There are two very natural propensities which we may distinguish in the most virtuous and liberal dispositions, the love of pleasure and the love of action. If the former is refined by art and learning, improved by the charms of social intercourse, and corrected by a just regard to economy, to health, and to reputation, it is productive of the greatest part of the happiness of private life. The love of action is a principle of a much stronger and more doubtful nature. It often leads to anger, to ambition, and to revenge; but when it is guided by the sense of propriety and benevolence, it becomes the parent of every virtue, and if those virtues are accompanied with equal abilities, a family, a state, or an empire, may be indebted for their safety and prosperity to the undaunted courage of a single man. To the love of pleasure we may therefore ascribe most of the agreeable, to the love of action we may attribute most of the useful and respectable, qualifications. The character in which both the one and the other should be united and harmonized, would seem to constitute the most perfect idea of human nature. The insensible and inactive disposition, which should be supposed alike destitute of both, would be rejected, by the common consent of mankind, as utterly incapable of procuring any happiness to the individual, or any public benefit to the world. But it was not in this world, that the primitive Christians were desirous of making themselves either agreeable or useful.

Edward Gibbon
From Chapter XV: Progress Of The Christian Religion.
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_text_gibbon_1_15_5.htm

The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.

From Gibbon, vol 1 ch 15:

http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_text_gibbon_1_15_1.htm

"Yet Commodus was not, as he has been represented, a tiger born with an insatiate thirst of human blood, and capable, from his infancy, of the most inhuman actions. Nature had formed him of a weak rather than a wicked disposition. His simplicity and timidity rendered him the slave of his attendants, who gradually corrupted his mind. His cruelty, which at first obeyed the dictates of others, degenerated into habit, and at length became the ruling passion of his soul."

Gibbon

 

It is almost superfluous to enumerate the unworthy successors of Augustus. Their unparalleled vices, and the splendid theatre on which they were acted, have saved them from oblivion. The dark, unrelenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the feeble Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero, the beastly Vitellius, and the timid, inhuman Domitian, are condemned to everlasting infamy. During fourscore years (excepting only the short and doubtful respite of Vespasian's reign) Rome groaned beneath an unremitting tyranny, which exterminated the ancient families of the republic, and was fatal to almost every virtue and every talent that arose in that unhappy period.

 

From Gibbon, Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire (vol 1).

Date: Tue, 26 Sep 95 15:55 MDT
From: mosterin@hydra.unm.edu (Ana Mosterin)
To: dsmith@cs.unm.edu

well, you should love wild cooking too
you have to find the right attitude:

you have to be sensitive enough
to feel the fear and shudder a bit at what you're doing
and to love your piece of fishus enough
to touch it and smell it
with patience and lust
and then aaaaaaaarrrh! sacrifice it
and chop it skillfully
and be matter-of-fact enough
to to act like you've done it before
and professionally dry your hands
with your apron
and and have your hands on your hip
as you listen and smell to
the sound of the frying
breath in through your nose
as you watch the pan with love and think
"no, no more garlic,
just a half-cup of wine"
and relax!
it's the ferocious poetry
of the wild cooking job
and then eating it will be twice as lovely
you'll see

hey, derek,
cooking is not mary poppins!

From: Scott McCue
Subject: Fluidinfo Europe Meeting
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2010 11:26:28 -0400
To: "terry@fluidinfo.com"

Dear Terry:

Would you be available for a brief conference call? I am writing from
the Mayor of London's Foreign Direct Investment office, Think London,
to see how we can help you with any European expansion plans you may
have. I am curious if you have considerations for a physical location
in Europe within the next few years.

