waka waka waka

Labor Day weekend is here, and while a lot of folks are moping about summer coming to an end, you won’t hear any griping from me. Just as the advancing weeks of May and June fill me with a gathering dread each year as the heat and fetor approach, when I get to the end of August I begin to realize — with woozy incomprehension at first, but then with a growing sense of elation — that deliverance is at hand, and that against all the odds I have staggered and sweated through another summer in New York without taking my own life (or anyone else’s).

Now come the most beautiful months of all: September and October, when a reliable succession of Canadian fronts will drape, in graceful catenary arcs, across the weather maps in the Times, sweeping the skies clear of summer’s viscous murk. The air will sparkle and invigorate, the gentle harvest sun will bathe the countryside in its golden radiance, and our mighty city will rouse itself from its sweltering torpor and get about its important business once again. The days, clear and mild at first, will turn cool, then crisp, and the leaves will flare again with impossible, incandescent beauty.

Above all, though, as I’ve said before, what I love the most about the fall is the gathering rush of change, as the massive pendulum of the seasons, having rested briefly in the summer’s heat, turns and begins its ancient transit once again, taking us all along for the ride.

As one who has taken, shall we say, a rather nonstandard path through life, I’m always gratified to see mavericks and autodidacts come through with the goods, and I’ve just run across a particularly noteworthy example. Inventor John Kanzius, of Erie, PA, who is battling leukemia, has developed a technique, using nanoparticles and radio waves, that may be a powerful new weapon against cancer. Learn more here.

In a rather heated post a little while back, I railed against the notion that a merciful God would permit suffering such as that of little Abigail Taylor, the six-year-old girl who was recently disemboweled in a horrifying accident. The universal, reciprocal cruelty of the natural world also offers bountiful evidence that even if some sort of God exists, He cares not a fig for the torment of the living beings for whose existence He is reponsible.

In yesterday’s mail, correspondent Edward Babinski sent along a link to a website that extends this line of reasoning even farther than I had thought to take it; arguing that God is not indifferent, or nonexistent, but malicious. Have a look here.

With a hat tip to our friend the Big Hominid, we direct you to a remarkable video clip, of the apostate Muslim gadfly Wafa Sultan engaging in a heated debate on al-Jazeera television.

Sultan characterizes the struggle between jihadis and the West:

The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.

This is a brave woman. Apparently this clip has been making the rounds for a while, but I hadn’t run acroos it before, and perhaps you haven’t either. See it here.

We are still more occupied with sun and surf than the glowing screen, but will be back in town, with nose reapplied to grindstone, this week.

Meanwhile, a rather odd item from the frontiers of astrophysical research: it appears that there is an enormous hole in the visible universe, a billion light-years across. Lately it seems that the more we see of the cosmos, the less we know. Learn (a little bit) more here.

The publication schedule here at waka waka waka may be a little gappy for the next few days: we are off on a family vacation (a rarity these days, with both kids entering early adulthood), and squinting at the computer for hours on end fits poorly into our activities schedule. We will, however, post up whatever weightless froth and insubstantial rubbish we can offer without exercising ourselves unduly; here, for example, is a dirt-digging news item that identifies the real culprits in the global-warming case — a poorly-assimilated community of large, hairy and flatulent Norwegians.

A few days ago we made passing mention of the Oxford philosopher of science Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument, which makes the claim that we are probably living in some sort of Matrix-like computer program. This dismal notion, which we looked at a bit more closely back in May, was also the subject of a brief article in last week’s New York Times.

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Here.

Many, perhaps most, fans would, if asked, name Sgt. Pepper’s as the greatest Beatles album of them all — and it was, without question, a work of coruscating brilliance. But many of us who grew up during that extraordinary period in musical and cultural history feel that it was the album immediately preceding that was the Beatles’ most significant creative breakthrough — the most audacious departure from all that had come before, both musically and technically. I’m talking, of course, about the 1966 release Revolver.

Why am I bringing this up? I’ve just stumbled upon a marvelous little book about this revolutionary recording, and I wanted to share it with you all. Go and have a look here.

We note with sadness, if not surprise, recent reports that the vainglorious popinjay Hugo Chávez is further consolidating his dictatorship of Venezuela by seeking to eliminate Constitutional term limits.

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Yale’s David Gelernter, the well-known computer scientist, has written an article in Technology Review on the problems that bedevil AI research. He has some interesting things to say — not only about AI, but also about consciousness itself — and it’s well worth your while to read it.

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Longtime waka waka waka readers will recall that I used to work for an outfit called PubSub. It was an immensely promising idea, with truly revolutionary potential, but despite the fact that first-tier VCs were lining up around the block to give us money, the company perished in a spectacular (and wincingly public) implosion. I think of it as the USS Thresher of Internet startups.

The concept was simple enough; PubSub did “prospective search”, which turns the Google-type search paradigm on its head.

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I’ve been working long hours this week, and have had scant leisure for thinking or writing. I hate to send you away empty-handed, though, after you’ve made the effort to check in, so here, courtesy of our friend The Stiletto, is an online test of your ability to remember names and faces.

I actually did rather well, to my surprise; it has seemed to me that my memory for such things has been slipping away in recent years, a decline I have probably done my fair share to accelerate.

