January 8, 2008 – 5:15 pm
We read here that the Supreme Court is considering the legality of the most widely used method of lethal injection, on the grounds that it may cause undue suffering to the party being executed, thereby running afoul of the Constitutional proscription regarding “cruel and unusual” punishment.
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January 8, 2008 – 10:39 am
There are two interesting editorial items in the Wall Street Journal this morning. Some of you won’t like them — particularly the first one, because it is by Fouad Ajami, whose viewpoint is far from neutral, and because it says some good things about George Bush, and about our recent adventures in the East. (There may be accusations of “twaddle”.) Nevertheless, I think it is worth reading, if only for the sake of balance. Feel free to fire away.
The second piece, by Bret Stephens, is about how our uncommonly good fortune here in America gives us a slightly skewed perspective about what real troubles are.
Have a look here, and here.
January 8, 2008 – 12:04 am
After twenty-five years or so of making my living in recording studios, I decided, a few years back, with two kids to put through college and the recording industry in ruins, to take up software engineering. I taught myself the programming language C++, and managed to get a new career off the ground (though I still do some recording, usually an album or two a year).
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January 6, 2008 – 10:31 pm
A little while ago I ran across an interesting, if rather sad, item in the Physorg.com daily newsletter, having to do with the small stature of pygmies. Previous notions had been that having such wee bodies better adapted them to food shortages, or to moving about in dense forests, but neither of these explanations has held up well.
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January 5, 2008 – 10:34 pm
As each new year begins I enjoy looking back at all the search keyphrases that have brought readers by for a visit in the previous twelve months. According to my server’s statistics-gathering software, there were 1379 of them in 2007 (although, annoyingly, it only explicitly displays the first thousand). As usual, it’s an odd assortment, reflecting how scatterbrained this website is.
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January 4, 2008 – 11:29 pm
Our reader and commenter Charles, proprietor of the excellent weblog Liminality, has pointed out that the little “Captcha” feature that I am forced to use in order to block comment spam is a time-wasting nuisance. So I’d like to remind all of you that you can register here for a login of your own, which will allow you to post comments without having to deal with that damnable irritation every time.
January 4, 2008 – 11:14 pm
I apologize for my tendency to bang away on certain topics without respite sometimes; I’ve done this in the past with things like mind-body dualism, and seem to be on a bit of tear about religious faith lately. These issues really nag at me: they seem important, and religion in particular is far more than an abstract philosophical or existential problem when people worldwide are butchering one another daily over it, the American electorate makes it a primary criterion for selecting its leaders, and creationists are battering at the doors of the nation’s science classrooms.
But enough of that for now. Here’s some more good news about beer.
January 4, 2008 – 12:33 am
We wrote recently on the “problem of evil”, and argued that it is hardly necessary that good and evil be absolute, objective features of the world for subjective beings like us to have difficulty reconciling the notion of an omnipotent, loving, and infinitely merciful God with the gruesome and arbitrary suffering we see all around us, and with the many horrendous examples of divinely encouraged murder, rape, torture, enslavement and genocide that are reported in the Bible.
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January 2, 2008 – 11:54 pm
One of the most interesting features of the website Edge.org has been the Edge Annual Question, which each year presents a stimulating question to an assortment of the world’s brightest minds. Past posers have included What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?, What Questions Have Disappeared?, What Is The Most Important Invention In The Past Two Thousand Years? (that would be the air-conditioner, if you ask me), and What Is Today’s Most Important Unreported Story?, among others.
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January 1, 2008 – 11:41 pm
Our friend The Stiletto wonders, in a recent post, how an irreligious voter might go about selecting a candidate, given the way they’ve been elbowing each other aside to crow about their faith:
” Romney Didn’t Win Any Converts: Rarely does someone get the chance truly to see things from another’s perspective. Having read as much as she can about Joseph Smith, the angel Moroni and the tenets of Mormonism – admittedly, mostly from LDS-sanctioned sources that omit doctrinal beliefs non-Mormons are not meant to know ”“ The Stiletto has a pretty good idea what atheists think of all the miraculous (supernatural) events described in the Old and New Testaments that believers take on faith. When he’s settled back into his post-holiday routine, The Stiletto will ask her pal at waka waka waka to explain how an atheist decides for whom to vote, considering that every candidate holds a variety of “irrational’ and “fraudulent’ religious beliefs ”“ her curiosity on the matter having been raised by this editorial in The Guardian (London), which asks: “Could you vote for a man who abides by Moronish wisdom?’
