Author: Don

A note on Dilbert

James:

From time to time I had reason to stroll through some of the engineering buildings, or chemistry or math1, and now and then the business school. Fifteen/twenty years ago Dilbert was all over the place in physics (I had some) and computing and engineering, but not at the business school. Other cartoons appeared there, so it wasn’t a department dictum on decorum….

Since Dilbert so often skewered pointy-haired bosses and HR, it’s no surprise that the strip wouldn’t pop up on grad student doors so much in those regions….

From the speed with which the strip was dropped I suspect there was great relief in the relevant management and HR corporate quarters at the excuse for revenge.

I expect everyone visiting here has a collection of Scott Adams’ books in his library, so I don’t need to post my favorites. The Silicon Graybeard posted some of his here.

Hmm …

Ted Gioia:

After three decades of total connectivity, here’s where we stand:

  • Four movie studios still control Hollywood.
  • Four subscription platforms account for two-thirds of home movie streaming.
  • Three major record labels own most of the hit songs.
  • Five publishers account for 80% of the US book market.
  • Just one company controls 60% plus of the US audiobook business.
  • Etc. etc.

It may not be a coincidence that I don’t watch recent movies either in theatres or online, don’t stream music or listen to radio, seldom read recent books, or listen to audiobooks. If Gioia’s schoolbus plunges off a cliff, it would be a net gain for civilization.2

Beauty and Catholicism

Point:

Because of Catholicism’s insistence on beauty as a theological necessity, as a manifestation of divine order in sensible form, it has, surprisingly, sometimes even been adopted by gay creatives from Oscar Wilde in the 19th Century, Karl Lagerfeld in the 20th, to Dolce and Gabbana today. The elaborate liturgy, the vestments, the architecture, the music; these weren’t decorations applied to worship but constituted worship itself. Beauty was the form truth took when it entered the world.

Counterpoint:

Many of the characters in Converts, like Graham Greene, explicitly characterized their Catholicism as intellectually rather than emotionally motivated. Lord Alfred Douglas claimed that “The ritual, although I had always liked it and thought it beautiful, did not influence me in the very slightest degree”; Maurice Baring was “less interested in the aesthetic aspects of the faith . . . than in the rational arguments” and declared that “candles and incense never did . . . affect me”; Evelyn Waugh, according to his friend Christopher Sykes, had a “rational” approach to his faith, “remarkable for a lack of emotion”; similarly, Muriel Spark insisted that her faith was “dogmatic rather than emotional.”