waka waka waka

Well, as we feared would happen, it appears that the peaceful uprising in Burma has been tamped down by ruthless violence. The UN has sent an envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, to speak with the ruling junta, and we can be sure that he will, at the very least, administer a stern finger-wagging — and if that proves ineffective, he may have to resort to more extreme measures, such as a baleful scowl, or perhaps even harrumphing. After all, these are pretty rough customers he’s dealing with, and this is no time for pussy-footing.

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I expect things to settle down a bit as of tomorrow, but writing at any length requires, for me at least, quiet time alone, which has been in short supply all week. So for tonight, I find myself reduced not just to “meta-blogging”, which is simply pointing readers to the work done by others, but to meta-meta-blogging. In this case, following a link from our friend Kevin Kim — which in turn was based on a tip from his pal, and our occasional visitor, The Maven — we direct you to some wonderful little Flash animations, by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, of brief talks by the late Zen practitioner and autodidact Alan Watts. They are charming, and you can find them here. I particularly like “Prickles and Goo”.

I do apologize for the paucity of content around here this week. But don’t go away mad: here, with a hat tip to my friend Greg Estren, is some fabulous video footage of the exotic fauna of the ocean’s abyssal depths. Do have a look.

Here.

Not having the time this evening for any long-winded jibber-jabber, I’ll share with you something nifty I’ve just run across: a new system that enables ordinary digital cameras to take multi-gigpixel panoramas. Have a look here, and zoom in all you like.

For those of you who are interested, here is a transcript of the events at Columbia University on Monday.

Looking back, I suppose little was gained, and perhaps something lost, by Mr. Bollinger’s caustic introduction, although for those of you who have only heard about it, it is worth reading, because it is much more than just taunting and name-calling; Bollinger makes it quite clear why a civilized world should have contempt for this regime.

But for Ahmadinejad’s admirers, it simply made him look brave to stand and take it. And for the rest of us, there was no need; we already know what the man is.

We note with considerable interest the goings-on in Burma these days, where the military junta that runs the country — one of the most repressive governments in the world today — is finding itself in a bit of a cleft stick as Buddhist monks are waging an ever-bolder campaign of civil disobedience.

Were any other group attempting such defiance of the ruling committee, they would be crushed by the armed forces, but such is the popular allegiance to these monks that the army, so far, has not dared, and so they are being pushed ever deeper into a very difficult corner.

Science-fiction readers, of which I was one myself in my youth, may note some similarity in this situation to one that the late Isaac Asimov described in his Foundation series. In that story, when a credulous agricultural populace was forced to choose sides between the technological priesthood of the Foundation and the mighty army of the Galactic Empire, they sided with the priests — the stewards of their immortal souls.

It certainly would be wonderful to see this awful regime driven from power in a bloodless revolution, but it is not in the nature of those who have gained absolute power by force to surrender it peacefully. Something has to give way soon. The world is watching.

Today’s Physorg newsletter (which, as always, I recommend to those of you who like to keep up with science news) contained a story about what looks to me like an important piece of medical research, involving the role played by tryptophan in cancer and other diseases. Have a look here.

There was a predictable ruction about whether or not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should have been allowed to speak at Columbia today, and I must say that at the very least it was gratifying to see that he was given a chilly greeting. It was nice to see the academic community turning out to express their disapproval of America’s enemies for a change.

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I have been busy this weekend with a two-day Iron Wire seminar (which is turning out to be one of the most interesting and esoteric experiences I’ve had in 32 years of kung-fu training), so for tonight I’ll just leave you with an engaging little diversion. It’s an online test of your ability to perceive and remember musical tones.

A tip: pay attention! Here it is.

Further wisdom from the Sage of Baltimore.

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Ask anyone these days, and they’ll tell you that health-care services in Cuba are second to none. Despite the island nation’s having been so thoroughly beggared by almost half a century of totalitarian Marxist rule that people drown themselves in rickety boats in desperate attempts to flee, even the humblest son of the soil, when troubled by the least infirmity, need go no farther than the nearest village to be seen to by world-class specialists working in gleaming state-of-the-art facilites. And it’s all free, free, free! Eat your heart out, imperialist running dog lackeys.

