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.
November 14, 2007 – 11:50 pm
You may have noticed that a great many people seem to really, really hate George W. Bush. Here in Park Slope, Brooklyn, one of the “bluest” neighborhoods in America, there’s a tacit assumption on the part of everyone you meet that you, too, really, really hate George W. Bush. And why do all the people here make that assumption? It’s because they themselves really, really hate George W. Bush, and because everyone else they know around here really, really hates George W. Bush too.
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November 14, 2007 – 1:06 am
Thanks to our friend Dennis Mangan, the curmudgeonly proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, for commenting at his website on our recent post The Teflon God. Dennis — with whom, by the way, we generally agree about most things — raises the objection, often made, that some of the worst brutality in recent history was committed by atheistic regimes. This is undeniably true, but I think that it misses the main point, which is that these horrors ought more reasonably to be charged against totalitarian, Utopian, social-engineering schemes — which often take the form of secular “religions” themselves, as I mentioned in this post — than to atheism per se, which, in contrast to most religions, asserts no normative ideology of its own. Indeed, I would lay much of the responsibility for the mass brutality of the Russian, Chinese, and Khmer Rouge regimes upon the pernicious nature of Communism itself, which can only enforce equality of wealth by institutionalizing an enormous inequality of power, with predictably corrupting effect.
The mistake here, then, I think, is to confuse “Godless and wicked” with “Godless, therefore wicked”.
November 13, 2007 – 12:32 am
The battle rages unabated between the pious and the heathens. Here’s tonight’s salvo:
All things dull and ugly, All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty, The Lord God made the lot;
Each little snake that poisons, Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom, He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous, All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous, The Lord God made them all.
Each nasty little hornet, Each beastly little squid.
Who made the spikey urchin? Who made the sharks? He did.
All things scabbed and ulcerous, All pox both great and small.
Putrid, foul and gangrenous, The Lord God made them all.
– From Monty Python, of course.
November 12, 2007 – 1:46 am
I apologize for the sloppy editing of yesterday’s post. I try to be careful, but it is in the nature of daily blogging that occasionally one’s vigilance will waver, and poorly proofread material will go into print. The post contained both a repeated passage and a mistaken double negative, both of which have been corrected.
I do seem to have been harping on religion and politics too much lately, but unfortunately I’m reminded daily how important they are. There is vociferous debate all around, and I hate to let some of what I read go unrebutted.
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November 11, 2007 – 12:10 am
As you know, the debate between theists and a-theists is heating up a bit lately. (That we can even have such a debate is a healthy trend, considering that in earlier days such disputes were resolved by burning the nonbeliever at the stake.) There will, of course, be no resolution of it, as theists make claims that are carefully tuned to be unfalsifiable, then insist that, simply by virtue of being unfalsifiable, they are every bit as respectable as models that include no supernatural agents. (One of this faction’s most articulate spokesmen is Dr. William Vallicella, who has joined the battle again in recent posts, and who defends his theism with considerable agility.)
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November 9, 2007 – 11:45 pm
Some pressing personal matters having laid claim to my attention these past two days, I have had no time for writing. So for tonight, it’s “America’s Finest News Source” to the rescue, with two important stories. The first describes a startling discovery that might be just what our flagging economy needs, and the second follows a great man of letters on his mission to preserve a vital cultural resource.
November 8, 2007 – 4:48 pm
A new book focuses on the lifelong loyalty and admiration that Winston Churchill, whom I consider one of the very greatest men in all of Western history, held for the Jews. I’ve just heard about it today, in a Wall Street Journal opinion-page item, but I’m sure I’ll be getting a copy. The article itself is worth a look too. An excerpt:
After the war, Churchill felt that the most fitting response to the Holocaust would be to punish those guilty of the most horrific crimes against the Jews and to fulfill the promise of a Jewish homeland that he and Britain had made almost 30 years earlier. When Ernest Bevin, Britain’s Labour Party foreign minister, hesitated to recognize Israel nine months after its founding, for fear of inflaming Arab opinion, Churchill swung back hard: “Whether the Right Honorable Gentleman likes it or not, the coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years.” Israel was just recompense, Churchill felt, not only for what the Jews of Europe had lost but for what they had given to civilization over the centuries.
This view, of course, no longer prevails. Today the existence of Israel is apparently something to be regretted, even deplored, not only in Arab capitals but in European ones and on American university campuses. Paradoxically, such feelings intensified after 9/11, an event that should have made us all aware of who the friends of Western civilization really are–and who its enemies. Martin Gilbert’s book reminds us that anti-Semitism is the dark turn of the modern mind against itself, and a form of cultural patricide.
