Philo Spot | Life Interests and Observations

How to prepare for freediving

October 15, 2020 by Douglas Jimenez

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Freediving is a form of water recreational activity. The term refers to diving underwater with no external breathing apparatus. A freediver relies solely on their breath-holding ability during the duration of the diving session.

It might seem scary at first but freediving is actually a much less limiting type of diving the scuba diving or surface supplied diving. You are not carrying any heavy gear that you need to learn how to use and you are free to move around how you see fit because there are no cords connecting you to the overwater world.

Chances are you might have freedived in the past and not even been aware of it. Just putting your head underwater and holding your breath as you swim is considered freediving.

As such, freediving is the type of diving that requires the least amount of preparations beforehand. However, some preparations are necessary just so that you know what to expect when freediving.

Preparations

Prepare yourself

The only thing stopping you from freediving as long as you want is the limits of your own body capabilities. If you can control your lungs and breath successfully you will be able to freedive deeper into the water and for longer times.

Before you dive into the water for the first time, you should try and hold your breath to see more or less what your lung capacity is. You need to know this to be able to measure how much time you have before you have to start going back up to the surface. You will also need to learn how to take deep slow breaths. Breathing out the air should take three more times than breathing it in. Managing your breath is key to successful underwater freediving.

Equipment

Mask

A freediving mask covers your eyes and nose, creating a nose pocket with air inside of it. The best masks have low volume, meaning they retain less air and you don’t need to use your lungs as much to control the amount of oxygen you have left. It goes without saying but the mask should also fit your head like a glove. Most good masks are equipped with a soft silicone skirt that goes around your head to create a tight seal. However, the mask should not be too heavy to avoid weighing you down. Get a mask with clear lenses so that you can see everything around you.

Fins

You can freedive without any fins on your feet but you probably won’t get very far. You are already limited by your lungs so it is recommended that you do whatever you can to increase the distance you can dive and save your energy at the same time. There are bi-thelakeandstars.comfins, a pair of fins that you put on your feet, and monofins, which is a single wide fin that fits both of your legs. The best freediving fins are on the long side so that you get more power out of them. The foot pockets have to be the right size for your feet but if you use too tight ones you are risking foot cramps.

Freediving is just one of the many ways you can connect with nature. Visit thelakeandstars.com for other articles about outdoor activities.

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7 Tips For Playing Golf In Winter

July 27, 2020 by Douglas Jimenez

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Playing golf in winter is a challenge for any amateur that wants to experience a new angle of this complex sport. Accepting it requires a lot of forethinking and preparedness for dazzling winds and blindingly white snow.

With the thought of helping you to figure out the novelties of golf during winter, we have compiled a list of most important tips for a convenient and unbothered play.

Canonical winter golfing tips

1. Choose the right club

Equip yourself with a wide range of clubs because winter is a quite whimsical season for golf. However, snow enables you to experience new facets of this elegant sport, so exploring what would be the proper dimension of your instrument is part of the entertainment of the journey. One tip would be to go for lower clubs that perform better in the cold season.

2. Choose walking not carting

While walking is always the better alternative to getting from one place to another by a cart, in winter moving on feet is particularly commendable. If this is the first time you’re planning to practice golf in winter, then you haven’t had the chance to acknowledge how inconvenient it is to freeze in a moving cart to your next spot.

3. Keep your hands warm

In golf, your hands are your most invaluable asset. If it hadn’t been for your hands, all the fancy techniques and expensive accessories would have been unnecessary. On a similar note, if your hands are freezing cold, controlling your movement and the club can be particularly difficult. As a solution, a pair of winter golf gloves will prove quite eventful during winter golf.

4. Customize the balls

Since white can hardly be distinguished in a block of snow, choosing a different and more obvious color would be for the better of your sight.

5. Be watchful of where the ball is heading

The blatant white of the snow can turn up dazzling when accompanied by the sun rays. In such scenery, grasping into sight the trajectory of the ball can be puzzling. Wearing a pair of sunglasses or being extra concentrated on the direction of the flying ball can prove helpful.

6. Stay hydrated

We usually associate a winter sport with a cup of hot chocolate or some steamy tea. However, these drinks don’t supply you with all the necessary nutrients that keep in you in a good form. Make sure to have a bottle of water in the immediate proximity, so that you can enjoy your game to the fullest.

