Eccentric Flower:199809/short subjects
From Eccentric Flower
«September 1998 «Eccentric Flower
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eighteen september ninety eight eleven a m short subjects Cleaned out my mailbox at work this morning. I have a habit of keeping emails because they have one URL or command which I know I'll want later. "Later" may have an arbitrarily large value; a timespan of six months to a year between the time I get the information and the time I need it is not unheard of. Rather than clog my system with these messages and slow down my already-logy mailer, I should just be writing the key scraps down and deleting the mail - which, today, I have done. This works reasonably well at work, where I have a datebook that never leaves my desk and is used for notes like these - even though it's a calendar, I don't actually use it to schedule anything! But at home, being a writer by avocation, my office is full - literally overflowing - with scraps and bits of paper, drafts, clippings, notes, sketches, et cetera. Writing something down there just makes it easier to lose. Fortunately the Mac (at work it's Unix; home is a Mac; the PC is just to play games) has a program called Stickies, which is like virtual sticky notes for the screen. It's been around a while - it comes with the OS. When I first saw it, I thought it was a silly, useless idea. I don't think that anymore. I hear tell that some bright people here have come up with an X version (that is, a graphical Unix version) of the same sort of thing. I need to look into that. This is all just to dispel any lingering idea you may have that my brain is organized. - - - Legislative matters: This site will be moving soon. Shouldn't affect you, but if you see a "lapse in service" (as they say in ISP-speak), you'll know why. My current provider has clamped down with an iron fist on incoming email, indiscriminately preventing entire domains from reaching me. If you have hotmail or rocketmail, and it bounced when you wrote me, that's why. mouth organ domain too - same people. It's unacceptable and thus it's time to migrate. - - - Having had my tantrum, I am amused by the number of people who have since then quietly, carefully, whispered to me in email: "Psst. Can you tell me what the allegory of the cave is?" Plato wrote of a man who had spent his whole life in a cave, and for whatever reason you choose, was unable to leave it. (This is a thought experiment. Make something up.) This man had never directly experienced the world outside that cave. All he hears of the world outside are the distorted sounds that pass through the cave mouth; all he sees of the world outside are the shadows cast from the cave mouth onto the wall. The man clearly has no basis for any sort of idea about what lies outside the cave ... yet he is certain to have one, and a very curious mental picture it must be. Sometimes, when I have constructed what I think is a theory about the way the world works, I have to remind myself to consider whether I'm seeing the reality, or just its shadows. Several times I have explained this reference recently and the other person has replied, "Oh, it's like the old tale of the blind men and the elephant" (where each man is touching a different part of the elephant and reaching a wildly incorrect conclusion about what he's touching). And so it is. But that amuses me as well, since I was forced to read the Plato item in high school and thought everyone else was as well, but I thought the story of the elephant was fairly obscure, and would never have used it as a reference .... Maybe I'm just seeing shadows again.
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