July 31, 2003
The Inspection-House
The English prisons of the eighteenth century were devoted to one thing: holding prisoners. Crime, even violent crime, continued unabated inside the prison walls. At the time, justice was somewhat arbitrary to begin with; the fact that wealthy prisoners could buy better accomodations while poor ones were given worse food and lodging (and died more often) makes it even more so to modern eyes. Utilitiarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham thought he could do better. He wanted to rationalize punishment.
(more...)Pain and pleasure are the great springs of human action. When a man perceives or supposes pain to be the consequence of an act, he is acted upon in such a manner as tends, with a certain force, to withdraw him, as it were, from the commission of that act. If the apparent magnitude, or rather value of that pain be greater than the apparent magnitude or value of the pleasure or good he expects to be the consequence of the act, he will be absolutely prevented from performing it....
With respect to a given individual, the recurrence of an offense may be provided against in three ways:
- By taking from him the physical power of offending.
- By taking away the desire of offending.
- By making him afraid of offending.
In the first case, the individual can no more commit the offense; in the second, he no longer desires to commit it; in the third, he may still wish to commit it, but he no longer dares to do it. In the first case, there is a physical incapacity; in the second, a moral reformation; in the third, there is intimidation or terror of the law.
July 29, 2003
You are invited
Last night at Fort Reno, the Dismemberment Plan played what is supposedly their final show ever in the United States. The Plan were probably the still-extant band I've seen the most often; now they're just another entry on my "favorite local band" chart. DC seems to have a knack for producing bands that ninety-nine percent of America has never heard of but that record shop-haunting types the nation over adore; I blame Dischord.
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July 26, 2003
Liver and lights
For over a thousand years, doctors in Europe depended on Galen. Galen represented the pinacle of Hellenic medicine. He experimented, for one thing: he invented the process of taking patients' pulses, demonstrated that the kidneys produce urine, and explored the role of nerves in keeping animals alive. But he didn't understand the role of the heart in blood circulation and didn't, in fact, understand blood circulation at all. Numerous inaccuracies crept into his work, some possibly due to his philosophical beliefs and some due to his practice of dissecting not human corpses but those of pigs, sheep, and apes.
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July 23, 2003
A place of light, of liberty, and of learning
If Gutenberg had been born just a few centuries earlier, there might have been no need for the university system. A medieval culture of the book, relying on written authority in both secular and religious matters, was developing, but there simply weren't many books to go around. Production of books at scriptoria was slow. At a time when an extensive private library might contain two or three dozen books, Oxford's Oriel College had 52 books in 1375; Cambridge, then as now vying with Oxford for the title of England's center of learning, had 122 volumes on its library shelves fifty years later. (On the Continent, where academic matters were somewhat more advanced, some monastaries of the period had hundreds, even thousands of volumes; these were the books copied in the scriptoria and circulated throughout Europe.) A gathering of scholars could share books. And there were other advantages.
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July 08, 2003
Venti
One of the joys of the Internet is that people with unusual interests can achieve critical mass and find one another: if you are, say, a recumbent bike enthusiast in North Texas or someone who likes listening to auto races via scanner, you can find compatriots online. So too for coffee nerds. Still, as wonderful as resources like Coffeegeek are for true obsessives, all the websites in the world can't match the impact of one ubiquitous chain. Starbucks is, of course, a frequent target of anti-globalization activists (as well as ornery individuals) because its amazingly successful business model has made it the most prominent coffee company in America. It's often chided for its habit of setting up shop near smaller coffeehouses and drawing foot traffic away from them; sometimes the business lost to Starbucks is enough to make the difference between staying open and closing down. In the towns and suburbs where there weren't coffeehouses of any sort before Starbucks arrived, however, their coffee can be a godsend. For all the twentieth century coffee world's technical developments (most especially including the modern espresso machine, a recent development in coffee's century old tradition), none had as profound an impact on American coffee consumption as the rise of instant coffee. At one time, every major city in America had several coffee roasters; there were once 45 roasters in Ohio alone. Alfred Peet, whose chain of stores remains a Bay Area institution, started his first coffeehouse in 1966 as a side business to coffee roasting. But the slow move to bland yet highly-caffeinated robusto beans -- used as cheap filler in instant coffee -- helped kill American coffee culture almost everywhere in the country until Starbucks brought it back. The company's efforts at social activism might not matter nearly as much as the growth in coffeehouses that accompanied (and perhaps was even triggered) by the chain's inexorable spread. Starbucks is everywhere, and coffee smells like money. Even fast-food chains now looking to make a buck off of gourmet coffee. And if Starbucks falters, another chain -- or even an alliance of independent coffee shops, doing it Booksense-style -- will rise up to replace them. America eats outmoded retailing concepts alive, and it doesn't need an overroasted $4 mocha to wash them down.