waka waka waka

After a truly debilitating holiday bacchanal last night, followed (almost immediately, it seemed) by a long day at work, I’m far too pooped to post. But I do have something interesting for you to read, if you like.

Anyone who pays attention to scientific and technological topics (or who reads the little messages generated by email spam filters) has probably heard of Bayes’ Theorem. If you’ve ever wondered what it was all about, you need wonder no more. Eliezer Yudkowsky has put together a wonderful essay about Reverend Thomas Bayes, “by far the most enigmatic figure in mathematical history”, and his marvelous theorem. Have a look here.

Readers of the New York Times will be familiar with Verlyn Klinkenborg, who contributes marvelous little essays to the editorial page. He lives on a small farm in upstate New York (”upstate” being a preposterously Gotham-centric term for the 97% of New York State that isn’t part of New York City or Long Island), and most of his pieces are evocative miniatures about rural life. I admire his writing very much; it is eloquent, graceful, and richly expressive.

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Having set such a breezy tone with my previous post, I’m sorry to have to get back to more serious matters. But I’ve just been presented with further evidence, in case any was lacking, that Western civilization is indeed circling the drain: apparently the first season of Sesame Street, from way back in 1969, has just been released on DVD — and such delicate creatures, such timorous little milquetoasts, have we become in a mere 38 years that the recordings have been marked as unsuitable for children.

No wonder the barbarians are at the gate. Learn more here.

It is difficult for a thoughtful person to get into his fifties without a persistent and lurking awareness of our mortal brevity. At this point in life even those who have been fortunate enough to have been spared frequent doses of calamity have lost a good friend or a family member, and by the half-century mark even the best-cared-for bodies are showing signs of irreversible and accumulating wear. This simple fact — that we die — is, due to the curious malformations of our psyche, something that we either go out of our way to avoid, like the landlady to whom our rent is in arrears, or that we ogle with palpitating, pornographic fascination. It is a focal point of all that we do not understand and cannot conceive. It confronts us not only with the unimaginable prospect of the evaporation of our subjective awareness (though why that should be such a horror, given that it is simply the state we occupied for all the eons preceding our birth, and given also that that which does not exist cannot suffer), but also deepens the mystery of our subjective experience of time.

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We note that former world chess champion Garry Kasparov has been arrested in Russia for leading a protest rally. According to reports he has been sentenced to five days in jail.

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About two weeks ago, I posted a little item called The Teflon God, about the highly evolved and adaptive unfalsifiability of religious “memeplexes”, in response to an item by William Vallicella.

My post attracted the notice of Dennis Mangan, proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, and he commented on it in a post of his own, which in turn prompted me to respond here. The discussion has carried on since then over at Dennis’s place, where he has since posted a third item in the series.

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It was a long day at work; I didn’t get home until after ten, and haven’t had time to prepare anything for tonight. But, saving the day, my friend Jess Kaplan has brought an awfully provocative story to our attention. The topic is an exotic one, right at the edges of human knowledge and understanding, and I am certainly not in an position to comment on it tonight. It comes to us from Lawrence Krauss, for whom I have a great deal of respect. Have a look here.

I’m too busy with the delightful chores of feast-preparation to write at length, so I just wanted to extend warmest wishes to all of you. High on the long list of things I have to be thankful for is the community of new friends I have met here at waka waka waka.

I don’t usually go in for sensational, gruesome stories in these pages, but having spent so much time today wrangling with commenters on the previous post, well, what the heck. Have a look here.

I might as well not keep the media on tenterhooks any longer. At the risk of confirming suspicions that I am nothing more than a Republican tool¹, I hereby let it be known that, as regards the bouquet of presidential candidates on offer this time around, the one most likely to pick up the official waka waka waka endorsement — so far at least — is Rudolph Giuliani. He has his peculiarities, to be sure, but they are not of the sort that bother me, and he is intelligent, principled, and consistent.

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1. Actually, I am a registered Democrat.  

I’m still in southern California, and have had no time for writing today. So here is some more Richard Feynman for you. This clip is about ten minutes long, and unfortunately begins in mid-sentence; of particular interest, however, is the section from about 5:15 on, in which he talks about the built-in uncertainty of science, the nature of doubt, and how hard it is for someone constituted as he is simply to “believe”.

