Travels with Epicurus

A charming meditation on the wonders of old age.

Travels with Epicurus

I’d previously read Mr Klein’s wonderful little book of philosophy jokes — Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar — but didn’t realize until halfway through that it was by the same author.

A running theme of Travels with Epicurus is that too many folks miss out on the charms of old age by trying to stay forever young. Mr Klein grabbed my attention with an anecdote about his dentist telling him that, unless he got seven implants to replace all of his lower front teeth, he would end up with an old man’s smile. Mr Klein decided that, since he actually is an old man, an old man’s smile seems perfectly appropriate and saved his money. Having been on the receiving end of countless dentists’ promises that, if only I gave them $8000 my life would be so much better, I decided that Mr Klein was a philosopher I could learn from.

The book is part reverie on the delights of just hanging out with other old folk on a little Greek island and part review of what philosophers throughout history, primarily Epicurus but also Sinatra and other modern philosophers, have had to say about growing older—the gist being that you should just slow down and enjoy old age and not cling on to lost youth. 

Denying that we are old is certainly not close, in order of magnitude, to denying that we are mortal, yet the two denials are clearly related.
Because, what happens then is that we proceed directly from the “forever young” stage of life to old old age, missing forever the chance at being a fulfilled old man “docked in the harbor, having safeguarded his true happiness.” We lose out for eternity on what I am beginning to agree with Epicurus is the pinnacle of life.

There’s a lovely little story of four old men sitting in their Greek taverna and admiring a beautiful young woman approaching down the steps. In the #metoo era, we might condemn them as dirty old men but, Mr Klein says no.

He and his friend are again seated at their table, chatting amiably, so far exclusively about the weather and what it portends. Then quite abruptly, they all go quiet. To a man, they are gazing up at the top step of the stone stairs that lead down from the coast path and past the taverna’s terrace. A young woman has appeared there, and the wind is pressing her blouse and skirt against her splendid, voluptuous body. For a moment, she pauses there, perhaps enjoying the warm breeze, but more likely enjoying the effect that she is having on the men looking up at her.

Mr Klein uses this story to riff on the idea that the forever young set, with their implants and their Cialis, are clinging to the obsessions of youth whereas the comfortably old are free to enjoy beauty without the distractions of desire. He quotes Mr Sinatra’s wistful “I See It Now”:

That world I knew is lost to me
Loves have come and gone
The years go racing by
I live as best I can
I see it now
I see it now

More on this theme from “This Is All I Ask”, from the same album, September of My Years.

Beautiful girls,
Walk a little slower
When you walk by me
Lingering sunsets,
Stay a little longer with the lonely sea.

It’s lovely little book. Don’t expect fireworks—just warm, witty reflections on life from Mr Klein, Frank Sinatra and Epicurus.


— Epicurus

Brexit is like a game of Tiddlywinks

Choose your metaphors carefully.

Brexit is like a game of tiddlywinks


But you cheated last time!

So did you!

But I won the previous game 50 years ago!

Brexit is like choosing where to go on holiday

We agreed we were going to Great Yarmouth this year!



Brexit is like an open marriage


Or Pierce Brosnan.

We can still see each other.

Brexit is like choosing from a menu

This chicken is still raw!


Brexit is like walking out on a marriage



I need to control my own toothpaste.



You decided that! I didn’t!

Brexit is like buying a car


Brexit is like a divorce



Where will you sleep tonight? Please don’t go!

No! That’s it! I’m walking away with no deal.

Don’t come running after me!

Photo Credits

Tiddlywinks by KaptainKobold on Flickr and Hannes Grobe on Wikimedia.

Car Shopping by Pictures of Money on Flickr.

Scarlett Johansson by Rogelio A. Galaviz on Flickr.

Dinner Menu from aposac on Pixabay.

Family Torn Apart geralt on Pixabay.

Great Yarmouth by Airman Dillon Johnston

Lonely Man by Jim Jackson on Pexels.

Brexit Despair and Brexit Hope

The hardest thing to bear in all of this is that no one is allowed to tell the truth: not May, not Corbyn, not the People’s Vote People, not the Daily Mail, not the BBC, not even the Guardian editorial writers. It’s like everyone watched A Few Good Men and learned the wrong lesson from it.

If I were Theresa May and more worried about the fate of my party than the fate of my country, I would make some cosmetic change to the Withdrawal Agreement (like, make the backstop orange instead of green or whatever) then try to hold on to this stalemate until the dying light at the end of March before making one desperate plea for My Deal or Deal. It might just work.

If she does anything sensible like making a deal with senior parliamentarians that results in a slightly softer Brexit, she is finished as a politician and the Tories are finished as a party.

