File Buz

On Your Left! Its Bike to Work Week

Good morning.

Its officially Bike to Work Week, so if youre lucky enough to be among the roughly %.08 of Americans who A) have a bike; and 2) have a job, this is your chance to shine!

Thats right, as counterintuitive as it may seem you really can use that two-wheeled vehicle with the pedals as a means of transport, and to that end the New York Times spoke to some dumb bike blogger about it:


Eben Weiss, the author of the blog Bike Snob NYC, offered some advice for the city: Institute a Drive to Work Week.

“That way, people can see how wildly impractical it is to drive to work compared to biking.”

Smug remarks aside, he said, “Riding in the city is freedom from traffic, timetables and transit delays.”

Oh, Im so clever--but did I actually say "biking?"

Oy.  Ive become everything I once despised.

Anyway, I was pleased to see the aforementioned piece is already attracting the usual brand of insightful bike-related commentary:

Lifelong New Yorker 

Bloomberg never should have started the CitiBike program without first impressing on would-be cyclists that the traffic laws apply to them too. They blow red lights, go against traffic and - on the fancy bike lanes on Queens Blvd. - completely ignore the helpful arrow on the ground and still go against traffic. Way too many of them are an ignorant and/or arrogant menace. I know this from daily experience and, I was knocked down by one while I was crossing in the crosswalk with the light in my favor.

Instead of complaining about cyclists, Lifelong New Yorker and Full-Time Imbecile should realize that he (or she, but lets just say "he") is a statistical anomaly in that he has not yet been killed by a driver on Queens Boulevard.

Meanwhile, via the aforementioned article, apparently the NYPD is observing Bike To Work Week with a "targeted initiative" to protect cyclists:


“This targeted initiative will make sure New Yorkers on bikes have clear bike lanes and safe conditions as more and more people take to the streets,” Mayor de Blasio said in a statement.

Hey, this sounds great in theory, but why do I suspect that as this directive makes its way down the chain of command it will go from "make sure New Yorkers on bikes have clear bike lanes" to "ticket cyclists for not riding in bike lanes"?

Officers from all 77 city precincts will be directed to focus on drivers who are committing traffic violations that endanger bicyclists. In addition, NYPD traffic enforcement agents will focus on parking violations most associated with bicycle accidents, like parking in a bike lane, double parking or parking in a No Standing zone.

Yep, theres that "A" word again.  Are they really "bicycle accidents" if theyre caused by drivers putting their cars where they dont belong?  After all, when I step on one of my kids Legos, I dont consider that a "dad accident."  I call it a deliberate attack on the authority and physical well-being of the paterfamilias, and youd better believe I punish them accordingly.

Speaking of bike lanes and police, heres a member of the latter driving into a San Francisco cyclist as he rides his bicycle in an extremely awkwardly-situated example of the former:



Yesterday was not a pleasant Bike To Work Day for not one but two downtown cyclists.

Hoodline reader Tim Doyle, 48, was struck by a police car at 5:45pm while riding southbound on Second at Mission—in the streets recently installed bike lane.

A video of the collision that surfaced on YouTube today shows the SFPD vehicle pull into the right-hand turn lane behind another vehicle at the Second and Mission intersection. The squad car then pulled to the left into the bike lane and struck Doyle, throwing him and the bike to the ground.

Though this being San Francisco, I suspect this may all be part of an elaborate viral marketing campaign:

The video above was published on YouTube by Nexar, which recently-launched a free iPhone dashcam app for vehicles. With the companys mission to "rid the world of car accidents" and help drivers "stay protected on the road and avoid getting into tough spots," the dashcam begins recording as soon as the driver suddenly hits the brake, or initiates the app with a tap or voice command. 

Thank you Silicon Valley for your ceaseless efforts on the part of motorists everywhere.

