Tiled With Pentagons

(With thanks to JM, who kicked off this discussion on the summer solstice, and some apologies to MC-M.)     This is a picture of an oak tree, or at least it would be if the artist, MC-M, weren't a coward. In 1973, he created one of the foundational pieces of conceptual art:  an oak tree. Not a picture of an oak tree, but an oak tree. It consists of metal brackets, a glass shelf, a glass of water, and the ineffable act of having transformed a glass of water into an oak tree. "How long will it continue to be an oak tree?" an interviewer once asked him. "Until I change it," he replied. Tread carefully before you reject the whole premise as nonsense. I ask: would you be just as pleased to march into your nearest cathedral one fine Sunday morning, stroll down the aisle as the choir boys sing Mass, and unceremoniously knock the wafers and wine out of the bishop's hands as bullshit? If you'll bite that bullet, that transubstantiation is actually completely fake...

There is a place in Brooklyn, in New York State just outside Manhattan; a little plot of land deep in a Jewish neighborhood.  I know it, because a piece of me is buried there; a piece that existed long before I was born. There is a bit of mythology in my family, you see: I share most of my name with my great-grandfather - the one in my direct paternal line, the Jewish side of my family. Because I resemble him so closely in temperament - an aesthete, an epicure, an ideologue, a traveller, a polyglot - the story goes that I am his reincarnation, giving this whole "living" thing a second crack. I've traded an MD in internal medicine for a PhD in math, and I can't enjoy pistachio ice cream anymore, but I'm in better health and don't have to contend with a world war. So once a decade, I join my father in a visit to the buried part of me whose nameplate I share and thus inherited, right down to the "Dr.".   I visited it on a fine Saturday much like this on...

(More prescriptive than my usual. With thanks to N and JM among others; the cultural victory must continue and intensify; thanks as well to those friends who are willing to humor me.) Kissing is overrated and I don't really understand why people like and value it so much. Who, exactly, decided that the best way to show affection for someone was to put one of the dirtiest parts of your body on them without particularly asking and without even causing much of a sensation in the process? Kissing isn't a human universal, either - only about half of all human cultures on Earth treat lip contact as romantic or affectionate as the Indo-European world does. From the Maori of New Zealand to the rest of Polynesia, parts of Southeast Asia, and the Inuit cultures of the Arctic (who, delightfully, call it a "kunik" - a term I might well steal for it), sharing breath is the order of the day; nuzzling faces against each other and pressing noses together to share breath is the deepes...

(Epistemic status: A hill I'll happily die on, but also will own as the kind of subjective hot take where my own taste is load-bearing for its validity. For everyone with a sweet tooth I've split a bottle of something nice with, and everyone embarrassed of liking fruity drinks.) How can you tell an eternal aesthetic truth from the vagaries of fashion and signaling? One of them holds up under comparative historical analysis, and the other has a start date. Alcoholic drinks - especially wine - have been getting drier for the last century, and prestige taste has shamed us into calling this progress. It's not: it's fashion masquerading as quality, and the slightest bit of modern archaeology wears that facade away like cheap  gold plating from copper. And just as with such faked gold, to be beholden to modern fashions is to spend more money than you should spend on less enjoyment than you might secure.   In 1916,  a Swedish schooner named  the Jönköping was transporting a...

I used to wonder what it was like to have written 100 blog posts. How does anyone come up with all those topics? How can they stand putting that much effort into something that few people will ever appreciate, put quite so much of their own lives and experiences out into the world? Is it true what they say, that everyone who's going anywhere has 100 posts worth writing in them? I can't answer all of those, but 365 days, a little over 2^17 words, and 100 posts later, I can say that Tiled With Pentagons has been well worth the effort. I tried to get a proper word count until I got sick enough of leafing through post after post that I got an LLM to do it for me, and at first I was a little sad that I hadn't quite hit 131,072 words - that's 2^17 - until I realized that actually, Blogspot's API was showing its age, and somehow one of my posts had gone missing in the shuffle. Adding it back in - "66: The Diminishing Returns of Double-Checking: A Phenomenological and ...

(As requested by EvN on the spur of the moment. This will make much more sense if you've read post 22, "Lorxus Favors: An Experiment in Self-Backed Giftlike Macroeconomics", first.) A Lorxus Favor is a claim to 8 working hours' worth of my time as applied to some task I'd otherwise be mildly averse to and whose fulfillment I'd be indifferent to, which debt is marked by a small silver coin. They look cool and are satisfying to play with and make nice jingling noises, and you probably want one. How might you get one? Usually, it'd be by rendering me or some other coin-bearer some specific good or service, on the spot or reasonably scheduled, or conceivably by paying significantly more money than you really want to. However, I have standing desires that for a long time I've been meaning to put up in print somewhere reasonably public. This is me, finally getting around to doing that. The following is a list of things I want or need, with bounties denominat...