You can read the whole piece here.
November 8, 2007 – 12:03 am
I’m too lazy to write anything tonight, so it’s Hitchens to the rescue. No, not that Hitchens, but his brother Peter, who writes for the UK Sunday Mail.
The item at hand deals with a pet peeve of my own: the pretentious and unnecessary revision of familiar place-names. In my day Ceylon has become Sri Lanka, Peking Beijing, Cambodia Kampuchea, Bombay Mumbai, Burma Myanmar, and so forth. It is a great bloody nuisance, and I am not the only one who thinks so, as we learn here.
November 7, 2007 – 12:59 am
The discussion of Divine Command Theory linked to in yesterday’s post is fascinating for me in more ways than one. I find it of interest not only in itself, as a thoughtful examination of an ancient and vexatious philosophical problem, but also on another, deeper level as well.
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November 6, 2007 – 12:54 am
Given that I have arranged to sell off most of each day to a medium-sized international corporation, leaving me in possession of only a few meager hours each evening in which to pursue my own diverse interests, I find myself, as does anyone whose assets are insufficient to satisfy his needs, having to scrimp and budget. So this evening, rather than spend an hour or two meticulously whittling into shape an original blog-post of my own, I gave the time over to what I knew would be some interesting reading — and, careful shopper that I am, I was well satisfied with the purchase.
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November 4, 2007 – 11:48 pm
Readers may be pleased to know that we did not in fact perish in this weekend’s storm, and are once again safely back in Gotham.
I will say, though, that it was quite a ride: the winds did indeed perform as expected, knocking down many trees, and by Saturday afternoon had blacked out the entire outer Cape from Eastham up through Truro. Saturday night was, I must say, rather a grim business, and a fine display of malevolent, elemental fury. (Mighty dark, too.) But our sturdy little house emerged unscathed.
By Sunday morning Noel had moved on, and the skies were clear. As it turned out, though, more peril lay in store.
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November 3, 2007 – 2:41 pm
As promised, the former Hurricane Noel is giving Cape Cod a virile rogering. The outer Cape — a narrow, longitudinal wisp of sand that comprises the picturesque villages of Chatham, Orleans, Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown — juts a long way out into the Atlantic, and is getting a far stiffer dose than points west.
I’m writing from a wooded hilltop in Wellfleet (on the west side of town, just off Chequessett Neck Road), and while the house itself appears to be in no immediate danger of being hurled from its moorings, I am less confident about the trees all round, which are having a very stressful day. Fortunately, the dead pine I mentioned yesterday, which stands only about three feet from the deck at the north end of the house, has already lost most of its branches, so the wind is having a hard time getting a purchase on what remains.
The worst, though, is apparently yet to come, with wind gusts up to 90 or 100 m.p.h. predicted for the early evening. It may well be that we will be losing electrical power at some point, which of course will mean that we will be off the air either until it is restored, or we flee back to Gotham. If, however, our number’s really up (and I must say it is getting awfully windy outside), well, it has been a pleasure getting to know you, friends, and don’t forget to browse our archives.
November 2, 2007 – 10:10 pm
We’re up at our little retreat on the far end of Cape Cod tonight, awaiting the arrival of the former Hurricane Noel, which is supposed to give these parts a pretty good thumping over the next 24 hours or so. I’m glad to be here for the storm — not only because I enjoy dramatic weather, which I do, but also because there’s a dead pine tree right outside that I haven’t got around to cutting down yet, and if it falls on the house I’d like to know about it sooner rather than later.
It’s been such a lazy day that I haven’t prepared anything much for tonight’s edition, so I’ll just pass along a couple of items that I happen to have lying around.
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October 31, 2007 – 11:31 pm
From our old friend Peter Kranzler comes a link and a question. The link is to this news item, which tells us that the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, has been ordered to pay $10.9 million to relatives of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq, after church members jeered at people attending his funeral.
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October 30, 2007 – 11:34 pm
I’ve been a fan of Don Van Vliet, alias Captain Beefheart, for a very long time. Though you may not be familiar with him, he is one of the more influential figures in late 20th-century American music, and without question one of the oddest.
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October 29, 2007 – 10:20 pm
Which animals live the longest? That’s right: clams. And according to today’s Physorg.com newsletter, we have a new champion. Learn more here.
