In the J. Robert Oppenheimer speech about Einstein that was the subject of yesterday’s post, we find the following paragraph: Einstein is also, and I think rightly, known as a man of very great good will and humanity. Indeed, if I had to think of a single word for his attitude towards human problems, I […]
From my friend Jess Kaplan comes a link to the text of a 1966 speech by Robert Oppenheimer about Albert Einstein, whom Oppenheimer of course knew for decades. It is a fascinating glimpse into the personality of the great man, and readers are encouraged to take a look. (It is also far less controversial and […]
We welcome two new additions to the waka waka waka sidebar tonight. The first, called Mixotrophy, is a brand new blog by reader and commenter Andrew Staroscik, a bacteriologist and oceanographer. The other, recommended by Andrew, is the blog Sandwalk, which is the website of one Larry Moran, a professor of biochemistry at the University […]
I’ve had a long drive, at the end of a long day, to wrap up a long week. So for tonight I’m just going to leave you with a wonderful short story by the great Isaac Asimov — an old favorite that I just found online. It’s called The Last Question, and it’s a gem. […]
Q: Should one attempt to write a post at the end of a long and active day, when one has just got home, at 11:15 p.m., from taking one’s elderly mother-in-law to a lavish and bibulous birthday dinner at a delightful Manhattan restaurant? A: No.
We are back home, and this week, with a slightly freer evening schedule, might offer some quiet time for serious study and comment, I hope. In addition to other pending items, I have just read, finally, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and ought to say a thing or two about it here. I see […]
April 30, 2007 – 10:34 pm
We’re back in Gotham, and will be resuming normal operations shortly. We were away on a whirlwind trip to the Midwest for the happiest of reasons: the graduation, with honors, of our daughter ChloÁ« from the University of Michigan.
April 27, 2007 – 12:39 am
It’s been a very busy week indeed, and there has been scant time for writing, or for that matter, even thinking, it seems. I’ve had not a moment to join (for which I apologize) Titus Rivas and Bob Koepp in the excellent discussion that followed this post, and I’ve also had no time to prepare […]
Readers are encouraged to have a look at this thoughtful piece by Kevin Kim, in which he examines freedom and responsibility in the wake of the Virginia massacre.
April 16, 2007 – 11:58 pm
We’re back in Gotham, delayed for a day by the immense storm that has battered the Eastern Seaboard. We sat out the tempest in Wellfleet, Massachussetts, which is situated on a narrow spit of land twenty-five miles out to sea, and which took quite a pounding, as you might imagine.
Back in early March I called readers’ attention to Colony Collapse Disorder, which is the name given to an alarming development: bees abandoning their hives, never to be found. This ominous phenomenon, which presents a major threat to our food supply, is already a serious problem — here on the East Coast, it is estimated […]
April 13, 2007 – 12:05 pm
Today is Friday the 13th, an occasion that many folks regard with a wary eye. Not me, though: as it happens, I was born on a Friday the 13th, 51 years ago today. So whenever they pop up I always think of them as auspicious. Of course, as a man of science, I realize that’s […]
April 12, 2007 – 12:24 am
My friend Duncan Werner has just alerted me to the sad news that Kurt Vonnegut has died. Duncan’s note contained the following passage from Cat’s Cradle, which seems as apt as anything I might say: If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the […]
April 10, 2007 – 11:13 pm
If you follow such things, you might be interested to read about an effort by a University of Washington researcher to demonstrate what is known as “quantum retrocausality” – in other words, backwards causation.
There is a front-page story in today’s New York Times about a radical and highly controversial proposal that, if adopted, will almost certainly shake our civilization to its very foundations: voluntary guidelines for well-mannered blogging.
In recent years, though I still record an album or two a year, I’ve spent most of my working hours as a software engineer. Most of my code is written in the “object-oriented” language C++, and is designed to run on the Windows operating system. I took up this arcane profession just at the beginning […]
Hard upon the government’s global-warming setback at the hands of the Supreme Court, we have new evidence that the Bush administration’s environmental perfidy knows no Earthly bounds. Learn more here.