As for that awkwardly-placed bike lane, to find worse youd have to travel all the way to Brisbane, Australia, where they just installed this:



Seems to me the island should be buffering the bike lane and not the other way around.  Maybe installing bike lanes in mirror image is an Australian thing, like how their toilets flush backwards.  By the way, heres some background on the above bike lane via the reader who forwarded it:

A couple of years a go Danish university student Rebekka Meyer, studying at University of Queensland was riding her bike to uni on Annerley Road when she stopped at the traffic lights.  When the lights turned green she was run over by a truck, killing her. 

There was a Coroners inquiry into the accident and one of the recommendations was for separate infrastructure.

Today Brisbane City Council created this in the area where the accident occurred.

Nicely done.

By the way, as you may recall from this very blog, Brisbane is the same place where residents are tormented by Freds discussing their sexual exploits:


FOUL-mouthed cyclists bragging about their bedroom exploits have sparked so many complaints from fed-up residents a councillor wants "keep quiet" signs erected along a popular cycling route.

Once again, its important to note that Freds have nonexistent sex lives and the extent of their "bedroom exploits" is the pre-ride application of chamois cream, so this is clearly a group of people with some delicate sensibilities indeed.

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OH SNAP! PICS I dont mean to start anything but is this the new style with Akungba Chicks LOOL

Paparazzi at work eheh. This pics was taken at somassa LT

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Ondo State Bursary to be paid on or before Friday Chairman Dayo Awuye

At last, the chairman has released a statement that AAUA and Adeyemi College Bursary will be paid on or before this Friday. He also said that the portal for registration will be opened till 23rd of may.

The full statement below..

"I wish to inform all Ondo State Students who have made payments but have not been able to complete their applications as at the closing date (20/05/2014), that the application portal will still be opened till midnight of Friday 23rd May, 2014, for them to be able to complete their application. This is to ensure that no one is unjustly denied the right to apply having already made payment.

Also, AAUA and ADEYEMI COLLEGE will be paid their outstanding Bursary on or before this Friday.

I thank you all for your patience.
Dayo Awude,
Chairman, Scholarship Board."

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Open Letter to President Yudof

Dear President Yudof,
A year ago, I told the regents that they needed to investigate recent incidents of police pepper spraying, tasering, and beating students. I said that we cannot have a real dialogue if students, faculty and workers are afraid that their actions will result in bodily harm. However, President Yudof, you and the Regents stood by the police and did nothing.

The same day I addressed the Regents, a police officer pulled a gun on several students. Once again, I urged the university to investigate and punish dangerous police actions, and still nothing was done. It has taken a viral video of police violence at UC Davis for the university to take this issue seriously.

While all of the attention is now on UC Davis, there needs to be an investigation of the broader culture of police hostility towards students, workers, and faculty. I believe this culture of violence starts at the top, and it is the Regents and the President who must be responsible for the safety on all of our campuses. When violent actions by the police continue to go unpunished, the administration sends the message that these acts are tolerated. What we need to do is to simply disarm the police on our campuses, which would follow the model of most private universities in America and most public universities around the world.

Bob Samuels, President, UC-AFT

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Off to Japan!

Small sketchbook doodle. Warm up for more sketches of the trip? One hopes

Just harried enough. Going on trips always seems attract all manner of little emergencies that must be attended to. Not like I have a bazillion things to still prepare for. Anyway, were off tomorrow morning and we hope to post updates of our progress. Weve got quite a line up of people to meet and I must say that this is very exciting! AND were going to do a Sketchcrawl with these folks!

I hope to draw and write while on the plane. Likely Ill be dozing off and failing to read Shannons book. Or not writing Paper Biscuit stories. And that other project, or that one other concern...oh, well. The laptop will thwart me, Im sure, and therell be no Don Shank in sight.

Check back for updates. Enricos mobile blog capacity can post up to the minute updates so check his blog often. Me? What I lack in speed I make for in style. Or effort. Or good intentions.

Later!



Enricos blog

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On McGinns response to Hookways Affective States and Epistemic Immediacy

I’d like to advance a certain take on the essay debate between Christopher Hookway and Marie McGinn (who commented on Hookway’s “Affective States and Epistemic Immediacy” printed in “Moral and Epistemic Virtues,” eds. Brady and Pritchard, 2002), which is as follows: McGinn’s charge that Hookway is begging the question against the skeptic in his attempted refutation of skepticism makes sense only if Hookway claimed to refute the skeptic, which he did not (I’ll attempt to show).