If I were an ERG Brexiter, I would dance along with May’s Kabuki dance. Best case: May fails, we exit with no deal and one of my friends gets to be the next Prime Minister. Worst case, we get Brexit with an Orange Backstop and one of my friends gets to be the next Prime Minister.

I don’t know what I would do if I were Corbyn. I shot my bolt yesterday and missed the target. Perhaps my next move in this 11 dimensional chess game is to go all People’s Vote? Or perhaps I want a Brexit and all its horrible consequences that I can forever blame on the Tories.

I think the People’s Vote people are wounded now too. I was one of these people the day before yesterday but the storyline has moved on. There was a good case for a three way vote: May’s Deal, No Deal or No Brexit but May’s Deal is no longer a credible choice.

If I were a country-over-party tory like, maybe, Ken Clarke, I would try to finagle a No Confidence vote that results in a coalition government. This coalition would amend May’s deal to keep us in the Customs Union and call it done. I think it would pass. Does anyone not wearing a top hat and a monocle believe we could make better trade deals than the ones we already have? The politicians in Westminster should just get on with it.

If I were to wish my biggest wish, the Labour Party would (somehow) fight a general election with not-Corbyn at the helm. The manifesto would be 1) Cancel A50. 2) Commission a panel of experts (or a People’s Assembly, whatever) to design a proper, unicorn-free Brexit 3) Put the result to a three-way People’s Vote: deal vs no deal vs remain. If it’s my lucky day, Remain would win but I’d accept any of the outcomes.

At my most cynical, I’d appeal to all those people that the BBC keeps rounding up for their sham Vox Pop sessions and, after they had agreed that they are all fed up with hearing about Brexit, I’d tell them that if we just withdraw Article 50, we need never mention Brexit ever again.

When do we forget?


Aftermath (1919)

Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked a while at the crossing of city ways:
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
Have you forgotten yet?…

Do you remember the rats; and the stench

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack,—
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads, those ashen-grey

Have you forgotten yet?…

Siegfried Sassoon, 1886-1967


Image may contain: 8 people, crowd



Image may contain: 7 people, people standing and wedding




Image may contain: 2 people, people sitting



Image may contain: 2 people, people standing and outdoor


“So now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me.
And I see my old comrades, how proudly they march
Reliving their dreams and past glory,
I see the old men all tired, stiff and sore
Those forgotten heroes from a forgotten war
And I ask myself the same question.
But the band plays Waltzing Matilda,
And the old men still answer the call,
But year after year, the numbers get fewer
Someday, no one will march there at all.”
—Eric Bogle

Photo Credits:


The End of Political Science

The core idea is sound.















A More Social Software Engineer

That Google memo business has got me thinking.


I’m going where angels fear to tread. Wish me luck!




Men and Women are Different




There is chronic sex discrimination in the hiring process.



Vive la différence!





I don’t know of any work that looks at agreeableness as a liability in interviews but there was an interesting experiment recently at that tried to understand why women are less likely to succeed in interviews.

Make interviews more social? is a website that gives software engineers an opportunity to practice interviewing in a safe environment. They noticed large differences in outcomes between male and female candidates.


Here’s what they knew before the experiment:






What I learned was pretty shocking. As it happens, women leave roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview.


The author speculates some more…






Maybe we can make software engineering more social?









Isn’t that just what Damore argued in his memo?




He got a lot of things right though.

The psychologists at the Heterodox Academy looked at the research.




The Heterodox Academy





Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic summarizes the misleading coverage well.








Bring your daughters to work. And keep them there.






The Dream Watchers

I’ve had an idea that answers the question “What are dreams for?” floating around in my head for several years now. Whenever there’s an article or a podcast about sleep, I listen to hear whether anyone else has had the same idea. This meaning of life dialog comes close.

Bob Wright asks the classic question “Why do we dream?” and Robert Stickgold gives a long and fascinating answer about the role of dreams in information processing and its relationship to forming memories.

There are studies demonstrating that, if you are given a cognitively complex task to perform and then tested on that task three hours later, your performance will degrade. However, if you have a nap during the three hour interval, you’ll perform even better after the interval than you did when you first attempted it.

A more elaborate version of the study has the researchers waking the subjects from their naps at periodic intervals and asking them what they were dreaming about. The subjects who reported dreaming about the task, performed better at the task when they were retested than those who didn’t. Robert Stickgold’s conclusion is that (one reason) we dream is to help form associations between events. I think this is wrong and it’s got to do with a muddle over the meaning of the word consciousness.

Bob Wright:

When you wake up in the middle of the dream it seems as if there was consciousness of the dream but if you didn’t wake up, you would never be able to recall it. It’s as though consciousness has to be a part of the information processing infrastructure.

