Edge Banding Technique

When using plywood to build things, one problem you (almost) always have is: What to do about the edges? Unlike with solid wood, when the edges look like, uh, wood, with plywood the edges look like, uh, plies of wood stacked on top of each other. Not usually the look you want. So the usual thing to do is apply 'edge banding'. The easiest way to do this is to buy iron-on edge banding, for example, from Veneer Supplies (which is where I get all my cool veneers). This works great, but it comes in a limited variety of woods, and you do still end up with the edge of the edge banding being visible, which isn't too bad, in most cases, but isn't ideal. 

So another way to proceed is to make your own. I.e., cut thin (say 1/8") strips of wood, and then glue them onto the edges of the plywood. It is not too difficult to cut the strips, if you have a table saw. (And it helps to have a pair of these guides.) And, in many cases, it isn't too hard to glue them to the plywood. The problem is to get sufficient pressure across the whole strip, so it will glue down evenly. I've managed that with lots of clamps, and long pieces of wood used as cauls.

But there is one time this doesn't work: when trying to apply edge banding to the edges of shelving, when the shelves are already in place, and the back is already on whatever the shelves fit into. (Why put the back on first? For stability, usually.) The problem then is that you simply can't clamps across the shelves: The back is in the way.

There are commercially available clamps for edge banding. And there are some simple DIY versions. But none of those look to me like they really apply enough pressure. 

I finally figured out a method that works for me, and only uses things I have lying around the shop anyway. The pictures below show how it works. Basically, I've got C-clamps in front of the edge banding (though I should also have used a caul), and then shims between the C-clamps and the banding. Banging them in good gives quite a bit of pressure on the edge banding. The pipe clamps on the sides are holding the edges down.

 

 

 

John Coltrane, Jazz Piano Solos v. 24

Yet another book of solo piano arrangements, this time of tunes either written by or recorded by John Coltrane. The ones he wrote (most of them, at least) cannot be 'played', as of this writing, presumably due to the need to pay royalties for such 'playing'.

The arrangements in this book are by Brent Edstrom.

Are "Facials" Misogynistic?

This paper has been on my website for a while (here). It has now been accepted for publication at Porn Studies, which is a peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor & Francis. I've been wanting for some time now to publish something in a non-philosophy, gender-and-sexuality-studies sort of journal, so it looks like that will finally happen.

Abstract:

So-called ‘facial’ cumshots, when a man ejaculates onto a woman’s face, are very common in pornography. While they are frequently said to be degrading and misogynistic, the fact that women are usually shown as enjoying this act should make us think again. Facials may instead be rooted in male insecurity: of a fear that an aspect of how men orgasm—semen—is disgusting to women. By contrast, the fantasy, which pornography makes vivid, is that women might not just tolerate but celebrate and eroticize both ejaculation and its product. The way mainstream pornography presents facials may often be misogynistic, but it does not have to be, and it is not always.

 

Melanie Spanswick: Women Composers, Book 2

A collection of works by women composers, from baroque to modern, for intermediate to early advanced, edited by Melanie Spanswick. See here for more information.

Complete YouTube Playlist here. 

New Paper: Does Davidson Argue For Compositionality?

 Abstract

Donald Davidson is generally supposed to have offered an argument for the principle of compositionality in “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages”. Peter Pagin, however, has argued that Davidson offers no such argument. Indeed, Pagin claims that Davidson explicitly rejects any demand that compositionality should be justified and, moreover, that the argument in question is invalid. I argue here that the first claim is mistaken and that the latter, though it offers a helpful corrective, does not undermine the interest of the argument Davidson gives. But there is a deep tension in Davidson's work here, to which Pagin may well be responding, and that tension is not resolvable.

Get it here. 

This paper has now been accepted for publication at the Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy. 

Truth, Reflection, and Implicit Commitment

 New paper, forthcoming in a volume on the foundations of mathematics. Abstract:

The 'Implicit Commitment Thesis' (ICT) states that, if you accept a mathematical theory, then you are 'implicitly committed' to its consistency, and perhaps also to various sorts of reflection principles. This is meant to have various consequences, such as that consistency proofs can never be cogent: give us reason to believe that a theory is consisetent. I here consider a sampling of arguments for ICT and argue that they are all wanting. At the end, I suggest that we should, anyway, think of soundness proofs, in particular, not as attempts to justify reflection principles but as attempts to explain why they are true. 

Get it here. 

This is the paper for which the two short notes posted earlier, "A Note on the Strength of Disentangled Truth-Theories" and "Some Remarks on 'Logical' Reflection", are essentially appendices. 

Frege Arithmetic and the Epistemology of 'Everyday' Arithmetic

For the conference in honor of Crispin Wright held in St Andrews recently, I gave a talk that continued a discussion several of us had been having at the UConn conference a couple years ago, celebrating the 40th anniversary of Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects. The subject of that discussion was whether there's any plausibility to the claim that Frege's Theorem might throw light on the epistemology of ordinary arithmetical knowledge, that is, the arithmetical knowledge of the legendary queer on the Clapham omnibus. I argued in the talk that there might well be such a case to be made. 

I don't know if I'll ever write up this material, so I'm making the slides available on my website.