December 8, 2009 – 12:45 am
It is a common view that consciousness has something to to with the degree of integration of different areas of the brain. The idea is not only a modern scientific notion: it is also a tenet of various esoteric schools (for example that of G.I. Gurdjieff; see here and here) that higher degrees of consciousness […]
December 6, 2009 – 11:53 pm
We’ll get back to normal operations tomorrow, I expect, but for today I’ve still been twiddling around with this new layout. (Reactions have been mixed, and I’m still making up my mind about it.) It’s taking me a little while to figure out how to customize the design — there are various PHP and CSS […]
December 6, 2009 – 1:07 am
I’ve just upgraded my WordPress installation, and am fishing around for a new visual “theme” for this site. (I’ve gotten very tired of the old one.) So the look of this place may vary for the next few days or weeks until I settle on something. Feel free to comment.
December 5, 2009 – 12:48 am
We’re off duty today, and so the lovely Nina and I took a long walk this afternoon on the beach at Maguire’s Landing (a.k.a. Lecounts Hollow) here in Wellfleet. It being December, we had the place all to ourselves. (Well, almost, as you’ll see below.) It was very beautiful. I took a few pictures, shortly […]
December 4, 2009 – 6:07 pm
Well, the saga continues at Mangan’s. His old blog having risen from its ashes, Dennis has decided to carry on there, while taking precautions to ensure continuity if he is cold-cocked by Google again. So: http://mangans.blogspot.com it is.
December 3, 2009 – 5:03 pm
I’ll be traveling today, with scant time to write, but I wanted to let all of you know that Dennis Mangan is back in business: http://mangans.typepad.com/mangans/ Adjust your links accordingly.
December 2, 2009 – 9:17 pm
I watched the President’s speech last night. It was not encouraging. It had something for everyone: escalation for the hawks; an exit date for the doves; the usual rot about “distorting and defiling a great religion”, to keep the Muslims off the streets; some bean-counting for the frugal; some American exceptionalism for the true believers; […]
December 2, 2009 – 12:06 pm
Now here’s something you rarely see: a prominent and powerful male, exposed publicly to have been a duplicitous, goat-footed philanderer — and having thereby humiliated, before a drooling global audience, his dutiful wife and mortified family — makes a sheepish statement (note the shift in declension, from caprine to ovine) in which he reassures us […]
December 1, 2009 – 1:00 pm
It appears that our friend Dennis Mangan has run afoul of Google’s guidelines for acceptable content: as of late afternoon yesterday his blog’s homepage has been replaced by the dreaded Blogger Screen of Death. This happened also to Jeffery Hodges a while back, though in that case it appeared to be some sort of mistake: […]
November 30, 2009 – 12:46 am
In the comment thread to our recent post about John Derbyshire’s book We Are Doomed, commenter JW asked one very good question: why, if increasing ethnic and cultural diversity lead to corresponding increases in tension and strife, does New York City (where I live) manage to function as well as it does? Why indeed? To […]
November 28, 2009 – 12:12 am
A recent item in the Long War Journal informs us that it appears that al-Qaeda is consolidating a Waziristan-style presence in Eastern Syria. Nothing happens in Syria without the consent of the Ba’ath Party, and the story does indeed tell us that there appears to be a working partnership in place between al-Qaeda and former […]
November 25, 2009 – 3:30 pm
I’ve just begun reading John Derbyshire’s dour and mordantly funny new book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. The first chapter deals with our bizarre and destructive obsession with Diversity — a liberal viewpoint, now thoroughly hegemonic at all levels of societal administration, that Mr. Derbyshire sums up as The Diversity Theorem: Different populations, of […]
November 24, 2009 – 11:34 pm
There’s all sorts of interesting scientific news today, including several stories from recent Science Daily newsletters. First up: there is further supporting evidence that the Toba volcano, which I have written about before, indeed caused far-flung devastation when it blew a gigantic hole in the island of Sumatra 73,000 years ago. The explosion is believed […]
November 24, 2009 – 12:29 am
David Duff is having a nice gloat over the Climategate kerfuffle — which I must say is unfolding rather gratifyingly, for those of us who thought we already had enough religions in the world and didn’t see the need for any expensive new ones. Here.
November 23, 2009 – 12:31 am
While I was away this weekend, paying scant attention to the news, a serious brouhaha seems to have erupted in the global-warming community. Apparently a hacker got hold of, and made public, emails and internal documents from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia — a major center for AGW study — […]
November 22, 2009 – 11:01 pm
You know you’ve been spending way too much time programming when you suddenly see the people making sandwiches at the deli counter as a thread pool, and the single slicer as a synchronization object.
