March 14, 2009 – 10:21 pm
The “Monty Hall problem”, which we looked at in a recent post, is a revealing example of the ways in which, despite our vaunted intelligence, our cognitive intuitions are often misleading, or simply wrong. This is worrisome: just how extensive is the problem? If we can’t trust our intuitions about simple probabilities, then what else […]
March 13, 2009 – 10:34 pm
Not much time for writing this evening, so it’s time for some Shameless Filler. In tonight’s edition: The 50 Worst Cars Of All Time.
We humans perform a great many hard cognitive tasks with astounding ease. We form sentences, recognize faces, detect patterns, read body language, and accomplish without effort an astonishing variety of complex feats that turn out to be very, very difficult to program computers to do. This is because our brains have evolved a powerful collection […]
March 11, 2009 – 11:38 pm
In his latest post, Jeffery Hodges has brought to our attention, and commented upon, a very interesting article by Roger Scruton about some of the fundamental distinctions between Islam and the West. I do hope you will go and read it.
March 11, 2009 – 10:19 pm
I think one of the most amazing gifts of the technological revolution of the past few years has been the use of satellite imagery to create dazzling applications like Google Earth. I just love it, and I love it even more with each improvement in coverage and resolution. But now, according to a recent item […]
March 10, 2009 – 10:52 pm
You may have heard of a physicist and mathematician by the name of Stephen Wolfram, a man of remarkable gifts who was doing important work in particle physics by age 17, had his doctorate from Caltech by 20, and who went on to build an enormously successful business venture around a software product called Mathematica.
Minimum-wage laws are often thought of as a boon to the least fortunate, and a moral rebuke to Dickensian free-market sorts — but they do not always confer the blessings their sponsors desire. A recent government report about a sharp rise in minimum-wage mandates in Honduras shows us something about unintended consequences.
From the AP comes a fine example of the moral rectitude of Islamic law. A woman from Iran was attacked with acid by a suitor she rejected (which seems, by the way, to be an increasingly popular way to brutalize Muslim females these days, and I expect Middle-Eastern acid merchants are doing well even in […]
Anyone who has been paying any attention to world affairs will by now have heard of the traffic “accident” Friday in which Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai was injured, and his wife killed. Tsvangirai has been a thorn in dictator Robert Mugabe’s side since leaving the ruling party, Zanu-PF, in the early 1990’s. Since then […]
In the wake (perhaps too ominous a word) of my little medical adventure last summer, a highly regarded New York cardiologist, noting that my total cholesterol was, at 248 (with a cholesterol/HDL ratio of 3.4), too high for his liking, put me on a low dose (7.5 mg/week) of the statin drug Crestor. I was […]
If you are like me, you will, on extremely rare occasions, find yourself having had a great deal to drink the night before, and greeting the day with a challenging “hangover”. I have done a little independent research into this predicament over the years, and believe I have settled on the right approach to it. […]
I’ve always liked Dick Cavett. His career as a prominent public conversationalist began in 1968, when I, as twelve-year-old, was only beginning to understand how grownups could possibly enjoy just sitting around talking. My mother used to watch his show, and I found, to my surprise, that I enjoyed watching it too. He is a […]
Here’s something odd. I’ve seen this a few times before, but this is the best example yet: If you aren’t sure what you’re looking at here, it’s an ice-tray I just pulled from the freezer. I’ve occasionally wondered how these odd stalagmites form, but until tonight I had no idea how, or what special conditions […]
A knowledgeable and inquisitive reader, having joined me in puzzling over the strange “blacklisting” errors we have just experienced here for Asian IPs, thought I might find a certain year-old Slate article interesting. I did indeed. It describes the findings of one Babak Pasdar, a network-security expert who was called in by a major telecommunications […]
There is rather an amusing ruckus underway in the Republican Party, which has been floundering in disarray since the presidential race. The titular head of the GOP, Michael Steele, has been going mano a mano with Rush Limbaugh over who is really the party’s leader. Steele may have the official position, but he made a […]
I’ve received two emails today from readers living in Asia, both telling me that they had received the error “HTTP Error 403 – Forbidden” when trying to access this website. One thought that I had intentionally blocked him from visiting the site, something I would be very unlikely to do. I don’t know what the […]
I’ve mentioned that I have sort of a drummer’s crush lately on Porcupine Tree / King Crimson batteur Gavin Harrison — who, I have decided, may not be human (I’m well acquainted with others of his alien species: Dennis Chambers, Keith Carlock, Peter Erskine, etc.). Here he is again.