October 28, 2007 – 11:34 pm
I’ve just watched the debate I mentioned a few days ago: between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza on the topic Is Christianity The Problem? It was as interesting as I had expected; these are two sharp minds.
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October 26, 2007 – 3:25 pm
I haven’t time just now to write at length, but want to draw your attention to an excellent article, by one Sarah Baxter, from London’s Sunday Times. It examines the convergence between the Far Left and radical Islam, which arises from a confluence of several interests, loathing of America and resentment toward Israel being foremost among them.
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October 25, 2007 – 10:54 pm
It’s late, and I haven’t had time to prepare anything for this evening, so for now I invite you all to go and read two interesting posts over at Kevin Kim’s place. The first is his reaction to the D’Souza – Hitchens debate, and the second is an item about Hugh Everett’s “Many Worlds Interpretation” of quantum mechanics, which has just received a bit of a boost from some recent scientific work. (You might like to read this Wikipedia article for a little background.)
Service will be gappy for the next couple of days; I’ll be on the road, and won’t be back until Sunday. And by the way, I’ve recently gone back over our voluminous archives to create a “Favorite Posts” category, so if you’d like to browse those in the meanwhile, please do. Comments are always open.
October 24, 2007 – 10:31 pm
On Monday evening Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza squared off for a debate at The Ethical Culture Society’s Manhattan auditorium; the topic was “Is Christianity the Problem?” I first heard about it from my friend The Stiletto, who sent me a link to an item by D’Souza announcing the event.
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October 23, 2007 – 11:32 pm
In today’s New York Times is a review, by Michiko Kakutani, of The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, by the feminist author Susan Faludi. I haven’t read the book, and I am not about to comment on it.
I did, however, read an Op-Ed piece by Ms. Faludi back on September 7th, in which she articulated the principal theme of her book: that America is founded on a mythos of helpless women and protective men, and that the circumstances that originally fostered this mindset — American settlers at risk of Indian attacks as they began to tame the wilderness — were similar enough to the terror-haunted post-9/11 U.S. that this primeval worldview is ascendant once again, in political and popular culture.
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October 23, 2007 – 12:00 am
In a recent post at his Maverick Philosopher website, Bill Vallicella responds to the following brief remark by philosopher Jim Ryan:
The reason I’m an atheist is straightforward. The proposition that there is a god is as unlikely as ghosts, Martians amongst us, and reincarnation. There isn’t the slightest evidence for these hypotheses which fly in the face of so much else that we know to be true. So I believe all of them to be false.
I agree with most of what Ryan says here, but consider Bill to be as nimble and astute a theist as one is likely to find, so I was interested to see how he would reply.
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October 21, 2007 – 11:17 pm
A couple of days ago the Nobel laureate James Watson was all over the news: he had expressed, in an interview for the London Times, his opinion that scientific results indicated that black Africans were, on average, less intelligent than white Northerners. In a subsequent article, we read:
Dr Watson, who runs one of America’s leading scientific research institutions, made the controversial remarks in an interview in The Sunday Times.
The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa’ because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”. He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true’.
He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level’. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so’.
It’s not surprising that this has caused quite a stir. From the Left, we hear cries of racism. And from the Right, we hear that Dr. Watson is being unfairly vilified for refusing to put political correctness before impartial scientific inquiry.
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October 21, 2007 – 12:01 am
In a previous post, I commented, perhaps a bit archly, upon the recent decision of the Portland, ME school board to give birth-control pills to young children without parental notification. While it is easy enough (and fun!) simply to jeer and scoff, now that I’ve got that out of the way I suppose we should address the possibility that, however remote it may seem, there was some rational process, some explicable motus mentis, behind the school-system’s decision.
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October 20, 2007 – 1:18 pm
In my morning visit to Kevin Kim’s place I found this post, in which he calls our attention to a hilarious video clip.
This is not a family-oriented link (except in the sense, perhaps, of creating one). Adults only, please.
October 20, 2007 – 12:07 am
In today’s Times we learn that the King Middle School of Portland, Maine, will be doling out birth-control pills to its pupils. Eligible candidates will be as young as 11, and parents will not be notified. If you don’t believe me, take a moment to read the story for yourself.
Readers will, of course, already be aware that I am a reactionary killjoy, a superannuated mossback, a benighted atavism, and am utterly out of step with the brisk accelerando of 21st-century social reform. So it should come as no shock that I think this is breathtaking in its lunacy.
