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[ by Charles Cameron — avoiding a tough piece of necessary writing by dealing with something simpler that conveniently fell into my hand ]
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Why do I bother?

Recall that the more information you get, the more disproportionately higher the ratio of noise to signal. Say, a little bit of information, 50% noise; a lot, 99.9% noise.

Likewise, in any field, the higher the number of academic publications the higher the ratio of garbage.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) December 28, 2019

Well, you know Nassim Nicholas Taleb, he gave us the concept of black swans, very bright guy because he questions, questions, and the answers he gets from reality don’t always match with the expectations routinely offered in answer to the same questions.

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Well, Taleb‘s tweet cropped up in my feed within about a minute of Greg McMurry quoting the Oratorian priest Fr David Abernathy‘s tweeting a quotation from St Charbel, which seemed to convey a very similar notion, only expressed in terms of spiritual rather than secular ratios between loss and gain:

Their buildings rise, their morality sinks. Their worldly goods increase, their values diminish. Their speeches multiply, their prayers grow scarce…. An edifice based on man may well rise, but it ends up crushing him. St. Charbel pic.twitter.com/5iZChni2ia

— FrDavid AbernethyCO (@pghoratory) December 28, 2019

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I bother because seeing parallelisms and oppositions and taking note of them is one of the prime “moves” in creativity, and I want to be as primed to recognize such parallelisms, particularly when they cross disciplinary boundaries, as readily as possible.

Bonus point because both St Charbel and Nassim Nicholas Taleb are of Lebanese origin.

[ by Charles Cameron — a parallelism post, more than one about free speech and civility ]
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Lexington, VA, and Richmond, VA, the logos:

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A neatly observed opposition, more or less a natural DoubleQUote, between the Black Swan incident where a fellow customer assaulted Steve Bannon verbally in a bookstore and the restaurant incident where the owner of the Red Hen restaurant ejected Sarah Huckabee Sanders, saying her views did not conform to the ethic — or should that be ethos — of the restaurant:

THE OPPOSITE OF THE RED HEN: The owner of a Richmond book store asked a woman to leave after she confronted STEVE BANNON. “Bookshops are all about ideas & tolerating different opinions & not about verbally assaulting somebody, which is what was happening." https://t.co/hHn4wd4CQa

— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) July 8, 2018

Now from a purely amateur natural history perspective, in a match between a black swan and a red hen, muy money is on the swan every time, as I trust Nassim Nicholas Taleb would agree. And Nabokov too, for that matter.

From a popular consumer interest perspective, if the match is bookstore vs restaurant, restaurant wins hands down — but I’d go with bookstore, especially if it’s a used bookstore..

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As to civility vs freedom of expression, thank God I’m not a cop or a judge — I require both. And that’s certainly a paradox, and probably a koan our society will have to face one of these days.

Steve Bannon as a person I find intriguing to the point of sympathy, because he’s read many of the oddball authors I have, though my resulting observations come out of left field, and his out of right..

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But none of that is what ultimately draws me to this post, it’s the delicious double parallelism of red vs black, swan vs hen.

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I’ve been wondering, putting together this post, whether the bookstore is named for NN Taleb’s celebrated book, or for the wildly popular ballet film of thet name:

Btw, Vogelgesang is birdsong: hen cluck, swan song.