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One hears a lot these days about a “right” to health care. I bristle at this, because I think the notion of “rights” as anything other than matters of human convention is rubbish. We may, as a society, choose to define our laws such that they include a “right” to those things we deem appropriate: health care, broadband Internet access, full pirate regalia for all adults, or whatever else we like — and of course we have already done exactly that in the case of freedom of the press, bearing arms, and so forth. But until we have made such formal arrangements, any talk of axiomatic “rights” is weightless froth. So while we may yet decide that it is in our nation’s interest to establish a universal health-care arrangement of some sort — and there are good arguments on both sides of the issue — to claim, as matters stand today, a “right” to such a government-supported service is to gabble nonsense.

I mention all of this because Bill Vallicella has just posted a pungent little essay on this very topic. Have a look here.

On September 6th, Israel did something in Syria, something about which they have been rather uncharacteristically mum. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens, ex-editor of the Jerusalem Post, considers what it might have been.

Our pal The Stiletto takes a pointed look at farm subsidies. Here.

I’ve been swamped, and have had no time for the sort of brooding and omphaloskepsis required for gestating these posts. But today my friend Louis Franzetti sent along a copy of some recent Darwin Awards, and to keep you occupied this evening I offer a link that pops up a randomly chosen example every time you click it.

We’ll be back soon.

I’ve been spending a few days in our seaside shack, reading a little H. L. Mencken. The collection I have in hand is The Vintage Mencken: Gathered by Alistair Cooke (at a mere $11.96, you should go right ahead and buy it).

In an essay entitled Mr. Justice Holmes, Mencken pauses briefly to assess our legislators:

The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology, or cannibalism.

He also rates our jurists:

The average American judge as everyone knows, is a mere rabbinical automaton, with no more give and take in his mind that you will find in the mind of a terrier watching a rathole.

If you haven’t read any Mencken, your life is the poorer: he is one of America’s greatest writers and sharpest wits.

The great tragedy, and supreme irony, of Mencken’s life is that he spent his last eight years rendered aphasic by a cerebral thrombosis, unable to read or write.

Our friend Kevin Kim has recently begun and ended a storm-tossed relationship with a fellow by the name of Zach Shatz, who has written a slim book in which he attempts to explain Ultimate Reality through the prism of, well, prisms. Kevin did an interview with Shatz about the book (which, judging by this interview, is nothing more than foaming New Age poppycock), in which the author came up far short of impressing me with the coherence of his thinking, or the profundity of his insights.

Kevin has lots of readers, and one of them wrote him a witheringly scornful email about the interview, which Kevin promptly posted. Finally, Kevin, having had an increasingly frustrating behind-the-scenes email exchange with Shatz, has lost all patience with the man, and has posted the whole correspondence online.

Lesson to be learned: don’t expect Kevin Kim to help you disseminate your bullshit.

You can follow the whole exchange as linked below:

The interview.

The letter from Kevin’s reader.

Kevin applies the final smackdown.

It startles me how differently people can see things. We all like to flatter ourselves that our opinions are guided by naught but sweet reason, but we overlook that reasoning is in general terms simply a manufacturing process, and like all such processes its output depends sensitively upon its input. That input, however, depends in turn upon a constellation of evaluative judgments, unquestioned assumptions, intuitions, and cultural preferences that vary across so many dimensions, and which are sensitive to perturbation by so many contingent influences, that in fact, although the machinery of reason itself may function similarly in us all, the finished product may vary enormously among people who seem outwardly to be as similar as two peas in a pod.

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From my son Nick, a splendid young man, restless Internet spelunker, and the prop of my dotage, comes a link to what looks like an worthwhile website: The Worlds of David Darling. I’d never heard of the fellow, but according to Wikipedia he is a well-known British astronomer who has written scads of books.

Anyway, his site is glossy and professional, and the premier attraction therein is a promising resource called The Internet Encyclopedia of Science. Do have a look.

To do physical science, one needs uniform references for fundamental quantities: length, duration, mass, and so forth. Over time, as the need for accuracy has increased, attempts have been made to place the fundamental units on ever more precise footing. For example, the reference meter, which was declared in 1791 by the French Academy of Sciences to be one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along a meridian running through Paris¹, is now taken to be “the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.”

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1. By the way, the measurement of this distance by a seven-year surveying expedition undertaken by Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre and Pierre François André Méchain is a fascinating story, and is told in the recent book The Measure of All Things, by Ken Alder.  

Here is some interesting reading for you all, courtesy of Edge.org.

First up is an essay called Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion, by Jonathan Haidt, in which he takes the “new atheists” to task for failing to develop a subtle enough appreciation of the adaptive underpinnings of religion, and of morality. He draws on recent shifts in how the notion of group selection is understood, and introduces some non-traditional functional concepts about morality.

