My old friend Pat Goldsmith, who has traveled the world for decades as a dealer in exotic art, is selling some of his collection. He has some particularly splendid examples of Indonesian and other South Asian work, and you can acquire them at very reasonable prices (particularly, I think, if you mention that you heard about them here). By all means do take a look; his website is here.
Despite all Man’s ennobling qualities, despite all the many ways in which he is set apart from the beasts — his vaunted freedom of will, his keen moral intuition, his literature, his arts, his sciences, his care for the future, his veneration of the past — he still manages to give frequent and mortifying examples of how far there is to go, and of the extent to which he is yet ruled by the animal drives that writhe and snarl beneath his civilizing forebrain.
We are adding two new links to the sidebar. Both are blogs maintained by citizen journalists from Baghdad, with very different perspectives. The first, Iraq the Model, is the work of two brothers, Mohammed and Omar Fadhil, who see in their nation’s strife and suffering the hope of a nascent modern democracy, while the second, Baghdad Burning, which is written by a highly articulate and obviously well-educated woman who goes only by the name Riverbend, bitterly laments the cruelty and chaos that has resulted from the war, and the fracturing and destabilization of Baghdad society after the fall of the old regime. Both are extraordinary examples of the power of this new medium.
If you haven’t already heard, there is something disturbing going on that might have far-reaching effects on North American agriculture. All over the country, the bees are disappearing.
What was meant to be a relaxing, restorative weekend of healthful exercise, quiet contemplation, and the writing of some meaty posts about the freedom of the will, US politics, and a fascinating but largely unknown collector of unexplainable facts instead became a weekend of the severest toil, thanks to a crisis at my workplace and a last-minute mixing session. I therefore find myself without any substantial offering for this evening, and will leave you for the nonce with a weightless little meringue that I turned up in a brief scouring of the Web. In this case it a humorous little confection from the comedic oeuvre of the late-night entertainer Conan O’Brien, in which he meticulously insults almost every nation on Earth.
Reader Andrew Staroscik has sent along an interesting article about recent developments in the neuroscience of human brains, for those of you who are interested in such things. The gist of it is that human brains are markedly different from the brains of other animals not just in their gross anatomy, but in the microscopic details of the neural tissues themselves. In other words, it isn’t that all mammalian brains are made of the same stuff, with ours just being bigger and more complex, but rather that we have evolved some new varieties of brain cells that aren’t found elsewhere.
You can read the story here.
“Ask yourself: are you free? Many are inclined to answer ‘yes’, if they are relatively secure in a material sense and do not have t worry about the morrow, if they depend on no one for their livelihood or in the choice of their conditions of life. But is this freedom? Is it only a question of external conditions?
February 28, 2007 – 11:52 pm
It is very, very difficult to develop oneself harmoniously. We are not one, but a collection of parts, and the parts bicker, struggle for power, jostle for position. Very often, one gets out in front of the others, sometimes for a very long while, and the last thing that it wants is for there to be an overview, a higher vantage, from which our whole inner world, and the tumult and disorder therein, can be seen.
The intellect, the instincts of the body, the emotions, all have their jobs to do in a properly functioning organization, but we are not so well organized, and there is no-one in charge. In one moment the feelings are on top, in the next it is some idea or other; soon it will be the stomach, a little later the reproductive organs — each with their own wishes, their own aims. And what of our aim? Where are we amid this riot, this anarchy? We are gazing out the window, or sitting comfortably — we must always be comfortable — dozing, recalling the past, or imagining the future; or we are fast asleep, dreaming that we are awake, that we are in command. And meanwhile, the servants, dressed in our clothes, are painting the town red, and writing checks in our name.
February 28, 2007 – 12:08 am
While Islamic culture isn’t exactly on the cutting edge of intellectual progress these days, it wasn’t always so, as anyone with a rudimentary familiarity with history will know. In Islam’s heyday, the caliphate was a beacon of enlightenment, in fields as diverse as mathematics, medicine, and astronomy. I have often marveled at Islamic decorative art, in particular the intricate tesselations, with their complex fivefold symmetries, that grace Muslim architecture from those times, and have noted their similarity to what are known as Penrose tilings, named for the great mathematician and cosmologist who first subjected them to a rigorous examination.
