August 1, 2006 – 11:12 pm
One of the little pleasures of growing older – and they are admittedly not numerous – is that you hold things in living memory that, as far as the hyperkinetic larvae who seem to be taking over the world these days are concerned, never even existed. One of these, for doddering old fossils such as your humble correspondent, is the musical satire of Tom Lehrer.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, in his Best of the Web newsletter of July 25th (I’m just getting around to reading it now), calls our attention to something rather odd in an NBC Nightly News video clip from the evening of the 24th. The report, by NBC’s Beirut bureau chief Richard Engel, is a tour of the havoc wrought in Lebanon by Israeli air strikes, and at one point the camera crew visits the flattened financial district of Sidon. On screen briefly are what appear to be uncut sheets of U.S. $100 bills. This is more than a little odd, Taranto points out:
Now, it’s possible to buy uncut sheets from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, at premiums ranging from 12.5% to 275% over face value–but apparently only in denominations of up to $50. Anyhow, somehow we doubt these were collectibles.
Hezbollah is known to be involved in counterfeiting of US currency, and this may well be an example of their work. Read the item here.
Many on the secular left have for quite a while been complaining, with not inconsiderable justification, of the deepening partnership here in America between fundamentalist Christians and the political right. While I would stop (far) short of characterizing the U.S.A. under the current administration as a “theocracy” as many of my blue-state neighbors might, there is no question that church and state have got awfully cozy lately, a trend that I imagine will be good, in the long run, for neither. From my old friend Jess Kaplan comes an AOL news item about the pastor of an evangelical megachurch who feels the same way, if perhaps for different reasons, and who has quite publicly staked out a contrary position.
I’m allowing myself a little slack here in the dog days of July and August; excessive heat tends to randomize the syntactic patterns of my little grey cells, and I have learned to be wary of attempting ambitious cogitative efforts under such conditions, as they often go badly awry, with unpredictable results. Readers, therefore, will most likely notice a temporary dropoff in both quantity and quality as I withdraw, at least partially, into estivation here in Wellfleet (which for me is going to consist of lolling on beaches, swimming in ponds, imbibing libations cooling and potent, and thinking shallow and largely non-sequential thoughts).
Ah, P.J. O’Rourke. If you are old enough you might remember him as a contributor to (in fact the managing editor of) The National Lampoon , way back in the seventies. I hadn’t read anything of his since I read Parliament of Whores some years ago, but while I was absorbing a post of Bill Vallicella’s on the topic of “gender-neutral language” earlier this evening I found, in a comment, a link to a review by O’Rourke of an academic volume called Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language of the Association of American University Presses.
The great Ukiyo-e master Katsushika Hokusai is perhaps best known for a series of prints called 36 Views of Mt. Fuji. These images vary greatly in their depiction of the mountain; in some of them, Fuji-san is the focus of the picture, while in many others it is a barely noticeable feature off in the distance. The images show people working, playing, on the street, in town, in the country, on boats, and so forth. But the great volcano is there, somewhere, in every frame, and the set gives, in its distributed way, a sense of what a powerful presence the mountain is. Its snowclad, tapering summit often seems to float in a sea of purple mist, as though it belonged more to the heavens than the world below; at the same time, though, it is a looming token of subterranean power and mystery, and an insistent reminder of the ungraspably enormous scale at which the life of the Earth proceeds, and of Nature’s majestic indifference to the fleeting life of Man.
Tonight finds your correspondent once again in Seattle, Washington, at the end of a long day.
From my daughter Chloë, an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, comes a link to an interesting item at the UM website. The story is about physics professor Mark Newman, who left the Sante Fe Institute to join the UM faculty, and his work with maps and networks.
I suppose I’ll weigh in on the situation on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, although I tend to shy away from politics in these pages. In short, my view is that Israel is doing exactly what it ought to be doing, and ought to keep doing it for a little while longer. I offer a few thoughts, none of them particularly original.
