January 28, 2006 – 6:22 pm
Tonight is the beginning of the Year of the Dog, lunar year 4703. It is called “bingxu” in the “Stem-Branch” system, which repeats a name every 60 years.
Congratulations, and may you prosper.
January 27, 2006 – 11:52 pm
Having written a post earlier about James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces, I probably should remark on the recent brouhaha, which you would have had to have been in a persistent vegetative state not to have noticed.
It turns out that Mr. Frey’s story of his recovery from multiple addictions was perhaps as much fiction as fact. Among other things, he wrote of jail time that he never in fact served. He fabricated an excruciatingly convincing account of undergoing multiple root-canal procedures without anaesthesia. He concocted a tragic backstory about being responsible for an adolescent girlfriend’s death. In other words, he made a lot of stuff up and passed it off as the truth. A lot of people are pretty upset, not least of whom is his principal benefactor, the towering Oprah Winfrey, who dressed him down before the Entire World yesterday.
January 21, 2006 – 4:20 pm
I’m fond of books. I tend to accumulate them, and at this point have between one and two thousand of them on shelves, in piles on the floor, and scattered about. But I do have to admit that they are bulky and old-fashioned. In a conversation yesterday with PubSub CEO Gus Spathis, he referred to an attachment to physical books as “quaint nostalgia”. There are few technologies – and let’s acknowledge that the printed word is a technological artifact – that have survived so long essentially unchanged. Books are large, they are heavy, and they are made at considerable cost from wood and cotton and soot. The information represented by a book is, by Information Age standards, completely sessile, and the hard drive of my laptop, which is smaller than almost any book, could easily hold the contents of even the most avid collector’s personal library.
January 15, 2006 – 9:14 pm
One of the things that people like to do is “boil down” the staggering complexity of the world into comprehensive rules and principles. Surprisingly, the world itself often cooperates by revealing itself to be, in fact, a rather orderly place that does indeed seem to behave according to laws that are simple enough for us to ferret out.
Some of the rules we have worked out are abstruse, detailed and complicated, yet have held up well under critical examination – quantum mechanics and general relativity come to mind – while others are vague generalities like “there’s a sucker born every minute” and “faint heart ne’er won fair lady”. Some are obviously wrong, like “a watched pot never boils”.
Sometimes we pick one thing and make it the central orgainizing principle of the world. My friend Bob Wyman, for example, has worked out a plausible system of ethics entirely based upon the idea of resisting entropy. Another friend, songwriter Larry Mcnally has written that “Love is everything – everything else is nothing.” He’s not the first to take that stance, but it’s a good song.
Well, I’m not immune to this temptation either, and sometimes I think that the fundamental currency in human affairs – the fungible coin in which the business of mankind is transacted – is attention.
January 14, 2006 – 6:17 pm
Today the Washington Redskins are visiting the Seattle Seahawks for an NFL playoff game. The contest has been attended with the usual hype, but the sportswriters covering the game for the Seattle Times have faced a peculiar challenge – the paper has decided not to allow them to use the name “Redskins” more than once in their stories. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the only other obvious token by which to refer to the team is the name of their hometown, Washington, which happens also to be the the home state of the home team.
January 2, 2006 – 11:55 pm
It suddenly dawned on me this evening that I had not yet written a post formally introducing my readers to The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The world first learned of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s role in the creation of all that is when one Bobby Henderson, a “concerned citizen”, wrote an open letter to the Kansas School Board in which he explained that humans received the spark of life from His Noodly Appendage, and described the teachings of Spaghetti Monsterism. Mr. Henderson quite reasonably requests that the Pastafarian account of the origin of life be taught along with Intelligent Design and Darwinism:
One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.
December 28, 2005 – 12:24 am
Educational and psychological theories of the mid-20th century saw the human brain as an infinitely flexible learning machine, with no “factory presets”. But the picture that is now emerging of our mental apparatus is of a suite of prewired cognitive modules, located in various areas of the brain, each of which has been shaped by natural selection for some useful task. These modules provide us with a common a priori framework for organizing our model of the world, and each module contributes an intuitive description of some aspect of our environment.
December 24, 2005 – 4:02 pm
There are many in the scientific community – some of its most prominent spokespersons – who seem to have embraced a rather militant form of atheism. Richard Dawkins seems to be the most visible, but there are many others.
I used to be a strongly committed atheist myself, but my viewpoint has softened, and I would categorize myself now as a curious agnostic. One of the reasons that I abandoned the atheist position is the simple fact that reason itself is silent on the question of God’s existence. Efforts have been made to put faith in God onto a solid naturalist or philosophical foundation, but the fact remains that there is still no way to compel either belief in or denial of the existence of God.
