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.
Well, I’ve been slacking off again. Rather than sitting home hammering at life’s persistent questions, I spent the evening at the Yee’s Hung Ga 32nd Anniversary and First Annual Awards Banquet, at a restaurant on Elizabeth Street in the heart of New York’s Chinatown. Along with the copious distribution of engraved plaques to various honorees, the four-hour bacchanal featured kung fu demonstrations, laudatory and exhortatory orations, lion dances, a celebratory proclamation issued by no less than Hizzoner the Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg himself, and ten courses of Cantonese food. A splendid time was had by all.
There are places here and there that are noted by painters and photographers for the special quality of their light. Southern France is one; van Gogh made some of his most beautiful paintings in and around Arles. St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida!) is another, and so, as it happens, is the far end of Cape Cod.
Here’s an amusing item over at MandellOnline: a one-man review of the history of pop-music dance styles over the past 50 years. Well worth a peek.
Those who’ve read any Charles Fort (I’ll be writing about him shortly) will know that over the centuries there have been, from all corners of the globe, reports of odd things falling from the sky – frogs, fish, stones, sheets of ice, mysterious slime, etc. One of the more common reports is of showers of blood.
These accounts are often either dismissed as fabrications, or explained away in various unhelpful ways. One such “scientific explanation” of the shower-of-blood phenomenon, for example, was “a fine mist of blood cells produced by a meteor striking a high-flying flock of bats”. Usually, of course, they are simply swept under the rug and forgotten.
Now comes a noteworthy development from India, where one Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, has collected some samples from a red rain that fell in Kerala, and upon examining them has found what appear to be some very strange microbes. They are small – about 10 microns in diameter – and reproduce under harsh conditions, though they appear not to contain any DNA. Louis has suggested that they may in fact be of extraterrestrial origin, and may be examples of panspermia (the notion that life on Earth was seeded by otherworldy molecules).
Read more here.
I don’t spend a lot of time in the recording studio these days; one of the reasons that I took up software development after twenty-odd years of making records for a living was that the long and irregular hours were beginning to get to me. It was not a big deal, really, to do multiple consecutive sixteen-hour sessions when I was in my twenties; I’d just collapse for a day after the project ended, and I’d be fine. But as I got older it got harder to bounce back, and I’d spend days in a fog after those marathons. Now I’m 50 (50!), and I have to say that after putting in 32 hours in two days on Tuesday and Wednesday over at Right Track I feel about as focused and articulate as Ozzy Osborne on a fistful of ‘ludes. So instead of the usual piercing analysis and trenchant commentary on the passing scene, I’ll just have to leave you today with something else to worry about: Giant Hogweed. It’s big, it’s phototoxic, it looks like a cow parsnip on steroids, and it’s coming your way. Learn more here, and here.
Once again, waka waka waka has been experiencing service outages. The reason this time was a six-hour drive home to New York on Monday evening, and a 14-hour day in the recording studio today (just got home at one a.m).
I spent the day at Right Track Recording on West 48th Street – one of my favorite places to make records – to do basic tracks for an album by a very talented young woman from Australia, a bassist by the name of Tal Wilkenfeld. Joining us in Studio A were tenor player Seamus Blake, pianist Geoff Keezer, and the astonishing drummer Keith Carlock. Tomorrow we will be joined by an old friend, guitarist Wayne Krantz.
So I hope you understand; I’m just too worn out to write a post today. Back soon.
It’s been pleasantly cool, for the most part, this spring, but June is just around the corner, and temperatures well into the eighties are predicted for the coming week back home in New York. Most people seem to be perfectly happy about this – the TV and radio meteorologists always act as if it’s glad tidings for all when the summer weather moves in – but I, for one, dread its arrival every spring, and always murmur silent thanks on those cool grey late-spring days that many people seem to take as a personal affront.
It’s just the way I’m built, I suppose – I’m a stocky fellow, weighing about 100 kilograms, and have a robust internal furnace. I’m also of Scottish blood, and since Scotland lies rather far north, and consists almost entirely of cold-water coastline and craggy mountains, it keeps pretty cool up there. I rarely feel cold even on the frostiest winter days, but when the temperature creeps above 80, I start having difficulty managing my heat economy, and when it gets into the 90’s with high humidity, as it does with depressing regularity in New York City, I begin to suffer in earnest. When it gets really bad – those hellish days in the upper 90’s when the sky is nothing but white glare, the tops of the skyscrapers are lost in the haze, the asphalt is melting, and the air at street level is a sickening, superheated misama – I begin to wish I’d never been born. I’d gladly trade six weeks in the single digits, with a howling boreal gale straight off Baffin Bay, for a single one of those awful summer days.
All right -ok -I’ll try to get hold of myself here. I’m sorry to burden you with all of this, but each year Memorial Day is when the Fear begins to take hold of me. Things aren’t too bad yet, and I’m grateful for that, but I know very well what’s coming.
It is extraordinarily quiet here in Wellfleet tonight. It’s been cool and grey all day, and just at dusk a thick fog crept in. The air is heavy and still, and a gentle rain is falling. It is the first day of the new Moon, and the sky is utterly back.