I have quite a few old chess books on my shelves – I have a hard time passing them up whenever I see a street vendor selling them, and they tend to accumulate. The other day, in the wee hours of the morning, weary but not yet ready to retire, I pulled a couple of volumes at random and settled in with a board and an adult beverage, looking forward to browsing a bit and perhaps playing over a master game or two. The two books I had happened to choose were The Book of the Nottingham International Chess Tournament, 10th to 28th August, 1936, With Annotations and Analysis by A. Alekhine (probably the best tournament book ever, given the quality of the annotation, and that the field included Alekhine, Capablanca, Lasker, Fine, Tartakower, Vidmar, Bogoljuboff, Flohr, Reshevsky, Euwe, and Botvinnik, among others), and a wonderful collection called The Treasury of Chess Lore, by that most beloved of all chess writers, Fred Reinfeld.
This weekend we held our little farewell gathering in Oceanside, CA for my mother Alison. I’ll give a brief account for the many of you who either knew her or who, having followed the sad story of her final weeks in these pages, have written with kind words of support and sympathy.
Well, we’re back from my mother‘s memorial service out in Oceanside, CA. It was everything we could have hoped for, and I will be writing about it shortly.
We flew back from San Diego to JFK on American Airlines earlier today, and we had a female captain (which is still quite unusual), by the name of Linda Parks. She did an excellent job, of course; in particular, she made an outstandingly smooth landing. She even got us home a little faster than her male counterparts usually do, because she didn’t mind stopping someone to ask directions.
Once again, waka waka waka may lie fallow for a couple of days, as Nina and I are flying out to California tomorrow for a memorial service for my mother. This is going to be a difficult weekend all around, especially for my father, and there might not be many opportunities to write, though if I can I will.
We’ll be back in New York on Monday.
I hate to keep harping on this topic, but the weather here in New York today has been particularly unpleasant. The air seems oddly compressed, and even more saturated and viscous than usual – as though it contained not just the usual summertime admixture of water vapor and filth, but also maybe some mule sweat or hog saliva. There was not the slightest breeze, most of the day, to stir the fetid broth, and the sun, visible at times through its nubilous veil, brought the whole dolorous mess to a slow and sultry simmer as the dreary day wore on. The psychological effect – to drain one of all joy, hope, or sense of purpose – is also deepened, for those who have spent a summer in New York before, and haven’t managed to repress the memory, by the certain knowledge that worse is yet to come.
My lovely wife Nina and I spent the evening in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, where the New York Philharmonic Orchestra kicked off their summer concert series with a program of Tchaikovsky and Dvořák.
In today’s New York Times, former chess champion Garry Kasparov, who has forsaken competitive chess for pro-democratic political activism, challenges the Western democracies to take “a tougher stand” against the increasing trend toward authoritarianism in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Garik writes:
Opposition activists and journalists are routinely arrested and interrogated. The Kremlin, in complete control of the judiciary, loots private businesses and then uses state-controlled companies to launder the money abroad.
Mr. Bush and Europe’s leaders apparently believe it is best to disregard such unpleasantness for the sake of receiving Russia’s cooperation on security and energy. This cynical and morally repugnant stance has also proven ineffective. Just as in the old days, Moscow has become an ally for troublemakers and anti-democratic rulers around the world. Nuclear aid to Iran, missile technology to North Korea, military aircraft to Sudan, Myanmar and Venezuela, and a budding friendship with Hamas: these are the West’s rewards for keeping its mouth shut about human rights in Russia.
Read the entire essay here.
I’ve finished reading George Beke’s book Digging Up the Dog: The Greek Roots of Gurdjieff’s Esoteric Ideas, and must recommend it again, not only for those who are curious about Gurdjieff’s teaching, but also for those who wish a deeper understanding of Christian symbolism. Many familiar Christian ideas – the Trinity, the Twelve Stations of the Cross, even the word Alleluia – represent much older knowledge and traditions that found their way to us by way of the Greeks. Gurdjieff, who sometimes described his teachings as “esoteric Christianity”, once said, when asked about the connection between ancient Greece and the modern Church:
Everything Christian came from old Greek, then they spoil. All, all, comes from Greek.
As I’ve mentioned before, I am fond of books, and have a hard time passing an outdoor bookseller’s table (and here in Gotham they are everywhere) without picking something up. As a result they are all over my house; I simply don’t have enough bookshelves to contain them all, so they tend to accumulate in piles in less-trafficked areas. Every so often I make some attempt at reorganizing them, and the process takes much, much longer than it ought, because exhuming them from their dusty desuetude is like meeting old friends, and I wind up just sitting on the floor reading.