December 20, 2005 – 10:12 pm
The campaign by Biblical literalists to have their mythology masquerade as science in the public schools has been dealt another setback. In a welcome and much-needed decision, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones has struck down the Dover Township, PA school board’s attempt to smuggle “Intelligent Design” into the biology curriculum.
You can read the judge’s opinion here.
December 19, 2005 – 11:05 pm
I expect that most of you have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but you may not have seen the preface that he wrote for a Ukrainian edition. The preface was censored in England, and was not added to most English translations. I certainly hadn’t seen it before my friend Duncan Werner sent me a link to it today.
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 – 1:00 am
Here is an interesting item from the 1010 WINS website. The headline reads:
Jogging Song Offends Relatives of Inmates
According to the story,
More than 50 recruits and their trainers jogged in formation past the jail last week singing: “Jailbirds, jailbirds, look and see. You’re locked up and we’re free.”
Relatives, who were in the jail parking lot, say they were shocked.
I agree that the doggerel in question scans poorly, but I hardly consider myself shocked. After all, if these recruits had the lyrical skill to be successful poets, they wouldn’t have to be out there jogging in the first place.
December 4, 2005 – 8:09 pm
There is a heartening item in today’s New York Times: the creation myth known as Intelligent Design is having a tough time taking root. The ID movement’s complete and unsurprising lack of any scientific agenda is apparently beginning to catch up with it.
December 2, 2005 – 12:22 am
It is easy for us to bustle though our busy lives without pausing to reflect that so much of our familiar and comfortable world was not created by us, but bequeathed to us by those who lived and died long before we took our cue to strut briefly upon the stage. Here in Gotham one tends to take the city itself for granted, as if it were given feature of the natural world, but if one stops to consider that every last brick, every nail, every floorboard, every window, every doorknob, every layer of paint in every one of the city’s innumerable structures, from the meanest toolshed to the loftiest tower, was carefully put in its place by some human hand, the scale of one’s indebtedness to those who went before us is almost ungraspable in its immensity. To these multitudes, almost all of them nameless and forgotten, we owe nearly everything – our cities, our nations, our languages, our religions, our music, our literature, our science, our mathematics, our art, our culture, and even the very bodies that we inhabit. I think it is worthwhile to dwell on this astonishing fact every so often.
From my remarkable friend George Beke, who might best be described as a cultural archeologist, a tireless scholar of the symbolic and esoteric artifacts of bygone times, comes an extraordinary insight into one of the most familiar features of our common cultural framework – the days of the week.
December 1, 2005 – 12:04 am
Looking over the science section of the New York Times yesterday I found the following response to an article about hypnosis (sixth letter down):
To the Editor:
Re “This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis”: The first thing that came to mind when I read that some people are susceptible to suggestion is the trance some religious fundamentalists get into. The article goes on to say that suggestion changes what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.
That would explain the apparent contradiction in our most recent presidential election, where logic seemed to be turned on its head.
Was that 10 to 15 percent who could have been in a hypnotic trance enough to turn around an election and in essence undermine (undermind) the democratic process?
Mark Gretch
Raleigh, N.C.
What idiotic, insulting, execrable drivel.
Re “This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis”: The first thing that came to mind when I read that some people are susceptible to suggestion is the trance some religious fundamentalists get into. The article goes on to say that suggestion changes what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.
That would explain the apparent contradiction in our most recent presidential election, where logic seemed to be turned on its head.
Was that 10 to 15 percent who could have been in a hypnotic trance enough to turn around an election and in essence undermine (undermind) the democratic process?
Mark Gretch
Raleigh, N.C.
What idiotic, insulting, execrable drivel.
November 18, 2005 – 5:17 pm
Here’s Charles Krauthammer, in today’s Washington Post, getting off a shot at “Intelligent Design”:
“How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too.”
Read the full article here.
November 18, 2005 – 1:52 pm
I’ve just spent a few days at PubSub’s Granite State Research Kitchen up in Nashua, NH. It’s in an enormous brick building that used to be a textile mill back in New Hampshire’s industrial heyday. A lot of these old piles, which are all over the place up there, have now been converted into high-tech office complexes, pottery studios, and cutesy-poo shopping malls.