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December 31, 2007 – 11:49 pm
… is something I won’t be doing here. I just want to thank all of you once again for reading and commenting, and to wish all of you a splendid 2008.
Warmest regards to you all!
December 30, 2007 – 3:07 am
In a recent post Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, examines an argument an atheist might make about the existence or nonexistence of God in light of the “problem of evil”. What he has written is good as far as it goes, but the argument he examines is not, I think, one that atheists generally make.
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December 28, 2007 – 6:42 pm
The columnist, author and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan has an item today in the Wall Street Journal in which she rates the current crop of Presidential candidates according to her slogan for 2008: “Reasonable Person for President”. She is herself a reasonable person, and while our assessments diverge in spots, I agree with much that she has to say. In particular I share her view of Hillary Clinton:
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December 27, 2007 – 12:40 am
After a full day at work, and an evening at the kwoon, it appears another day has got away from me. We will be traveling tomorrow, so it appears that, as they say, “blogging will be light” for a little while. Things might not get back to normal until after the New Year, though there is much I’d like to take up if the opportunity presents itself. (Oh, to be a “man of independent means”, and not have to continue to sell off my dwindling reserve of days! How sweet it would be to keep those that remain for my own ends.)
Meanwhile, have a look at this post over at Bill Vallicella’s place. I’d be curious to know what you think.
December 25, 2007 – 1:40 am
To all of you. I am very fortunate indeed to have such intelligent, friendly and gracious visitors, and I wish you all a wonderful holiday.
December 23, 2007 – 6:38 pm
Well, today is the first full day of winter, so it’s time for some spiritually uplifting and seasonally appropriate material. Have a look here.
December 22, 2007 – 9:22 pm
Following a link from Bill Vallicella, I’ve just read a review of the movie Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, in which the reviewer, the historian Ronald Radosh — who knew Seeger personally, and admires him as an artist and a man of peace, generally — nonetheless calls attention to the unrepentance of those of the American Left, including a great many beloved folk musicians, who strove on behalf of the Communist Party for much of the 20th century.
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December 21, 2007 – 11:40 pm
I’ve mentioned the website Edge.org on several occasions; it is a fascinating place, an online salon where some of the world’s brightest minds exchange ideas — and occasionally “cross hands”, as we say in the martial-arts racket. In its most recent newsletter, its founder, John Brockman offers us the site’s annual recommended-reading list, and laments the absence of similar material in any of the more prominent year-end literary roundups:
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December 20, 2007 – 11:55 pm
This is a busy time, and although there are some weighty topics to return to, I think they may have to wait until things quiet down a bit.
But there’s a bottomless well of entertaining material to pass along, and tonight I offer a tasty morsel.
From my old friend, the great recording engineer Larry Alexander, comes a link to a delightful animation of the Drifters performing a Christmas classic.We hear lead singer Bill Pinkney as Santa, and the late Clyde McPhatter providing the high notes. Here it is. Enjoy.
December 19, 2007 – 11:50 pm
One of the pitfalls of airing one’s thoughts in public on a daily basis is that one’s thoughts vary in quality, and some are better left unexpressed. I wrote a post a few days ago about falsifiability and theism that was a pretty poor piece of work, and so I have taken it down. Apologies to all.
December 19, 2007 – 12:51 am
I’ve learned a new word: whalefall. It refers to the effect of reduced buoyancy upon deceased cetaceans, and came up today in an interesting and educational context.
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December 18, 2007 – 1:47 am
Here’s an entertaining article on pentagonal tilings. (I worked rather late tonight…)
December 17, 2007 – 12:21 am
The city government here in Gotham has been wringing its hands for some time now about how to reduce traffic congestion, which is indeed very bad. The suggestions that have been aired so far have generally taken the form of small-bore monetary disincentives: a fee for driving below 96th street during the week, tolls on the East River bridges, and so forth. These have been met, in each instance, with predictable opposition from whichever group is about to get its ox gored. For example, we Brooklynites were vociferously defended earlier today by our plucky and voluble champion, borough president Marty Markowitz, against a proposed eight-dollar toll on the Brooklyn Bridge, on the grounds that it would be blatantly discriminatory. (The logic may or may not be valid, but the passion was genuine.)