November 20, 2009 – 7:24 pm
I know I said I’d lay off this stuff, but what the heck. In today’s edition of the WSJ’s Best of the Web, James Taranto offers the following:
November 20, 2009 – 6:14 pm
Our recent post on the need for cultures to have, like any organism, an effective “immune system” has led to an interesting discussion with our friend Kevin Kim. It continues here.
November 20, 2009 – 1:44 pm
A brain is only as strong as its weakest think.
November 19, 2009 – 12:20 am
I’ve been writing an awful lot about the decline of the West lately, and in particular about how our crazy obsession with “diversity” affects our prospects in our ancient conflict with Islam; one might think that’s the only thing on my mind, which it certainly is not. I also think that I’ve begun to give […]
November 17, 2009 – 9:14 pm
I’m working late again this week, and have had no time to write. But reader JK has sent along a link to an informed and thoughtful post about the Obama administration’s decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in the criminal court here in New York City. Here is an excerpt:
November 15, 2009 – 5:51 pm
The Fort Hood massacre has got people talking, and it even seems suddenly to have dawned on a lot of people — as a startlingly new idea — that perhaps there might even be appropriate limits to our liberal infatuation with multiculturalism and radical non-discrimination: that “diversity” might not only not be the summum bonum […]
November 14, 2009 – 3:51 pm
As I write, the Wolverines are collapsing yet again, this time against Wisconsin. How I miss Lloyd Carr. Apparently I am not the only one who is upset with Rich Rodriguez, as you can see below.
November 14, 2009 – 12:18 am
I have to say: YouTube is amazing. Here’s something for you music lovers “of a certain age”: a clip from the old TV series F Troop, in which the folks at Fort Courage were visited by a musical act calling themselves The Bedbugs. As it turns out, the leader and drummer of The Bedbugs are […]
November 13, 2009 – 12:11 am
Recently Bill Vallicella excerpted, and I commented briefly upon, some passages from philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s essay On Being Conservative. Wishing to refresh my memory of a few points, I opened it up again today — and was impressed once more by what a fine piece of writing it is, and by how well it limns […]
November 12, 2009 – 1:01 am
Tonight we note with sadness the death of photographer Evelyn Hofer, who although not nearly as well known as some of the prominent photographers of her day, was widely regarded as one of the greatest photographic artists of the 20th century. I did not know Ms. Hofer well, though I met her on a couple […]
November 11, 2009 – 12:16 am
President Obama gave a speech today at Fort Hood. You can read the transcript here. In his remarks he referred to Nidal Hasan’s murderous rampage as “incomprehensible”. To him it may actually be, which is in itself a harrowing thought. For most of the rest of us, it is anything but.
November 9, 2009 – 1:47 pm
Economist Thomas Sowell offers some sensible remarks about the health-care juggernaut now bludgeoning its way through Congress: One of the strongest talking points of those who want a government-run medical care system is that we simply cannot afford the high and rising costs of medical care under the current system. First of all, what we […]
November 8, 2009 – 2:34 pm
For those of you who were puzzled by the sudden withdrawal of challenger Abdullah Abdullah from the runoff election in Afghanistan the other day, the Asia Times has the answer: he did so under U.S. pressure, as part of a complex deal brokered by our Secretary of State during her recent visit to Pakistan. Mr. […]
November 8, 2009 – 2:07 pm
From the AFCEA Nightwatch newsletter for November 5th: The Taliban in Afghanistan now operate in more than 220 of the 400 districts in Afghanistan, compared to fewer than 30 five years ago. A new Pakistani Taliban movement has sustained insurgency in the Pakistan border regions and spread terror east of the Indus River boundary and […]
November 8, 2009 – 1:52 pm
Our former Lieutenant Governor, Betsey McCaughey, offers a brief survey of some of the just-passed House healthcare bill’s salient points. Here.
November 6, 2009 – 7:16 pm
In a recent post we mentioned that some of the boffins at CERN had begun to suggest, apparently seriously, that the problems that have dogged the development of the latest generation of high-energy particle colliders — first the Superconducting Supercollider here in the US, and more recently CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — might actually be […]
November 6, 2009 – 12:37 am
The topic of the day is obviously the massacre at Fort Hood. The news agencies have rather a hot potato in the essential fact of this story, namely that an apparently radicalized Muslim, a member of our own armed forces, launched a murderous attack upon servicemen who were about to be deployed to fight fundamentalist […]
November 4, 2009 – 2:36 pm
On the front page of today’s Times is a story I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about before. It seems that the Iraqi security forces are using a bomb-detection gizmo that seems, quite obviously, to be nothing more than an expensive, tarted-up divining rod. The gadget in question is called the ADE 651, and the Iraqis […]
November 3, 2009 – 11:35 pm
With a hat tip to my friend and former employer Bob Wyman, here’s a clever way to get people to take the stairs.