Today’s New York Times carried an article about these remarkable mosaics, and suggested that the high Muslim culture that created these elaborate patterns may even have glimpsed the idea of quasicrystals, which are aperiodic crystals that are built on the same odd, pentagonal geometry.
Learn more here.
February 26, 2007 – 11:52 pm
You may have heard of the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by the late Thomas Kuhn; it is arguably the most influential book ever written on the history and philosophy of science. In it, Kuhn examines the life cycle of a scientific “paradigm”, and the way that scientific communities pass from periods of “normal” science, during which research stays comfortably within the reigning paradigm, to “crises”, in which results begin to appear for which the current model cannot account, and during which more and more desperate efforts are made to preserve the existing view. An example of such a crisis would be the difficulties pre-relativistic physics found itself confronted with in the aftermath of the Michelson-Morley experiment.
Eventually, some breakthrough is made — a “scientific revolution” — and a new model is found that accommodates the troublesome data. Often this involves an entirely different understanding of the phenomena, and even of the nature of reality itself; Kuhn coined the now-familiar term “paradigm shift” to refer to this sort of reformulation.
February 26, 2007 – 9:36 pm
While I’m trying to find the time to get back to more serious topics, here’s an amusing bit of froth, in which we find Robert deNiro doing what he does best.
February 25, 2007 – 9:17 pm
There are lot of sidewalk book vendors in my neighborhood, and it’s hard for me to take a walk along the avenue without noticing something I just have to take home. Today’s grocery bag also ended up containing a slim volume from 1906, the year our house was built.
February 24, 2007 – 7:18 pm
These past two weekends mark the celebration of the Chinese New Year; this time around it’s the Year of the Pig. As I’ve mentioned before, kung fu schools traditionally go out in the streets to do lion and dragon dances. Ours is no exception, and as I’ve done most years since 1976, I spent the day traipsing around Chinatown in the freezing cold.
February 23, 2007 – 12:59 am
I do apologize for the dearth of worthwhile content around here lately, but it’s been a busy week. Tonight, for example, we spent the evening at a Lewis Black show at City Center. Black, who splutters in dumfounded amazement at the world’s absurdities, is a funny guy, part of an honored tradition of professional ranters. At times tonight I was reminded of another, even more idiosyncratic observer of the humanity’s hyperkinetic confusion: one Brother Theodore, who referred to his act as “stand-up tragedy”.
February 22, 2007 – 12:33 am
We mentioned a little while ago the increasingly vexatious problem of space debris. Astronomers and aerospace engineers worry that we are fast approaching a sort of critical mass, in which the breakup of some some large orbiting derelict will generate enough fragments to begin a chain reaction that could well end up with the lowere reaches of orbital space too cluttered with lethal projectiles to fly safely through any longer. For this reason the recent demolition of a Chinese satellite in a weapons test was greeted by shock and derision from the spacefaring community, and now comes the news that things may have just got a good deal worse.
Learn more here.
February 21, 2007 – 12:39 am
Saxophonist Michael Brecker, who died most unjustly a few weeks ago, was remembered tonight in a memorial service at Town Hall, which was filled to capacity by the people who knew and loved him.
February 19, 2007 – 8:32 pm
I’m afflicted today with what appears to be food poisoning, and have absolutely nothing to offer tonight, especially as I’ve used up any remaining fuel in the cogitative tank commenting on an interesting thread at philosopher Alan Rhoda’s website about the “problem of evil”, and whether our morality is based on any sort of objective foundation. Interested readers may find that post, and my long-winded opinion, here.
February 17, 2007 – 11:41 pm
We’re at Avatar Studios all weekend, mixing into the wee hours both days. Back Monday, if not sooner.
February 16, 2007 – 11:49 pm
From trumpeter John McNeil, who’s been through a lot:
You don’t have to fail absolutely to have no confidence: you just have to fail every so often.
February 15, 2007 – 6:26 pm
In Lebanon yesterday, supporters of the pro-Western, Sunni-led government marked the second anniversary of the assassination of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri with a large demonstration. According to the story in today’s paper, as they marched along they chanted:
“We are against sectarianism!
