The 306 Greatest Books #84 - The Nicomachean Ethics

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Nichomachean Ethics (AKA Ethica Nicomachea) by Aristotle. This book can be found on the Sybervision Book List. 

Generally I have found the Philosophy books to be a weird mix of "well, duh" and "what is going on here". The Nicomachean Ethics in particular, is a difficult book to describe because much of what Aristotle goes into is common sense today. In the book, Aristotle goes through and describes each of our emotional attributes and describes the extremes of them; from bravery to cowardice, and so on. The result of his analysis was that the middle of the road response in most cases was the "good" response and that most people should strive to be "good" people. Overall, I felt like I was reading a treatise on the seven deadly sins and I did not gain much from it afterwards. I can't imagine ever having to recommend this to anyone.

Bar Done!!!! FINALLY!!!!!!

Yes it has been several months since I started working on the bar. You can see the first part of the bar done HERE. The second and last part is pictured below. The main problem I ran into is I miss-stained the bar the wrong color, a far darker color, so it took me over a month to unstain it. That was a pain. Also I had to figure out a way to saw 5" logs in half. Also not a fun thing since I only had my little circular saw. But it is all done and ready for use. YEA!!!!.

View of the front of the bar with the bar top down.

View of the front of the bar with the bar top open.

Side of the bar showing the three pillars.

Back of the bar with a closeup of the checkerboard bar top.

Everything done and in place with the bar of the bar all set up.

Over Thinking Things

I just read this in Money magazine and I felt it was especially apt for pretty much anything. It is from an interview with Philip Tetlock, a guy who studies the odds of financial forecasters and how much they get right.

"I once witnessed an experiment that pitted a classroom of Yale undergrads against a lone Norwegian rat in a T-maze. Food was put in the maze in no particular pattern, except that it was designed to end up in the left side of the "T" 60% of the time. Eventually, the rat learned always to turn left and so was rewarded 60% of the time. The students, on the other hand, fell for a variant of the"gambler's fallacy." Picture a roulette player who sees a long sequence of red and puts all his money on black because it's "due." Or more subtly, he looks for complex alternating patterns - the same kind of mental wild-goose chase that technical stock pickers go on. That's what happened to the Yalies, who kept looking for some pattern that would predict where the food would be every time. They ended up being right just 52% of the time. Outsmarted by a rat."

Now I understand they were just undergrads, but hey, I feel this can happen to anyone of us. Over thinking things has become a staple of human life. We always try to find what isn't there. Sometimes we just need to sit back and look for the simpler pattern. Sometimes it is just that simple.

2009 Personal Goals - May Update

4 Months in and so far not too bad, I feel like I stalled on some things though.

1. Finish the first draft of my fiction novel.
Start of 2009 - I have the first 1/3rd of the book written
February 1st - Nothing more written
March 1st - Nothing more written
April 1st - Nothing more written
May 1st - Nothing

2. Drop my weight to 167lbs.
Start of 2009 - I started the year at ~185
February 1st - ~180
March 1st - 175.2
April 1st - 172.2
May 1st - 172.2 (somehow again)
Not only am I trying to get a 6-pack now but I am also training for a Sprint Triathlon. How do I get into these things.

3. Pay off all my credit cards.
Start of 2009 - I started the year with 5 credit cards with balances and one relative we owed money to.
February 1st - Payed back the relative. Still 5 cards with balances.
March 1st - Payed off 1 card. 4 cards with balances.
April 1st - Payed off another card. Currently 3 cards with balances.
May 1st - Payed off one more. Down to 2 cards with balances. 1 with 0% APR until 2011 though so that one may be waiting a while.

Other achievements of note.
Currently on the bar status - The bar has been entirely stripped and restained and is mostly finished. 1/3rd of it is complete and installed. All I am trying to finish is get a nice bar top. I've decided that polyurethane wasn't working and I changed it to epoxy. So far so good.
I also finished one book on my 100 greatest books list.
And working on getting University of Utah paperwork straightened out.

Twix - Part 2

Here is the continuation of my Twix stories. You can find this one and all my other Twix stories at my website HERE.

