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Quote of the Day: Pythagoras on Beans
“Abstain from beans.” — Pythagoras of Samos
Pythagoras has a reputation as having been a somewhat odd dude. Perhaps a charlatan, perhaps a thaumaturge. One thing that many sources say is that he urged his followers to abstain from beans. About a thousand years ago when I was in school, it was explained to me that he did this because the Ancients believed that beans gathered spirits of the dead, and this is why they created gas, because the spirit was the breath.
A much more interesting explanation I ran across much later was that voting was done with beans, so by saying “Abstain from beans,” what Pythagoras meant was, “Stay away from politics.” Well, who could argue with that?
Published in History
My wife asks me why I spend money on a subscription to Ricochet. I answer that it’s because I value intellectual conversation. She says that she likes intellectual conversation as well, and asks to read along.
I say, “No, this is pretty high level stuff. You wouldn’t understand.”
She looks at me knowingly…
Wives seem to know when their husbands are, um, full of beans.
I’m reading this stuff to my wife right now.
Like you I’ve always wondered the same question. “Is three real?”
It’s always been surprising to me that no one seems to have tried to answer it. Look at all of the man-hours society has expended on philosopher labor to get just this simple answer, which could have been spent on making our fake shutters look wide enough to cover the windows on our houses, or producing any of a number of other currently missing economic goods. (I was just mentioning the first currently missing economic good that popped into my mind. I’m not compulsive about shutters or anything.)
Hume and Kant didn’t really seem to be interested much. They offered answers but didn’t bother to give any particular reason for them that I’m aware of.
To answer “is three real?” a person and his listener would obviously have to agree on what that means.
(Wouldn’t it would be silly for a philosopher try to prove to someone else that “all the sets for this weekend’s big show have been completed” if the other person is thinking that that means that “all of the games required for a complete tennis match have been completed”? I mean, come on!)
For a philosopher and his reader to agree on what “is three real?” means, obviously they’d first have to agree on the answer to “how can we tell if something is real?”, and then the philosopher would simply show that “three” met that criterion.
Or maybe they did bother, and I just didn’t catch it. But you would have, since this is your line of work, so I am back to: they never bothered to try to answer the question seriously.
So it just seems odd, like we’ve given up a lot of halfway decent fake shutters, and almost of the houses in the country look like crap, with nothing to show for it.
The idea is that they are supposed to be folded at least once, so they would cover more than it appears.
But the ones on your picture window would need to fold three or four times.
You can’t imagine how this little explanation is going to improve my enjoyment of living in the suburbs. Thank you!
While I’ve got you, maybe you are the one to ask this other question. Is three real?
Also, you know those silly-looking flat molded plastic grids that they always pop in between the glass layers when they make the fake wood windows? What are they supposed to look like, that doesn’t look like crap?
Yakking the bean talk.
3 isn’t real. 3.0 is.
I’d think that they would first have to come to some agreement on what the meaning of “is” is . . . . but then I grew up in the 90’s.
I have to believe that until very recent times–and still not everywhere–that human flatulence wouldn’t add very much to the overpowering ambient stink. If you even noticed it, it probably meant you were just too sensitive to live in that world.
My dad was a big fan of modernity, an admirer of sunsets over power plants and the beauty of freeway interchanges. Hardly surprising for a man whose mother’s biggest fear for him was that he’d get into the street and be run over by horses. A favorite expression of his as an adult was: “Imagine all this with horses!” Horse leavings stats for NYC at the turn of the 20th century support the point.
I don’t need Pythagoras to know that beans are nasty and should never be eaten.
Another theory I’ve encountered is that a bean often has a smaller “bean” inside, sort of like an embryo. As with the Biblical injunction not to cook the calf in the milk of its mother, there may have been a horror of eating a pregnant creature.
I hesitate to hijack ANY post by this person, one of my R. total faves.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi, ok.
Do youse-all have any of those unspoiled houses that were built back in the 50’s, when juvenile delinquents in Queens all tried to coif their hair that one cool way, you know the style I’m talking about?
They were Ranch houses. The houses, I mean. They had windows about four foot wide and one foot high, and the shutters were trapezoidal. At the top, the shutters would have easily covered 8, 9% of the window, had they not been glued on to the house. But at the bottom, maybe just 4.5%?
Some styles need to just fade away I think. I’m just talking about the architecture, obviously. I know: “What, would you like to have Hillary’s hairdo? Or John Wayne Gacy’s?” No way. I am firmly in the Never Caligula camp.
A philosopher at least as wise as Pythagoras, the estimable Mr. Dooley, famously pronounced: “Polly-tics ain’t beanbag.”
Yes. (For most versions of real.)
No, I do not know. Are you speaking of dual (or triple) layer vinyl windows? I have never seen a plastic grid inside. Unless you are speaking of security glass with a metal grid?
The Midwest is architecturally tasteful. We have nothing like that here.
Dual layer. It is supposed to make them look liked glazed windows, where there was a gridwork of wood, with small glass panes set in, fastened with metal “points”, and finally sealed with a fillet of putty called glazing compound.
But some philosophers have looked very seriously and carefully at this question.
Hmm. Real, or more precisely unreal?
If one had an adverse reaction to beans and still wanted to be a total vegetarian (no meat, diary or eggs), I’d say the best option is oats and quinoa.
2.5 cups of dry oats has 66 grams of protein but only 1,517.5 calories.
2.5 cups of dry quinoa has 60 grams of protein but only 1,565 calories.
In the actual implementation, one would likely eat less than 2.5 cups of oats or quinoa (and one would cook ’em too, not eat them dry) and combine these foods with other foods that contain protein. For example, quinoa and broccoli.
Four stalks of steamed broccoli has 26.8 grams of protein and 392 calories.
Even tomatoes have a significant amount of protein. One can get enough without beans. But beans is the one common food that all of the long lived populations ate.
Bean burritos !
Real as opposed to integer.
It’s not just a matter of protein, it’s a matter of complete proteins. So, beans and corn (maize) are complimentary. Same with most other grains and potatoes. (It has been sixteen years since I was a vegetarian and had to worry about it, so I nearly forgot the combos.) They all have some amino acids, but are not complete. Thus, one needs to compliment them. Beans and most other grains also work, but corn and potatoes are missing one of the amino acids.
Integers are a subset of real numbers, just as whole numbers are a subset of integers. Of course, whole numbers are not a group, but that’s a different branch of mathemagics.
These days, instead of “group” or “faction” you’re supposed to say “tribe.”
I don’t know that branch of mathematics. Tribe theory? Never heard of it. Group theory, though, is exciting stuff.
OK, I’ll accept that. So 3, or 3.0, the square root of 9, is real. The square root of -9 would be another matter, of course.
Definitions. Are you an integer? A real number? A whole number?
I know people who care about such things.
Carry on.
ooh, I was Percivaled
Tell me she had a friend named Cecil. @rightangles
Cool! How do we determine if something is real according to them?