…And God is with the Sunnis!!”
February 15, 2007 – 12:07 am
One of the cleverer ways that archaeologists date the artifacts they find is a technique known as dendrochronology, which relies on the patterns of growth rings in the trunks of trees.
February 13, 2007 – 11:16 pm
I miss Carl Sagan. He was such a gentle and reasonable man, eloquent and passionate, but never strident, never shrill. He took immense joy in the simple fact that we humans live in a breathtakingly beautiful natural world, a universe of bottomless wonder and complexity, and that from this dance of atoms and forces arose beings that could come, in time, to understand it: that we, born of the ashes of stars, are the mirror in which the awakened Cosmos can behold itself.
February 12, 2007 – 11:11 pm
An article in today’s Times raises an interesting issue. The story concerns a Dr. Marcus Ross, who was recently awarded a Ph.D. in paleontology by the University of Rhode Island. His professors all seem to agree that he did good solid scientific work in the pursuit of his degree, but there is one curious wrinkle: the newly minted Dr. Ross is a young-earth creationist.
February 11, 2007 – 5:25 pm
I’m mixing all day today, so have no time for the usual logorrheic bombast. Here’s an interesting morsel, though:
If you’re planning a visit to the moon, but aren’t sure what to occupy yourself with once you get there, NASA has put together a handy 181-item to-do list. Read all about it here.
February 10, 2007 – 3:13 pm
I’ll join Kevin Kim in suggesting that readers go take a look at this post by Bill Keezer — one of our valued readers and commenters — on how wrong things might go if our Islamic enemies acquire nuclear weapons.
February 9, 2007 – 11:35 pm
Yesterday we took up Jared Diamond’s discussion of Easter Island in his latest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The book, as I suppose anyone who wasn’t just stunned by a blow to the head might gather from the title, looks at societies that have failed, contrasts them with others that have not, and attempts to explain the difference.
February 9, 2007 – 11:15 am
My old friend Jess, a California attorney, comments on the sad death of Anna Nicole Smith:
This shows, once again, how higher-level appellate litigation devastates the body.
February 8, 2007 – 11:49 pm
You may be familiar with the author Jared Diamond, whose brilliant book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies quite deservedly netted a Pulitzer Prize. I’ve been reading his latest effort, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and it is awfully good as well.
February 8, 2007 – 5:22 pm
Here’s a stunning photograph, today’s “Featured Picture” over at Wikipedia. Worth a look.
February 7, 2007 – 11:04 pm
I don’t often recommend recordings in these pages, as people’s tastes vary greatly — but maybe I should, as I have, in the course of thirty years as a recording engineer, been exposed to an awful lot of good music. So here’s one, if you’re interested.
February 6, 2007 – 11:59 pm
There were two excellent articles in the science section of today’s New York Times, and I encourage all of you to go and read them.
February 5, 2007 – 11:13 pm
Well, it’s mighty cold here in Gotham. The temperature is dropping back down into the single digits tonight, and adding a piquant accent is a howling wind that appears to have dropped straight down to Brooklyn from somewhere up around Port Radium. The few pedestrians that I can see out on the street, swaddled and muffled beyond any regard for fashion, tilt forward into the Boreal gale as they make their way to shelter. Otherwise, all is quiet save for the occasional pop as frozen sparrows, dislodged from their miserable perches by the icy blast, shatter like lightbulbs on the stony ground.
Here in our modest bow-front Victorian limestone townhouse, however, we are snug and warm, thanks to the controlled combustion of a steady flow of natural gas. This resource is provided, at exorbitant cost, by our mild-mannered neighbors to the North — who are, now that I think about it, the same ones who are supplying us with all this Arctic bluster in the first place.
You know, that’s a pretty smooth operation.
February 4, 2007 – 3:02 pm
Dr. William Vallicella calls our attention to a post by Dr. Alan Rhoda in which Dr. Rhoda argues that the “problem of evil” is as much a difficulty for the atheist as for the theist. But Dr. Rhoda’s post, which Dr. V. calls a “good solid crack at it”, rests on the unwarranted assumption that the atheist will be as troubled as the theist by the notion that there might not be an objective basis for morality.
