We’ve had plenty of chat in in here lately about the political Left and Right, and what the words mean. I recently induced, with mischief aforethought, a conniption or two merely by mentioning that I was reading a book that argues (and persuasively, I might add) that Fascism was a phenomenon of the political Left; […]
A couple of days ago I linked to Steven Pinker’s discussion of the recent report by the President’s Council on Bioethics, and mentioned that one of the contributors, surprisingly given the overall makeup of the Council, was the irreligious and materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett. In his essay, he is in fine, feisty form.
Can anybody explain to me why there is such a flap about Hillary Clinton’s mention of the RFK assassination? It makes no sense to me whatsoever, even taking into consideration that taking offense is the new national pastime. I’m no fan of Mrs. Clinton, but this seems ridiculous.
Having posted some video clips of Kwong Sai Jook Lum Praying Mantis master Gin Foon Mark a couple of weeks ago, it seems only fair that I do the same for the system I’m involved with these days, Tang Fung Hung Ga. Here, then, is a video (forgive the odd camera angle) of our own […]
Steven Pinker, writing in The New Republic, takes aim at The President’s Council on Bioethics for mulish opposition, on largely theological grounds, to a variety of promising medical and scientific efforts.
Well, perhaps “nothing here until Friday at the soonest” was overly pessimistic; I’ll squeeze in one brief item. Following on our post about the pros and cons of conversing with one’s enemies, here is a relevant item from the opinion page of today’s Times, about JFK’s unwisdom in agreeing to the Vienna summit of 1961, […]
Due to a particularly grueling schedule Wednesday and Thursday, we’ll have nothing here, I’m afraid, until Friday at the soonest. I realize this has been happening more often of late, but there it is. At least there’s still no talk of a rate increase.
If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you know that the word of the week is “appeasement”. President Bush popped it up in an address to the Knesset, and Barack Obama, waving off his teammates, managed to get himself under it and make the catch. And now Pat Buchanan, who is clearly off his […]
A couple of weeks ago my old friend Carl Sturken, with whom I’ve been knocking about since fifth grade, called me up to ask if I felt like joining in a pickup band to play at a 35th reunion for the Princeton Day School class of 1973. (I’m not an official member of the class, […]
It’s been a hectic weekend, and there’s been no time for writing. Fortunately, our West Coast correspondent Jess Kaplan has sent along two items of interest.
We’ll most likely be off the air until Sunday or Monday. Apologies to all.
This will be of zero interest to any of you, but in my little corner of Gotham the corks are popping. Here’s why.
From our old friend Dave Pauley comes a link to some extraordinary photos of the Chaitén volcanic eruption in Chile. As Dave points out in his note to me, a local villager could understandably think there were more than “merely” natural forces at work here. Have a look.
If you haven’t heard, embattled Microsoft has now taken aim at Google Sky with its new application, the World Wide Telescope. Have a look here.
With a hat tip to our occasional commenter Addofio, here is the work of a most remarkable artist. Go have a look.
For those of you who don’t know, our friend Kevin Kim has a new website, created for the purpose of chronicling his upcoming transcontinental walk — a trek whose purpose is to explore the many parallel currents of religion in America, and if possible to help build bridges between them. The walk itself won’t get […]
From Jess Kaplan comes this story about the disaster unfolding in Lebanon. Hezbollah, and by proxy Iran, now owns this tormented land.
We’ll carry on with our meditations on free will shortly, but for tonight — it’s been a very busy weekend, with no time for writing — we have, for those of you with an interest in such things, some videos of the great Southern Praying Mantis master Gin Foon Mark, taken during his recent visit […]
One of the main reasons that the USA, despite its ethnic diversity, has held itself together as well as it has (well, aside from that little scuffle back in the mid-1800’s) is that we all speak the same English language. But that’s only in the most general sense; American English takes a lush and delightful […]
This entry is part 6 of 15 in the series
Free WillOne of the most worrisome aspects of determinism, in many people’s minds, is that it means that our deliberation — all our agonizing about the choices we must make in our lives — is a sham. In Daniel Dennett’s book Elbow Room, which I think is one of the best expositions of the “compatibilist” view […]
Once again the despicable military junta that holds the nation of Burma hostage has forced the world to examine the presumptive “right” of inviolable national sovereignty. A horrifying natural cataclysm has just sheared away tens of thousands of its captive and wretched citizens, and laid its principal city to waste, while hundreds of thousands more […]
For those of you who have been following this somewhat distasteful presidential-election business, here’s Robert Novak’s take on where matters stand in the wake of Barack Obama’s strong showing yesterday.
Before I forget, here is another item on the subject of improving the memory: it’s just one of those breezy little magazine-style top-ten lists, but some of the items merit a closer look.
My daughter ChloÁ« has sent along a link to an article about Piotr Wozniak, the inventor of SuperMemo, a software application that uses some neglected facts about the workings of human memory to help users retain more of what they learn. The system is designed to remind users at specific intervals of items they have […]
We learn from today’s New York Times that the new Grand Poo-bah of Turkmenistan, the fabulously yclept Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, has begun dismantling in earnest the splendiferous personality cult of his predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, a.k.a Turkmenbashi. Mr. Niyazov’s image and idisosyncratic worldview had permeated every corner of Turkmen life during his reign, but no symbol of […]
Sam Harris, in a recent article, weighs in on the response to Dutch politician Geert Wilders’ anti-Islamic movie Fitna, which appears to be unavailable online at the moment.
This entry is part 5 of 15 in the series
Free WillJeffery Hodges left a comment on our last post about free will (and I do apologize for approaching the subject so circumspectly, over a period of weeks) in which he asked if I was making a distinction between causes and reasons. This is an important question — and indeed I am.
