January 24, 2006 – 11:53 pm
I am haunted tonight by a link sent to me by my friend and coworker Eugene Jen. I had decided earlier this evening not to mention it here, because I thought it might have the same rather harrowing effect on some readers that it has had on me. But that left me still having to write this evening’s post, and try as I might I couldn’t deflect my thoughts. So if you don’t want to read a disturbing item, just amuse yourself in some other way tonight, perhaps by browsing our fascinating archives. waka waka waka will be back to its usual cheery self again tomorrow, I promise.
January 19, 2006 – 11:20 am
From my friend Steven Cohen comes comes an interesting link for those of you who tend to accumulate books: LibraryThing. It’s a Web-based system for cataloguing your personal library. You can tag your books according to subject, view other online libraries, see who has collections similar to yours, and so forth. It looks like a fantastic tool for hard-core bibliophiles.
January 6, 2006 – 11:27 pm
I never get enough sleep. I get up between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m., get to PubSub’s Lower Manhattan nerve center at about 10, toil at the “bleeding edge” of Internet technology until 7 p.m. or so, then head home.
There are things to do in the evening. Dinner must be prepared and consumed. Often I will train a bit, and one night a week I teach class. There are books clamoring for my attention. My guitar, a winsome Taylor 310, beckons. There are chess games at RedHotPawn to which attention must be paid. Of course, as a husband and father, I spend time with Nina and Nick (and Chloë, when she is home from college). Most of the time there are other lingering details: mail and telephone calls to answer, or little chores to do. Then there are blogs to be read, upon which perhaps to leave pithy and thought-provoking comments. Finally, I must confect the day’s post for waka waka waka.
December 31, 2005 – 11:04 pm
waka waka waka wishes all of you happiness and good health, and good luck in 2006.
December 30, 2005 – 11:31 pm
The new Moon of December 31st will be the second one this month; the first having been on December 1st. When two full Moons occur in the same calendar month, it’s called a “Blue Moon”, but till now there has been no name for this inverse phenomenon. The folks at Spaceweather.com asked for suggestions for their readers, and the winner was “Ebony Moon”. Like Blue Moons, Ebony Moons happen about once every two-and-a-half years. The next one will be in August of 2008.
December 25, 2005 – 12:18 am
To all of you. May your homes be havens of peace and love, may you grow in wisdom and understanding, and may fortune smile upon you in 2006.
-Malcolm
December 23, 2005 – 11:55 pm
One of the things that people who dislike George Bush often mention as something that particularly bothers them is what they call his “swagger”. I too have found myself vaguely irritated by his carriage, without realizing what it was that bothered me. I’ve now put my finger on it.
December 22, 2005 – 11:59 pm
Science, the official organ of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, has published its Top Ten list of scientific breakthroughs for 2005. The winners are:
December 22, 2005 – 12:41 am
This transit strike has the city clenched and writhing like a spider stuck by a pin. Businesses are withering, traffic is packed solid from river to river, municipal and union officials are locked in a snarling impasse, while Gotham’s hapless and frozen workforce staggers to and fro across the city’s bridges in their hundreds of thousands. And all of this four days before Christmas.
New York is rightly renowned for taking these things in stride, but this is going to get old in a hurry.
December 22, 2005 – 12:26 am
One of my favorite left-clicks in all of cyberspace is WikiPedia’s Random Article link.
December 20, 2005 – 12:43 pm
Well, the bus-and-subway strike is on. New York depends on mass transit more than any other city in the country, and this is going to be very bad indeed, especially given the timing.
December 16, 2005 – 12:28 am
As I write, Gotham is on the edge of its seat. We are waiting to see if the transit workers, whose contract expired twenty-eight minutes ago, are going to walk out. If they do, it will be disruptive, to say the least. Estimates of the cost to the city’s economy start, I believe, at around four hundred million dollars a day. It couldn’t come at a worse time for the city’s merchants, of course, some of whom make their entire annual profit in the Yuletide purchasing spasm.
December 11, 2005 – 12:05 am
I’ve been distracted by worldly matters for a day or two, so all I have to offer tonight is yet another of those parasitic posts in which I merely present a link to some interesting spot on the Web. Rest assured that some tasty confections are on the stove.