I can tell you from dolorous personal experience how difficult it can be, once you have confected a snappy little essay, blog post, or other other coruscating gem of tightly condensed prose, to come up with an apt and witty title; often it’s the hardest part of the job. So I have long admired the […]
According to this news item from the Russian news agency Novosti, the Belgian region of Wallonia has found a potent weapon against human-induced climate change: a tax on barbecueing. As I’m sure our readers are well aware, a session at the grill can produce up to 50 grams of carbon dioxide. But rest easy: the […]
I’ve mentioned this before, but my friend Patrick Goldsmith, who spent years collecting handmade art in Southeast asia, is selling his collection in order that he may move to China. He has a wonderful assortment of beautiful objects, and as time is short, he is willing to part with them at fire-sale prices. If you […]
March 22, 2007 – 10:27 am
From my old PubSub pal Mike Zaharee — one of the top scientists at our now-shuttered Granite State Research Kitchen up in Nashua, New Hampshire — comes a surprising item. Are you thinking of trading in your gluttonous, swaggering Hummer for a fashionably meek, environmentally-friendly Prius? Not so fast. You might want to read this first.
March 20, 2007 – 10:31 am
Our pal Kevin Kim — essayist, professor, artist, and a genuine Renaissance man whose interests range from the comparative study of religion to philosophy of mind to the passing of intestinal gas, has just published a book. It’s called Water From a Skull, and is described online as “a collection of reflective essays and academic papers (1999-2006) on religious diversity, Buddhism, Christianity, mind, and other topics of personal interest.”
Kevin has a piercing and wide-ranging intellect, is a marvellous writer, and has a truly skanky sense of humor. I’m sure the book is well worth reading, and I’m going to get me a copy. You should too; you can pick one up here.
Enough brooding and introspection already. Let’s get happy. This will help:
Readers may be interested to take a look at the latest addition to the waka waka waka sidebar; it’s a relatively new website called Strange Maps. It is exactly what the name suggests — a weblog devoted to cartographic curiosities. In here you will find such oddities as The Whole World in a Cloverleaf, East Germany Lives On — As a Tiny Carribean Island, The Most Generic Country Ever, the United Shapes of America, and a whole lot more.
Enjoy.
March 16, 2007 – 10:14 pm
I’m happy to say that waka waka waka‘s Brooklyn nerve center, which for the last couple of days has been as isolated as the hapless Easter Islanders of a thousand years ago, is once again connected to the outside world. Unfortunately, however, even though it is ten p.m. on a Friday night, I am still at my office in Midtown, attending to clamant matters having to do with my primary source of income. As I may be here into the wee hours, it appears that a resumption of the usual bombast, bloviation and braggadocio will have to wait one more day. I do apologize.
Unfortunately, Internet access from my Brooklyn lair is down; this may mean that waka waka waka will be down as well until the problem is fixed.
Thank you, Time Warner Cable.
March 12, 2007 – 10:58 pm
Readers of these pages will know that I have often participated in the online discussion at The Maverick Philosopher, a weblog maintained by Dr. William Vallicella. Dr. Vallicella is a staunch defender of dualistic interpretations of the mind-body question, a position that puts him at odds with such prominent thinkers as Daniel Dennett, John Searle, the Churchlands, and many others (and of course with pretty much all of the neuroscientists studying the workings of the mind and brain). But despite what you may have gathered from harsh dismissals of dualism from Dennett et. al., dualism is very much a defensible and consistent philosophical position. I believe it is most likely to turn out to be wrong — an unnecessary product of our need to fill explanatory gaps, and a relic of a pre-scientific model of the world — but it is indeed a view that can be coherently defended, and I have learned a great deal about how this can be done from Dr. Vallicella and his astute commenters.
We are traveling today, and Internet access will be spotty over the weekend, so blogging may be, as they say, light.
My old friend Pat Goldsmith, who has traveled the world for decades as a dealer in exotic art, is selling some of his collection. He has some particularly splendid examples of Indonesian and other South Asian work, and you can acquire them at very reasonable prices (particularly, I think, if you mention that you heard about them here). By all means do take a look; his website is here.
