work to myself for now.

The first thing that needs to be said is that the weather has been remarkably nice since I’ve arrived. This really is a big deal since most days out of the year the United Kingdom is a dim, wet place. I’m housed in one of the livelier and more diverse parts of Cambridge: Mill Road. There are lots of “ethnic” or “international” restaurants and groceries on Mill Road, including the local Al Amin grocery, whose owner, Abdul Arain is running for chancellor of Cambridge against Lord Sainsbury, the heir-apparent and owner of one of the UK’s largest supermarket chains.

Also of note in my neighborhood is CB 1 – the world’s first internet cafe! Some have joked that it also may be the last. Regardless, it’s one of the nicer places to read in Cambridge. And since the libraries close here around 7 pm, having a good cafe nearby that’s open late is important.

I’ll have to make some more comments later about the college system, its perpetuation of structural inequalities, and the dispersion of administration that sets Cambridge pretty far apart from American universities as institutions.

I started rewatching Friday Night Lights recently and have been taking notice how the show’s story changes over the course of the five seasons. I haven’t given energy to plot or character changes, but I have noticed how the show changes its portrayal of the very site and origin of the Panthers/Lions tale: Dillon, Texas.

One of the central themes of the show is how hard-working, good-hearted women and men overcome the very basic and ingrained adversity of their circumstances. Matt Saracen rises to the challenge and leads his team to a state championship, despite having no immediate leaders in his family life. Tim Riggins time and time again pushes aside his inner demons and does the right thing. And most extremely, Vince Howard transforms himself from Another Young Black Criminal to the virtuous leader of his family and team. He becomes the man he always was on the inside. This is the story of Friday Night Lights–that individuals can overcome their class and race positions, their poor upbringing, in short, whatever shit they were born into–and I think it is a good one.

But this is what makes the subtle change in the show’s portrayal of Dillon interesting. As the site of most of the characters’ adversities–and it’s a refrain among the characters that if they could just get out of Dillon, they would leave all these difficulties behind–it’s interesting to see the show shift from portraying the Dillon landscape as depressed, isolating, and ex-urban to bright, nurturing, and more rural.

The best measure of the show’s portrayal of place are the scene setting shots of Dillon from a moving vehicle. They work almost like intertitles.

Here are some from Season One:

And here are some from Season Five:

In this last shot, the dialogue is actually:

Becky: It’s so pretty out here.

Luke: I used to hate it here. My whole life I figured football was gonna take me outta here. I couldn’t imagine staying around here…but…I guess I better try to imagine it.

Becky: I have an amazing imagination.

…

Luke: You ever think you could imagine living on a farm?

Becky: Sure.

Luke and Becky are talking about staying in Dillon. Furthermore, one of the last shots of the final season is of Tim and Billy Riggins building a house in Dillon at sunset. It’s almost as if we’ve witnessed the transformation of the town from a place of adversity and disadvantage to a place of redemption and hope. It certainly has transformed from a place of escape to one of return.

Which is interesting for two reasons:

1) This narrative affirms the logic of nostalgia which is so critically examined in the first season, as well as in the movie and book.

2) This dulls the show’s social comment that the adversity these characters face may be caused by the place, i.e. the social, political, and economic circumstances that these characters are in. In this very small way, by dissociating the town of Dillon, Texas from the institutional difficulties the characters face, the show seems to be removing their adversity from larger societal trends, such as racism, classism, or discrepancies in education.

The other day I took a ride through a relatively new sub-division next to the neighborhood where my parents live. This new sub-division is called Nassau Grove and it’s built and designed by the national housing chain K. Hovnanian, from New Jersey.

It’s a really strange place. To begin with, the name doesn’t make too much sense. There is a tiny municipality called Nassau (an old train depot, I think) near present-day Nassau Grove, but there’s no grove as far as I know. The sub-division has followed the usual pattern of Sussex county development: farms to modular homes.