Today’s referent is the indispensible Dead or Alive. Just go take a look. No further explanation necessary.
December 6, 2005 – 10:37 pm
My friend Duncan Werner has sent me a link to a brief but outstandingly informative article that I thought I must share with you all. It offers helpful, practical advice about what to do if you suddenly find yourself free-falling from the stratosphere.
December 6, 2005 – 12:41 am
John Kerry is at it again. The lugubrious, thatch-crowned Ent, whom readers may recall bloviating on all sides of every issue during last year’s depressing presidential campaign, was on “Face the Nation” yesterday, accusing US soldiers of “terrorizing” ordinary Iraqis, and “breaking sort of the customs of the–of–the historical customs, religious customs.”
December 1, 2005 – 12:46 am
Today, November 30, was Winston Churchill’s birthday. He would have been 131.
Like many, I regard Winston Churchill as perhaps the greatest man of the twentieth century. He alone sounded the tocsin as Germany rearmed. His measureless optimism and indomitable spirit gave the British the sinew to stand alone against the Nazis after his warnings went unheeded. His ringing oratory sustained the fighting spirit of a battered nation. His literary output, and his incomparable command of his beloved language, would make him a towering figure even had he confined himself solely to writing. His six-volume history, The Second World War, is unique in all of literature – a spellbinding account of one of mankind’s greatest struggles, written not just by a gifted historian, but by the leader of a dauntless nation, and the architect of civilization’s ultimate victory.
November 27, 2005 – 10:38 pm
I have a new toy:
My parents, who are, shall we say, “getting on”, and who are less capable physically than they once were, have moved to smaller quarters, and needed to get rid of some of their stuff. Some was sold, some thrown out, and some redistributed to friends and family. My father, not needing it anymore, entrusted to me his microscope.
Now this isn’t just any old microscope. It’s a Wild M20, made in Switzerland, and considered by many to be the finest optical microscope ever made. My father bought it in London, his hometown, in the 1950s, when he was just beginning his career as a medical researcher. Though it is not particularly large, it is surprisingly heavy, and its dense metal body is finished in deep, lustrous black. Its interlocking parts, even after fifty years, move with exquisite precision, and without the slightest play. The optics are incomparable. Though it is a purely functional object, I find it almost hypnotically beautiful.
I know little about the practical techniques of microscopy, but I intend to learn. What a gift! I think of the legions of the curious throughout the ages who would have given their eyeteeth for such an instrument, and feel that I owe it to them to learn to use this fantastic tool, and to use it reverently and well.
You can read about the Wild M20 here, and here.
Thanks, Dad.
November 27, 2005 – 9:49 pm
Here’s an uplifting headline:
Man from 1,500 years ago had violent death
It’s the story of an aboriginal Australian who “was repeatedly speared and then axed,” according to the scientists who found him.
“He sure trod on someone’s toes,” said Allen Madden, cultural and heritage officer for the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council.
You can read the story here.
November 21, 2005 – 11:59 pm
I’m fond of metaphors. In fact – with apologies to Will Rogers – I never metaphor I didn’t like. Here’s one that seems rather apt to me lately:
Life is a Pachinko machine.
November 8, 2005 – 1:30 am
I’ve just read, on my wife Nina’s recommendation, the book A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. Here is the first paragraph:
I wake to the drone of an airplane engine and the feeling of something warm dripping down my chin. I lift my hand to feel my face. My front four teeth are gone, I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut. I open them and I look around and I’m in the back of a plane and there’s no one near me. I look at my clothes and my clothes are covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.
The book is the story of Frey’s six weeks, at age 23, at an elite detoxification clinic in Minneapolis. It is a horrifying tale. I have known an awful lot of drug addicts and alcoholics in my day, and have peered over the edge of that abyss at times myself, but Mr. Frey, I have to say, raises the bar. He has, by the beginning of this story, been a dedicated alcoholic for ten years, and an obsessive crackhead for three. He has spent every day for years pumping booze and drugs into himself until he blacks out. He has destroyed every relationship he has ever had with anyone, is wanted in three states for various antisocial acts, and has brought himself to the uttermost brink of death.