It seems completely obvious to me that memory and awareness are separate functions in the brain and Robert corrects Bob’s error…

You are conflating a couple of things. One has to do with remembering your dreams when you wake up.

…but then goes on to make a similar error himself. Let’s deal with Bob’s error first.

Arguments about the meaning of consciousness have a long and storied history and I expect that a lot of the controversy arises because it’s not obvious what the term consciousness refers to. Is it the difference between being asleep and awake? Is it something to do with recognizing yourself in the mirror? Is it that ineffable quality of experiencing the colour red? I think it’s none of those things and all of the mystery goes away if we stop using the word consciousness and talk about awareness or attention instead.

In a previous dialog with David Chalmers, Bob tried to explain the distinction between perceiving the color red and having the experience of perceiving the color red. That distinction, in a nutshell, according to Bob, is what consciousness is all about and is what separates us from the lower animals and is why machines will never be conscious. But, for the life of me, I struggle to understand this distinction and wonder whether or not I am actually conscious myself.

The real explanation is simpler.

I can perceive the colour red and I can be aware (or not) that I have perceived the colour red and I can have a memory (or not) that I was aware that I have perceived the colour red and those are all separate ideas. It’s well established that we can perceive things without being aware of it—this is the basis for subliminal messaging—but it’s less obvious that we can be aware of something but to then immediately forget that we were aware of it. At least, it’s less obvious to Bob.

When you think about it, our brains must have a finite memory and to make sure we remember the good stuff we have to throw away a lot of the bad stuff and our brains continuously make decisions about which is which. This brings us back to Robert’s explanation of what dreams are for.

Dreams, according to Robert, are for making associations between events and for fitting them into an information schema in our memories so that we can recall them at appropriate times in the future. According to this explanation, our dreams rummage through the day’s events and decide which are significant and which are not (paying special attention to the emotional valence of an event, which is why dreams are often emotionally disturbing). I think this is close, but wrong.


Michael Gazzaniga discovered through experiments on patients with split-brains, that is patients who have had the connection between the left and right halves of their brains severed, that different areas of the brain have different responsibilities. You can think of these areas as specialized modules.

From a New York Times article,



In one experiment, Dr. Gazzaniga showed different pictures to different halves of the brain.




In this multi-module model of how the brain works, there is a module for recognizing faces, another for experiencing emotions and yet another for  reasoning. But most importantly for our purpose here, there is a module whose job it is to make up stories about what we’ve just seen. Dr Gazzaniga calls it the interpreter or narrator.


Back to the question of what dreams are for. Putting together what we’ve learned from Dr. Gazzaniga and Professor Stickgold, my answer is: nothing at all.

I imagine that there’s a module somewhere in our brain that sorts through our memories, categorizing them and throwing away the useless ones. As this memory sorter looks at each memory, it comes to the attention of the interpreter module which makes up a story about it.

So, imagine your memory sorter going through your recent memories one by one:

  • Big presentation at work (file it under anxiety).
  • Beautiful lady said ‘Hi’ on the bus (file it under lust).
  •  Taxes are due next week (file it under dread).

These three things are unrelated except for the fact that they were memories to be filed away. Meanwhile, the poor old interpreter is watching these memories as they scroll by and feels compelled to make up a story about them and suddenly you are back in 10th grade giving a presentation to your class in double history and, when the cute girl in the front row smiles, you realize you are naked and run away screaming.

There’s no rational meaning to the dream (like President Trump, the storyteller’s gonna tell stories whether they are true or not) and if you happen to wake up at the right moment, the story itself becomes a memory. And that’s where dreams come from.

Dreams are not for anything. They are a weird side-effect of your memory-processing system being watched by your story-telling system. They have no function and no predictive power. Just enjoy them.


Dream Photos from Flickr (Creative Commons)

The Curse of the Worthy Movies


You have to pace yourself.



  1. Are they fun?
  2. Are they good quality?


Click chart to embiggen.








There are two reasons why that doesn’t happen.







Come join us, why don’t you?

Parlour Games


We tried a similar game at work today.






Sounds fishy to me.


Here’s Mr Walker:

Here’s your body, reduced to a rubber bag.



calorie excess = calories in – calories out





– Arthur Schopenhauer











More from the article:


A diagram makes the point more forcefully.



The last part of the article shares a more likely explanation.



A final word about Mr Cahill. This is just nuts:





And here’s my argument in a nutshell:


Religious Bathwater

I’ve been reading Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists.

Religion for Atheists (cover)






On Being - The School of Life







From On Being.




MS. TIPPETT: Exactly.












MR. DE BOTTON: Of course, I mean …
MS. TIPPETT: Do you have a spiritual life?