Monthly Archives: March 2023

Tunnel Vision

March 26, 2023 – 11:08 am
By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (2)

On The Ramparts

March 25, 2023 – 5:59 pm

I’ll share with you a podcast I just ran across: an interview with embattled University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. The podcast’s web-page introduces Professor Wax as follows: Amy Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Amy attended and graduated summa cum laude from Yale University […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reaction | Comments (1)

A House Divided

March 23, 2023 – 12:14 pm

The problem of technological modernity is that we keep finding new and wholly unprecedented ways to pit different parts of human nature against one other.

By Malcolm | Posted in Apophthegmata | Comments (1)

Jumping The Shark

March 22, 2023 – 7:27 pm

Everyone’s waiting breathlessly for the indictment and arrest of Donald Trump. It’s a fantastically bad idea: if it happens, it will die in the court system; the rickety legal theory behind the indictment is one that the DOJ has already rejected, and even if a tendentious jury convicts him in New York City, the thing […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (9)

Racist Thing #115

March 19, 2023 – 1:26 pm

Coffee.

By Malcolm | Posted in Racist Things | Comments (1)

On Beauty

March 18, 2023 – 11:01 pm

Sorry it’s been slow again here — I’ve been a bit under the weather. I do have something interesting for you tonight, though: a substantial essay, by a writer I’ve never encountered before, on the stubborn consistency of our perception of physical beauty — in particular, female beauty — across ages and cultures. The essay […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities, Ruminations | Comments (7)

All Hat And No Cattle

March 11, 2023 – 9:06 pm

Here’s Colonel Douglas MacGregor once again, giving a blistering interview to George Galloway regarding this idiotic war and the West’s ruinous decades of prideful stupidity.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Military | Comments (0)

Start Worrying. Details To Follow.

March 10, 2023 – 10:47 pm

In a comment to our recent post featuring Eliezer Yudkowski’s Cassandra-esque warning about the danger of humanity annihilating itself by creating artificial intelligence, reader Jason asks: Mr. Yudkowski discusses evolution of AI in the same terms as biological evolution, that this autonomous entity would want to kill us for our atoms if I perceive his […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Technology | Comments (6)

The Demon-Haunted World

March 8, 2023 – 4:44 pm

The title of this post refers to a book by the late Carl Sagan, in which he argued that scientific naturalism was a light that could drive out the demons that have bedeviled humanity throughout most of history. He’s right about the bedeviling, and the need for a positive force to keep the demons at […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Religion, Reaction | Comments (3)

Old Geezers, Old Song, New Version

March 6, 2023 – 10:16 pm

If you will forgive the digression, I’ll leave aside current events for a moment to offer a year-and-a-half-old recording of a fifty-four-year-old song. In December of 2021, some friends and I got together in a studio in Dobbs Ferry, NY (Riverworks Recording) to try our hand at a classic Procol Harum tune. A few weeks […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (2)

Gosh!

March 4, 2023 – 6:11 pm

Just ran across the abstract of a paper (with some informative diagrams) called “Reconstructing visual experiences from human brain activity with Stable Diffusion”. The gist appears to be this: experimenters present an image to a test subject, and use data gathered by monitoring the subject’s brain activity to make a reconstructed version of the original […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Technology | Comments (4)

David Lindley, 1944-2023

March 3, 2023 – 6:08 pm

We follow yesterday’s sad post with more of the same: David Lindley, the great session player and maestro of every stringed instrument, has now died as well. You might not know the name, but if you are over the age of 30 or so, you know his playing. More and more of the great musicians […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (0)

Wayne Shorter, 1933-2023

March 2, 2023 – 5:35 pm

I’m sad to report that the musical giant Wayne Shorter, lyrical virtuoso of the tenor and soprano saxophone, has died at age 89. Mr. Shorter first came to my attention as a member (along with Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, and Ron Carter) of Miles Davis’s incomparable 1960s quintet (which released a series of albums including […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (0)