Strength, Valor, Style

I was looking for deals at Express over the holiday weekend and found a new line of Fitted Men's Collared Shirts called the MK2 (perhaps introduced the MK1 sometime in the past few years, maybe around the time we started the Iraq War).






The catalogue reads:

"Strength. Valor. Style. Military specs get a modern update. Refined details and at ease comfort create the perfect uniform. Strong in tradition. Modern in style. Cut slimmer through the shoulder, chest and waist from versatile cotton stretch fabric." (1)

Do you think that military-type clothing falls into fashion in and around times of war (or recession)? Regardless of what you say I'm going to still buy this shirt.



1) Express Fashion Website, MK2 label. Accessed November 29, 2009. http://www.express.com/catalog/product.jsp?productId=18917

James Lovelock - he stole my idea!!

It's not really my idea, but I had come to this conclusion maybe 1-2 years ago on my own. He calls what I am talking about the Gaia Hypothesis (1). He uses empathy as his primary hypothesizing system, again something I've been doing now for a while and I wrote an essay on the matter which is in the process of publication. Empathy here has a different connotation than you might be thinking. It is almost synonymous with imagination. Empathy could mean that you are pretending to be an influenza virus in a respiratory droplet and are watching as the host sneezes you out and you land on a different host's shoulder. It could also mean, as is the case with the Gaia, that you are the Earth and operating like a cell or machine, have various functions of homeostasis (among which is humans but other things are included). So empathy here is imagination, not pretending to be someone else as it is normally utilized. This is interesting to think about. Empathy clearly has survival advantage, but it can be used in these other ways which give rise to entire branches of science. Essentially though, empathy is best suited for what it evolved to do, predict the actions of other individuals. How useful could it possibly be when applied to what appears to be completely different situations? And is empathy the seed of imagination/creativity? I'll see what some of my neurology and neuroscience books say, but from what I remember of them, this question is not addressed.



1) Lovelock, J.E. (1965). "A physical basis for life detection experiments". Nature 207 (7): 568–570. doi:10.1038/207568a0

2) http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/11/03/midmorning1/

The Wire - Greatest television show of all time?

Last night I finished season 5 of The Wire. I am more documenting that than anything else as I think I'll need time to process the show and write something meaningful on its behalf. This is likely the best show I have ever seen and may in fact be the best television show of all time. This, of what I've read of Shakespeare, lines right up there (even though the aims of the two are different). It really is like literature on screen.

David Simon the shows creator, worked with Ed Burns, a former detective (and I thought crime journalist for a Baltimore or Washington based newspaper but I may be thinking of Simon). I highly recommend reading any of his books or watching any of his interviews (easily found on google or youtube one of which is linked below). I'll try to find some of his articles from the Baltimore Sun and bring those for discussion here.


http://www.hbo.com/thewire/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire#cite_note-greatest-2

Bill Moyers compares him to Dickens but before that Edward Gibbon!!!
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=david%20simon&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wv#