waka waka waka

We’re back in Gotham, and will be resuming normal operations shortly. We were away on a whirlwind trip to the Midwest for the happiest of reasons: the graduation, with honors, of our daughter Chloë from the University of Michigan.

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With a tip of the hat to Dennis Mangan, here are some striking public-service posters from France, warning of the dangers of AIDS. Shocking, perhaps, to some, so caveat observator.

As mentioned below, waka waka waka will be off the air until the weekend is over. We’ll be on the road, and I won’t have a computer along, which is, frankly, quite a pleasant prospect.

It’s been a very busy week indeed, and there has been scant time for writing, or for that matter, even thinking, it seems. I’ve had not a moment to join (for which I apologize) Titus Rivas and Bob Koepp in the excellent discussion that followed this post, and I’ve also had no time to prepare the thoughtful response that I would like to make to some of the arguments that Titus has put forward in this article. Little snippets and lightweight froth have been all I’ve managed, and it won’t be until next week that things quiet down a bit, as we are traveling this weekend, and I expect to be fully occupied with auspicious events in the real world until Monday evening at the earliest. We’ll get back down to business around here after that.

There’s lots of interesting news these days from really faraway places; if you’re interested in such things, you should subscribe to two of the newsletters I get: one published by NASA, and the other from Spaceweather.com.

There are three stories I’ll mention tonight.

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The noted computer scientist David Gelernter has been working on what he believes will replace the World Wide Web. He calls it the Worldbeam. Learn more here.

In remarking on a recent post, commenter Titus Rivas offered a link to a paper he and Hein van Dongen wrote in 2001, in which they launch an assault on the mind-body model known as epiphenomenalism. Epiphenomenalism is the view that the subjective, conscious mind is a causally impotent byproduct of the physical activity of the brain — that it only witnesses our cognitive processes, without having the ability to influence them in any way.

I’ll admit that I have found epiphenomenalism attractive myself; it squares nicely with, to pick one example, the experimental results of Benjamin Libet, which seem to show that we act on our decisions before we are conscious of them. But it has its difficulties, too, and I think Rivas and van Dongen have mounted a successful refutation, which I will summarize here, of this philosophical position. It’s also worth mentioning that they stand in agreement on the insupportability of epiphenomenalism with philosopher Daniel Dennett¹, and when you have two committed dualists in firm agreement with Dennett that a particular mind-brain model doesn’t work, you have good reason to be skeptical of it.

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1. see Consciousness Explained, 1991, pp 398-405  

Readers are encouraged to have a look at this thoughtful piece by Kevin Kim, in which he examines freedom and responsibility in the wake of the Virginia massacre.

An item in today’s Times reports a new and important result from a major European research facility. After years of painstaking investigation, the Vatican has announced that Limbo, an area where the souls of unbaptized babies and of the multitudes who lived before the time of Christ were previously understood to dwell — not in communion with God, but enjoying “eternal happiness” nevertheless — has been found not to exist. This significant discovery has presumably been announced only after extensive peer review.

Further research may be necessary to determine the status of the individuals thereby displaced; as of now, the provisional theory consists of a “prayerful hope that they reach Heaven”. Heaven itself, of course, is still presumed to exist, barring experimental disconfirmation, occupying as it does a central position in what might be termed the “Standard Model”.

Peas as Large as Beets! Hot and Cold Air from Spigots!

…I haven’t the time this evening to disgorge any of the usual tendentious bloviation, so I thought I’d share with you a breezy little item I stumbled upon this morning, when I should have been working.

Man Will See Around the World! No Foods Will Be Exposed!!

These are just a few of the predictions made in 1900 by the domestic sybils of the Ladies’ Home Journal about what the world of 2000 would be like.

Store Purchases by Tube! Vegetables Grown by Electricity!!!

They actually did a fair job of it; you can judge for yourself here.