If I may, I think I have the answer. All that should be necessary is to take, quite at random, a dozen or so cars each week off the streets of Manhattan, give the drivers exactly sixty seconds to remove their belongings, and then crush the vehicles into compact lozenges of scrap metal. Under such a system there would be no burdensome tolls, and nary a whiff of discrimination. Given that far more cars must surely be destroyed each week by random events such as steam-pipe explosions, building collapses, helicopter mishaps, high-speed police chases, and drug-gang quarrels, the effect would be, for the most part, purely psychological. But I’ll bet after a month or two you’d be able to hop in your car on a Friday at lunchtime and drive river to river in two minutes flat.
If you’re lucky.
December 13, 2007 – 11:55 pm
It may not have escaped your notice that the readable content available on the World Wide Web, though generally of very high quality in terms of both educational utility and literary style, contains a sparse admixture of comparatively shoddy material. This is, of course, an unavoidable consequence of the democratic nature of the Internet, and until now it seemed that there was nothing that could be done.
There are some very clever people in the world, however, and fortunately for the rest of us, a few of them have now applied their talents to this problem, with promising results. Have a look here.
December 13, 2007 – 12:52 am
After eleven hours in the office (and an hour each way to get there and back), I’m simply too depleted tonight, dear readers, to whip up a new tub of froth. But there’s no need to look so glum, because I still have a little treat for you all. As it happens, my old friend Eugene Jen has sent along a transcript of a slender volume written long ago by the great P.T. Barnum on the subject of “money-getting”. His advice is timeless, and his style is engaging, as you might well imagine. You can find it here.
December 12, 2007 – 12:14 am
I’ve found another fun way to waste your time: a website that ranks the “education level” of your favorite blogs.
I should warn you that I have absolutely no idea how the rankings are determined. Perhaps the algorithm is based upon complexity of sentence structure (such as, for example, the use of parenthetical clauses); maybe it looks for indicators such as proper compound-adjective hyphenation, occurrences of sesquipedalian words, or usage of words, once common, that have now fallen into desuetude.
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December 10, 2007 – 10:41 pm
Have you ever heard of symbolics.com? I hadn’t either. But this humble domain has an important distinction: it was the first .com name ever registered.
If you’re curious, you can find a list of the first 100 here.
December 9, 2007 – 11:55 pm
As one of the wretched unbelievers that Mitt Romney has now clearly identified as foes of God’s favorite country, I’d like, as a further act of sedition, to share with you an excellent speech that Sam Harris gave to a roomful of atheists back in late September. Harris has a supple mind, and he has been keeping it limber. Among the points he makes in this excellent piece are several that may have ruffled some feathers even among the damned souls in attendance.
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December 8, 2007 – 12:32 am
It should come as no surprise that Christopher Hitchens had something to say about Mitt Romney’s speech last night. From his latest piece in Slate, a sample:
Romney does not understand the difference between deism and theism, nor does he know the first thing about the founding of the United States. Jefferson’s Declaration may invoke a “Creator,” but, as he went on to show in the battle over the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, he and most of his peers did not believe in a god who intervened in human affairs or in a god who had sent a son for a human sacrifice. These easily ascertainable facts are reflected in the way that the U.S. Constitution does not make any mention of a superintendent deity and in the way that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention declined an offer (possibly sarcastic), even from Benjamin Franklin, that they resort to prayer to compose their differences. Romney may throw a big chest and say that God should be “on our currency, in our pledge,” and of course on our public land in this magic holiday season, but James Madison did not think that there should be chaplains opening the proceedings of Congress or even appointed as ministers in the U.S. armed forces. Trying to dodge around this, and to support his assertion that the founders were religious in the Christian sense, Romney drones on about a barely relevant moment of emotion in 1774 and comes up with the glib slogan that “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Any fool can think of an example where freedom exists without religion””and even more easily of an instance where religion exists without (or in negation of) freedom.
Amen. Read the whole thing here.
December 7, 2007 – 1:26 pm
Well, we’re all still drying off after our dousing last night from Mitt Romney’s Gatorade barrel of holy water. Like JFK in 1960, Romney saw that his campaign was imperiled by a controversial religious affiliation; in this case, however, the risk was not that he was afraid of being seen as some sort of religious kook, but rather that he might be seen as the wrong sort of religious kook. Despite previous assurances that the particulars of a President’s religion don’t matter, as long as he has plenty of it, Mitt now feels the need to reassure the fundamentalist Protestant Republican base that he is every bit as tight with Jesus as they are, and that trivial details — such as polygamy, or that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri, and so forth — need not come between them.