Feynman articulates my own feelings about all of this almost exactly. How sad that he is gone.

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One of the men I admire most — a genuine intellectual hero — is the coruscatingly brilliant (and untimely departed) physicist Richard Feynman (he was from Brooklyn, of course).

Here he is.

I’m in San Marcos, San Diego County, California, for a couple of days, visiting my father. After a two-hour weather delay at JFK, another 50 minutes queued up on the runway waiting to take off, a six-hour flight, a fifteen-minute wait at LAX for an avaliable gate, a twenty-minute wait for luggage, and an hour and a half to pick up a car and drive down here, I have just arrived at the no-frills but serviceable Ramada Limited of San Marcos, at 2:30 a.m. (that’s 5:30 a.m. Gotham time).

So no post tonight.

You may have noticed that a great many people seem to really, really hate George W. Bush. Here in Park Slope, Brooklyn, one of the “bluest” neighborhoods in America, there’s a tacit assumption on the part of everyone you meet that you, too, really, really hate George W. Bush. And why do all the people here make that assumption? It’s because they themselves really, really hate George W. Bush, and because everyone else they know around here really, really hates George W. Bush too.

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Thanks to our friend Dennis Mangan, the curmudgeonly proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, for commenting at his website on our recent post The Teflon God. Dennis — with whom, by the way, we generally agree about most things — raises the objection, often made, that some of the worst brutality in recent history was committed by atheistic regimes. This is undeniably true, but I think that it misses the main point, which is that these horrors ought more reasonably to be charged against totalitarian, Utopian, social-engineering schemes — which often take the form of secular “religions” themselves, as I mentioned in this post — than to atheism per se, which, in contrast to most religions, asserts no normative ideology of its own. Indeed, I would lay much of the responsibility for the mass brutality of the Russian, Chinese, and Khmer Rouge regimes upon the pernicious nature of Communism itself, which can only enforce equality of wealth by institutionalizing an enormous inequality of power, with predictably corrupting effect.

The mistake here, then, I think, is to confuse “Godless and wicked” with “Godless, therefore wicked”.

The battle rages unabated between the pious and the heathens. Here’s tonight’s salvo:

All things dull and ugly, All creatures short and squat,
   All things rude and nasty, The Lord God made the lot;

Each little snake that poisons, Each little wasp that stings,
  He made their brutish venom, He made their horrid wings.

All things sick and cancerous, All evil great and small,
  All things foul and dangerous, The Lord God made them all.

Each nasty little hornet, Each beastly little squid.
  Who made the spikey urchin? Who made the sharks? He did.

All things scabbed and ulcerous, All pox both great and small.
  Putrid, foul and gangrenous, The Lord God made them all.

- From Monty Python, of course.

I apologize for the sloppy editing of yesterday’s post. I try to be careful, but it is in the nature of daily blogging that occasionally one’s vigilance will waver, and poorly proofread material will go into print. The post contained both a repeated passage and a mistaken double negative, both of which have been corrected.

I do seem to have been harping on religion and politics too much lately, but unfortunately I’m reminded daily how important they are. There is vociferous debate all around, and I hate to let some of what I read go unrebutted.

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As you know, the debate between theists and a-theists is heating up a bit lately. (That we can even have such a debate is a healthy trend, considering that in earlier days such disputes were resolved by burning the nonbeliever at the stake.) There will, of course, be no resolution of it, as theists make claims that are carefully tuned to be unfalsifiable, then insist that, simply by virtue of being unfalsifiable, they are every bit as respectable as models that include no supernatural agents. (One of this faction’s most articulate spokesmen is Dr. William Vallicella, who has joined the battle again in recent posts, and who defends his theism with considerable agility.)

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Some pressing personal matters having laid claim to my attention these past two days, I have had no time for writing. So for tonight, it’s “America’s Finest News Source” to the rescue, with two important stories. The first describes a startling discovery that might be just what our flagging economy needs, and the second follows a great man of letters on his mission to preserve a vital cultural resource.