We live on a small hilltop on a little dirt road in the woods, about half a mile from the harbor, and although it is Friday night on a major holiday weekend, nary a soul is stirring anywhere within earshot. Even the coyotes, who often gather at night for no apparent reason other than to see how much noise they can make, are keeping mum.
When you are used to living in New York City, which is always ablaze with lights and throbbing and humming with purposeful clamor, such darkness and silence has quite an effect. Tonight seems almost actively black and quiet, and stepping outside one feels oneself in the presence of a great enveloping blotter, drawing out all that hustle and bustle so that something else, perhaps, may enter.
As sometimes happens, it’s late, and I may have to shirk my bloggardly duties for today. After a late night Wednesday, an early morning today, hours in the office reviewing mind-numbingly opaque Internet-protocol documents, and then a long drive from New York City to Wellfleet, MA, I am simply too zonked to opine about anything.
Well, almost. As I write I am listening to a 1965 recording, by the incomparable Arthur Rubinstein, of Chopin’s Nocturnes, in particular Opus 9, No. 3, in B major. The ‘A’ section of the piece is a simple melodic figure, played with infinite tenderness by the great master. The structure repeats several times, and each time the second half of the figure is reinterpreted with increasingly intricate variation. It is sublimely, heartbreakingly beautiful.
Listening to this music, sometimes I feel that even if this were all the human race ever accomplished, it would be enough.
I susbcribe to a daily newsletter that sends along little quotations and aphorisms from various religious traditions – each day I get a Hindu one, a Muslim one, and a Buddhist one (the Christian and Jewish ones leaned too much on Old Testament begetting and begatting; they were boring, frankly). This was the Muslim one from yesterday:
When we allow God’s power to pervade all our actions, and submit to his decrees, we shed all anxiety about the effects of our actions on others; we cease even to consider the effects of our actions. When we cease to consider the effects of our actions, we are adopting the attributes of God himself.
-Qushayri, “Risalah”
From “366 Readings From Islam,” translated by Robert Van der Weyer. Copyright 2000. All rights reserved.
Before you go see Al Gore’s new movie, take this fun quiz.
Just sent my way by Eugene Jen: a remarkable 3-D view of an underground city constructed by a colony of Florida harvester ants, Pogonomyrmex badius. Take a look here.
In today’s Wall Street Journal newsletter was a link to a recent commencement speech by John McCain, in which he tries to frame the context of political debate, and reminds us that more unites us than divides us. It’s well worth reading, and you can find it here.
We should never underestimate the pervasiveness of human nature. Among the many drives that motivate us is the desire for status, which in primate groups like ours is obviously correlated with one’s reproductive prospects. This yearning to increase our standing in the group affects our behavior even in the most rarefied spheres of endeavor, for example the practice of philosophy.
Want strong, healthy bones? I have the answer. Learn more here.
Oh, and you can take that part about “moderation” cum grano salis. I certainly do.
From time to time I mention amusing or imaginative Web sites in these pages. I’ve just stumbled across a good one; it’s an artificial-intelligence engine that plays (and usually wins) the game of Twenty Questions. It has just managed to correctly guess that I was thinking of a snail, a pair of sunglasses, a pencil, and a grapefruit.
Click here to give it a try.
It having been a long day – it’s eleven p.m., and I’ve just got back from the kung fu school – I’ll just leave you tonight with an interesting tidbit from today’s paper.
Apparently, recent study of the human genome has turned up an interesting kink in our lineage. It seems that the human-chimp divergence wasn’t quite as neat and tidy as was once believed; it now appears that after the human and chimp lines had parted ways, they rejoined, thereby producing chimp-human hybrids for a while (not sure what you’d call them, maybe “humps”). In other words, proto-humans, and then female hybrids, crossbred for a while with the proto-chimps.
This is bound to give some humans fits. I haven’t checked to see how the chimps feel about it. Read more here.
Well, as it happens, the featured article on the front page of Wikipedia today is Philosophy of Mind. In the article we find the question:
“How can the subjective qualities and the intentionality (aboutness) of mental states and properties be explained in naturalistic terms?”
Small world.
One of the knottier topics in philosophy of mind is intentionality. The term refers to the way our thoughts are about their objects, and intentionality is often considered to be an exclusive hallmark of the mental. A thought can be “about” Paris, but a stone, or a lampshade, cannot be.
We had a little Steely Dan playing on the PubSub office jukebox today, and I had occasion to reflect, as we listened to Jeff “Skunk” Baxter’s outstanding guitar playing on “Reelin’ In The Years“, on what an extraordinary fellow he is. Not only is he one of the most capable rock musicians of the last several decades, always in demand as a producer and sideman (and one of my favorite soloists), but he is also a self-taught defense-technology expert, who has become a widely respected D.O.D. consultant on such matters as counterterrorism tactics and missile defense.
If you’d like to find out more about this remarkable autodidact, Baxter’s Wikipedia entry is worth a peek.