This is “Nassau Grove” ten years ago:

This is Nassau Grove today:

My dad refers to Nassau Grove as “Pleasantville,” and it is actually quite striking how unreal the place is. For one, all the streets are named after French wines: Grenache Ct, Chablis Ln, Nouveau Ave, uzw. But more importantly, it’s not clear who actually lives in Nassau Grove. K. Hovnanian built most of the houses in one go, assuming they would sell without any trouble. Then the recession hit, and modular homes that were selling in the “upper 500s” (as advertised) are now in the “lower 200s.” Most of the homes are unoccupied, and I find myself doing a double take whenever I see someone sitting on a porch or walking down Anjou Ct.

Aside from taking the place of a local farm and adding congestion to Sussex County’s poorly planned road network, places like Nassau Grove are mostly harmless (though there are plenty of cases of local landowners getting swindled by developers and selling their land for about 10% of its actual value). However, I think that the rapid development of Sussex County has wrought some more subtle cultural damage that is harder to notice.

The sense of community in Lewes and Rehoboth is now highly ambiguous. Growing up it felt quite coherent, if prejudiced and exclusive. Take as an example a single beach called the naval jetty.

Growing up, the naval jetty was a part of the beach few people went to. It was a bit out of the way compared to the main Cape Henlopen and Rehoboth beaches of the area, and it has lots of obstructions in the water and sand that make it a bit more dangerous. But, it had a nice break, so lots of people went there to surf. You could count on meeting someone you knew there, and more than once as a kid my parents just dropped me off at the beach, assuming that I’d be able to get a ride home with someone’s folks.

Nowadays, if you go down to the naval jetty you’ll see the beach packed with tourists, and some accompanying graffiti like “NO KOOKS” or “GO BACK TO PA.” I appreciate the defensive sentiment, but I think it’s coming from a confused place. I was down at the naval jetty the other day, waiting in the line-up with about a million other people, when I was told to “get off the locals’ beach” by a middle-aged man who I happened to know was a dentist from upstate with a beach house in Lewes.

As an actual local, I was initially pretty upset with this jerk, but soon grew confused over what sort of circumstances would give someone permission to behave like this. I realized that the local population, and any claim to local-legitimacy, was so radically in flux because of the massive population growth and radical socio-economic change in the area, that it’s basically a total free-for-all in the arena of who-is-who in the rapidly changing rural-to-exurban Sussex County.

Because the category of local is so radically in question, and so many are making various types of claims to it, I think the only appropriate category in action now is the neo-local.

It’s weird.

After years of making due with generously donated but poorly fitting bikes, I finally have a steed to call my own: a Salsa Casseroll. I was looking for an affordable road bike that could do long rides comfortably and would stand up in all seasons and conditions. I was initially drawn to the Surly Pacer, which I’ve read is an outstanding bike (and comes in sick racing green!), but I quickly became enamored with the new Salsa Casseroll.

The Casseroll is “a relaxed road bike,” which means a solid steel frame with more traditional road geometry, but a slightly extended head tube, 32 cm tires, and a sweet included front rack for out-of-the-box randonneuring. I decided on the Casseroll over a more traditional road bike because I’m hoping to do some longer rides and maybe one day a few centuries. I know I felt joint and back fatigue acutely during longer rides in the past on my more aggressively configured bikes, and was looking for a more sustainable way of riding farther.

So far I am extremely pleased with the Casseroll. I won’t be winning any races with these tires and my upright posture, but I’ve been able to cruise at a healthy clip for a while without feeling stress anywhere but my thigh muscles. You can still sprint efficiently, and the generous drops let you get quite low and wide for fast descents and powering through corners. It’s a really versatile bike. I’ve taken it on gravel paths without a second thought. My real ”I’m happy I own a Casseroll” moment came the other night when I was just pedaling around the neighborhood and went off exploring in an unfinished sub-development with a mix of paved and unpaved roads. I didn’t have to worry about the bike at all; I was carefree. I’m sure anyone with a solid hybrid or mountain bike will have this same experience, but on the Casseroll, I could quickly ride the two paved miles home without breaking a sweat.