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December 6, 2007 – 10:59 pm
I was gratified today to learn that the album Borrowed Time, which I recorded and mixed last winter for my old pal, the great jazz guitarist Steve Khan, has just been nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Latin Jazz Album” category. Steve is an outstandingly creative musician, and he certainly deserves this nomination. The record is a splendid example of his talents not only as a player, but also as composer and arranger, and the performances — by Steve, John Patitucci, Jack DeJohnette, Randy Brecker, Bob Mintzer, Manolo Badrena, Ralph Irizarry, and other luminaries — are of exceptional quality. I’m proud to have been at the console for this project.
You can read a typical review here.
December 5, 2007 – 6:14 pm
Okay, after a sobering preliminary dose of Darwinian nihilism, time for a few yuks. Meet Mrs. Hughes.
December 5, 2007 – 3:42 pm
With a “hat tip” to the Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella, here is Garry Kasparov’s account of his recent arrest and imprisonment (as noted in these pages last week).
December 5, 2007 – 12:58 am
In Daniel Dennett’s most important book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, he makes with brilliant clarity the case that Darwin’s great insight — arguably, I think, the greatest ever had by anyone, so far at least — is, as Dennett calls it, a “universal acid”, eating at the foundations of many of Man’s smugly cherished notions about himself. I believe he is right about this, but I have also thought for some time now that even Dennett, arch-naturalist that he is, has stopped short of acknowledging what is perhaps the most unsettling conclusion of Darwinism:
There are no objective moral truths.
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December 4, 2007 – 1:10 am
There’s much more that I want to say about the important questions raised in the previous post, but for tonight I just want to let you know about a website I’ve just run across. It’s called Philosophy Talk, and it’s associated with a radio show by the same name. The show is hosted each week by two Stanford University philosophers: Ken Taylor, the chairman of the philosophy department, and John Perry, the Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy.
The website offers downloadable recordings of archived programs for a nominal fee, but if you don’t want to pay for your own copies you can listen to them as streaming audio at no cost.
There are an awful lot of shows in the archive, featuring some well-known guests. Topics include Consciousness, with David Chalmers; The Mystery of Mind, with John Searle, Predicting the Future, with Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan); Intelligent Design, with Daniel Dennett; Philosophy and Neuroscience, with Patricia Churchland, and dozens and dozens more, on all the Big Questions: free will, religion, truth, art, beauty, love, virtue, time, evil, you name it. It looks like a hugely entertaining resource.
As I’m always saying, there just aren’t enough hours in a day. Or days in a life.
You can find the site here. Onto the sidebar it goes.
December 2, 2007 – 11:46 pm
Readers will probably be familiar with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Muslim apostate and political writer. You may have heard of her in connection with the film Submission, about the opression of women under Islam — for which she wrote the screenplay, and for which its director Theo van Gogh was murdered in an Amsterdam street by a Muslim zealot.
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December 2, 2007 – 12:57 am
Zoologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins has become a household name lately — not because of his decades of creative academic work, and his outstandingly informative and accessible books on biology and the Darwinian paradigm, but because of his in-your-face denial of God — which has probably, on balance, earned him more enemies than supporters here in the ultra-religious United States. And I’d be the first to admit, fan that I am, that his “people skills” are perhaps not everything they could be, and that he might actually advance his cause — one with which I am in general agreement — more effectively if he were able to make his perfectly reasonable point a tad less condescendingly.
But however you feel about the man, he is a disciplined professional, and he does his homework. My old PubSub pal Eugene Jen has just sent me an excellent example, both of Dawkins’s thoroughness and some outstanding blogospheric geekery. Have a look here.
November 30, 2007 – 11:35 pm
After a truly debilitating holiday bacchanal last night, followed (almost immediately, it seemed) by a long day at work, I’m far too pooped to post. But I do have something interesting for you to read, if you like.
Anyone who pays attention to scientific and technological topics (or who reads the little messages generated by email spam filters) has probably heard of Bayes’ Theorem. If you’ve ever wondered what it was all about, you need wonder no more. Eliezer Yudkowsky has put together a wonderful essay about Reverend Thomas Bayes, “by far the most enigmatic figure in mathematical history”, and his marvelous theorem. Have a look here.
November 29, 2007 – 1:49 am
Readers of the New York Times will be familiar with Verlyn Klinkenborg, who contributes marvelous little essays to the editorial page. He lives on a small farm in upstate New York (“upstate” being a preposterously Gotham-centric term for the 97% of New York State that isn’t part of New York City or Long Island), and most of his pieces are evocative miniatures about rural life. I admire his writing very much; it is eloquent, graceful, and richly expressive.