October 20, 2005 – 6:03 pm
It is 4:58 p.m. on Thursday, October 20th, 2005. I am sitting In John F. Kennedy International Airport, in the gleaming new Jet Blue terminal, waiting for a flight to Long Beach, California. I’m flying there for the weekend to help my parents move. They are no longer young, and their health is not what it was, so they are leaving the house they have lived in since the early ’90s for a residential facility that will be a good deal less demanding.
I’ll be back In New York City on Sunday evening.
I am sitting in a surprisingly pleasant bar/restaurant, having arrived almost two hours before my flight is to depart. Looking around me I see twenty-two high-definition television screens, one of which is almost the size of a single bed. One of the screens is displaying moment-by-moment coverage of Hurricane Wilma, which satellite observations have determined to be the most intense storm ever to have been noticed in the Atlantic Basin. The satellite image is superimposed on a computer-generated map of the southeastern corner of North America, and is colored a lurid orange at the center of the storm. This is where Doppler radar observations show the highest wind velocities. Wilma is cruising through the Yucatan Channel on its way to visit a familiar type of destruction on southern Florida.
October 20, 2005 – 10:23 am
This story, one of the enormous body of Mulla Nasrudin folk-stories, is taken from The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, by the late Sufi writer and teacher Idries Shah.
The philosophers, logicians and doctors of law were drawn up at court to examine Nasrudin. This was a serious case, because he had admitted going from village to village saying: ‘The so-called wise men are ignorant, irresolute and confused.’ He was charged with undermining the security of the state.
‘You may speak first,’ said the king.
‘Have paper and pens brought,’ said the Mulla.
Paper and pens were brought.
‘Give them to each of the first seven savants.’
They were distributed.
‘Have them separately write an answer to this question: “What is bread?” ‘
This was done.
The papers were handed to the king who read them out:
The first said: ‘Bread is a food.’
The second ‘It is flour and water.’
The third: ‘ A gift of God.’
The fourth: ‘Baked dough.’
The fifth: ‘Changeable, according to how you mean “bread”.’
The sixth: ‘A nutritious substance.’
The seventh: ‘Nobody really knows.’
‘When they decide what bread is,’ said Nasrudin, ‘it will be possible for them to decide other things. For example, whether I am right or wrong. Can you entrust matters of assessment and judgement to people like this? Is it or is it not strange that they cannot agree about something which they eat each day, yet are unanimous that I am a heretic?’
October 17, 2005 – 11:46 pm
Alright, I’ve had it.
Once again today I heard someone say “it’s a chicken-and-egg thing”. This refers, of course, to that stale old chestnut “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” This trite saying is supposed to be an example of an impenetrable mystery, but it is nothing of the sort. The least understanding of biology, given a moment’s thought, easily resolves the question.
How does speciation occur? Is it by some creature starting its life as one species and ending up as another? Obviously not. New forms of life arise through mutation, through the imperfect transfer of genetic information from parent to child. So in this example something that was not-quite-a-chicken laid an egg containing the world’s first chicken.
Which came first? The egg. Move on.
October 17, 2005 – 4:07 pm
We can stop arguing about the existence of qualia, thanks to Sony.
Somebody should send Daniel Dennett one of these.
October 17, 2005 – 12:40 am
This weekend I was up in Wellfleet, MA, for the annual OysterFest. Lots of small towns the world over have shindigs like this to celebrate a local product, but this isn’t just any local product. These are Wellfleet Oysters, and they are magnificent.
Wellfleet is a lovely old fishing village on the slender outermost stretch of Cape Cod, and since its founding hundreds of years ago it has been renowned for this matchless mollusc. For two days each October the town’s picturesque main thoroughfare is closed to traffic, and epicures come from far and wide to sample the bodacious bivalve in every conceivable form – baked, grilled, fried, stewed, and, best of all, just as Nature made it: succulent and beckoning on its nacreous and razor-edged half-shell.
Wellfleet Harbor’s clean, cold, salty waters and 12-foot tides provide the ideal environment for raising these incomparable invertebrates, and as good as Wellfleet oysters are when ordered at Manhattan’s fancier tables, to savor them in their eponymous hometown, only hours or even minutes after they have been roused from their briny slumber, is enough to make one wonder whether there mightn’t actually be a divine Plan after all.