Today, while looking for something in the computer room upstairs, I noticed a forgotten pile of books, and second from the top was an old favorite: the Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, by David Wells (no, not the former Yankee hurler).
My friend George Beke, a tireless and erudite scholar of esoteric teachings, has just sent me a copy of his new book Digging Up the Dog: The Greek Roots of Gurdjieff’s Esoteric Ideas. In this slim volume George shares with us the fruits of his decades of research into the occult legacy of the Pythagoreans and Plato – which are often considered by modern Western thinkers to be merely mathematical and philosophical teachings – and their relation to the complex system for inner development brought forth a century ago by Gurdjieff. I look forward to reading it and commenting on it here. You can order a copy of your own – I can promise you that if you are curious about such things you will not be disappointed – here.
Things should be getting back to normal around here tomorrow, but having just got home to Brooklyn after a long day of driving in the rain, I think that tonight we’ll just have a few links from the mailbag. First, from Jess Kaplan comes a patriotic little Java applet with an appealing Big Apple theme. Next we have, courtesy of Mike Zaharee (formerly of PubSub‘s Granite State Research Kitchen), further evidence, as if any were necessary, of what mischievous little imps the North Koreans are, and finally, thanks to Jon Mandell, we have a glimpse of the amusing discomfiture at Wikipedia as the fractious online organism tries to equilibrate in the wake of Enron blackguard Ken Lay‘s unlamented demise.
Happy Independence Day to all from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where, in a remarkable cessation of hostilities, even the local cetaceans made an appearance in today’s town parade.
One advantage of my having toiled for a couple of years at PubSub is that everyone who worked there keeps one eye on the Internet at all times, looking out for odd or interesting items, and when they find them they pass them right along to yours truly. From Jon Mandell comes a link to a vituperative article about Wikipedia, the online resource that seems to be emerging as America’s second-most-polarizing cultural entity, right behind George W. Bush himself (Righteous Swordsman of Freedom, or Chimpy W. Hitler, depending on which side of the aisle you’re on).
My friend Eugene Jen, whose restlessly curious mind makes him a rich source of interesting material, has sent along a link to a story about the great logician Kurt Gödel. Apparently Gödel, in preparing for his U.S. citizenship examination, made a characteristically analytical reading of the document, and realized that despite the Framers’ aversion to tyranny, they had left in place a weakness that might lead, under the worst of circumstances, to the establishment of a dictatorship. It was Gödel’s intention to mention this at his examination, but his good friend Einstein, who had accompanied him to the proceedings, talked him out of it.
Apologies to all, but I am enjoying a much-needed respite from glowing screens today. As Groucho said, “I love my cigar, but I take it out once in a while.”
I wish you all a restful, safe and happy Independence Day weekend, and waka waka waka will be back within the next couple of days.
I do apologize for the lightweight content around here the past few days. I’m not sorry enought to do anything about it tonight, though: having just come at 11:15 p.m. to the end of a long, busy, sticky day of bustling about in the foul and dispiriting New York weather, I find that the little grey cells that I rely on for generating trenchant analysis, rib-tickling humor, biting social commentary, and up-to-the minute reporting are in a restive and mutinous mood, and I frankly don’t think I’ll get anything out of them until they’ve had a little R&R (I’m pouring some as we speak).
Also, bearing in mind Machiavelli’s advice that whereas good news should be measured out a little at a time, bad news should be given all at once, I must mention that we will be on the road over the weekend, and waka waka waka might be dark for a day or two.
But in keeping with our practice of exhuming, when I am too inebriated, shiftless or lazy to write anything worth reading, some bit of rubbish from the infinite landfill we call the Web, I offer yet another momentarily diverting wisp of froth – in this case a clever optical illusion.
It’s summertime, and the weather here is not conducive to ponderous thoughts, so this evening we shall amuse ourselves with a look at how our doughty pals the Finns make merry while the sun glances briefly upon their Boreal realm. I’m talking, of course, about the World Championship of Wife-carrying.