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November 27, 2007 – 11:06 pm
Having set such a breezy tone with my previous post, I’m sorry to have to get back to more serious matters. But I’ve just been presented with further evidence, in case any was lacking, that Western civilization is indeed circling the drain: apparently the first season of Sesame Street, from way back in 1969, has just been released on DVD — and such delicate creatures, such timorous little milquetoasts, have we become in a mere 38 years that the recordings have been marked as unsuitable for children.
No wonder the barbarians are at the gate. Learn more here.
November 27, 2007 – 1:18 am
It is difficult for a thoughtful person to get into his fifties without a persistent and lurking awareness of our mortal brevity. At this point in life even those who have been fortunate enough to have been spared frequent doses of calamity have lost a good friend or a family member, and by the half-century mark even the best-cared-for bodies are showing signs of irreversible and accumulating wear. This simple fact — that we die — is, due to the curious malformations of our psyche, something that we either go out of our way to avoid, like the landlady to whom our rent is in arrears, or that we ogle with palpitating, pornographic fascination. It is a focal point of all that we do not understand and cannot conceive. It confronts us not only with the unimaginable prospect of the evaporation of our subjective awareness (though why that should be such a horror, given that it is simply the state we occupied for all the eons preceding our birth, and given also that that which does not exist cannot suffer), but also deepens the mystery of our subjective experience of time.
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November 25, 2007 – 10:56 pm
We note that former world chess champion Garry Kasparov has been arrested in Russia for leading a protest rally. According to reports he has been sentenced to five days in jail.
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November 25, 2007 – 12:49 am
About two weeks ago, I posted a little item called The Teflon God, about the highly evolved and adaptive unfalsifiability of religious “memeplexes”, in response to an item by William Vallicella.
My post attracted the notice of Dennis Mangan, proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, and he commented on it in a post of his own, which in turn prompted me to respond here. The discussion has carried on since then over at Dennis’s place, where he has since posted a third item in the series.
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November 24, 2007 – 12:20 am
It was a long day at work; I didn’t get home until after ten, and haven’t had time to prepare anything for tonight. But, saving the day, my friend Jess Kaplan has brought an awfully provocative story to our attention. The topic is an exotic one, right at the edges of human knowledge and understanding, and I am certainly not in an position to comment on it tonight. It comes to us from Lawrence Krauss, for whom I have a great deal of respect. Have a look here.
November 22, 2007 – 1:45 pm
I’m too busy with the delightful chores of feast-preparation to write at length, so I just wanted to extend warmest wishes to all of you. High on the long list of things I have to be thankful for is the community of new friends I have met here at waka waka waka.
November 21, 2007 – 12:06 am
I don’t usually go in for sensational, gruesome stories in these pages, but having spent so much time today wrangling with commenters on the previous post, well, what the heck. Have a look here.
November 19, 2007 – 11:09 pm
I might as well not keep the media on tenterhooks any longer. At the risk of confirming suspicions that I am nothing more than a Republican tool ((Actually, I am a registered Democrat.)), I hereby let it be known that, as regards the bouquet of presidential candidates on offer this time around, the one most likely to pick up the official waka waka waka endorsement — so far at least — is Rudolph Giuliani. He has his peculiarities, to be sure, but they are not of the sort that bother me, and he is intelligent, principled, and consistent.
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November 18, 2007 – 3:55 am
I’m still in southern California, and have had no time for writing today. So here is some more Richard Feynman for you. This clip is about ten minutes long, and unfortunately begins in mid-sentence; of particular interest, however, is the section from about 5:15 on, in which he talks about the built-in uncertainty of science, the nature of doubt, and how hard it is for someone constituted as he is simply to “believe”.
Feynman articulates my own feelings about all of this almost exactly. How sad that he is gone.
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November 17, 2007 – 3:20 am
One of the men I admire most — a genuine intellectual hero — is the coruscatingly brilliant (and untimely departed) physicist Richard Feynman (he was from Brooklyn, of course).
Here he is.
November 16, 2007 – 6:41 am
I’m in San Marcos, San Diego County, California, for a couple of days, visiting my father. After a two-hour weather delay at JFK, another 50 minutes queued up on the runway waiting to take off, a six-hour flight, a fifteen-minute wait at LAX for an avaliable gate, a twenty-minute wait for luggage, and an hour and a half to pick up a car and drive down here, I have just arrived at the no-frills but serviceable Ramada Limited of San Marcos, at 2:30 a.m. (that’s 5:30 a.m. Gotham time).
So no post tonight.