The first thing you see when you enter the building is a larger-than-life wooden cigar-store Indian. He looks pretty much like the prefab one in this picture (I found this image here – hope its owners don’t mind):
Shading his eyes, the brawny warrior gazes past you into the distance as you come through the front door. Is he scanning the blue horizon for smoke signals? Following the flight of a soaring eagle? I doubt it. My feeling is that he is probably too embarrassed to make eye contact, not only because his descending career arc has brought him from hunting bison on the majestic plains of the West all the way down to hawking handfuls of Presidentes, but also because he has apparently been coerced into wearing, as a token of his subjugation, a fetching, knee-length, American-flag skirt.
I find it interesting that you can get away with that up in New Hampshire. Here in Gotham you’d have picketers outside your place in about twenty minutes.
November 11, 2005 – 2:04 pm
Here’s an interesting item:
A Miami-based film director is spending $100,000 on a piece of property. He plans to turn the location into a big-game hunting resort. What makes the venture somewhat unusual is that what will be hunted is “dinosaur-like monsters”, and that the property is located inside the online game Project Entropia.
They say the real-estate bubble may have burst. So who needs “real”?
November 1, 2005 – 1:31 pm
Today, the new Moon, is the day of Diwali. From Wikipedia:
DiwÄlÄ« or DÄ«pÄvali (also transliterated Deepavali; Sanskrit: row of lights) is the Hindu Festival of Lights. For Jains it is one of the most important festivals, and beginning of the Jain year. It is also a significant festival for the Sikh faith.
October 28, 2005 – 11:11 am
My good friend Jess Kaplan, who practices law in Sacramento, has just sent me an interesting item (written before Harriet Meiers withdrew herself from consideration) about confirmations of judicial appointments. One might assume that qualifications like a high-level clerkship, outstanding academic credentials from prestigious institutions, experience on the bench, an extensive body of written work, and so forth, would grease the wheels, but it appears that exactly the opposite is the case. In the author’s words, “The less sterling a candidate’s record, the more likely Congress is to confirm.”
Readers can find the article here.
October 18, 2005 – 10:58 am
Some years ago anthropologist Donald E. Brown published a book called Human Universals. Its argument is that there are cultural traits that can be found in every human society – universal characteristics that, because they are manifest in all cultures throughout history and in all environmental settings, clearly must represent innate features of human nature. Such an idea, of course, flies in the face of the “progressive” intellectual fashions of the past century, fashions that persist to this day, as discussed in a previous post.
Dr. Brown has compiled a list of these ubiquitous human traits; you can read it here.
October 13, 2005 – 12:55 am
I have already posted about Steven Pinker’s excellent book The Blank Slate, a salvo against the modern denial of innate human nature. In today’s Wall Street Journal Charles Murray, who as one of the co-authors, in 1996, of The Bell Curve was pilloried by the Left for suggesting that there might be inherent statistical differences among human genetic groups, has returned to the battle with an essay arguing that subsequent study has buttressed his position.
He has kept a low profile since his ruthless persecution by the Thought Police nearly a decade ago, but the recent tar-and-feathering of Lawrence Summers for suggesting that innate sex differences might have something to do with the low numbers of women at elite levels in science and mathematics was more than he could bear in silence. It is brave of him to speak up again, because he is sure to get little but contumely and derision for his efforts. I encourage all to read this essay, and to try to do so with an open mind.
September 8, 2005 – 1:05 am
I have been preoccupied by discussions with Bill Vallicella in this space, and should give him a moment’s peace.
In a letter to the New York Times (fifth letter down), one Linnda Caporael shows us once again how deeply entrenched the perverse cultural doctrine that Steven Pinker calls “The Blank Slateâ€still is. MS Caporael writes (italics mine):
David Brooks is right to see that the “bursting point†has come (column, Sept. 4), but it does not include “the elemental violence of human nature.â€
There is no such thing as human nature without culture and its institutions. The message of Katrina was not from Hobbes; it was from a neoconservative leadership: “Starve the beast,†feed the rich, abandon the poor, disgrace the nation. That’s not a natural disaster; it’s an American tragedy.
September 6, 2005 – 11:24 pm
Yesterday I left a comment on a post by Bill Vallicella (who maintains one of the most interesting sites anywhere in the blogosphere) about Richard Dawkins’ antipathy toward the “theory†of Intelligent Design. Dr. Vallicella has responded here, and I’ll take this opportunity to respond to his response.
There has been quite a ruction lately about the Topeka, Kansas school board’s wish to accommodate literalist Christians by introducing new teaching standards for biology. The proposed guidelines would suggest to the impressionable student that the Darwinian idea, in which modern organisms (including humans) arose through a lengthy process of evolution by natural selection, is mere scientific dogma, and that an alternative account of the phenomena — “intelligent design†– should be given serious consideration.
