waka waka waka

… is something I won’t be doing here. I just want to thank all of you once again for reading and commenting, and to wish all of you a splendid 2008.

Warmest regards to you all!

In a recent post Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, examines an argument an atheist might make about the existence or nonexistence of God in light of the “problem of evil”. What he has written is good as far as it goes, but the argument he examines is not, I think, one that atheists generally make.

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The columnist, author and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan has an item today in the Wall Street Journal in which she rates the current crop of Presidential candidates according to her slogan for 2008: “Reasonable Person for President”. She is herself a reasonable person, and while our assessments diverge in spots, I agree with much that she has to say. In particular I share her view of Hillary Clinton:

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After a full day at work, and an evening at the kwoon, it appears another day has got away from me. We will be traveling tomorrow, so it appears that, as they say, “blogging will be light” for a little while. Things might not get back to normal until after the New Year, though there is much I’d like to take up if the opportunity presents itself. (Oh, to be a “man of independent means”, and not have to continue to sell off my dwindling reserve of days! How sweet it would be to keep those that remain for my own ends.)

Meanwhile, have a look at this post over at Bill Vallicella’s place. I’d be curious to know what you think.

To all of you. I am very fortunate indeed to have such intelligent, friendly and gracious visitors, and I wish you all a wonderful holiday.

Well, today is the first full day of winter, so it’s time for some spiritually uplifting and seasonally appropriate material. Have a look here.

Following a link from Bill Vallicella, I’ve just read a review of the movie Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, in which the reviewer, the historian Ronald Radosh — who knew Seeger personally, and admires him as an artist and a man of peace, generally — nonetheless calls attention to the unrepentance of those of the American Left, including a great many beloved folk musicians, who strove on behalf of the Communist Party for much of the 20th century.

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I’ve mentioned the website Edge.org on several occasions; it is a fascinating place, an online salon where some of the world’s brightest minds exchange ideas — and occasionally “cross hands”, as we say in the martial-arts racket. In its most recent newsletter, its founder, John Brockman offers us the site’s annual recommended-reading list, and laments the absence of similar material in any of the more prominent year-end literary roundups:

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This is a busy time, and although there are some weighty topics to return to, I think they may have to wait until things quiet down a bit.

But there’s a bottomless well of entertaining material to pass along, and tonight I offer a tasty morsel.

From my old friend, the great recording engineer Larry Alexander, comes a link to a delightful animation of the Drifters performing a Christmas classic.We hear lead singer Bill Pinkney as Santa, and the late Clyde McPhatter providing the high notes. Here it is. Enjoy.

One of the pitfalls of airing one’s thoughts in public on a daily basis is that one’s thoughts vary in quality, and some are better left unexpressed. I wrote a post a few days ago about falsifiability and theism that was a pretty poor piece of work, and so I have taken it down. Apologies to all.

I’ve learned a new word: whalefall. It refers to the effect of reduced buoyancy upon deceased cetaceans, and came up today in an interesting and educational context.

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Here’s an entertaining article on pentagonal tilings. (I worked rather late tonight…)

The city government here in Gotham has been wringing its hands for some time now about how to reduce traffic congestion, which is indeed very bad. The suggestions that have been aired so far have generally taken the form of small-bore monetary disincentives: a fee for driving below 96th street during the week, tolls on the East River bridges, and so forth. These have been met, in each instance, with predictable opposition from whichever group is about to get its ox gored. For example, we Brooklynites were vociferously defended earlier today by our plucky and voluble champion, borough president Marty Markowitz, against a proposed eight-dollar toll on the Brooklyn Bridge, on the grounds that it would be blatantly discriminatory. (The logic may or may not be valid, but the passion was genuine.)

If I may, I think I have the answer. All that should be necessary is to take, quite at random, a dozen or so cars each week off the streets of Manhattan, give the drivers exactly sixty seconds to remove their belongings, and then crush the vehicles into compact lozenges of scrap metal. Under such a system there would be no burdensome tolls, and nary a whiff of discrimination. Given that far more cars must surely be destroyed each week by random events such as steam-pipe explosions, building collapses, helicopter mishaps, high-speed police chases, and drug-gang quarrels, the effect would be, for the most part, purely psychological. But I’ll bet after a month or two you’d be able to hop in your car on a Friday at lunchtime and drive river to river in two minutes flat.

If you’re lucky.

It may not have escaped your notice that the readable content available on the World Wide Web, though generally of very high quality in terms of both educational utility and literary style, contains a sparse admixture of comparatively shoddy material. This is, of course, an unavoidable consequence of the democratic nature of the Internet, and until now it seemed that there was nothing that could be done.

There are some very clever people in the world, however, and fortunately for the rest of us, a few of them have now applied their talents to this problem, with promising results. Have a look here.

After eleven hours in the office (and an hour each way to get there and back), I’m simply too depleted tonight, dear readers, to whip up a new tub of froth. But there’s no need to look so glum, because I still have a little treat for you all. As it happens, my old friend Eugene Jen has sent along a transcript of a slender volume written long ago by the great P.T. Barnum on the subject of “money-getting”. His advice is timeless, and his style is engaging, as you might well imagine. You can find it here.

I’ve found another fun way to waste your time: a website that ranks the “education level” of your favorite blogs.

I should warn you that I have absolutely no idea how the rankings are determined. Perhaps the algorithm is based upon complexity of sentence structure (such as, for example, the use of parenthetical clauses); maybe it looks for indicators such as proper compound-adjective hyphenation, occurrences of sesquipedalian words, or usage of words, once common, that have now fallen into desuetude.

