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Thursday, October 27, 2011

Begging the question...

"Begging the question" and "raising the question" are not synonyms.

This is the most useful thing I took away from an ill-advised course in undergraduate philosophy (and yes, I recognize that it is not particularly useful).

"Begging the question" is a logical fallacy where the premise implicitly or explicitly assumes the proposition to be proven - it means the reasoning will be circular.

This mistake happens all the time and it doesn't bother me because language is defined by how it is used, and the important thing is that people understand what you're trying to communicate. Here is a gem that I couldn't overlook though:

Ralph Fiennes on the decline of the English language:
"Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us," he said. [...] "I think we're living in a time when our ears are attuned to a flattened and truncated sense of our English language, so this always begs the question, is Shakespeare relevant?"
The irony is so delicious. Get off your high horse Ralph Fiennes.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Unphotogenic Banana Zucchini Bread

In the spirit of not wasting food, but sticking true to my refuses-to-eat-spotty-bananas roots I decided to make banana bread to use up those bananas. I didn't have much in the house by way of food, but the improvised results were pretty delicious. The photo is kind of ugly though. 

Ingredients: 
  1. 2 ripe bananas, smushed
  2. 1/2 zucchini, grated
  3. 1/3 cup coconut oil, melted
  4. 1 cup brown sugar (loosely packed)
  5. 1 egg, beaten
  6. 1/4 tsp almond extract (I'm sure vanilla would do as well, I just never have any)
  7. dash each of cinnamon, ground cloves, nutmeg 
  8. 1 tbsp baking soda 
  9. 1 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour
  10. (optional) chopped walnuts
  11. (optional) tablespoon flax seeds
Directions: 
  1. Preheat oven to 350F
  2. combine oil, bananas, and zucchini 
  3. add egg, sugar, spices, and almond extract and mix
  4. add baking soda and salt and mix
  5. optionally, add flax seeds and/or walnuts
  6. add flour and mix. Yum.
  7. Butter and flour a 4x8" loaf pan
  8. Put batter in pan and bake for 40-60 minutes
  9. Remove from oven when finished, cool and remove from pan