There is quite a ruction, as we might expect, over the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding a Federal law barring “partial birth” abortions, and even the justices of the Supreme Court seem quite angrily divided. This is law at its most difficult, in which separating the rights and interests of the parties involved — in fact, even defining how many interested parties there are — depends not on simple, practical considerations, but upon metaphysical intuitions for which there is no demonstrably correct answer, and about which people’s beliefs vary diametrically.

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In the wake of the horror at Virginia Tech, folks around the world, and here at home, are expressing a predictable variety of responses. The Left is calling for stricter gun control, the Right for stricter immigration, the Europeans are criticizing our violent culture, and all sorts of people are focusing on the Asian-ness, or more specifically the Korean-ness, of the shooter. (For the Korean viewpoint, I recommend that readers pay Kevin Kim a visit.) President Bush, with breathtaking clumsiness and insensitivity, prefaced his first remarks to the nation with an oafish assertion about his position on gun ownership. News anchors are cautioning us against racist outbursts; there will undoubtedly be some. (The Wall Street Journal today carried a level-headed editorial that readers may find of interest.)

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A few days ago the New York Times offered a revealing glimpse of the august body of solons by whose sage and impartial judgment New Jersey law is made.

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We’re back in Gotham, delayed for a day by the immense storm that has battered the Eastern Seaboard. We sat out the tempest in Wellfleet, Massachussetts, which is situated on a narrow spit of land twenty-five miles out to sea, and which took quite a pounding, as you might imagine.

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Back in early March I called readers’ attention to Colony Collapse Disorder, which is the name given to an alarming development: bees abandoning their hives, never to be found. This ominous phenomenon, which presents a major threat to our food supply, is already a serious problem — here on the East Coast, it is estimated that 70% of commercial bee colonies are already depopulated. So far there has been no explanation, but now my friend Jess Kaplan has sent me a news item announcing that a European researcher, one Joachim Kuhn of Landau University, has identified a possible culprit: cellular phones. The idea is that the electromagnetic signals given off by mobile phones are interfering with the bees’ navigational systems, and that the bees, unable to find their way home, simply wander off into the wild, there to die alone.

It will be interesting to see how the Colony Collapse Working Group responds to this suggestion.

This is an extremely serious problem; Albert Einstein (who was, admittedly, not a trained agronomist) is quoted in the story as having said that if the bees disappeared, “man would have only four years of life left”. Well, they are indeed disappearing, and fast.

Read the article here.

Today is Friday the 13th, an occasion that many folks regard with a wary eye.

Not me, though: as it happens, I was born on a Friday the 13th, 51 years ago today. So whenever they pop up I always think of them as auspicious. Of course, as a man of science, I realize that’s just superstitious nonsense, but there it is anyway. It happens to the best of us.

There’s a story about the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr: apparently he was greeting some visitors at his country house, and one of them was surprised to see a horseshoe hanging over the doorway. When asked what it was doing there, Bohr said that he had heard it brings good luck.

“But professor! Surely you don’t believe in such things!”

“Of course not,” said Bohr. “But they say it works even if you don’t believe in it!”

We’ll be on the road today, and Internet access will be spotty over the weekend, so content may be thin over the next couple of days.

Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus. Imus Imus Imus. Imus Imus Imus, Imus, Imus Imus Imus Imus Imus!

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If you’ve ever set up a wireless home network using Windows machines, you know what a vexatious task it can be. David Pogue, tech reporter for the New York Times, shares his personal adventure here. It appears there is room for improvement.

My friend Duncan Werner has just alerted me to the sad news that Kurt Vonnegut has died. Duncan’s note contained the following passage from Cat’s Cradle, which seems as apt as anything I might say:

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.

Today’s Wall Street Journal features an informative piece by Mideast scholar Fouad Ajami on the changing balance of power in Iraq. An excerpt:

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If you follow such things, you might be interested to read about an effort by a University of Washington researcher to demonstrate what is known as “quantum retrocausality” - in other words, backwards causation.