7. Choose the proper apparel

Clothes are an element that allows you to grasp all the benefits of the sport you’re practicing. Protecting your organism from cold is just as important as protecting it from the scorching sun during summer.

Best winter golf apparel

Finger Ten Winter Golf Gloves
With a double layer of high-quality fleece, these winter gloves will embrace your hand and ensure a comfortable play.
Adidas Climaheat half-zip Jacket
Both modern and of superior quality, this jacket features hollowed fibers that help keep your body warm in any weather condition.
Stromberg Wintra Trousers
These pants are instrumental in a humid, freezing-cold day since they protect your legs from the nippy weather.

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Reporting

March 30, 2019 by Douglas Jimenez

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Here is my response to the actual charge of “failing to report a consensual relationship”, written in December 2012. I have redacted the student’s name and other potentially identifying information.

Non-reporting of relationship

I will here set out the reasons I had for not reporting the relationship that I had with X to the Chair and thereby severing any evaluative relationship with her.

1. Reporting the relationship would have been against her expressed wishes, because perception of a personal relationship would (she believed and stated) likely devalue my positive academic assessment of her in the eyes of other people, being assigned to purely personal feelings.

2. Removing myself from any evaluative relationship with her could have had unfortunate consequences for her future academic career, since I would no longer be able to work with her and express my support of her. This would apply to such matters as being her thesis supervisor, being on her dissertation committee, examining her qualifying exams, and writing a recommendation for her for future employment. Given her interests this would have deprived her of the support of the person in the department best suited to support her. (Note: this is a point purely about no longer having me as an academic support—it has nothing whatever to do with “retaliation”, real or imagined.) She greatly valued my academic assistance and support and to lose it would have been a blow.

3. Not being in an evaluative relationship with her would raise questions in the minds of potential academic employers, since I was the natural person in the department for her to work closely with, given my interests. Her main interest is philosophy of Y and she was extremely interested in the topics covered in a seminar I gave on Y that she attended. Employers would naturally wonder why there was no letter of recommendation from me, and may suppose that I did not have a good opinion of her.

4. She believed and I agreed that it would not be easy to find another member of the department to replace me in these various roles, because of the closeness of her interests to mine and the smallness of the department. Indeed, her future work would likely be partly about my work (especially on Y).

5. Reporting the relationship would inevitably give rise to the impression that the relationship involved more than it actually did, because it would be assumed that it was sexual in nature. It was not. This would have been detrimental to both her and me, and would be very difficult to combat. Nor would it be possible to keep the severance of the evaluative relationship confidential, as it would be evident to all in the natural course of events. It would certainly lead to harmful prurient speculation about our relationship, both within the department and the wider philosophical community (which is the position in which we now find ourselves).

6. It would be difficult for me to keep all positive opinion of her academic abilities quiet, since I arrived at a very strong assessment of her abilities and people would inevitably consult me about her, even if only informally. Given this, it would be difficult to avoid giving a positive evaluation, because the lack of any evaluation might be misinterpreted. I might then be deemed to have broken the rules about non-evaluation (as well as lost an opportunity to support her).

7. My previous support of her would have been retrospectively questioned (though groundlessly).

8. I did not feel that my objectivity as to her academic abilities had been …

Letter from Ed Erwin

March 30, 2019 by Douglas Jimenez

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Here is a letter from my colleague Ed Erwin, who knows about the case inside out. He gave me permission to post it here. Expect to hear more from Professor Erwin.

Colin:

Seth Zweifler asked me to comment on his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (7/1). I believe that his piece was generally fair, but in discussing sexual harassment in philosophy departments, he unwittingly left the impression that your case is an example, when in fact it is not. Here is my letter to him.

Seth:

Most of your article is very fair to Colin, but it is entirely one-sided on a very central issue. The ‘ignominious conclusion” to Colin’s career at Miami, you write, has fueled a continuing conversation about sexual harassment in philosophy departments. Are you not suggesting here that the Miami case is a story of sexual harassment and its consequences for a tenured professor? Readers who might have doubts about your meaning will likely stifle them when they go on to read that “stories of harassment of women have longed plagued the discipline”; that “It is almost unheard- of, however, to see one of these accounts end as it did at Miami: with the departure of a tenured professor”; that women at a British University are now considering making their own complaints of sexual harassment after learning of McGinn’s case; and that, according to another philosopher, McGinn’s resignation will likely embolden administrators to take a harder line on sexual harassment.