A new book focuses on the lifelong loyalty and admiration that Winston Churchill, whom I consider one of the very greatest men in all of Western history, held for the Jews. I’ve just heard about it today, in a Wall Street Journal opinion-page item, but I’m sure I’ll be getting a copy. The article itself is worth a look too. An excerpt:

After the war, Churchill felt that the most fitting response to the Holocaust would be to punish those guilty of the most horrific crimes against the Jews and to fulfill the promise of a Jewish homeland that he and Britain had made almost 30 years earlier. When Ernest Bevin, Britain’s Labour Party foreign minister, hesitated to recognize Israel nine months after its founding, for fear of inflaming Arab opinion, Churchill swung back hard: “Whether the Right Honorable Gentleman likes it or not, the coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years.” Israel was just recompense, Churchill felt, not only for what the Jews of Europe had lost but for what they had given to civilization over the centuries.

This view, of course, no longer prevails. Today the existence of Israel is apparently something to be regretted, even deplored, not only in Arab capitals but in European ones and on American university campuses. Paradoxically, such feelings intensified after 9/11, an event that should have made us all aware of who the friends of Western civilization really are–and who its enemies. Martin Gilbert’s book reminds us that anti-Semitism is the dark turn of the modern mind against itself, and a form of cultural patricide.

You can read the whole piece here.

I’m too lazy to write anything tonight, so it’s Hitchens to the rescue. No, not that Hitchens, but his brother Peter, who writes for the UK Sunday Mail.

The item at hand deals with a pet peeve of my own: the pretentious and unnecessary revision of familiar place-names. In my day Ceylon has become Sri Lanka, Peking Beijing, Cambodia Kampuchea, Bombay Mumbai, Burma Myanmar, and so forth. It is a great bloody nuisance, and I am not the only one who thinks so, as we learn here.

The discussion of Divine Command Theory linked to in yesterday’s post is fascinating for me in more ways than one. I find it of interest not only in itself, as a thoughtful examination of an ancient and vexatious philosophical problem, but also on another, deeper level as well.

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Given that I have arranged to sell off most of each day to a medium-sized international corporation, leaving me in possession of only a few meager hours each evening in which to pursue my own diverse interests, I find myself, as does anyone whose assets are insufficient to satisfy his needs, having to scrimp and budget. So this evening, rather than spend an hour or two meticulously whittling into shape an original blog-post of my own, I gave the time over to what I knew would be some interesting reading — and, careful shopper that I am, I was well satisfied with the purchase.

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Readers may be pleased to know that we did not in fact perish in this weekend’s storm, and are once again safely back in Gotham.

I will say, though, that it was quite a ride: the winds did indeed perform as expected, knocking down many trees, and by Saturday afternoon had blacked out the entire outer Cape from Eastham up through Truro. Saturday night was, I must say, rather a grim business, and a fine display of malevolent, elemental fury. (Mighty dark, too.) But our sturdy little house emerged unscathed.

By Sunday morning Noel had moved on, and the skies were clear. As it turned out, though, more peril lay in store.

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As promised, the former Hurricane Noel is giving Cape Cod a virile rogering. The outer Cape — a narrow, longitudinal wisp of sand that comprises the picturesque villages of Chatham, Orleans, Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown — juts a long way out into the Atlantic, and is getting a far stiffer dose than points west.

I’m writing from a wooded hilltop in Wellfleet (on the west side of town, just off Chequessett Neck Road), and while the house itself appears to be in no immediate danger of being hurled from its moorings, I am less confident about the trees all round, which are having a very stressful day. Fortunately, the dead pine I mentioned yesterday, which stands only about three feet from the deck at the north end of the house, has already lost most of its branches, so the wind is having a hard time getting a good purchase on what remains.

The worst, though, is apparently yet to come, with wind gusts up to 90 or 100 m.p.h. predicted for the early evening. It may well be that we will be losing electrical power at some point, which of course will mean that we will be off the air either until it is restored, or we flee back to Gotham. If, however, our number’s really up (and I must say it is getting awfully windy outside), well, it has been a pleasure getting to know you, friends, and don’t forget to browse our archives.

We’re up at our little retreat on the far end of Cape Cod tonight, awaiting the arrival of the former Hurricane Noel, which is supposed to give these parts a pretty good thumping over the next 24 hours or so. I’m glad to be here for the storm — not only because I enjoy dramatic weather, which I do, but also because there’s a dead pine tree right outside that I haven’t got around to cutting down yet, and if it falls on the house I’d like to know about it sooner rather than later.

It’s been such a lazy day that I haven’t prepared anything much for tonight’s edition, so I’ll just pass along a couple of items that I happen to have lying around.

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