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There is a front-page story in today’s New York Times about a radical and highly controversial proposal that, if adopted, will almost certainly shake our civilization to its very foundations: voluntary guidelines for well-mannered blogging.

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In the last three posts in this series on mind-body interaction, we looked at some of the more serious objections to what is known as “interactionist ’substance’ dualism”. After laying out a litany of difficulties with this model, I ended the previous entry by asking why anyone would defend such a view.

There are several reasons. Let’s look some of them over.

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From my good friend Duncan Werner, one of the cleverest people I’ve ever met (I’m sure he’d rather I hadn’t said that, but there it is), comes something brand new that I think will be a Big Deal indeed before long — and as far as I know, you waka waka waka readers are the very first people in the whole wide world to hear about it. It’s a simple enough idea; one of those that make you ask yourself “why didn’t I think of that?”

What is it? Well, think of Wikipedia. Now think of a good place to eat. Now look here.

In recent years, though I still record an album or two a year, I’ve spent most of my working hours as a software engineer. Most of my code is written in the “object-oriented” language C++, and is designed to run on the Windows operating system.

I took up this arcane profession just at the beginning of the new millennium, in response to the precipitous decline of the recording industry in the late 1990’s. Given that software engineering is well suited to the solitary brooder, I thought it was something I’d be good at — I’d always had a flair for logic and math, and had spent my working life to date in a highly technical field — but getting up to a professional level in advanced C++ programming was no small challenge for a doddering geezer of 45. At my first job in my new career, surrounded by dauntingly sharp-witted experts half my age, and still adjusting to my change in status from globetrotting recording-studio Big Shot to middle-aged nobody, I felt as if I were pulling onto the Autobahn in a fully-loaded 1967 VW microbus.

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Hard upon the government’s global-warming setback at the hands of the Supreme Court, we have new evidence that the Bush administration’s environmental perfidy knows no Earthly bounds.

Learn more here.

I can tell you from dolorous personal experience how difficult it can be, once you have confected a snappy little essay, blog post, or other other coruscating gem of tightly condensed prose, to come up with an apt and witty title; often it’s the hardest part of the job. So I have long admired the editors of the city’s tabloid newspapers, who are perhaps the greatest masters of this recondite art. The New York Post (one of the nation’s oldest papers, by the way, having been founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801) leads the pack; examples include announcing the sportscaster Marv Albert’s firing for being a cross-dresser with the headline Marv Gets Pink Slip, and long-ago classics like Headless Body In Topless Bar. I remember that when the barely human Mike Tyson snacked on a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear during a title fight the Post brought the matter to our attention with Chump Chomps Champ.

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According to this news item from the Russian news agency Novosti, the Belgian region of Wallonia has found a potent weapon against human-induced climate change: a tax on barbecueing. As I’m sure our readers are well aware, a session at the grill can produce up to 50 grams of carbon dioxide. But rest easy: the glaciers will soon be advancing once again, now that carnivorous Walloons will have to fork over 20 Euros to the government before they can heat their meat.

How will the new policy be enforced, you ask? By helicopters wielding thermal sensors.

As James Taranto (to whom we tip our hat for the story) points out: “Good thing helicopters don’t emit any CO₂!”

I’ve mentioned this before, but my friend Patrick Goldsmith, who spent years collecting handmade art in Southeast asia, is selling his collection in order that he may move to China. He has a wonderful assortment of beautiful objects, and as time is short, he is willing to part with them at fire-sale prices. If you have any interest in this sort of thing, this is a great opportunity to get your hands on some lovely pieces.

You can view the collection, and contact Pat, here.

My friend Jess Kaplan calls our attention to an extremely disturbing development: schools in the UK are now avoiding the subject of the Holocaust in their history curricula in order to avoid offending Muslim students, whose social and religious programming often includes Holocaust denial.

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I’ve just run across an unsettling story on the BBC’s website: while we’ve been bickering about philosophical zombies, it appears that over in Cambodia they have to deal with the real thing. Have a look here.