Your article is likely to be widely discussed, but except for people interested in real estate, the talk will not be about his penthouse apartment. It will be about Colin McGinn and sexual harassment. Did you have some reason for not telling the reader that this was not a case of sexual harassment? Even if you were uncertain of the charges, did you not think it worth mentioning that you had no evidence that sexual harassment was even alleged let alone proven?

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Strictly Said

March 30, 2019 by Douglas Jimenez

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Suppose I say to you “I went into a bar and I got drunk”. You reply: “How many drinks did you have in the bar?” I say “None—I was drunk before I went in there”. You retort: “Then why did you say you got drunk in the bar?” I say “I never said that; I merely said that I went into a bar and I got drunk—I never said I got drunk in the bar”. This illustrates the distinction between what is strictly said in an utterance—what proposition is literally expressed by the words uttered—and what is conversationally implied by the utterance. Grice used this distinction to argue that “and” is always semantically a truth-functional connective, with the temporal element assigned to pragmatic factors. He argued that we can see this from the fact that the implication of temporal succession in the events reported can be canceled without contradiction, as by saying “I went into a bar and I got drunk, but I bought coffee at the bar having got drunk at a wedding previously”. A careful report of what I strictly said would limit itself to semantic content, but an audience might naturally assume that I meant I got drunk in the bar; maybe I did, but Grice’s point is that I never actually said that.

Irony depends on this Gricean distinction—meaning the opposite of what you say. This is why reporting an ironic speech act can be tricky. Philosophers who know their Grice are constantly aware of this distinction and often exploit it to make clever remarks to other philosophers—gleefully canceling the “implicature” without contradiction. This is how we amuse ourselves on a Saturday night. Outsiders don’t get it, unless they have been schooled in Gricean philosophy of language. This can cause misunderstandings. Maybe Grice should be taught in high school, along with Darwin.

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Some Basic Facts

March 30, 2019 by Douglas Jimenez

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I have not been fired from the university.

I have never been charged by the university with sexual harassment; nor did the student accuse me of that. The lack of such charges can be attributed to the simple fact that I have not been guilty of sexual harassment (which I deplore).

There are no findings of any kind against me by the university.

The only charge the university considered that involved a (putative) violation of university rules was that of failing to report a consensual (though nonsexual) relationship.

The student’s accusation was made many months after the alleged offenses (as much as seven months).

The student’s complaint occurred soon after a dispute between her and me over research work she was supposed to do over the summer (for which she was paid $4000) that she failed to do.

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The Prehensionalist Manifesto

March 29, 2019 by Douglas Jimenez

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The Prehensionist Manifesto

(This document states the main tenets of the Cult of the Hand. All members of the cult are expected to conform to these principles. Formally, the cult is referred to as the Gripparian Order.)

We seek to promote greater hand consciousness

We advocate manual cultivation, arboreal therapy, and brachiation training

We believe in prehension science and are strict evolutionists

We preach hand reverence

We encourage hand intimacy, but not hand promiscuity

We are in the grip of the grip

We deplore hand neglect and hand repression

We thank nature for the gift of the hand

The thumb and forefinger are objects of special reverence

Our prophets are Charles Darwin, Charles Bell, and John Napier

We foster hand virtue

We think the hand is a thing of beauty

All hands are created equal

We contemplate the hand every day

We never take our hands for granted

We observe the hands of others

We prefer writing to speaking

We support an active hand life-style

All fingers are important

Hand communication is encouraged

We practice special secret hand greetings

We think the hand jive was cool

We leave casts of our hands after death

We worry about the decline of the hand in the modern world

We view tools as extensions of the hand

We classify species according to their prehensive profile

We regard the brain as secondary to the hand

We have intense hand discussions

We teach our children hand anatomy

We believe that pointing is profound

Hand exercise is mandatory

We do everything to avoid cold, numb hands

We believe that a flexible hand is a flexible mind

We regard the intellect as an extension of the hand

We tolerate pan-prehensionists but this is not official doctrine

We admire gibbons greatly

We sing praises to the hand

We favor eating with the hands

We esteem the feet because they are the platform of the hands

The muscles of the forearm are fascinating to us

We believe that anatomy is destiny

We regard the body as essentially prehensile

We regard speech as a fall from grace

We reserve a special compassion for those who have lost their hands

We are entranced by trees

We abhor “glad-handing”