If you haven’t already heard, there is something disturbing going on that might have far-reaching effects on North American agriculture. All over the country, the bees are disappearing.
Reader Andrew Staroscik has sent along an interesting article about recent developments in the neuroscience of human brains, for those of you who are interested in such things. The gist of it is that human brains are markedly different from the brains of other animals not just in their gross anatomy, but in the microscopic details of the neural tissues themselves. In other words, it isn’t that all mammalian brains are made of the same stuff, with ours just being bigger and more complex, but rather that we have evolved some new varieties of brain cells that aren’t found elsewhere.
You can read the story here.
February 28, 2007 – 12:08 am
While Islamic culture isn’t exactly on the cutting edge of intellectual progress these days, it wasn’t always so, as anyone with a rudimentary familiarity with history will know. In Islam’s heyday, the caliphate was a beacon of enlightenment, in fields as diverse as mathematics, medicine, and astronomy. I have often marveled at Islamic decorative art, in particular the intricate tesselations, with their complex fivefold symmetries, that grace Muslim architecture from those times, and have noted their similarity to what are known as Penrose tilings, named for the great mathematician and cosmologist who first subjected them to a rigorous examination.
Today’s New York Times carried an article about these remarkable mosaics, and suggested that the high Muslim culture that created these elaborate patterns may even have glimpsed the idea of quasicrystals, which are aperiodic crystals that are built on the same odd, pentagonal geometry.
Learn more here.
February 26, 2007 – 11:52 pm
You may have heard of the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by the late Thomas Kuhn; it is arguably the most influential book ever written on the history and philosophy of science. In it, Kuhn examines the life cycle of a scientific “paradigm”, and the way that scientific communities pass from periods of “normal” science, during which research stays comfortably within the reigning paradigm, to “crises”, in which results begin to appear for which the current model cannot account, and during which more and more desperate efforts are made to preserve the existing view. An example of such a crisis would be the difficulties pre-relativistic physics found itself confronted with in the aftermath of the Michelson-Morley experiment.
Eventually, some breakthrough is made — a “scientific revolution” — and a new model is found that accommodates the troublesome data. Often this involves an entirely different understanding of the phenomena, and even of the nature of reality itself; Kuhn coined the now-familiar term “paradigm shift” to refer to this sort of reformulation.
February 26, 2007 – 9:36 pm
While I’m trying to find the time to get back to more serious topics, here’s an amusing bit of froth, in which we find Robert deNiro doing what he does best.
February 24, 2007 – 7:18 pm
These past two weekends mark the celebration of the Chinese New Year; this time around it’s the Year of the Pig. As I’ve mentioned before, kung fu schools traditionally go out in the streets to do lion and dragon dances. Ours is no exception, and as I’ve done most years since 1976, I spent the day traipsing around Chinatown in the freezing cold.
February 23, 2007 – 12:59 am
I do apologize for the dearth of worthwhile content around here lately, but it’s been a busy week. Tonight, for example, we spent the evening at a Lewis Black show at City Center. Black, who splutters in dumfounded amazement at the world’s absurdities, is a funny guy, part of an honored tradition of professional ranters. At times tonight I was reminded of another, even more idiosyncratic observer of the humanity’s hyperkinetic confusion: one Brother Theodore, who referred to his act as “stand-up tragedy”.
February 19, 2007 – 8:32 pm
I’m afflicted today with what appears to be food poisoning, and have absolutely nothing to offer tonight, especially as I’ve used up any remaining fuel in the cogitative tank commenting on an interesting thread at philosopher Alan Rhoda’s website about the “problem of evil”, and whether our morality is based on any sort of objective foundation. Interested readers may find that post, and my long-winded opinion, here.
February 17, 2007 – 11:41 pm
We’re at Avatar Studios all weekend, mixing into the wee hours both days. Back Monday, if not sooner.
February 16, 2007 – 11:49 pm
From trumpeter John McNeil, who’s been through a lot:
You don’t have to fail absolutely to have no confidence: you just have to fail every so often.