Hookway’s Argument (in “Affective States and Epistemic Immediacy”) proceeds something like this:

Initial presuppositions:

1. Ethics and epistemology share a common concern with evaluation, an enterprise with underlying issues whose similarity is such that an evaluative epistemic project could gain from attending to its evaluative ethical parallels.
2. Such gains (for evaluative projects in epistemology) include: (a) attaching (as most ethical theories do) importance to affective states (i.e. emotions); (b) Emphasizing the role of virtue in epistemology beyond the scope of self-proclaimed “virtue” theories.

Hookway’s Argument: (Which is an attempt to defend and clarify the second of these initial presuppositions) goes “loosely” like this:

P1. (Something like) Quine’s theory of induction is plausible/correct. This position characterizes the phenomenon of inference (which leads to our acceptance of propositions) as possessing a kind of “immediacy”; on this view, the evidential relations on which we depend aren’t available to reflection, but the “goodness” of the inferences (which lead us to accept propositions) are “felt”, and hence, “the vehicle in our confidence of inference is affective.”
P2. The best way to accommodate the “immediacy” of our evaluations is by appeal to character traits (i.e. virtues, such as “being observant”), which are simply stable patterns of identifying what is emotionally salient relative to the goal of inquiry (i.e. asking the right questions, etc.)
P3: Making such a move has the feature of paralleling the evaluative project of ethics, which pays (what Hookway appears to consider) appropriate consideration to affective states and virtues, attention lacking in contemporary epistemology’s evaluative endeavor.

It is not my understanding that a central endeavor of Hookway’s is to refute skepticism, even though Hookway does mention some implications the acceptance of his premises would have toward placing his project distinct from anti-skeptical endeavors that are (as Hookway thinks) “over-intellectualized”—by their feature of requiring reflective justification ad infinitum. Hookway’s Quinean appeal distances himself from the over-intellectualized justificatory positions, and he makes this clear on pp. 84 and 85 when pointing out how his position avoids two “troublesome regresses” (the “regress of reasons” and the “regress of justification”) that have led other positions to be hard-pressed to refute the skeptic. That Hookway’s view has this virtue, though, is better understood as a peripheral (and positive, if successful) upshot of adopting his premises, and not at all integral to the conclusion for which I take him to be arguing.
It is for this reason that I am surprised that Marie McGinn’s entire rebuttal to Hookway focused (and self-proclaimedly focused) on that one particular facet of Hookway’s position. No doubt, McGinn’s position is, in a nutshell, the claim that Hookway tries to rebut the skeptic and fails. Not only is rebutting the skeptic not a central focus of Hookway’s argument, but I think that, even the extent to which skepticism is addressed peripherally (on pp. 84 and 85) we find no solid affirmation that Hookway thinks that his position literally “defuses” the skeptic, as McGinn claims him to be positing.

My claim here needs some defense, and so, I will site verbatim the three times that Hookway explicitly mentions skepticism in his article:

(1) “And even fewer would insist that taking the role of emotions, or affective states, seriously is necessary if we are to deal in a satisfactory way with what we can think of as the central problems of epistemology—for example, the defusing of skepticism or the study of how internalist and externalist demands in the theory of justification can be integrated.” (pp. 75-76).

(2) “…it is important that education and training equip us to avoid questions that should not be addressed. In other cases (“might I be a brain in a vat?”) the explanation of why it is good not to address such questions may be different again.” (p. 84)

(3) “To answer skepticism, it seems, we need to combine these perspectives: we must be properly confident (subjective) that we are reliable (objective). The worry we now face is that we can only be properly confident that our emotional evaluations are conditionally reliable.” (86)

Fourthly, Hookway (p. 84 and 85) mentions the two “troublesome regresses” that his view can circumvent, and while these regresses are known to lead some to skepticism, Hookway never offers that his circumvention of these regresses is sufficient for defusing skepticism (rather, the much weaker claim, that he has simply dodged these particular regresses).