The CNN website today carried an interesting little item: an interview with Saddam Hussein’s defense attorney, Ramsey Clark. For those of you who aren’t up on Mr. Clark’s curriculum vitae, he was United States Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, and played an important role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960’s, but since then has wandered farther and farther into the fever swamps of the extreme Left, and from the Vietnam era forward has happily made common cause with an sordid assortment of America’s foes. He also seems to have, to paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, an “inordinate fondness” for brutal tyrants, including Serbian thug Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević, Liberian despot and mutilator of uncounted thousands Charles Taylor, and of course the Butcher of Baghdad himself. Clark attended MiloÅ¡ević’s funeral, for example, and announced that “history will prove MiloÅ¡ević was right.” Right to wage a ruthless campaign of genocide, I assume he means.
It seems that a lot of people have been asking me about PubSub Concepts, the innovative Internet-search company where I spent the last two years designing and building client software. Word has got around that the company has fallen on hard times, and folks are wondering what’s up.
Indeed, as seems to be no secret, things haven’t gone so well lately. Given my staid British upbringing, however, and an innate sense of tact, I feel that it would be indecorous for me to say much about it all publicly, other than to allow that I do find myself with rather more free time these days, as do some of my newer friends.
Though unfortunate, this sort of thing is hardly unprecedented. Think of World War I, or perhaps the Challenger disaster.
Well, it’s a strange business, and no mistake. For some reason traffic here at waka waka waka has spiked up dramatically – more than tenfold – in the last couple of days, and I have no idea why. I turned off the comment-spam blocker for a while, but that wasn’t it, and I can’t see any pattern in the stats. I’d like to think that suddenly the world just can’t get by without a daily dose of the waka waka Weltanschauung, but I have no illusions on that score. It sure is odd, though.
Have I mentioned that I rather dislike the weather here in the summertime? It reminds me of the popular television program Iron Chef, in which the antagonists are given some key ingredient – cuttlefish mantle, say, or babirussa tongue – and ring its changes by serving it up as hors d’oeuvres, soups, salads, entrees, desserts, and even beverages. Well, here in New York, the theme is humidity – enervating, spirit-breaking humidity – and the merciless Gotham microclimate dishes it out in every way imaginable.
My friend Eugene Jen has brought to my attention a sad item: Harriet, a Galápagos tortoise brought home on the Beagle by Charles Darwin himself, has died at the age of 176.
Harriet, we hardly knew ye.
Today I had an interesting lunch downtown with my brother, David Pollack, and PubSub CEO Gus Spathis, and afterwards walked with David, through sweltering heat and sweating throngs more evocative of Bombay than Broadway, to the Merrill Lynch headquarters at the World Financial Center, where he was to attend a meeting with the sultans of high finance.
Yesterday’s New York Times ran a story about a website called Language Log, which I visited at once and had a hard time leaving. There is even a special introductory post written just for all the new visitors that came by as result of the piece in the Times.
If you love English, you’ll love this blog. Onto the sidebar it goes.
Yesterday, I made a brief and rather positive reference to the communally written Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia. Today, my good friend David Pauley has sent me a link to an essay, posted at Edge.org by computer scientist Jaron Lanier, that makes some very pertinent criticisms of the increasing fashionability of such examples of Internet “collectivism”. Lanier’s argument is that “hive minds” like Wikipedia are good at some things, but very bad at others, and that the current trend seems to be toward an uncritical embrace of a kind of “digital Maoism” that he sees as potentially quite destructive. Lanier writes:
In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion.
This is a fascinating and important discussion. Read Lanier’s essay here, and an assortment of responses here.
I’ve got something else for you to worry about, if you’d like to take your mind off cyanide in the subways, North Korean missile tests, and bucket drownings.
It is never the final word, but it is quickly getting to be the world’s best starting point.
Well, just as I feared, it’s here – New York’s estival death-cloud has arrived, and life in Gotham will now be a fetid, stinking, sweaty hell until sometime in late September. Today the temperature was up around 90, the air was viscous and clinging, and the sun beat down pitilessly from a blinding white sky.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
Today I noticed no fewer than five different people wearing Che Guevara T-shirts here in my ultra-blue neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. I will be generous enough to assume that they do so out of youthful ignorance, and not out of an informed wish to lionize the ruthless and bloodthirsty Communist revolutionary, butcher of political dissidents, gays, and Christians at Castro’s Cabana prison, who personally executed, with apparent relish, even the children of his political opponents, and who tried to cultivate in his followers “hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.”
Forgive me for discussing personal business in this sober forum, but today’s post is one of congratulations to our son Nicholas, who was graduated today from the Berkeley-Carroll school here in Brooklyn. Next stop: Brandeis University.