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October 18, 2007 – 10:57 pm
There are several things in the news that are worth mentioning tonight; in particular I’d like to ruminate a bit on the James Watson imbroglio. But I’ve just got back from teaching class down at the kwoon, and it’s too late to begin a long post (especially as my forearms are a bit banged up, rendering typing somewhat unpleasant). So the difficult subject of what to do about awkward scientific results will have to wait, I’m afraid.
I’d be remiss, though, if I didn’t pause to thank Joe Torre for all the wonderful years he gave us as Yankees skipper. He will be a mighty hard act to follow.
But you know, of course, that I won’t send you away empty-handed. So here is tonight’s wisp of Internet froth: an engaging optical illusion, complete with pop-psych rubbish about brain-hemisphere dominance.
October 17, 2007 – 9:45 pm
As I was poking around at the newly added Policeman’s Blog (see our previous post), I came across an item that featured the video below, in which we learn how a proper Musselman is expected to treat the ladies.
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October 17, 2007 – 9:36 pm
If you’re like me — and I have no reason to assume you aren’t — you’ve been wondering: what is it really like to be an English policeman, anyway?
Well, wonder no more, thanks to the latest addition to our sidebar (courtesy of the estimable Deogulwulf): The Policeman’s Blog.
October 17, 2007 – 12:30 am
I took a stroll through town this evening after work: from Grand Central down to the Lower East Side, with a stop at Pete’s Tavern to have a drink with a friend. The night air was enjoyable, and it was good to stir my bones after sitting at my desk in the office all day.
It was good, also, to be reminded of what a vibrant place New York City is. I tend to withdraw, especially lately; I’ve had plenty of hustle and bustle in my day, and have little need of crowds and noise. These days I generally prefer the quiet of our wooded hilltop in Wellfleet to the clamor and din of Midtown, and when the weather is too warm for my liking — as it has been until this week — I find being out in Gotham’s congested streets rather difficult to bear.
But on a clear and pleasant autumn evening it was easy to remember why I love this city. New York comes to life in the fall, and I felt surrounded and buoyed by its bracing, positive energy. Young couples were everywhere, getting about the important business of enjoying themselves, and one another. Two old Cajuns were playing banjo and fiddle at Cooper Square. The Bowery, once a metaphor for destitution, bustled with upscale nightlife. And even the unlovely Lower East Side — Delancey Street, Allen Street, and environs — seemed warm and welcoming, and throbbed with life.
I guess there’s no place like home.
October 16, 2007 – 12:41 am
I’ve just read Sam Harris’s Letter To A Christian Nation. It is brief — one can finish it in an hour or so — but pungent.
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October 14, 2007 – 12:04 am
Today was the occasion of the 7th Annual Wellfleet OysterFest, and, as usual, folks came from all over to visit our charming seaside village, to browse the displays put up by our many artists and craftspeople, and, first and foremost, to gorge upon the succulent bivalves for which the town is justly famed. The beer flowed, the bands played, the weather was clear and cool — in short, it was a splendid occasion. I wish you all could have been here.
Readers may recall my brief account of last year’s bacchanal, which, though generally a delightful event, was tragically marred by this reporter’s elimination in the later rounds of the annual OysterFest Spelling Bee. Well, at the risk of seeming immodest, I am pleased to report a happier conclusion to this year’s tournament: after many rounds of sanguinary combat with some truly outstanding competitors (not to mention a few heart-stopping missteps, including one egregious error), I managed to come away with First Prize.
There is a tinge of sadness in the realization that one simply has no mountains left to conquer, but for now I’m just savoring the moment.
October 12, 2007 – 4:09 pm
By now you have probably heard of Second Life, the enormously popular online “world”. I’ve poked around in it a bit myself, but am such a reclusive old grouch that I haven’t been inclined to hang around much. (One of the things I have found off-putting is the lack of a good audio interface, which has meant that one must communicate by typing — though I understand they’re working on that.) But I can see why it’s doing well; you can do and see and build all sorts of creative things, if you aren’t already worn out from writing code all day long at work, and you can certainly meet all sorts of people, from all over the place. (Well, not all sorts, I suppose: you aren’t, for example, likely to meet many technology-shy, bookish sorts, or blind people, or my mother-in-law, or Sentinalese tribesmen. But you get the idea.)
Anyway, it’s easy to imagine that Second Life would be a nice getaway for folks who are confined in one way or another in their real lives: lighthouse keepers, say, or the endungeoned. Now we find, thanks to today’s Physorg.com newsletter, that Japanese scientists are working on a way to make Second Life available to paraplegics by allowing them to control the user-interface with their thoughts alone.
Learn more here.