Next, read responses by Michael Shermer, David Sloan Wilson, and Sam Harris, here.

I haven’t had time to digest all of this myself yet. Have a look, and let’s talk about it a little later.

I was saddened to see in today’s news that the great Joe Zawinul has died, of cancer, at the age of 75.

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As a software engineer, and a techie all my life, I don’t get all that excited about most of the products that come down the pipe. But this could really be the Next Big Thing: Windows RG. Have a look here.

Well, enough already, for now at least, with the religious stuff. I’m sure that readers are running for the hills after all that swooning about “numinous beauty and harmony”, etc. I had to make what I think is an important point, and I will return to it, I’m sure, before long, but for now, back to shallow-minded drivel, and lowbrow japery.

It’s Fashion Week here in Gotham, and every morning on the way to the midtown skyscraper where I arrange ones and zeroes for pennies a day, I pass by the big white tents in Bryant Park. West 40th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, is a buzzing hive of activity: news trucks, electrical equipment, reporters, caterers, fashion groupies, menials in various dusky shades, and of course the models, who are easy to spot: they’re the ones whose tuberculosis is apparently so advanced that they’ve been unable to eat for weeks.

Anyway, each morning as I pass by I gaze in wonderment at these elaborate temporary structures, which for a few magical days turn our charming little park into the Olympus of couture, knowing that within this temple of style — a venue that, for a homely schlub like me, is as inaccessible as the seraglio of Suleiman the Magnificent — the Illuminati are gathered to give the sacred codex of Fashion its equinoctical update.

As I trudge past this glittering palace to spend another day shackled to my oar, my heart is aflutter with curiosity. What will be on the runway today? What delicious flights of fancy are taking wing, to the delighted gasps of the fortunate few?

And the most important question of all: what will I be wearing this fall?

Well, wait no longer, friends. Have a look.

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In last night’s post I tried to make clear that disbelief in God need not be correlated with the sort of spritual tone-deafness that Dr. William Vallicella argued for in a recent essay.

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We have just passed the 10th anniversary of the death of Mother Teresa, and much is being made of letters, recently publicized, that indicate that she had grave doubts about the existence of God, and was deeply tormented by her own lack of faith.

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I am not, nor have I ever been, a “morning person”. I enjoy the peace and solitude of the nighttime; it’s my only opportunity to think long, slow thoughts without interruption.

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From Reuters, by way of our friend Jess Kaplan, comes a reassuring item about airline safety. Have a look here.

We note with grave concern that the legendary Shaolin Monks, the state-sponsored Chinese “wushu” outfit, have got their saffron-hued knickers in a knot over some incendiary remarks made by an anonymous commenter in an online forum of some sort.

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In Kevin Kim’s excellent book Water from a Skull (which I will be commenting on in greater detail as time permits — meanwhile, follow this link and buy a copy), he quotes Mark Salzman’s book Iron and Silk, in which kung fu master Pan Qingfu says “live each moment as if it were your last.”

Kevin’s book is fascinating, and I have already learned a great deal from it, but this aphorism, while not without a certain dashing appeal, is simply not good advice. If nothing else, you’d never have any groceries in the house.

I offer this instead:

“Live each moment with a conscious awareness of its proper context.”

I realize, to use an apt metaphor, that when it comes to sports reporting lately here at waka waka waka, we’ve dropped the ball. Sure, we’ve covered some important events from time to time (see here, here, and even here), but when the deadline arrives each day, we usually find ourselves running other material: a narrow-minded and insensitive screed about religion, some sort of reactionary and poorly researched political polemic, or other twaddle. But today, we’re going with a story that is clearly on a par with the Hindenburg disaster, the wreck of the Titanic, or any other of history’s most depressing calamities:

The Michigan Wolverines¹, the number-5-ranked team in the nation — considered by many to be serious contenders for the national championship, and a virtual lock for the Big Ten title — were defeated today, in their season opener, by Appalachian State University, 34-32.

At home.

By “Appalachian State University”.

At home. That’s the Big House, friends. In Ann Arbor.

Appalachian State. Have you ever even heard of “Appalachian State”? Not me. They are from North Carolina, or someplace, apparently.

Want to learn more? Whaddya want from me, a link? Go ask your search engine. I’ll be in the kitchen, with my head in the oven.

1. Disclosure: I am a Wolverines fan.  

It’s been a long day of work and travel, so we won’t be going to press tonight.

However, please join all of us here at waka waka waka in wishing our friend Kevin Kim a very happy 38th birthday!