A careful reading of these sections will not find Hookway proposing that his position is sufficient for defusing skepticism. (1) could be read weakly as mentioning the defusing of skepticism as among the central problems of epistemology. A stronger reading of (1) would be that, few would think that an analysis of emotion would help to resolve central problems in epistemology; any substantive claim that Hookway’s position is supposed to do that job is not made explicit here. (2) merely presents the skeptical question as a “type” of question that perhaps ought not be addressed. He brings up the skeptical question (and mentions subsequently that it might be only epistemically relevant to goals of inquiry within the philosophy class) as a demonstrative analogue to another sort of question (on which he focuses) which should not be asked, namely, questions which are irrelevant to inquiry (i.e. how many grains of sand were on the beach in 1952) and which an intellectually virtuous person would not find emotionally salient. No where in (2) is any substantive claim that Hookway thinks he has refuted the skeptic; all we could make of this is, perhaps, the skeptical question ought not be asked (but not even necessarily for the same reason that the non-salient questions Hookway is discussing ought not be asked!)

(3) would be the best candidate McGinn could site in her attempt to claim that Hookway thinks he has rebutted skepticism. However, even (3) proposes only this: X is a necessary condition for rebutting skepticism. We shall see how my view meets X”. And that’s just what Hookway does; he tries to show how his position meets what he thinks are those necessary conditions; this is not a case of Hookway claiming to have met sufficient conditions.

And, as I mentioned, his discussion of the “worrisome regresses” on pp. 84-85 could lead us no further than to accept that Hookway thinks that his views have circumvented two particular regresses that tend to skepticism—a different claim than the claim that skepticism simpliciter is rebutted by his view.

Here is a bit of what McGinn has made of Hookway:

“The question I want to focus on here is whether the understanding of the nature of our epistemic practices that Hookway develops in the light of ideas that he draws from ethics provides an effective means of “defusing…skepticism” (75)

“…there is something prima facie perverse in trying to answer the philosophical sceptic by appeal to the essential role of emotional responses in our epistemic evaluations, insofar as we do not normally regard the emotions as having any special or privileged connection with veridicality.” (96).

“Moreover, given that Hookway’s account of our ordinary practice acknowledges that the relation between the emotional evaluations on which it rests and objective truth is contingent, it is hard to see how the work of resisting skepticism in a philosophical context is to be achieved.” (99).

“But [a consequence of Hookway’s view] means that I can take my current emotional evaluations as a proper ground for rejecting the sceptic’s questions only by assuming the very thing that the skeptical voice in me doubts—that is, by arguing in a circle.” (100).

There are quite a few other comments on this line because, alas, the paper McGinn’s written has skepticism as its focus.

I don’t intend to be a rabblerouser here and suggest that McGinn’s reply is in any way scandalous or malevolent. Quite the contrary! McGinn has raised a philosophically interesting question, which is what the implications of Hookway’s position would be if the mission were to rebut skepticism. Is Hookway’s position capable of rebutting skepticism? This is entirely a project worth pursuing. My intention to go to some length here was only to indicate what I think was a misattribution; rebutting skepticism was not Hookway’s goal, and so, the question of whether Hookway’s position is capable of providing a response to skepticism is a question different than whether Hookway was successful in his attempt to do so. No such attempt fell within his project, and McGinn’s response didn’t appear to recognize this.

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Nunu Advent Calendar of Stuff She Likes to Chew December 9th

My pillow.

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Nunu Advent Calendar of Stuff She Likes to Chew December 11th

Her bed.

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ONDO STATE BURSARY FUTA peeps got Bank alert today what has happened to AAUA

Was reading through National Association of ondo state group on Facebook and some of Futa students testified they got the alert today. Hmm hopefully alerts will hit our phones later today or tomorrow. Goodness right? :)

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Nunu Advent Calendar of Stuff She Likes to Chew December 8th

The cat.

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