Praveen and Linda and I went out for Indian food.
(Getting Indian food has
worked well for me in the past
on major Christian holidays.)
We went to the Al Hamra restaurant on 16th between Valencia and Mission.
It was great, and surprisingly cheap. The restaurant advertises
"Indian/Pakistani" food, and has an Arabic name, but most all of
the menu is the same as that of most "Indian" restaurants I've seen.
(If you want a significantly different selection, walk a block up to
the Pakistani restaurant Pakwan between Valencia and Guerrero. But
Pakwan, unlike Al Hamra, was closed for Christmas.)
What do humanities and sciences have in common?
They tell us that making sense out of our experiences is an
intricate task -- you might say "a difficult task", but I think
the point is more fundamentally about complexity than about
difficulty.
They also tell us not to despair, because they allow us to
imagine the possibility of making sense of our experiences.
The epigraph to Neil Gaiman's Coraline is
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that
dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
(G. K. Chesterton)
But there is a cautionary note in these fairy tales: even if the
world is ruled, or our lives are ruled, by some order, the world
is very large, and larger than you expected.
Atom from atom yawns as far
As moon from earth, or star from star.
(R. W. Emerson, "Fragments on Nature and Life")
There's a lot of space everywhere. I just re-read Gardner's
wonderful essay "Surprise". I still say you can only do that
essay justice by reading it all by yourself at midnight on a
train ride across the country. (Come on, what are you waiting for?
Get the book,
book your ticket.)
There's a lot of space everywhere.
Bob Frankston just said something
which I felt had the
potential to become almost as much of a
philosophical classic as Jon Postel's
"Be liberal in what you accept,
and conservative in what you send".
(Observers seem to disagree about whether Postel meant that
deliberately
to have broad philosophical connotations, or whether that was
inadvertent
and uninteded.)
What Bob said was
As long as people ask for solutions instead of opportunity [we] will get what
we ask for and no more.
I'm having terrible trouble with my arms again. I hope it passes.
There are many possible reasons for it. It might be partly because of
this horrible NewTouch keyboard.