From terry Thu Jun 7 01:26:35 +0200 2001
To: dsmith@cs.unm.edu, high@hci.ucsd.edu

today i saw a bag snatching
happened about 20/30 yards in front of me
2 guys on a motorbike
the back guy leans sideways
smooth as can be
takes the handle of a bag from an old well dressed woman

they head off down the side of the church
right next to where i live

the people yell out to the people at the end of the street
looking away from me

i am in motion

sprinting.

i zoom past the robbed
going absolutely flat out
heading to the end of the street
thinking i had no chance at all

but, around the corner
not more than 5 yards
i see the guys on the motorbike
caught behind some walking other people
(there is construction there
which makes it narrower
harder to pass)

this is right on the corner of paseo del borne (our street)
and montcada

and.......................

i fucking tackled them
yeah
over the top
arms spread to get them both at once
guys to the ground
motorbike to the ground
me falling stepping over the top
grazed shin, no more

i wasn't thinking really
just knew i had to stop them
couldn't do it as good as it could have been
and as it was the bike crashed down almost
into some people beside it
who had no clue what the fuck was going on

the guys jumped up
yelled
ripped off their helmets and flung them away
one smacking hard into the wall
and sprinted off
leaving one shoe behind

i was pretty surprised
didn't occur to me that the bike was stolen too

the cops turned up in about a minute flat
there were 30 or 40 people gathered around
talking like crazy
no-one knew what had happened
the robbed people just came around the corner to find a mess
one guy saw it and one woman
the woman acted like my PR agent
telling the entire crowd
over and over that i was a hero

it was great
so funny
i smiled and bowed to them all
like an idiot
hamming it up

the robbed people thrust a 2000 ptas reward into my hands
absolutely insisted that i take it
(we ate it in pizza later)

the cops shrugged it off
called in the stolen bike

it was pretty cool
i could get into being a vigilante

i should have tried to have held one of the guys
but i thought hitting them hard sideways
and knocking their bike over would do it

but, it wasn't their bike

i was smiling afterwards
the most exercise i've had
since beating derek to the office on skates a few weeks back

To read of Eleanor and Franklin is to weep at what we have lost. Gone is the ancient American sense that whatever is wrong with human society can be put right by human action. Eleanor never stopped believing this. A simple faith, no doubt simplistic - but it gave her a stoic serenity. On the funeral train from Georgia to Washington: "I lay in my berth all night with the window shade up, looking out at the countryside he had loved and watching the faces of the people at stations, and even at the crossroads, who came to pay their last tribute all through the night. The only recollection I clearly have is thinking about 'The Lonesome Train,' the musical poem about Lincoln's death. ('A lonesome train on a lonesome track/Seven coaches painted black/A slow train, a quiet train/Carrying Lincoln home again...'). I had always liked it so well - and now this was so much like it."

I had other thoughts in 1962 at Hyde Park as I stood alongside the thirty-third, the thirty-fourth, the thirty-fifth, and the thirty-sixth Presidents of the United States, not to mention all the remaining figures of the Roosevelt era who had assembled for her funeral (unlike the golden figures in Proust's last chapter, they all looked if not smaller than life smaller than legend - so many shrunken March of Time dolls soon to be put away). Whether or not one thought of Eleanor Roosevelt as a world ombudsman or as a chronic explainer or as a scourge of the selfish, she was like no one else in her usefulness. As the box containing her went past me, I thought, well, that's that. We're really on our own now.

---

The above are the last 2 paragraphs of Gore Vidal's November 18, 1971 essay "Eleanor Roosevelt". NY Review of Books.

A visual summary of my coding work in the last week, creating branches, working on them, merging them back into the FluidDB trunk.

Today I met an extraordinary Iranian man in the Geneva airport. He's written a 1000 page book in Arabic about (at least in part) his experiences in Cyprus. He approached me, asked if my English was really really good, sat next to me, and started pulling out several pages of hand-wrtten uppercase English. He had me go over them, improve them, write some new text as he read his Arabic in halting English, told me exactly how he wanted it to sound, pressed me to find shorter ways to say things, and finally got me to write out (for his next helper, no doubt) a clean copy of all my work. He had me go look up a recent paper dating the evolutionary split between humans & chimpanzees and to confirm that it didn't contradict his text (another fragment thrust importunately into my hands). He was about 75. We spent 90 mins together, smiling and congratulating each other over a few sentences that turned out particularly well. Told me he's going to have it published by Oxford - that's his aim anyway.

I thought to myself that we each have our own mountain to climb - or at least those who have a taste for years-long patient endeavors, but how different his from mine. We parted and he went off to approach another stranger. He'll get the whole book done a few pages a day in the Geneva airport, I've no doubt. "It's the perfect place" he told me. Amazing, extraordinary, humbling, etc...