I got that pizza butt!

The Wallpaper remix of Das Racist's "Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell" has been tearing up the the poptimists charts like a diamond blade cutting through a pizza and a taco, and in Vegas has been tagged as an early favorite to win the poptimists year-end singles poll.

A bit of research uncovers Das Racist's MySpace page, with a version of "Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell" that's more techno-rap and less goth-dance than the Wallpaper remix (which I've been saying reminds me of Flipper and the Descendents, who are generally considered to be variations on hardcore punk, for you nomenclature fans). Das Racist describe themselves as sounding like Asher Roth and they cite Eminem as an influence. They seem to be serious about that, in fact tend to basically be hip-hop.

YouTube reveals potential for "Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell" to go viral, e.g.:

Watch on YouTube

but that would depend on its getting an official dance (rather than stuff like this or this [which seems to be at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell on the 16th Street Mall]).

Here's Wallpaper's MySpace. The big play there is "T Rex," which is spacey love funk on ice skates.

Kuhn 17: Uh, what was the question?

dubdobdee asked me several weeks ago to remind him what the Kuhn questions were, so I'll repost some of them here. Back in Kuhn 5 I asked six broad questions, thinking we could get to work on 1 through 3 relatively quickly and 4 through 6 as we went further. "Quickly" is relative, and if you think of the notion of quickness relative to geologic time, we're but an instant away from when I asked the questions. In any event, in getting to work on question 2, another question began to supersede these six, an apparently more esoteric and seemingly less world-important one. I'll summarize the question as:

What does Kuhn think the difference is between being following a rule, on the one hand, and seeing how to apply a paradigm, on the other?

This question developed in discussion between Mark and me in the comments to Kuhn 8 and then got restated by me in Kuhn 11 in this way: Kuhn would say that the difference between following rules that tell you how to apply f = ma, on the one hand, and seeing how to apply f = ma, on the other, is _______. And then I summarized with: Kuhn would say that the difference between seeing a resemblance and following a rule is _______.

This was all in relation to this stream of questions (using the word "paradigm" in the narrow sense of "exemplar"): (a) What might these rules or types of rule be that Kuhn thinks other people think are in effect but he thinks are not? What do they do? (b) What are paradigms - these devices that Kuhn thinks accomplish what other people attribute to rules? What do paradigms do? (c) What's the difference between following a rule on the one hand and modeling your solution on a paradigm on the other? (d) Why is it that Kuhn thinks that scientists proceed by way of paradigms rather than rules? (e) Why does Kuhn think it's so important to distinguish between following a rule and being guided by a paradigm?

In trying to answer these questions, we will need to use examples more than to give definitions.

( I myself don't altogether understand how to anwer the question )

( The other six questions )