To add to the large collection of posts praising the move from WordPress to Jekyll: I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll today. I’m a very slow worker, a ruminator (as my mom tells me), prone to idiotic syntax errors, and it still only took me a few hours to install Jekyll, build some templates, and migrate my old stuff. Now, this blog is flying free courtesy of GitHub and Jekyll.

Why did I switch platforms? Mostly because I wanted to learn something new. GitHub is an incredibly useful tool, and I wanted to familiarize myself with the workflow of versioning, testing locally, and deploying that more applications-oriented development requires. Using Jekyll is actually a great introduction to git and GitHub.

The student’s perspective aside, what is the advantage of Jekyll over WordPress? Well, for my needs I prefer Jekyll’s smaller size, more intuitive templating process, and simple layout. I have to prepare myself each time I start a new WordPress project and begin contorting the default theme to my needs. Perhaps my approach is all wrong, but I end up wading through and cutting loose most of what WordPress prepackages when I make the relatively simple sites I do.

Jekyll doesn’t break down the main page into six (or seven?) component PHP files or anything like that. You have your default page template, which lets you put, in plain old HTML, whatever you’d like around your content, and you have your post template, which lets you add HTML or dynamic elements you’d like into your individual posts. Jekyll is basically a text to HTML engine, so the idea is to configure how you’d like your posts to be HTMLed.

Herein lies the benefit and limit of Jekyll when compared to WordPress. WordPress is extremely extendable, can handle multiple different types of content, and has a very nice off-the-shelf backend. It is an extremely capable CMS, but may be a bit too hefty for a simple little blog. It’s way bigger than Jekyll, which makes it more versatile, but a little less useable for simple applications like this one.

I still think WordPress is great. It’s amazing software. And free! And everyone uses it, so there are tons of neat WP things out there, as well as lots of excellent documentation and support. But, for those of you just blogging, and who are not into Tumblr, Posterous, Blogspot, etc., give Jekyll a try.

To get Jekyll going for free on GitHub, you’ll need to know HTML, CSS, and a little bit of Git. They’re all worth learning.

This is Jekyll’s “CMS”! It’s great! It’s a folder on your computer!

I’m not sure how I feel about how people use the word “hipster” – it seems to be a pretty essentialist pejorative that has a lot of dangers lurking behind it – but I think often when people use the word they are actually referring to a complex and deep historical phenomenon of the European middle-class. Maybe we’re better off using the word Bildungsbürgertum?

The concrete sociopolitical embodiment of the idea of a self-regulating aesthetic society was the so called Bildungsbürgertum, the "educated middle classes," who, although excluded from the exercise of serious forms of independent political power virtually everywhere, used their purported possession of a cultivated faculty of aesthetic judgment, their taste, to legitimize the retention of a certain socially privileged postion. Membership in this group, the Bildungsbürgertum, was not supposed to be guaranteed by noble birth, inherited wealth, or economic success, but was to be granted by the free recognition of one's (good) taste on the part of others who were themselves in a postion to judge. The Bildungsbürgertum was a self-coopting group whose collective good taste was a tacit warrant (almost) of moral superiority. (Raymond Geuss, Kultur, Bildung, Geist)

It might be a good idea to take note of the Bildungsbürgertum and the history of the aesthetics of the middle-class since we have the 19th century European middle-class to thank for a number of things: from museums to kitsch. Just sayin’, if we’re going to pass judgement on something, let’s make sure we know what exactly it is first.

I’m just diving into Rails (great tutorials on Ruby here, on Rails here and here) and ran into a very small bump in the road this morning that some Mac users might have. It’s an easy problem to troubleshoot, but I thought I would put my Google findings in one place for anyone who is also running into this issue.

Apparently the version of Ruby that ships with Snow Leopard has some trouble compiling and also is a bit older so can’t support Rails 3. You can deal with this by installing multiple versions of Ruby on your machine using Ruby Version Manager (RVM). There are some very straightforward installation instructions on RVM’s site, but for Mac users there are a few extra steps you’ll need to do to tell your machine where RVM is, and to tell it how to find RVM, and consequently which version of Ruby you choose, each time you open Terminal.