October 16, 2005 – 11:52 pm
Bill Keezer, who maintains several interesting blogs, has graciously added waka waka waka to the blogroll of his site Bill’s Comments. Bill is an open-minded, well-educated, intelligent, questioning Christian, and is just the sort of person that people like me, who are agnostic but intensely curious about what the spiritual truth of the world might turn out to be, need to have around. He also, as a trained scientist, provides a valuable perspective on how thinking people can reconcile science and religion, a project that is not going well in this country, to say the least.
In the post in which he lists recent additions to his blogroll, Bill refers to this site as “a serious blog by a philosopher”. I’m flattered; although I am curious and have read and brooded a lot, I have no formal training in Western philosophy, and am very aware of my amateur status in comparison to the real pros like Bill Vallicella, who have devoted their adult lives to the effort while I was off making records. But who am I to argue?
“A serious blog by a philosopher.”
I like the sound of that, and I shall try to live up to it.
October 9, 2005 – 12:31 am
Here is a remarkable image. It is the blazing surface of our Sun.
Each of the small granular regions in the picture is roughly the size of Texas. The Earth would fit comfortably within the large sunspot in the center.
Although they appear black in this image, sunspots are dazzlingly bright, as bright as lightning. It is only by contrast to the surrounding photosphere that they seem dark.
It is easy to look at such an image and marvel at it as an unusual and strangely beautiful visual phenomenon without making a deeper effort to establish a mental connection between our local context and what is being depicted here. Dwell for a moment on the scale of the scene in this photograph, both in relation to our Earth and to the Sun itself.
It is interesting that the picture can be taken in as somehow representing an object of comprehensible size.
“As above, so below.”
October 7, 2005 – 12:43 am
According to the news media, Gotham is once again in the “crosshairs of terror”. The problem this time, apparently, is a 19-martyr posse of fanatical suicide bombers with Metrocards. Al Qaeda the F-train ridah.
This news has little effect around here other than to give those who tend to become anxious something to become anxious about. My own parents lived through the Blitz in London, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let something like this bother me. I’ve been riding these subways, at all hours of the day and night, for 30 years. I’m used to staring death in the face.
They’re going to intimidate New York City?
October 7, 2005 – 12:18 am
Well, that’s about it – I’ve reposted everything I could find from the old site.
To recap, here’s what happened: this domain was previously hosted by a cheap-o hosting company called 1GBHosting.net. It had gotten good customer reviews, was a great deal ($5.95 a month) and gave me everything I needed.
At first the proprietors were engaged and helpful. Once I was up and running, though, they became somewhat aloof, especially when things started breaking.
First I noticed that I couldn’t send emails to some domains (aol.com, for example). This turned out to be because reverse DNS lookup was failing. I wrote the support staff about it, and got a response weeks later that said something like “um… yeah, we’re working on that…”
Next the cPanel application that provided a user interface for managing the site went dead – an expired license file. I wrote to the hosts again, but by now they were radio silent.
I started thinking about how I might get my content backed up and out of there, but before I could do anything the whole website vaporized.
So BACK UP YOUR CONTENT, ye bloggers.
October 5, 2005 – 9:45 pm
Well, it appears that the new location is becoming visible to the Web. As the smoke clears I am beginning to put things back together. Many thanks to my friends over at Maverick Philosopher for all the help and moral support.
I have copies, kindly cached by Google, of a lot of the old content (thanks, Sam, for the tip), but it is going to take a little while to get it all reassembled.
October 4, 2005 – 4:59 pm
We can rebuild it. We have the technology.
We’ll be back very soon.
September 1, 2005 – 11:56 pm
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has commented here on my previous “Logic and Faith†post, with his usual thoughtfulness and insight. He has also expatiated further on the general question of faith and intuition.
I feel the need to add a few more thoughts of my own.
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, comments here on Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. I haven’t read the book, so I must be careful about what I say here, but from the excerpts quoted, and the interview given by Harris at Amazon, he (Harris) appears to be staking out a position that, with unintended irony, is the product of his own faith. The most telling example of this is something he said in this interview:
‘Faith’ is a false belief in unjustified convictions.