This entry is part 4 of 15 in the series
Free WillWe’ve been brooding lately on the subject of free will and determinism. For tonight, just a few brief remarks; more to come shortly. Everybody wants free will, of course, but the notion itself is one of those things that look clear enough from a distance, but get harder to make out the closer you look. […]
It’s already well-known that affluence and education are positively correlated with any number of desirable outcomes: longevity, general health and happiness, that sort of thing. Now we find that it not is only disadvantageous to be poor and ignorant, it hurts. Story here.
I’ve accumulated an awful lot of books over the past half-century: I can never part with them, and add several each week, it seems. I’ve got lots and lots of books about history and philosophy and science, but there are hundreds of odder ones as well — and one that popped off the shelf into […]
April 29, 2008 – 10:15 pm
It is always interesting to me to see which of these posts will generate comments, and which will not. Often a probing and painstakingly drafted essay on a subject of ancient and universal interest will attract no more notice than, say, an important scientific discovery or a bit of good news from Iraq; but dash […]
George Orwell, in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. ” Little has changed since then.
April 25, 2008 – 11:45 pm
Sadly, today seems to have been entirely consumed by worldly distractions, and with a busy weekend coming up, we’ll likely be off the air until Sunday or Monday. Apologies to all.
April 24, 2008 – 11:26 pm
This entry is part 3 of 15 in the series
Free WillWhen we talk about the question of free will, it often seems that we approach the subject rather differently from the way we would look into any other unanswered question about the world. Usually, when we don’t know about something, we ask “what is going on here?”, and examine the observable phenomena, form hypotheses, put […]
April 23, 2008 – 10:50 pm
According to this story in today’s New York Times, Europe is looking to increased use of coal to meet its energy needs. As you might imagine, this news is not being received warmly by those who are concerned about levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, according to this item by Australian scientist-engineer Philip Chapman, we […]
April 22, 2008 – 11:17 pm
Our commenter Jeanie Oliver has asked why the overwhelming majority of comments at this website are from men, and I’ve often wondered the same thing. I know that there are more than a few female readers out there, and if you are one of them I just want to make it clear to you that […]
April 22, 2008 – 10:41 pm
This entry is part 2 of 15 in the series
Free WillYesterday’s musings about free will led us to the question of where our decisions actually come from. Even in our own inner experience, our choices seem simply to float up into our consciousness, and indeed, experimental results strongly suggest that our awareness of our decisions comes after they are already made. Our commenter Pat Goldsmith […]
April 21, 2008 – 11:57 pm
This entry is part 1 of 15 in the series
Free WillThe question of free will has been in the air around here lately, and more than one voice has been heard decrying the awful prospect of determinism. I have a rather blithe attitude toward the problem: I don’t think there’s any need to be upset by the notion that our minds are a product of […]
April 20, 2008 – 11:35 pm
…but not forthcoming, I am afraid. Worn out and feeling a little under the weather, I am neglecting my duties here for at least another day. Apologies to all.
April 18, 2008 – 10:48 pm
As suddenly and astoundingly as ever, it is Spring again in New York. The weather these past few days has been simple perfection, and the trees and flowers, having awakened in a celebratory mood, are getting about their morning’s work with extravagant exuberance. But not all is renewed, and even as the living world stirs […]
April 17, 2008 – 11:43 am
Having toiled at my Midtown office until 3:15 a.m. last night — and with a joint-locking seminar to attend this evening at the kwoon, and a long mixing session coming up on Saturday — published content may be rather thin these next few days. I apologize: in particular, I owe the estimable Deogolwulf a better […]
April 15, 2008 – 11:12 pm
What is strange to me now, after 15 years of steady Internet use — during which time an truly ungraspable immensity of information has become available to all — is when there is something I can’t get hold of online. Sometimes it is a particularly obscure quotation, or passage from a book that I would […]
April 14, 2008 – 10:54 pm
An awful lot of people attach tremendous importance to the notion that our decisions are somehow the uncaused product of our consciousness: that they happen not amongst the deterministic web of brain tissue, but impose themselves on that tissue, somehow, from without. I’m not one of them.
April 14, 2008 – 12:23 pm
We note with sadness the death of this great scientist. He was one of the giants of 20th century physics, and mentor to an extraordinary assortment of disciples. His New York Times obituary is here.
April 12, 2008 – 10:08 pm
It’s my birthday this weekend, on Sunday, April 13th. (I’m 52.) I’ve been taking a little break: just reading and puttering around up here in Wellfleet, and scrupulously avoiding any serious brainwork or controversial posts (I love the rough-and-tumble of a good debate, but the little grey cells needed a rest). So here’s another undemanding […]
Last Tuesday’s New York Times carried a tragic and fascinating story. It was about Anne Adams, a scientist who was sticken by a degenerative and ultimately lethal brain disease called FTD, which is an acronym for frontotemporal dementia. The disease attacks particular portions of the brain only, with the effect that as the damaged parts […]
Here’s another item from Physorg.com: it appears that there might have been something to the old saying after all.
I’ll be traveling later today, and off the air until tomorrow at the earliest. So for now, here is an enormous, time-wasting distraction to keep you occupied.
Since the Big Bang was first proposed as a cosmological model for our universe — a model that has since been accepted with confidence by the astrophysical community — it has been assumed that it might well be impossible in principle to say anything about the state of the world prior to the initial singularity. […]
If you’re like me, you like nothing better than tucking into a heaping plate of short-snouted seahorses. Problem is, they’ve become annoyingly rare. Well, I’ve got good news! Story here.