I started this blog because of a suggestion from @theprestige on the James Randi forum. I had written some things about some movies and reviews of movies, and for some reason, he found this intriguing.
I've always been interested in meta. I never met a meta I didn't meta. For the uninitiated, meta is stuff about stuff. Sometimes it's the same sort of stuff, and this gets interesting. Many of the mathematical advances over the 20th century consisted of using elements of sets to label elements of sets. This is at the heart of Russel's original observations about set theory. There is a town where the barber shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves. The naive observer points out that the barber must be a woman to have it make logical sense. But let's say it's in Italy, where the women need to be shaved as well. It leads to an interesting seeming paradox, which points to the idea that classical two-valued logic has interesting cases where it fails. Gödel, Turing, and Church ran with the idea. So did Cantor, to infinity and beyond!
On the more mundane level, people talk about things all the time. What they say is not the same as what they are talking about. Furthermore, what they are talking about is not what they say. Plato's cave and Kant's ding an sich talk about this. In Kant's case, this talking involves far too many useless words, which in an oblique way, proves the point. I am interested in these oblique ways.
A review talks about something: a movie, a work of art, a book, a potato, a syringe, a bird, or a Swedish apparatus. A review of a review talks about a review. By recursion (a fun meta thing) you can extend this forever.
Most people have a level of comfort. Once I was disturbed when it came to my attention that a girlfriend of mind had no idea even of the existence of atoms. To her, a table was made of table stuff, and bologna was made out of bologna stuff. (Tables and bologna both figured prominently in her lifestyle.) The lack of curiosity about stuff, to see if there were narrower or broader ways of looking at the world, disquieted me. We didn't break up for that reason; we broke up because she couldn't handle thinking of me as good because I volunteered after 9/11. So it goes. I miss her dogs, though.
The postmodernists had a different level of comfort, one where they gained status by ridiculing things they were able to convince others were beneath them. So they proved that Abraham Lincoln was a pervert who stuck pickles up his nose, or something. Still, they lacked a sense of humor about their own situation. I once suggested that postmodernist professors should be paid with a handful of magic beans. If they got pissed off, they should be lectured and yelled at about how beans were the source of life, and besides, you wouldn't want to be an icky capitalist. I like Dadaists better. Dada was funny.
I don't have a level of comfort. I like my brain to hurt. As the Church of the Subgenius says, bleeding head good, healed head bad. It's not as if I had a tenure to threaten, or if I could be much poorer than I am right now.
It is about this point where you might be wondering whether, by all this rambling, I am trying to convince you not to pay attention to me. Don't worry. I am.
If you are still reading, this should give you an impression of what you'll find here. If you don't like it, fine. If this is the sort of thing you like, then maybe it's also the sort of thing you like.