February 3, 2007 – 2:45 pm
On the editorial page of today’s Times there is a paean to coffee by guest columnist Stacy Schiff. I happened to read it as I was enjoying an exceptionally tasty and enlivening mug of Indonesian joe, so it was well received. In particular I enjoyed two quotes, reprinted below.
February 2, 2007 – 11:23 pm
As I mentioned recently, I’ve just read John Searle’s book The Mystery of Consciousness. Searle holds a sort of middle ground among philosophers of mind: he is a card-carrying physicalist, meaning that he rejects the idea that our minds are non-material entities that interact with the body in some ghostly way, but he also takes issue with functionalist philosphers who argue that consciousness is simply an emergent property of sufficiently complex information-processing systems. Searle’s best-known salvo against functionalism is his famous “Chinese Room” thought experiment, which I won’t recap here, but which has been a source of lively dispute ever since it was published in 1980.
February 1, 2007 – 12:37 am
As so often happens, there is an interesting conversation underway over at The Maverick Philosopher. In this case the topic is the recurring theme of mind-body dualism, and in particular how a non-physical mind might causally interact with a physical body. (The original post has to do with a rather arcane metaphysical system known as “hylomorphic” or “Thomistic” dualism, but a lively chat ensued.)
January 31, 2007 – 11:50 pm
In today’s New York Times I ran across an encouraging item: an account of an Internet personality who has developed a worldwide audience — but not with titillating videos, political vituperation, or lowbrow humor, but rather with, of all things, a series of podcasts about Byzantine emperors. His name is Lars Brownworth, and you can read his story here.
Unfortunately, as a result of the article today the servers are swamped, and Iso far I haven’t been able to download more than the first few seconds of the introductory lecture. But it is certainly gratifying to see a history teacher attracting such widespread interest, and I thought readers might like to take a look. The website is here.
January 31, 2007 – 12:50 am
From my friend Eugene Jen comes an interesting item about one Dmitri Tymoczko (Harvard ’91), who has come up with a new way of mapping musical tonal clusters into the topological space known as an orbifold, with interesting results.
The interesting question, of course, is how the orbifold mapping would represent “Oh, Pretty Woman”, or perhaps “Only the Lonely”.
Read all about it.
January 31, 2007 – 12:11 am
Here’s some disappointing news, in case you hadn’t heard: the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys has gone blind, the result of a blown fuse. While the other instruments aboard the orbiting observatory are still in fine shape, this is the camera that has been responsible for all those astonishing images we’ve marveled at in recent years. Learn more here.
January 30, 2007 – 12:46 am
I’ve been reading The Mystery of Consciousness by John R. Searle. Searle is perhaps best known for his long-standing wrangle with Daniel Dennett; they have clashed often over the years, with Dennett running roughshod over Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought experiment, and Searle excoriating Dennett (quite fairly) for his rather extreme position as regards the subjective ontology of consciousness.
January 28, 2007 – 11:21 pm
I’ve just got back to New York after a brief visit to San Diego to visit my father, and no matter how often I make the trip I still find it startling how utterly different the two corners of the continent are, and how easily we flit back and forth. It was a breezy 10° F. or so at dawn on Friday when I headed for JFK, and a sunny 70° at Lindbergh field when I blew in. Now, back in Brooklyn, though it’s warmed up quite a bit, it’s still snowing wetly.
January 26, 2007 – 10:40 pm
With apt timing as regards recent discussion of the place of science in our society, the New York Times yesterday featured on its front page a story about Dr. Charles Roselli, a researcher in Oregon who is studying homosexuality in sheep.
January 26, 2007 – 12:43 am
I’ll be flying to California at the crack of dawn tomorrow — I’m going off to San Marcos to visit my father. I was dithering over what books, music, etc. I might take for the ride, when suddenly I remembered that I had, a couple of years ago, got my hands on a collection of hundreds of hours of recordings of the old Jean Shepherd radio show.