There’s a rather tart saying about the loss of memory that attends old age:

“First you forget names; next you forget faces. Then you forget to pull up your zipper, and then you forget to pull down your zipper.”

For me, so far it’s mostly faces.

A reader who calls himself William has left an extensive comment on our recent post about the Korean hostages, in which he left quite a list of relevant links, prefaced by the follwing remarks:

Hi, I’m also trying to learn what on earth these Koreans have got themselves into. Without passing any judgment on the articles nor their subjects, here are a bunch of links to articles on their (mis-)adventure which I have found so far (I’ve tried to fix any broken link - sorry for inconvenience caused).

I have pasted in the corrected links that William later added; the list is below.

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Here’s another interesting item about climate change, sent our way by Mike Zaharee. It appears that some of the data about which of the past hundred years or so have been the warmest may have been a bit off. See this post as well.

Freeman Dyson, one of our greatest living scientists, has always been known for the originality and independence of his thinking. I’ve just read a remarkable essay by this formidable man, and hope you’ll read it too.

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The revised and enhanced Barry Bonds, as some of you may know, broke Henry Aaron’s career home-run record yesterday by knocking the ball out of the park for the 756th time.

His place in history is a controversial matter, however, due to his Bruce-Banner-like transformation from the wiry and slender athlete he was in the early 1990’s to the beefy slugger he is today.

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In yesterday’s New York Times, the cultural critic and polymath Edward Rothstein discussed the central idea of Lee Harris’s book The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West, namely that the Enlightenment faith in the progressive ascendancy of reason in human affairs is a false hope.

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Kevin Kim, in today’s edition, outlines the typical career arc of a successful stand-up comic, from early aspirations at the microphone to washed-up Hollywood star.

After spending many years doing freelance recording for the music-for-hire houses here in New York, I can offer a similar timeline, The Life of a Jingle Singer.

Let’s say his name is Kyle Simms. His career unfolds as follows:

Yes, it’s a brutal life, friends. But at least it’s short.

With a hat tip to my old pal and fellow Power Station alumnus, engineer extraordinaire Larry Alexander, comes a mesmerizing animation of this John Coltrane classic, one of the high-water marks of Western civilization. Tommy Flanagan, piano; Paul Chambers, bass, Art Taylor, drums, and of course John Coltrane on tenor. If there is anything more sublime than music of this quality, I don’t know what it is. Heraclitus would have loved this one, by the way.

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Here, from the journal Foreign Affairs, is Barack Obama’s obligatory term paper on foreign policy. (Thanks to my friend Jess Kaplan for sending the link our way.)

Though the paper deals mostly in generalities, its tone is encouraging, and although I doubt Obama will get the Democratic nod next year, I was pleasantly surprised to see how little he pandered to the more extreme elements in the party’s base. He recommends a beefed-up military, troop buildups in Afghanistan, serious pressure on Pakistan, with aggressive diplomacy taking a primary role, but backed by a genuine willingness to act if necessary: in general, a confident, forward-leaning foreign policy, and one that embraces, rather than rejects, the notion that the US ought to be using its unrivaled power, and the beneficent appeal of its core principles, to shape the sort of world we live in. In fact, he sounded rather like a neoconservative in the making!

As I say, something of a surprise, and an interesting move on his part; obviously the Dems are trying to balance getting out from under their soft-on-security image with not just becoming Bush-Cheney Lite. I think he will lose some support on the far Left, but gain some in the center, as a result of this article. I imagine also that some will wonder, as I do, whether he’s just trying it all on, to see how it fits. Do have a look.

The Gypsy Scholar, Horace Jeffery Hodges, discussed the question of absolute national sovereignty in a recent post. It’s an important and difficult issue, and opinions vary greatly.

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During Republican administrations there tends to be a steady seepage, across our northern border, of sanctimonious and neurasthenic lefties quitting the littoral zones of the USA to make new lives in Canada, their delicate constitutions overwhelmed by the populist social fluctuations permitted by our nation’s vastly more robust one. The Bush administration, which is pretty bad weather even for the rest of us, seems, unsurprisingly, to have increased the osmotic pressure.

While this may be no great loss for us, for some of our neighbors in the Great White North it is just about the most irritating thing imaginable. Here (by way of our friend Kevin Kim, the “Chosen” One) is a splendid rant wherein the inimitable Skippy vents his capacious spleen upon these latte-fueled epiphytes. Of particular interest is his debunking of the myth of Canada’s status as the El Dorado of socialized health care, where the streets are paved with gauze. Adults only, please.

At least you aren’t a seven-legged, terminally constipated, hermaphroditic ruminant.

Readers will recall that the bloated Bible-beater Jerry Falwell died a little while back; here’s a related item I ran across earlier today. It’s a video clip of Christopher Hitchens offering, to CNN’s ubiquitous Anderson Cooper, a post-mortem opinion of the porcine preacher (whom Hitchens refers to, at one point, as a “Chaucerian fraud”). See below.

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Elton John would like to do away with the Internet.

He laments, as do I, that people no longer get together to make music, but do so now mostly alone, sequestered in their little digital studios. He’s quite right about that part; music has a strongly social component, and good things happen when people play together, and usually don’t when they don’t. But close down the Internet? Dream on. As Tony Soprano said, “you can’t put the shit back in the donkey.”

Anyway, even if he did manage to get the Internet shut down, he’d be pilloried in the blogosphere.