We find hand holding extremely romantic

For us the hand has a halo around it

We view the mouth with some suspicion

We see nature as the Great Chain of Prehensive Being

We feel the foot is misunderstood

We collect hand trivia

We admire hand erudition

We disapprove of hand exhibitionism

Our central metaphor is the grip

At wedding ceremonies we say, “You may now hold the bride’s hand”

We have private hand gripping sessions

Shaking hands is taken very seriously

We feel a kinship with apes

Kissing the hand is permitted but not encouraged

Calling someone “handy” is a great compliment

We see no distinction of status between the power grip and the precision grip

We think philosophers have wrongly ignored the hand

In the beginning was the hand-deed

We despise the phrase “hand job”

We believe that capitalism has led to proletarian hand alienation

We think it is bad manners to grab things

We have long arguments about hand etiquette

We regard the hand as corruptible but not corrupt

We are ambivalent about gloves

We are a secular organization but we applaud hand worship in moderation

We support hand pride initiatives, but deplore hand vanity

We feel that musicians are basically good but at risk of hand abuse

We accept that man is nothing without his opposable thumb

We oppose hand oversimplification

We give out hand achievement prizes,

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Brenin, Nina, and Memory

March 29, 2019 by Douglas Jimenez

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Here’s a photo I’m going to talk about in my next few posts (which I’ll hopefully get to over the weekend). It’s of Brenin, my wolf (or wolf dog), and Nina, my GSD/malamute mix, taken at Inchydoney Beach in County Cork, Ireland sometime (I believe) in the autumn of ’97.

I love this picture for so many reasons. But in the posts to follow, I’ll (seemingly miraculously) connect it up with the question I asked about about Rilke in my previous post. (At least I hope I will – if you don’t hear any more about this, then you’ll know the idea didn’t work out). Hint: the connection lies in something the picture does not contain.

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Postscript

March 29, 2019 by Douglas Jimenez

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Postscript

A point that tends to get lost in all the furor is that I am not the only one negatively affected by public defamatory statements made against me. I have a wife, a family, grandchildren, past and present students, friends, supporters—all are affected. I thus have not just a right but also a duty to defend my good name (not to mention financial prospects). This necessarily involves casting doubt (based on reason and evidence) on the allegations made, and hence on those making the allegations. There is no way around this.

If a student makes a confidential allegation against a professor, this can be handled within the confines of the institution. There is no need to get into the public realm. But in the present case the student and her representative voluntarily went to the national press some nine months after the initial confidential allegation, for reasons that elude me. This made the matter public and so I had to make a public response, given the world in which we live. I did not make a public response to a confidential allegation; I made a public response to a public allegation that I deemed defamatory and without merit. I think anyone else would have done the same. What was I to do—say nothing? I owed it to my grandchildren to clear my name. But isn’t this all painfully obvious?

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Relativism and Democracy

March 29, 2019 by Douglas Jimenez

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I am struck by this passage from Tocqueville: “I have previously stated that the principle of the sovereignty of the people hovers over the whole political system of the Anglo-Americans. Every page of this book will reflect certain fresh instances of this doctrine. In nations were it exists, every individual takes an equal share in sovereign power and participates equally in the government of the state. Thus he is considered as enlightened, virtuous, strong as any of his fellow men.” Toqueville’s point is that democracy presupposes that each person is as competent and virtuous as any other. But of course this is false: people differ widely in intelligence and virtue. Note that he says “considered” not “really”. So democracy rests on a lie. How, then, to defend democracy? Well, if truth, reason, virtue, etc are not objective qualities that people exemplify to varying degrees, but are rather relative to each person, we have a way out: everyone is as smart and good as anyone else to himself. Then democracy rests on no lie, since everyone really is cognitively and morally equal. Relativism steps in to save democracy from its noble lie. Thus relativism finds a foothold. But relativism is rubbish; so where does that leave democracy?

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