I have been harping a lot lately, it seems, on cultural conflicts: immigration, racial and ethnic disharmony, and above all the struggle between Islam and the West. These are of course important topics, but the tagline of this blog (taken, as is the title itself, from Fela Kuti’s Coffin for Head of State), is “I […]
February 28, 2009 – 12:25 am
In today’s email, a friend has sent me some photographs of angry Muslims demonstrating on the street in what appears to be London. They are carrying signs, glowering menacingly, brandishing their fists, and shouting. The messages they carry are clear enough, if rather unimaginatively monotonous: SLAY THOSE WHO INSULT ISLAM. BUTCHER THOSE WHO MOCK ISLAM. […]
February 26, 2009 – 11:30 pm
There’s an interesting little item in the news today: paleoanthropologists have found Homo Erectus footprints 1.5 million years old that record the earliest known example of anatomically modern human feet — feet that are designed solely (so to speak) for walking, and not for grasping. It is hard to imagine anything more evanescent than a […]
February 26, 2009 – 12:04 am
When I began learning southern Chinese kung fu toward the end of 1975, there were still very few Chinese masters who were willing to teach “roundeyes”; my sifu at the time, William Chung, and his sifu Gin Foon Mark, were among the earliest to do so. But the one who first opened the door, as […]
February 24, 2009 – 11:14 am
With a double hat-tip to Dymphna and the Baron at Gates of Vienna, here are several items of interest on the clash-of-civilizations front. First, Geert Wilders is in town, fresh from being turned away at the door by the supine and craven British Government. He paid a visit to TV host Glenn Beck, and you […]
February 23, 2009 – 12:47 pm
In an editorial piece at CNN’s website, Michael Eric Dyson praises Eric Holder’s recent speech on race relations as “courageous and honest”, and suggests that Holder’s “nation of cowards” remark, which a great many morally stunted people have found tendentious and gratuitously offensive, has been “taken out of context”.
February 22, 2009 – 11:36 pm
If I told you that I knew there were invisible beings directing the flow of traffic on the highway, or that I had just seen someone rise from the dead and ascend into the sky, you’d want some proof — and if I had none to offer, you’d begin to doubt my sanity, and might […]
February 21, 2009 – 4:04 pm
Every now and then I am reminded of just how exotic the most ordinary scientific notions seem even to the average “educated” American. For example: in Thursday’s New York Times, there was a story about some feeble little earthquakes along the Ramapo Fault.
February 19, 2009 – 11:24 pm
There is quite a ruction today about Attorney General Eric Holder’s calling America “a nation of cowards” for its reticence to speak frankly about race (transcript here). I wonder what he really means, and what he really wants. At the very least, it seems a tad atrabilious for the nation’s first black attorney general — […]
February 18, 2009 – 10:40 pm
Automakers, at least the ones that still have employees, are scrambling to design alternative-fuel vehicles. On the drafting board, or already out on the road, are cars powered by electricity, ethanol, natural gas, hydrogen, and even french-fry grease. But while I was poking around online the other day I discovered that even as early as […]
February 17, 2009 – 11:02 pm
For those interested in the mortal struggle between Islam and the West (viz. those with the wit to acknowledge that such a struggle even exists), it’s been an eventful few days. The biggest story has been that the government of Pakistan has now surrendered the valley of Swat to the Taliban. The story in the […]
February 16, 2009 – 11:39 pm
One of the enjoyable quirks of the Outer Cape is Provincetown’s own radio station, WOMR (“Outermost Radio”). The station is everything you might expect from a place as full of artists, writers, musicians, eccentrics, oddballs, and misfits as the far end of Cape Cod is, and the playlist is eclectic, and seldom boring. A particular […]
February 16, 2009 – 10:46 pm
We congratulate Maverick Philosopher and Normblog for making the Times Online list of 100 best blogs. Cream does rise, it seems.
February 15, 2009 – 2:22 pm
We are in Wellfleet for the long weekend, and the Lower Cape seems particularly tranquil and beautiful under the blue winter skies. Yesterday the memsahib and I took a little spin up to Provincetown, at the outermost tip of the Cape, and along the way stopped at Longnook Beach in Truro to take a quick […]
February 14, 2009 – 10:28 pm
A reader has emailed us this link to a pithy, bullet-point summary of America’s security situation by retired general Barry McCaffrey (now Adjunct Professor of International Affairs at West Point). It’s terse, and worth reading.
February 14, 2009 – 9:58 pm
Tomorrow is a big day in Venezuela: a vote is scheduled on a term-limits referendum intended to assist the swaggering egomaniac Hugo ChÁ¡vez in the further consolidation of his fascist dictatorship. It appears that “El Comandante” is slightly in the lead. It will be interesting to see what happens if he loses.