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Have you ever heard of symbolics.com? I hadn’t either. But this humble domain has an important distinction: it was the first .com name ever registered.

If you’re curious, you can find a list of the first 100 here.

As one of the wretched unbelievers that Mitt Romney has now clearly identified as foes of God’s favorite country, I’d like, as a further act of sedition, to share with you an excellent speech that Sam Harris gave to a roomful of atheists back in late September. Harris has a supple mind, and he has been keeping it limber. Among the points he makes in this excellent piece are several that may have ruffled some feathers even among the damned souls in attendance.

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It should come as no surprise that Christopher Hitchens had something to say about Mitt Romney’s speech last night. From his latest piece in Slate, a sample:

Romney does not understand the difference between deism and theism, nor does he know the first thing about the founding of the United States. Jefferson’s Declaration may invoke a “Creator,” but, as he went on to show in the battle over the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, he and most of his peers did not believe in a god who intervened in human affairs or in a god who had sent a son for a human sacrifice. These easily ascertainable facts are reflected in the way that the U.S. Constitution does not make any mention of a superintendent deity and in the way that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention declined an offer (possibly sarcastic), even from Benjamin Franklin, that they resort to prayer to compose their differences. Romney may throw a big chest and say that God should be “on our currency, in our pledge,” and of course on our public land in this magic holiday season, but James Madison did not think that there should be chaplains opening the proceedings of Congress or even appointed as ministers in the U.S. armed forces. Trying to dodge around this, and to support his assertion that the founders were religious in the Christian sense, Romney drones on about a barely relevant moment of emotion in 1774 and comes up with the glib slogan that “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Any fool can think of an example where freedom exists without religion—and even more easily of an instance where religion exists without (or in negation of) freedom.

Amen. Read the whole thing here.

Well, we’re all still drying off after our dousing last night from Mitt Romney’s Gatorade barrel of holy water. Like JFK in 1960, Romney saw that his campaign was imperiled by a controversial religious affiliation; in this case, however, the risk was not that he was afraid of being seen as some sort of religious kook, but rather that he might be seen as the wrong sort of religious kook. Despite previous assurances that the particulars of a President’s religion don’t matter, as long as he has plenty of it, Mitt now feels the need to reassure the fundamentalist Protestant Republican base that he is every bit as tight with Jesus as they are, and that trivial details — such as polygamy, or that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri, and so forth — need not come between them.

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I was gratified today to learn that the album Borrowed Time, which I recorded and mixed last winter for my old pal, the great jazz guitarist Steve Khan, has just been nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Latin Jazz Album” category. Steve is an outstandingly creative musician, and he certainly deserves this nomination. The record is a splendid example of his talents not only as a player, but also as composer and arranger, and the performances — by Steve, John Patitucci, Jack DeJohnette, Randy Brecker, Bob Mintzer, Manolo Badrena, Ralph Irizarry, and other luminaries — are of exceptional quality. I’m proud to have been at the console for this project.

You can read a typical review here.

Okay, after a sobering preliminary dose of Darwinian nihilism, time for a few yuks. Meet Mrs. Hughes.

With a “hat tip” to the Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella, here is Garry Kasparov’s account of his recent arrest and imprisonment (as noted in these pages last week).

In Daniel Dennett’s most important book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, he makes with brilliant clarity the case that Darwin’s great insight — arguably, I think, the greatest ever had by anyone, so far at least — is, as Dennett calls it, a “universal acid”, eating at the foundations of many of Man’s smugly cherished notions about himself. I believe he is right about this, but I have also thought for some time now that even Dennett, arch-naturalist that he is, has stopped short of acknowledging what is perhaps the most unsettling conclusion of Darwinism:

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There’s much more that I want to say about the important questions raised in the previous post, but for tonight I just want to let you know about a website I’ve just run across. It’s called Philosophy Talk, and it’s associated with a radio show by the same name. The show is hosted each week by two Stanford University philosophers: Ken Taylor, the chairman of the philosophy department, and John Perry, the Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy.

The website offers downloadable recordings of archived programs for a nominal fee, but if you don’t want to pay for your own copies you can listen to them as streaming audio at no cost.

There are an awful lot of shows in the archive, featuring some well-known guests. Topics include Consciousness, with David Chalmers; The Mystery of Mind, with John Searle, Predicting the Future, with Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan); Intelligent Design, with Daniel Dennett; Philosophy and Neuroscience, with Patricia Churchland, and dozens and dozens more, on all the Big Questions: free will, religion, truth, art, beauty, love, virtue, time, evil, you name it. It looks like a hugely entertaining resource.

As I’m always saying, there just aren’t enough hours in a day. Or days in a life.

You can find the site here. Onto the sidebar it goes.

Readers will probably be familiar with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Muslim apostate and political writer. You may have heard of her in connection with the film Submission, about the opression of women under Islam — for which she wrote the screenplay, and for which its director Theo van Gogh was murdered in an Amsterdam street by a Muslim zealot.

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Zoologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins has become a household name lately — not because of his decades of creative academic work, and his outstandingly informative and accessible books on biology and the Darwinian paradigm, but because of his in-your-face denial of God — which has probably, on balance, earned him more enemies than supporters here in the ultra-religious United States. And I’d be the first to admit, fan that I am, that his “people skills” are perhaps not everything they could be, and that he might actually advance his cause — one with which I am in general agreement — more effectively if he were able to make his perfectly reasonable point a tad less condescendingly.

But however you feel about the man, he is a disciplined professional, and he does his homework. My old PubSub pal Eugene Jen has just sent me an excellent example, both of Dawkins’s thoroughness and some outstanding blogospheric geekery. Have a look here.