February 15, 2007 – 12:07 am
One of the cleverer ways that archaeologists date the artifacts they find is a technique known as dendrochronology, which relies on the patterns of growth rings in the trunks of trees.
February 9, 2007 – 11:15 am
My old friend Jess, a California attorney, comments on the sad death of Anna Nicole Smith:
This shows, once again, how higher-level appellate litigation devastates the body.
February 8, 2007 – 11:49 pm
You may be familiar with the author Jared Diamond, whose brilliant book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies quite deservedly netted a Pulitzer Prize. I’ve been reading his latest effort, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and it is awfully good as well.
February 8, 2007 – 5:22 pm
Here’s a stunning photograph, today’s “Featured Picture” over at Wikipedia. Worth a look.
February 5, 2007 – 11:13 pm
Well, it’s mighty cold here in Gotham. The temperature is dropping back down into the single digits tonight, and adding a piquant accent is a howling wind that appears to have dropped straight down to Brooklyn from somewhere up around Port Radium. The few pedestrians that I can see out on the street, swaddled and muffled beyond any regard for fashion, tilt forward into the Boreal gale as they make their way to shelter. Otherwise, all is quiet save for the occasional pop as frozen sparrows, dislodged from their miserable perches by the icy blast, shatter like lightbulbs on the stony ground.
Here in our modest bow-front Victorian limestone townhouse, however, we are snug and warm, thanks to the controlled combustion of a steady flow of natural gas. This resource is provided, at exorbitant cost, by our mild-mannered neighbors to the North — who are, now that I think about it, the same ones who are supplying us with all this Arctic bluster in the first place.
You know, that’s a pretty smooth operation.
February 3, 2007 – 2:45 pm
On the editorial page of today’s Times there is a paean to coffee by guest columnist Stacy Schiff. I happened to read it as I was enjoying an exceptionally tasty and enlivening mug of Indonesian joe, so it was well received. In particular I enjoyed two quotes, reprinted below.
January 28, 2007 – 11:21 pm
I’ve just got back to New York after a brief visit to San Diego to visit my father, and no matter how often I make the trip I still find it startling how utterly different the two corners of the continent are, and how easily we flit back and forth. It was a breezy 10° F. or so at dawn on Friday when I headed for JFK, and a sunny 70° at Lindbergh field when I blew in. Now, back in Brooklyn, though it’s warmed up quite a bit, it’s still snowing wetly.
January 26, 2007 – 12:43 am
I’ll be flying to California at the crack of dawn tomorrow — I’m going off to San Marcos to visit my father. I was dithering over what books, music, etc. I might take for the ride, when suddenly I remembered that I had, a couple of years ago, got my hands on a collection of hundreds of hours of recordings of the old Jean Shepherd radio show.
January 20, 2007 – 10:57 pm
There are few topics that get folks as worked up these days as the notion that there might in fact be innate differences amongst people (or even worse, statistical differences between identifiable groups of people). You may recall that Harvard president Lawrence Summers was tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail for so much as suggesting that known differences in the distribution of various cognitive attributes in men and women might account for some of the unequal success of the sexes in the sciences.
January 18, 2007 – 6:16 pm
I tend to procrastinate; I’ve had a problem with it all my life. For years I’ve meant to come to grips with this psychic defect, but I never seem to get around to it. I’m not alone in this, I realize: 15-20% of us are prone to habitual and reflexive deferment of life’s little obligations, and even though Mark Twain advises us never to put off till tomorrow that which can be done the day after tomorrow, many folks would still like to have a better understanding of why we so often would rather do just about anything than the thing that needs doing now.
For those of you who share this affliction, I’ve found a splendid resource for all things cunctatory: Procrastination Central. It’s the perfect place to spend some time when you should be doing something else. Take a look, if you can find the time.
January 15, 2007 – 12:34 am
We are home once again – just the two of us, having safely ensconced our son in his new home in the halls of academe. Thanks to those of you who have emailed in response to the previous post; the immediate connection with a community of friends is one of the most rewarding aspects of maintaining this website.
