February 21, 2010 – 11:51 pm
There’s a lively chat going on over at Mangan’s about how people react to the growing body of data about the diversity of various human groups with regard to IQ and general intelligence. That such differences actually do exist is at this point uncontroversial amongst those who study psychometrics, but it is of course a […]
February 18, 2010 – 12:19 am
I’ve been so busy of late spewing vile, reactionary, hate-filled, racist poison (or simple common sense, depending upon your point of view), that I have neglected another topic of critical import and urgency: butt-ugly deep-sea fishes. No longer. Tonight I invite you to contemplate the stupefyingly unlovely Psychrolutes marcidus, known to bathypiscophiles the world over […]
February 16, 2010 – 6:47 pm
We note with sadness the death, at age 57, of Doug Fieger, leader of the New Wave rock band The Knack, who had an enormous hit back in 1979 with the song “My Sharona”. I got to know Doug (and even met Sharona!) back in 1981, when I assisted in the mixing of the band’s […]
February 15, 2010 – 9:53 pm
It’s TED Time again. Most of the current talks haven’t been posted as videos yet, but a few of them have. Here’s one that shows what Microsoft is working on for Bing Maps.
February 15, 2010 – 12:33 am
When singers sing, or players of string or wind instruments sound a note, they almost always apply some vibrato — that familar effect in which the pitch is varied slightly, and rapidly — if the note is to be held for long. It is particularly unusual (in modern times at least) to hear singers who […]
February 13, 2010 – 7:24 pm
Once again it’s been a busy few days, with little time for brooding and writing. For now, then, here’s an essay that has been making the rounds for a week or so: Why Are Liberals So Condescending? It’s by one Gerard Alexander, who teaches politics at the University of Virginia. In it he identifies, and […]
February 11, 2010 – 11:22 pm
Well, whatever Iran had planned for today appears to have been a bit of a fizzle, at least as far as a “blow” to the West is concerned; indeed even the link I posted yesterday appears to be down. Any heavy blows were apparently reserved for the political opposition, and delivered by the Basiji. Don’t […]
February 9, 2010 – 12:01 am
Iran is playing a very dangerous game at the moment, and they are raising the stakes simultaneously on several of their wagers. First, they have now announced that they are planning, despite recent conciliatory remarks, to proceed with the enrichment of nuclear fuel to near-weapons-grade levels (well, 20 percent isn’t 90, but it will mean […]
February 8, 2010 – 11:09 pm
In Holland, the parliamentarian Geert Wilders is on trial for speaking his mind about the acute existential threat posed to European culture by Islam. Mr. Wilders — who believes, correctly, that Islam is at its core an explicitly totalizing and expansionist ideological system that is utterly incompatible with fundamental Western principles, and therefore should not […]
February 7, 2010 – 11:45 pm
I have had very little interest in all the fuss about the circumstances of President Obama’s birth. I’m certainly not hoping, as some people seem to be, to have the man pitched out of office on a Constitutional technicality; if nothing else I hardly think it’s in anyone’s interest to have Joe Biden running the […]
February 3, 2010 – 10:56 pm
Roger Kimball shares a few thoughts about Howard Zinn. Here.
February 1, 2010 – 11:47 pm
The military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy has been in the news lately. President Obama wants it repealed. I agree, though I disagree with him as to why.
January 29, 2010 – 11:16 pm
I’m rather under the weather at the moment. Back in a day or two.
January 25, 2010 – 11:57 pm
Last week NASA announced that the decade just ended was the warmest on record. I was a little surprised by that, because everything I’d been reading — including the Climategate material — seemed to indicate otherwise; indeed the inconvenient lack of warming this decade was starting to turn into a real marketing headache for the […]
January 20, 2010 – 9:37 pm
This is a story that keeps popping up: the potential health hazards of the electromagnetic fields our appliances and infrastructure bathe us in. A reader sent along a good example today, which you can read for yourself here; if the danger described in this article is real it is a worrisome matter indeed. The problem […]
January 19, 2010 – 10:33 pm
In Holland tomorrow, the trial of Geert Wilders begins. The world will be watching to see whether Europe is still to be a place where free people can speak out in defense of their besieged homeland and culture, or whether the battle may indeed already be lost. The International Free Press Society has organized a […]
January 19, 2010 – 10:20 pm
In a lip-smackingly delicious reversal for the Democrats’ rampaging statist juggernaut, conservative upstart Scott Brown has prevailed in Massachusetts, snatching away a glittering prize: a Senate seat that had been a liberal fiefdom for 46 years. Columnist Michael Graham, writing in the Boston Herald, said that the disastrously incompetent campaign run by heir apparent Martha […]
January 19, 2010 – 3:06 pm
In our earlier post about the Navy’s role in Haiti we quoted a “guesstimate”, from our naval source, that the Carl Vinson would be able to desalinate about 500,000 gallons of fresh water a day. That wasn’t too far off, though the actual number is a little less. Here’s an article with the details.
January 17, 2010 – 10:10 pm
The catastrophe in Haiti has evoked an enormous worldwide response. The biggest role so far has been played by the United States Navy, which was quick to dispatch various important resources. For the past few days a Navy “resource” of my own has been sending me informative emails and links describing and analyzing this mission.