January 25, 2007 – 12:45 am
My apologies to all for not getting the job done in yesterday’s post. Our friend Peter had asked this question, which last night’s item stopped short of answering:
Are there some scientific truths which ought not to be revealed?
Reader Kevin Kim, and then Peter himself, have quite rightly held my feet to the fire, and I’ll have a go at it here.
January 24, 2007 – 12:34 am
In a comment on a recent post about intelligence and education, commenter Peter Kranzler asks:
Let’s suppose that you possessed data which proved that a certain race of people were less intelligent than the rest of humanity. To take it outside this realm, let’s suppose that you are a white New Zealander and could conclusively prove that Maoris have an IQ substantially lower than the white population. If you report your findings, you will make life even more difficult for a group of people who have enough difficulties already. It is hard to imagine any good coming from the revelation that Maoris are incapable of ratiocination (or whatever). Do you report your findings? Are there some scientific truths which ought not to be revealed?
This is, as intended, a difficult question, and shows the trap that awaits any of us who insist on too tightly coupling moral and political philosophy to empirical questions of human biology.
January 22, 2007 – 10:25 pm
One of the greatest liberations in human history will arrive when we truly begin to master the physical system that is closest to us of all: our own bodies. Despite enormous triumphs in our command of the external world, from the building of vast and towering cities to the development of computers to the exploration of the planets, we still live and die as prisoners in the biological machines we are born into, held hostage every day to the caprices of their vital systems. Without the least regard to our station in life, or our virtue, wit, or wealth, we can all be brought down — stopped, literally, dead in our tracks — by some trivial malfunction, some slight physical insult. It might be a virus, or the bursting or occlusion of some tiny bit of plumbing. It could be a gene that causes a milligram too much or too litle of some necessary substance to be produced, or perhaps a renegade group of cells that, having mutinied, encourage others to join them. And of course we all, without exception, suffer the progression of a disease that is universally fatal, and which subjects its victims, little by little, to a withering and debilitating course of mental and physical demolition; that disease, of course, is aging.
January 21, 2007 – 3:06 pm
We are all, of course, thoughtful and open-minded people — a distinction that sets us apart from the rabble, from the average man who parrots the opinions of the braying donkeys he sees on television and reads in the papers. No, we are different; the views we express are carefully prepared, using only the finest ingredients: the facts at hand, our rich store of personal experience, and the wisdom of the many sages whose works we have absorbed. When we deliver an opinion, it is like a sauce that has been carefully reduced — a rich and flavorful concoction, complex and nutritious. How could it be otherwise?
Here’s how. We fancy that we are savants strolling the agora, but in fact we prefer to keep indoors, in our comfortable and well-appointed offices, and to let our secretaries answer the phone. They, of course, having none of our exquisite subtlety of mind, are expected to send the important callers in to see us, where we may give them and their questions the attention they deserve. But what happens, as we doze in our leather chairs, is that most callers never get past the front desk, where they are handed a brochure outlining the company policy and sent along their way.
January 20, 2007 – 10:57 pm
There are few topics that get folks as worked up these days as the notion that there might in fact be innate differences amongst people (or even worse, statistical differences between identifiable groups of people). You may recall that Harvard president Lawrence Summers was tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail for so much as suggesting that known differences in the distribution of various cognitive attributes in men and women might account for some of the unequal success of the sexes in the sciences.
January 19, 2007 – 11:34 am
Readers are encouraged to visit The Joy of Curmudgeonry for an excellent piece by “Deogolwulf” on the persistent allure of political revolution.
January 18, 2007 – 6:16 pm
I tend to procrastinate; I’ve had a problem with it all my life. For years I’ve meant to come to grips with this psychic defect, but I never seem to get around to it. I’m not alone in this, I realize: 15-20% of us are prone to habitual and reflexive deferment of life’s little obligations, and even though Mark Twain advises us never to put off till tomorrow that which can be done the day after tomorrow, many folks would still like to have a better understanding of why we so often would rather do just about anything than the thing that needs doing now.
For those of you who share this affliction, I’ve found a splendid resource for all things cunctatory: Procrastination Central. It’s the perfect place to spend some time when you should be doing something else. Take a look, if you can find the time.