Here’s a shot of the newly minted alumnus with his sister Chloë, who will be heading into her senior year at the University of Michigan.
Nick, I’m mighty proud to be your father.
My dear, departed mom used to quote a wise old saying from her native Scotland:
When in doubt, say nowt.
Good advice, friends.
The rate at which we learn is such a limitation. People are generally at least moderately intelligent, and if we were all able to comprehend the various things that everyone else is working on, I’m sure that so many helpful suggestions would be offered that the rate of progress in almost all fields of endeavor would increase exponentially. But it is simply impossible to get people “up to speed” as it were, with any reasonable investment of time or effort.
Today finds your humble correspondent in Seattle, Washington, where I have been summoned, quite unexpectedly, for a bit of business about which, unfortunately, I mustn’t disclose any details at the moment. The trip came up on very short notice, and the urgency of making hasty travel arrangements yesterday evening meant that waka waka waka lay fallow for the day. I apologize for the service outage.
The other day I had a familiar tune repeating itself in my head (an irritating phenomenon sometimes called an earworm), and couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was. Convinced that the Internet had to be able to help me somehow (my answer for everything these days), I got online and started poking around. I quickly turned up a website called SongTapper, where the idea is that most tunes are distinguishable by their rhythm alone. All you have to do is find your way to their song search page and tap out the rhythm of the song on your space bar. I was skeptical, but lo and behold, out popped the correct answer: Mozart’s Turkish March.
Try it yourself.
In considering the question of how “mere” matter can exhibit intentionality, I argued in a previous post that living things have their purposefulness and “aboutness” by virtue of their being designed, just as our artifacts have. The designer, however, in the case of living things, is not a purposeful Mind, but the blind processes of evolution and natural selection. If we are willing to acknowledge that our complex intentionality might, as we look backward through our ancestral history, take simpler and simpler forms, all the way back to the simplest early replicators, we might have in hand the “gradualist bridge” that many dualist philosophers insist cannot be built. We still have a major problem to solve, however, which is the origin of life itself. There have been many promising suggestions as to how life might have got started, but one stumbling block for many models has been a sort of Catch-22 problem in which the machinery for RNA replication needed to be in place in order for the ball to get rolling. NYU researcher Robert Shapiro, however, has a new and promising model that bypasses the need for preexisting RNA, and relies only on simpler organic reactions.
The paper is to be published in the June issue of the Quarterly Review of Biology, but you can read a bit more here (hat tip to Jon Mandell ).
Needless to say, a convincing demonstration of a mechanism whereby self-replicating organisms could have arisen in the early terrestrial environment would be an important result (to put it mildly), and would deal Intelligent Design proponents quite a blow.
From Marcus Aurelius:
“At every action, no matter by whom performed, make it a practice to ask yourself , ‘What is his object in doing this?’
But begin with yourself; put this question to yourself first of all.”
Today’s PhysOrg newsletter (which I highly recommend subscribing to, by the way – it’s free, pithy, and a great way to keep up with the latest in science and technology) contained some interesting news: it appears that some of the physical laws of the universe are changing over time.
Dr. William Vallicella’s website, The Maverick Philosopher, will of course be familiar to readers of these pages (in fact many of you will have come here in the first place as a result of our occasional cross-linking). Bill is a professional philosopher – the real McCoy, as opposed to the loquacious amatuers who drive taxis and cut hair here in Gotham – and his site is a fascinating forum for discussion of philosophical topics. He attracts interested laypeople like me as well as his academic colleagues, and the discussions are always at a high level both of erudition and civility. I have learned a great deal by reading and participating, and have been persuaded to rethink many of my own opinions as a result.
My friend Jess Kaplan has just brought to my attention an ominous datum: on this numerologically significant date, 6-6-06, the cost of the average fixed-rate mortgage just happens to be a rather unsettling 6.66%.
Those who prefer a dualist account of mind sometimes raise the objection that if our mental acts are simply the result of material chains of events in our brains, then there is no room for creativity, for our apparent ability to think original thoughts. But what does “creativity” mean?
In a gratifying development, it appears that scientists have finally weighed in on that dimwitted question concerning the chicken and the egg. As w.w.w. readers will recall, of course, from this post, the matter had in fact already been settled.