January 13, 2010 – 10:36 pm
Like all of you, I have been watching with horror the reports from Port-au-Prince. To this sorrowful place, which has for centuries known little but tyranny, misery, and despair, has now come, in a fell and sudden stroke, suffering and death on a scale beyond all imagining. Bodies are stacked in the streets — where […]
January 12, 2010 – 11:00 pm
Readers may recall a recent event that has come to be known as the Norway Spiral Anomaly. The cause, briefly mysterious, was soon revealed to have been a malfunctioning Russian missile that, as it tumbled through the sky, ejected exhaust in a helical pattern that was backlit by the sun. It was an impressive display. […]
January 9, 2010 – 12:44 am
President Obama made a speech yesterday on the subject of Islamic jihad. In it he sought to reassure an increasingly angry and jittery nation that his administration might in fact be capable, now that it is making a diligent and focused effort, of achieving at least minimal competence regarding national security. The speech, though full […]
January 8, 2010 – 12:21 am
In a post today at his website, Lawrence Auster brings to our attention a formidably gifted and hitherto-undiscovered satiric talent, a modern day Laszlo Toth: one Doug Van Gorder, from Quincy, Mass. At least, we think he’s a satiric talent. Anyway, he’s got people talking. Here.
January 7, 2010 – 12:28 am
Not being a man of independent means, I’ve been selling off my dwindling store of days just to earn a crust. As it happens I sold off almost all of this one, and so have none of it left for writing. That means it’s time to add another weightless diversion to our “shameless filler” category. […]
January 4, 2010 – 11:33 pm
Yemen is everywhere in the news these days. All the players in the region have now focused their attention on this broiling and desiccated snake-pit: Iran, the Saudis, al-Qaeda, and of course the USA. Enmities ancient and modern, religious and political, are all in play, and a tangled web of shifting alliances makes it awfully […]
January 3, 2010 – 11:50 pm
One of our stronger cognitive intuitions is to assume, in the presence of organized systems, that there is some central, organizing agency at work. In recent decades, however, it has become apparent that extraordinarily sophisticated group-level behavior can arise as a result of distributed local decision-making, using very simple rules. Among the best examples of […]
January 1, 2010 – 5:38 pm
A very happy New Year to you all! Thank you as always for dropping by to read and comment. Every year about this time I look back at the thousands and thousands of keyphrases that have brought visitors here from Google and other search engines. There are usually quite a few spectacular oddities (though for […]
December 30, 2009 – 6:30 pm
The other day the lovely Nina and I met a friend for some shabu-shabu at an outstanding Japanese eatery in Greenwich Village. Such “hot-pot” dishes, for those of you who don’t know, consist of meat and vegetables cooked in broth at the table on a little gas stove. The waitress explained, as she placed a […]
December 22, 2009 – 11:38 pm
I’ve been working late again, and have had no time this evening for writing. But I do want to take the time to mention to you all that our friend, the blogger Kevin Kim, is here in New York tonight at the hospital bedside of his mother, who is gravely ill with brain cancer. She […]
December 20, 2009 – 11:16 pm
It’s been pretty thin gruel over here the past few days — the holidays being what they are, I’ve had scant opportunity for solitary labor. So for tonight I’ll send you along to Mangan’s, where our doughty heathen Dennis confronts once again (as we have also done at length in these pages, at various intervals) […]
December 19, 2009 – 6:33 pm
The snowflakes are aswirl here in Gotham today, and, lighthearted soul that I am, I’m so caught up in the gay holiday mood that spending hours at the keyboard grinding out a lengthy post seems entirely out of the question. So for tonight, in the joyous spirit of Christmas, here’s a little item about how […]
December 17, 2009 – 11:06 pm
Are you a vegetarian? Well, I’m not. Indeed, I so enjoy being a carnivore that it has occurred to me on occasion to bump up to the next level, and eat only animals that are themselves carnivores — which I’ve always imagined would be the nutritional equivalent of smoking “roach weed”. Anyway, the next time […]
December 16, 2009 – 11:41 pm
Writing in today’s Times, Tom Friedman shows encouraging signs of coming around to a more realistic position on Islam and jihad, though he still stops well short of grasping the nettle.
December 13, 2009 – 11:09 pm
The lovely Nina and I were in Philadelphia this weekend, visiting some old friends, and today we took in the Arshile Gorky show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gorky was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, and the show made quite an impression on us (fittingly, I suppose, given that […]
December 13, 2009 – 10:17 pm
I owe a substantial debt of thanks to my friend Dan Betz for his help in redesigning the look of this website over the past week or so. Dan, who is a younger “training brother” of mine down at the kwoon (and a formidable Hung Ga expert, and instructor, in his own right), is also […]
December 12, 2009 – 1:01 pm
A new link on the sidebar today: a blog that focuses on Islam and insurgency in Yemen, where lately the game, as Holmes used to say, has been afoot. (And yes, I rather liked the name.)
December 11, 2009 – 10:59 am
If you drop by here over the next few days and things look completely out of whack, it’s because we are making some adjustments to the site’s WordPress “theme”. As they say on the highway signs, “Temporary Inconvenience — Permanent Improvement.” (As if THAT were true.) Anyway, thanks for your patience.
December 9, 2009 – 11:43 pm
In case you didn’t see this on the news: there were some very strange doings high in the sky over Norway this morning (take a peek below the fold). Story here.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, […]