General
The new EFF Pioneer Award winners have been announced, and they are Dan Gillmor, Beth Givens, and the authors of DeCSS.
I saw Aubrey this week; she was visiting from Southern California on her spring break. We met at City Lights, and I bought a couple of books there. My Jane Jacobs book turned up at home, but, most interestingly, I picked up Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker, which I've been reading over the past few days.
I seem to have several friends in Southern California now, which is nice, because I'm probably going to be going there pretty regularly to fight against a few of the troubles with the movies. (For instance, I'll be there on Tuesday and Wednesday, missing a bit of CFP.)
On Thursday of this week, I went to Rachel and Jeremy's place for another installment in their philosophy lecture series. This included a lecture on whether virtue can be taught (a question presented by Plato's Republic). In the ensuing discussion, I tried to distinguish several contrasting aspects of the question:
- is virtue real?
- is virtue universal?
- is virtue attainable?
- has anyone attained virtue?
- is virtue knowable?
- does anyone know virtue?
- is virtue expressible in language?
- has anyone expressed virtue in language? (completely? partially?)
- can virtue be acquired?
- can virtue be acquired deliberately?
- can virtue be imparted deliberately from one person who possesses it to another?
- ... by means of language?
- can virtue be learned directly (propositionally, "in one sitting", etc.) or is it a matter of acquiring particular habits, perceptions, concepts, etc., which are likely to be developed gradually (or experientially)?
These questions reach out further into how we think about the world, and how we think about a human being.
I saw Ben on Saturday, and we walked up Bernal Hill and around the Mission.
Klaus Knopper released a new version of cloop (0.64).
