One of the basic defects of the Bush administration’s designation of a “war on terror” was that it emphasized symptoms (bombs and bombers) over causes (the underlying ideology). In the war of ideas, the West has chosen not to compete, under the erroneous assumption that the ever more refined delivery systems for its sensual distractions are a Big Idea in and of themselves. They’re not. If you know your Tocqueville, they sound awfully like his prediction of a world in which “an innumerable crowd of like and equal men … revolve on themselves without repose,” a phrase which nicely distills the unending busyness of our gaudy novelties.
Quod autem dixit “dormit”, verum dixit. Domino dormiebat, hominibus mortuus erat, qui eum suscitare non poterant: nam dominus tanta facilitate excitabat de sepulchro, quanta tu excitas dormientem de lecto.
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Augustinus in Ioannem, Cap. 11
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Do we have an author for this “Nulla scientia melior musica animae harmonia”? #latin A cursory Googling doesn’t turn up anything. (Taken with instagram)
Several good things came together this evening. First, I managed to change the battery in my late 2009 white MacBook. This required assembling the right tools: Torx screwdrivers weren’t necessary but a tri-wing was, and the one that I had ordered turned out to be the perfect size. The battery also turned out to be the right one. I was rather skeptical about it because I had ordered from a place called battdepot.com for far less than I was seeing the (putatively) same battery elsewhere. (By “far less” I mean two or three times less!) It’s only in the early minutes of use, but so far so good.
I finally decided to get an Apple TV last week. The main thing I hoped to do with it was avoid the necessity of lugging the Macbook home from the office, plugging in the power, then the audio, then the video-out-to-HDMI in order to view content streamed over the web on our old Samsung 720p in the living room. Everything else is in the cloud: why do I have to carry a fairly cumbrous machine hither and thither to view streamed content where the whole family can enjoy it? In particular, I wanted to put Medici TV onto the family television. Medici TV has an iOS app as well as a high quality web stream to the desktop.
I savored the unboxing experience, but then quickly found myself disappointed with what I was seeing on the television screen. Our photos from my wife’s Photostream weren’t too impressive. YouTube videos which I thought should have been in HD didn’t look too impressive. And my main motivation in buying the device, to stream Medici TV, also seemed wasted: AirPlaying Medici TV from the iPhone or iPad worked well enough, the sound was fine (and coming out in five channels or at least all speakers were being utilized), but the video was squarely in the 420p range. It was livable, but disappointing and not likely to encourage frequent viewing.
After taking some criticism from my better half at dinner, who threatened to return the ATV3, I went back to see if I couldn’t get more out of the machine. First, I found that YouTube is capable of being gorgeous on the ATV3, but you’ve gotta find the right video content. So far as I can see, there’s no setting to force ATV3 to stream the highest quality YouTube has for a particular video. I’m assuming it must do that automatically because a National Geographic video I found was in at least 720p. So it’s hit or miss with YouTube; stay away from the non-HD content! My other recommendation is: get the Remote app on the iPhone set up to work with the ATV3 as it makes entering searches much easier.
As for Medici TV I found a solution there as well. The briefest bit of Googling turned up AirParrot, which for $10 is a bargain. AirParrot does now what Apple says they’ll enable us to do in OS Mountain Lion: AirPlay content from the desktop to the ATV. My only complaint about AirParrot’s performance was an occasional popping in the audio which was frequent enough to be remarked by me but not so frequent that it made me regret in the least the $10 for the application. For the rest, I was able to stream a high definition feed from the Medici TV website to the ATV3 and thus enjoy this concert in the living room with my family without the trouble of laptops or wires.
So all in all, a pretty good evening!
This caught my eye in today’s Opinion section of the WSJ.
It’s funny because it’s true
I saw this linked at Arts & Letters Daily. It seems a very plausible explanation to me. The facts on the ground, at any rate, are consistent with his thesis.
The trick of getting to the cradle
I thought this tweet from the other day so amusing (which, of course, I retweeted) that I post it again here:
On the way home (Taken with Instagram at Ave Maria University)
Florida moved up from number three last year to number two. Last year, Florida Gov. Rick Scott penned a tongue-in-cheek letter to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, warning him that Florida is coming after the Lone Star State’s top ranking. Since Scott took office, his administration has enacted business tax and regulatory reforms that have contributed to the creation of more than 140,000 private sector jobs and an unemployment drop of 2.1 percentage points last year—one of the biggest decreases in the nation.
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Well done to Governor Scott!
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Rainbow (Taken with Instagram at Emerson Park)
This is nothing to do with young Barack being 6 or 10 years old and meekly eating whatever was put in front of him. He was 34 years old when he wrote the passage quoted above and 10 years older when he recorded the audio edition. And, as both versions make plain, he thinks it’s kinda cool, and he knows that to the average upscale white liberal it has the electric frisson of the exotic other.
No matter what the outcome being examined - the quality of the mother-infant relationship, externalizing behavior in childhood (aggression, delinquency, and hyperactivity), delinquency in adolesence, criminality as adults, illness and injury in childhood, early mortality, sexual decision making in adolesence, school problems and dropping out, emotional health, or any other measure of how well or poorly children do in life - the family structure that produces the best outcomes for children, on average, are two biological parents who remain married. Divorced parents produce the next-best outcomes. Whether the parents remarry or remain single while the children are growing up makes little difference. Never-married women produce the worst outcomes. All of these statements apply after controlling for the family’s socio-economic status. I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties.