Sorry not to have posted anything yesterday; I spent the whole day in the ‘B’ room at Avatar Studios, doing some mixing with my old pal, guitarist Steve Khan. We were mixing two takes that didn’t make it onto last year’s album The Green Field (which featured Jack deJohnette, John Patitucci, and Manola Badrena). At the tracking dates back in May of 2005 we wound up recording more material than would fit on CD, so the two songs we mixed yesterday – Henry Mancini’s “Dreamsville” and McCoy Tyner’s “Blues for Ball” – will just have to wait till next time around.
Studio B is a nice little room, with a cozy live area that’s just right for a small rhythm section – among others, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards recorded a string of hits there, back in the 80’s – and an expansive Solid State Logic 9000 series console.
I was a staff engineer there from 1979 until 1987, back when the place was called Power Station, so I always feel right at home.
I’ve been getting a little back-channel heat about my tendency, lately, to make unkind remarks about the UN. So, for the record, I’d like to say that I have always felt that the only hope for the world, in the long run, was some sort of universal government, and that I think the historical tendency of “non-zero-sum” cooperative arrangements to emerge at larger and larger scales makes such an arrangement practically ineveitable, sooner or later. I used to be a big defender of th UN, back when US foreign policy seemed to consist mainly of prppoing up whatever foul despot would take our side against the Reds (although we are still cozying up to a few who will take our side against the jihadists).
Most of what happens in our lives conforms fairly closely to what we’ve come to expect. Most Tuesdays are, generally, rather a lot like most other Tuesdays, and the news most days is not significantly more or less notable than most other days. The weather is, generally, about what you’d expect for the time of year, and most lunches are not significantly more or less enjoyable than most other lunches. Memorable events are rare, and, almost tautologically, the truly salient events in one’s life – the things that come along “once in a blue moon” – are extremely rare. When they do happen, they are generally either thrilling, wonderful, electrifying moments that will glow happily in our memory for the rest of our lives, or they are the great tragedies and calamities that take the measure of us all.
We are blessed, I think, that the natural order of things – perhaps it is Zipf’s Law at work – spares most of us from too many of these extremes. Roller coasters are popular, but nobody wants to live on one.
When the big, bad things happen, we can be thankful that they are rare. And when the good ones do – and how sweet they can be – we should simply be thankful to be here at all.
There are several American Elm trees on my block in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and as they do every spring, they are squandering their resources in profligate and futile excess.
A story in yesterday’s New York Times brings to our attention once again the fine job that the United Nations is doing to make the world a better place:
Liberian girls as young as 8 are being sexually exploited by United Nations peacekeepers, aid workers and teachers in return for food, small favors and even rides in trucks, according to a new report from Save the Children U.K.
Of course, the entire civilized world, its patience already stretched to the limit by US abuses at Guantanamo, immediately rose up in outrage, and anti-UN rioting paralyzed the world’s capitals.
Oh wait – well, actually, nobody seems to be bothered, particularly, except for Save the Children, who recommends a swift and severe response:
Save the Children said Liberia and the United Nations should set up an office to investigate cases of the sexual exploitation and to work to ensure that the behavior stops, prosecuting the offenders, among other steps.
It also said United Nations workers accused of sexual exploitation should “go through judicial proceedings,” and if found guilty, should not be sent elsewhere as peacekeepers.
That ought to do it.
In an April 16th raid near Yusufiyah, Iraq, (in the so-called “Triangle of Death” ) US-led forces found a trove of al-Qaeda documents. One of them was a memorandum assessing the state of their efforts in Baghdad in less-than-rosy terms:
At the same time, the Americans and the Government were able to absorb our painful blows, sustain them, compensate their losses with new replacements, and follow strategic plans which allowed them in the past few years to take control of Baghdad as well as other areas one after the other. That is why every year is worse than the previous year as far as the Mujahidin’s control and influence over Baghdad.
Read the full translation here.
Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami was on the Wall Street Journal’s television program, the “Journal Editorial Report”, over the weekend, to discuss the recent conference in Philadelphia honoring the 90th birthday of the great Mideast scholar Bernard Lewis.
My friend Jon Mandell has sent along a link to a story about the rapid rise of blogging in China. It is estimated that by the end of the year exotic Cathay will be home to sixty million online scribes.
Read more here.
What is remarkable to me about the technological revolution of the last few years is the way that it enables us to ignore traditional barriers of scale. Just as we can, with Google Earth, take in the whole world from space, but in seconds swoop all the way down to our own rooftop, with tools like PubSub and Google we can survey the entire Earth-girdling ocean of human expression, and zoom in on any given drop.
It is easy to imagine that some emergent event, some critical mass, must be approaching as the worldwide interconnectedness of everyone with everyone else increases. In chemistry, solvents are used to enable molecules to react; as the reagent concentration increases, the number of reactions per second does too. What we are doing here is putting an ever-increasing number of highly reactive molecules – people – into solution. And the Internet is the solvent.
Sorry, I’m just too tired tonight to write anything worth reading. But I don’t want anyone who has taken the trouble to pay us a visit to go away empty-handed, so here’s an interesting link: a website where author Robert Wright (whose insightful book Nonzero I have just begun reading) has posted video clips of his interviews with an impressive assortment of prominent thinkers.