Twix Part II

So, for the most part Twix acclimated pretty well with us and us with her. She does not have some of the fantastic stories that Aikman left us with but she has a few good ones of her own. When we first brought her home it was immediately evident that we were her saviors. We could not walk out of a room without her following us wherever we went. She would curl up in the hallway when we went to the bathroom. She would curl up on the couch when we watched TV. And that is how she was for pretty much the first several months to the first year that we had her.
When she first arrived we were told she had come from another pound in Ohio and that she recently had just given birth to puppies. She also just got spaded so she was not in the best of shape. She looked depressed but she still devoted every ounce of love on us that she could. But then Veronica had to go to school and I had to go work and Twix was left home alone. This would not have been such a problem but she had an extreme case of separation anxiety. So we decided that she should spend the day down in the basement. It was a mostly finished basement and had a TV and a couch, so she could lounge around during the day and if she had an accident it was OK because the floor was tile and it would clean up easily. Other than the couple of pillows I lost to separation anxiety nothing bad really happened. She was already house trained so that went off without a hitch. She would freak out when we left and be in a state of utter exuberance when we returned but we slowly convinced her that we would always come back and the freak outs became less and less. She still bounces around when we return, 5 years later, but we have grown accustomed to it, and look forward to it now, a kind of over the top welcome home.

When we got Twix Veronica immediately set out to find clothes to dress her up in. Unfortunately (or fortunately in Twix’s case) she could never find anything large enough to fit a normal size dog. Everything we found came in mini form for all those mini “dogs”. But she did find a jersey that looked like it would fit her. Well Veronica is a bit of a Bill’s nut and the colors matched pretty well so we got it and squeezed it onto her (see picture). Well over the next couple of days we noticed that Twix was acting strange. It couldn’t be the jersey. Why would it be that? Well after I managed to get the jersey off of Twix she was back to her bouncing around self. It turns out the jersey was so small on her it was suffocating her or something so she couldn’t move. Poor dog. Well we reached a compromise and shredded the jersey to a point that Twix could still wear it and it wouldn’t strangle her.

When Twix had to go out we would have to walk her from the side door of the house to the backyard since the gate was about 10 feet from the house. So we would let her out and she would run around, sometimes we would run around with her. And she would stay outside until she was ready to come in. At that point she would stand next to the gate and look for us in the window where we could see her from the kitchen. Well when the weather started to get nicer we would let her out for longer and longer periods of time. And then we started to notice that instead of wanting to come in she would just stand and stair up into the trees at the back of the house (see picture). After watching her do this for a little while she would start to run back and forth along the fence, all the while looking up. We realized she was chasing squirrels that were running along the telephone wires and the trees back there.

So one day we saw in the store a stuffed squirrel. And we thought it would be a perfect gift for her. But we didn’t want to just give it to her. We wanted Twix to think she caught one of the squirrels. So when we got home we placed it in the fence and let her out. Well she ran around for a little while, did her usual search routine around the yard to make sure nothing was out of place, then she noticed it. She stopped dead in her tracks and slowly crept up to the fence. She sniffed it for a second then ripped it out of the fence and shook it around. That was when it started to be her new best friend and carry it around everywhere. Whenever we came home from being out she would run to the door and greet us then she would go fetch the Squirrel to show us. It became her new best friend. Wherever Twix went, Squirrel went. They became inseparable. She would snuggle with it in her sleep (see picture) and she would just carry it around from room to room. All I could ever thing of was Pookie from the Garfield cartoons.

One of the things that is great about Twix is that she loves to play. She is definitely a fighter as well. So when we fight it is a no-holds-bar, all out fight. She will snarl and snap and anyone passing by would think that she is mauling me, but she has never injured me. She will bite your hand but never bit down. When we first got her Veronica was a little afraid because she never had a dog before so I showed her that it was OK. Twix was not going to hurt her. So I put my hand in her mouth and I grabbed onto her lower jaw. Twix struggled and got my hand off of her but I showed Veronica that it was no big deal. Pretty quickly she came to be rough housing with Twix just as I do.

About a year after we got her we had to take her in to the vet to get some blood work done. Well we quickly realized earlier that she was not the vet kind of dog. She refused to even enter the vet. When I finally coaxed her into the office, it was a struggle the entire way to the scale and then to the exam room. When the vet examined her everything was going ok, until he decided to take a blood sample to test for heartworm. Well even with 2 nurses and I holding her down we could not take a sample. She would not hold still. So the doctor gave her some tranquilizers. We waited a little bit for them to take effect and we tried again, still to no avail. So the vet decided to give her the good stuff, the kind of stuff that knocks you on your ass. We waited a little while and after a struggle that she was still able to put up we finally got the sample. After that we went home and we gave her a treat for being such a good girl, at which point she just passed out holding the treat in her mouth (see picture). That is one of the funniest pictures of her because you can see her eyes are all bloodshot and she doesn’t even have the energy to eat the treat.