truth and beauty...

 The greek world by hugh lloyd-jones is a collection of essays about politics, art, literature, mathematics in classical Greece.

A really good introduction  before herodotus and thucydides if you can find them without forking out from the great purveyors at full price. 

This study shows how ideas developed by those early greeks still inform our world today  not only by their discoveries in mathematics and astronomy but the unbroken tradition of exact inquiry.

My great regret is that I never was all that good at mathematics as at the time of maximum learning one of my parents was extremely ill for some some which occupied all my thoughts.

nevermind I went back to nightschool to try my hand at trig and calculus which I more or less understood but the time had passed.

That left art. I never could draw but there  was still literature and philosophy which became a lifelong companion in a search for truth.

It is said that wittgenstein himself was a fan of the pulp fiction western genre and this connects with my thesis concerning learning in NZ.

At one stage many service organisations and outfits like the were conducting paper drives where all the good old stuff was swallowed up to pay for playground improvements and trips overseas for youth and one suspects mainly for their mentors. 

So a momentary good for some was a permanent gap in the ability for all to find "GOOD STUFF" in second hand shops because it had all gone.

The transient pleasure of going somewhere or getting a QSO superceded any chance that some kid could find somethng to give them pleasure for the rest of their lives or spark a quest for learning. But hey thats the KEEWEE way.

MATE!

ocasionally one still finds something in the thrift shops and on secondhand dealers shelves but the pickings get slimmer and slimmer and learning takes place in the universities where the philosophers hate freud because he told the truth. Knowledge is now a commodified good buried under an onslaught of consumer desires fuelled by mindless infantilised dissatisfaction with reality.

Philosophy qua philosophy has become subsumed into an adjunct to logic because that is the basis of computer languages and that is where the money is.

nearly forgot music

See you in hell blind boy