February 13, 2009 – 12:43 pm
Things are not going well in Afghanistan. A resurgent and emboldened Taliban has been harrying the Karzai government and its Western allies with renewed truculence, even going so far as to make a brazen attack this week in the heart of Kabul. Meanwhile the Russians, who have for centuries vied with the West for dominant […]
February 13, 2009 – 12:34 pm
Today is Friday the 13th. Having actually been born on such a day, way back in 1956, I’ve never been given to friggatriskaidekaphobia myself, but anxiety about Friday the 13th lingers as one of our more persistent superstitions (taking a distant back seat to religion, of course). It’s said that to have been born on […]
February 12, 2009 – 10:45 am
If Charles Darwin were alive, he’d be 200 years old today, and there has been an enormous outpouring of ink commemorating the great man’s bicentennial. From reader JK comes a link to a Pew Research Center article on the degree to which acceptance of his “dangerous idea” — in many people’s opinion the most important […]
February 11, 2009 – 11:59 pm
We’ve had some noisy conversations here recently on the subject of immigration. My own position has been that we should admit those, and only those, who will be assets rather than liabilities — and that we need to cultivate in ourselves the discernment to tell the difference. We want intelligent, motivated, creative, hard-working people who […]
February 11, 2009 – 11:28 pm
I suppose this was bound to happen: two satellites have collided in Earth orbit. Somebody’s insurance is going to be going up.
February 10, 2009 – 11:48 pm
It being the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth on the 12th of this month, this week’s Tuesday science supplement in the New York Times offered an engaging crop of Darwin-themed articles. Have a look here, here, here, here, here, and here.
February 10, 2009 – 8:35 pm
Apparently the British government has now refused entry to the Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Wilders, who has made a name for himself with his outspoken criticism of Islam, and by his vociferous opposition to its increasing presence and influence in the dangerously multiculturalist West, has lived under police protection in Holland since the release of […]
February 9, 2009 – 11:03 pm
Kevin Kim mentions, in a post published this evening, his curiosity about what he refers to as “real-time searching”. If things had gone a little differently back in 2006, real-time search would be a lot farther along than it is: this is exactly what the start-up company I used to work for, PubSub Concepts, was […]
February 8, 2009 – 8:31 pm
Today was the annual Yee’s Hung Ga Lunar New Year parade, in which our dragon and lion-dance teams make their way along a circuitous, miles-long path that covers just about every block of New York’s Chinatown. It’s a long day of physical effort and deafening cacophony, and by the end we are all completely worn […]
February 7, 2009 – 11:47 pm
I’ve just read an interesting item over at Bill Vallicella’s website, The Maverick Philosopher. It was a guest post (actually a “promoted” comment) by philosopher Peter Lupu, who has joined us over here on occasion as well. The post by Peter was about Objectivism; it was a fairly technical examination of the Objectivist position that […]
February 6, 2009 – 11:13 pm
More than a few states, facing the prospect of an increasingly activist federal government under the new Democratic administration, have passed measures in their local legislatures to assert their sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment. Here are some bills from Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri (this one has to do with resistance to Federal […]
February 6, 2009 – 10:52 pm
In today’s Best of the Web newsletter, WSJ editorialist James Taranto pokes some fun at the New York Times: The editorial board of the New York Times has stumbled onto a possibly revolutionary economic idea. The paper is sounding a note of caution about Gov. David Paterson’s proposal to impose a tax on theater tickets: […]
February 5, 2009 – 11:23 pm
February 12th being the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne has written a substantial essay on the status of science and religion in American culture 150 years after the publication of On The Origin Of Species, and on just how compatible the two really are. His […]
February 5, 2009 – 12:09 am
From Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal: Daniel Pearl’s father writes, seven years after his son’s brutal murder, on how far we haven’t come.
February 4, 2009 – 11:14 pm
Readers have often mentioned that they wished our comment box had a ‘preview’ feature, so I went poking around in the WordPress Plugins Directory and found one. It is a ‘live-preview’ plugin, which means the formatted text is displayed in a box below the comment, and is updated as the user types. There are others […]
February 3, 2009 – 10:53 pm
Here’s another item sent our way by Jess Kaplan, who is himself a frequent traveler to Moscow: passengers about to embark on an Aeroflot flight mutinied when they saw that their pilot was obviously drunk. (Quite a contrast, of course, with our own Chesley Sullenberger, who soberly managed to put his plane in the drink.) […]
February 2, 2009 – 10:46 pm
We’ve all heard of spelling bees. Now it turns out they can count, too.