November 3, 2009 – 11:14 pm
I’m old enough to remember Pan American World Airways, which throughout my early years was America’s foremost airline. I flew Pan Am on many occasions (including, once, all the way to Japan for a recording project), and through the misty lens of memory I recall the service and comfort being far superior to the cattle-car […]
November 3, 2009 – 10:42 pm
The other day our comrade in bloggery Horace Jeffery Hodges offered a post with a link to some old Calvin and Hobbes strips. I’ve always been a big C&H fan, and among my favorites among Bill Watterson’s many recurring themes were the strips in which Calvin’s dad would teach the restless wee lad about science. […]
November 2, 2009 – 11:14 pm
I must confess to being, along with several million of my fellow Gothamites, a tad distracted this evening; if you can’t guess why I’m not going to tell you. So here’s a link, sent today by a reader, that those of you with an interest in matters military, and in our current predicament in Afghanistan, […]
October 31, 2009 – 9:15 pm
Not tonight, anyway. So make your way straight over to The Joy of Curmudgeonry, where our friend the estimable Deogolwulf has just published a formidable essay on the auto-genocide of the West. Here.
October 30, 2009 – 10:02 am
On the front page of today’s Times there’s a photo from Pakistan: Hillary Clinton — the West’s most powerful diplomat, an inspiration to women everywhere, and an essential symbol and embodiment of Western liberty, strength, and confidence — in a Muslim headscarf. Again. Oh well, at least it will be a few years before she […]
October 29, 2009 – 5:44 pm
Well, our theme for this week notwithstanding, this is certainly anything but “shameless filler”: Bill Vallicella, over at his website Maverick Philosopher, has presented some pithy excerpts from Michael Oakeshott’s essay On Being Conservative, in support of his thesis that conservatism is first a matter of temperament and inveterate disposition, and only thereafter a matter […]
October 28, 2009 – 7:10 pm
Over at Der Spiegel Online is an interview with Charles Krauthammer, in which he assesses Barack Obama’s stewardship, to date, of our nation’s affairs. I find little to disagree with. Here are some excerpts.
October 27, 2009 – 10:53 pm
Heading wearily home on the subway late this evening, I skimmed an item in today’s Times — Waiter, There’s A Gavel In My Soup — in which the author Gay Talese described finding himself at the table next to Chief Justice John Roberts’s last Saturday evening at a cozy little Upper East Side restaurant. As […]
October 27, 2009 – 10:31 pm
With deadlines looming over me once again at work, I’m frazzled. It looks like it’s going to be another Shameless Filler Week here at waka waka waka. Our Muse tonight is Terpsichore, as we present a video clip — sent our way by the lovely Nina — in which we meet Elvyna, a p’tite jeune […]
October 26, 2009 – 9:53 pm
After eleven hours of heavy lifting at the office, I’m afraid the little grey cells have now called it a day, and a meaty post is simply not in the cards. But readers will know by now that having nothing of any interest whatsoever to say rarely keeps me from posting — and tonight is […]
October 26, 2009 – 12:09 am
It’s been a busy weekend, and I’ve had no time for writing. For tonight, then, a curiosity: the effect of visual contrast on gender recognition. Here.
October 23, 2009 – 10:48 pm
An item in today’s Physorg newsletter describes some remarkable neurological research: scientists at CalTech, by showing pictures to test subjects while monitoring brain activity, have managed to associate individual neurons in the medial temporal lobe with specific perceptions. We read: Dr. Moran Cerf of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues conducted their […]
October 23, 2009 – 6:48 pm
Life is hard, but at least it’s short.
October 21, 2009 – 1:02 pm
Over at CNN today we learn that the Coalition of Reason, an association of godless heathens, has purchased some advertising space in Gotham’s subway system. Their ads will point out the plain empirical fact that it is possible for people to be good without religion. What’s telling about this is not the story itself, but […]
October 21, 2009 – 12:32 pm
Over at Mangan’s today, Dennis reports on pressure being applied to the journal Medical Hypotheses (and its editor Bruce Charlton) in an attempt to suppress a controversial paper on AIDS. Here.