First you’ll want to install RVM from Terminal by running

You’ll then have to tell Terminal where to find RVM by running

This will tell Terminal where to find RVM for this session you’re in, but to tell Terminal to find RVM each time you open a shell, you’ll have to add it permanently to your .bash_profile. If, like me, you don’t have a .bash_profile (Terminal doesn’t create one for you by default), no worries. Just create one by typing

to create the file and edit it using any old text editor or run

to open it in Text Editor. Add our line

to .bash_profile, save it, and now Terminal will know where to find RVM each time you start a new session.

So, now you’ve downloaded some exciting new versions of Ruby using RVM. Want to use one by default? RVM can do that for you, too. Just run

and now you’re humming along on Ruby 1.9.2 (if you have installed it, of course). Check it by running

Most of this I learned from this post. It has some more helpful info, so check it out if you have any questions.

After careful consideration, I think it is very important that
we throw a raging kegger. These being the final days of our
formative years, the opportunities to get wildly drunk and act
with utter disregard and abandon will be fewer and fewer
until, god forbid, we become respectable people. Further, it
is commonly known that the typical Uchicago party is wanting
in spirit and verve; by throwing a raging kegger we can buck
this pervasive and unhealthy trend. I have been to many
parties where people were simply too sober and, though I
enjoyed the party, I came away thinking that it would be
really great if everyone were just a bit crazier and yes,
sloppier.

I think a keg is important for facilitating the atmosphere
necessary for a raging kegger. Kegs are also cheaper than a
comparable quantity of cans or bottles. Most people prefer
draft beer to other sorts of beer. While its true, kegs are a
hassle, the increased effort will be worth the cost

Beer pong is also an important aspect of a raging kegger. I
know that it is not in vogue on our campus. In fact, a great
stigma seems to be attached towards the activity. However,
beer pong is a fun activity that encourages a friendly spirit
of competition. Yes, beer pong is messy, but parties are
generally messy (even if they're not raging keggers). Our
floors need a good mopping anyway; we should resolve to mop
Sunday afternoon regardless of how messy the party gets.

I understand that a raging kegger may seem garrulous and
fratty. However, considering our well known and well defined
personalities combined with our equally well established
credentials as non-frat people, I suspect most recipients of
the e-mail invitation will understand our conscientious use of
the phrase and find it ironic and entirely consistent with our
personalities and m.o. Since we will, in fact, be throwing a
raging kegger, we get to have our cake and eat it too.

Respectfully disagreeing with ---, I think there is a
difference between BYOB and "contributions welcome." In my
experience, BYOB is code for "there won't be much alcohol"
while "contributions welcome" has a meaning more akin to: "be
a good person; help us defray the cost of the party." In
general, there have been far too many potluck style
house-parties lately and not enough instances of old fashioned
hospitality.

I welcome discussion on any of the matters above. I think its [sic]
important we're all together and committed to the vision of
our party, regardless of what that vision ends up being. It
is important we have a clear idea of said vision in the
immediate future so we can get an invite out. As far as
discussion goes, I think its important that we don't regard a
tame, traditional apartment party as the status quo by which
alternatives (namely the raging kegger) must prove themselves
superior, but rather hold to each option equally rigorous
standards of justification.

The title sequence of Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life is pretty stunning:

And in case you wanted that font.

As Scott has already put it, after a whirlwind six days, an excellent team of most righteous dudes - Harper Reed, Dylan Richard, Scott VanDenPlas, Aaron Salmon, and Scott Robbin - put together a great site for Rahm’s transition team. In record time, they conceptualized, wrote, tested, and finally overcame a most inopportune App Engine fail to launch Chicago2011.org to a warm reception.

It was a great experience and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have worked with such excellent people. And, importantly, Chicago2011.org is doing quite well. We’ve had a good number of visitors so far, and users have submitted some pretty excellent proposals on the Interact tool.

I’ll be excited to keep working on this project and seeing how far it can go.