Mass Confusion

September 13, 2007 – 11:35 am

To do physical science, one needs uniform references for fundamental quantities: length, duration, mass, and so forth. Over time, as the need for accuracy has increased, attempts have been made to place the fundamental units on ever more precise footing. For example, the reference meter, which was declared in 1791 by the French Academy of Sciences to be one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along a meridian running through Paris ((By the way, the measurement of this distance by a seven-year surveying expedition undertaken by Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre and Pierre François André Méchain is a fascinating story, and is told in the recent book The Measure of All Things, by Ken Alder.)), is now taken to be “the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.”

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, Technology | Comments (8)

Today’s Homework

September 12, 2007 – 11:39 pm

Here is some interesting reading for you all, courtesy of Edge.org.

First up is an essay called Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion, by Jonathan Haidt, in which he takes the “new atheists” to task for failing to develop a subtle enough appreciation of the adaptive underpinnings of religion, and of morality. He draws on recent shifts in how the notion of group selection is understood, and introduces some non-traditional functional concepts about morality.

Next, read responses by Michael Shermer, David Sloan Wilson, and Sam Harris, here.

I haven’t had time to digest all of this myself yet. Have a look, and let’s talk about it a little later.

By Malcolm | Posted in Darwin and Biology, Reason and Philosophy, Religion | Comments (1)

Joe Zawinul, 1932-2007

September 11, 2007 – 11:53 pm

I was saddened to see in today’s news that the great Joe Zawinul has died, of cancer, at the age of 75.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (1)

Really Good

September 10, 2007 – 10:27 am

As a software engineer, and a techie all my life, I don’t get all that excited about most of the products that come down the pipe. But this could really be the Next Big Thing: Windows RG. Have a look here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (1)

Clothes Make The Man

September 9, 2007 – 10:45 pm

Well, enough already, for now at least, with the religious stuff. I’m sure that readers are running for the hills after all that swooning about “numinous beauty and harmony”, etc. I had to make what I think is an important point, and I will return to it, I’m sure, before long, but for now, back to shallow-minded drivel, and lowbrow japery.

It’s Fashion Week here in Gotham, and every morning on the way to the midtown skyscraper where I arrange ones and zeroes for pennies a day, I pass by the big white tents in Bryant Park. West 40th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, is a buzzing hive of activity: news trucks, electrical equipment, reporters, caterers, fashion groupies, menials in various dusky shades, and of course the models, who are easy to spot: they’re the ones whose tuberculosis is apparently so advanced that they’ve been unable to eat for weeks.

Anyway, each morning as I pass by I gaze in wonderment at these elaborate temporary structures, which for a few magical days turn our charming little park into the Olympus of couture, knowing that within this temple of style — a venue that, for a homely schlub like me, is as inaccessible as the seraglio of Suleiman the Magnificent — the Illuminati are gathered to give the sacred codex of Fashion its equinoctical update.

As I trudge past this glittering palace to spend another day shackled to my oar, my heart is aflutter with curiosity. What will be on the runway today? What delicious flights of fancy are taking wing, to the delighted gasps of the fortunate few?

And the most important question of all: what will I be wearing this fall?

Well, wait no longer, friends. Have a look.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Rubbish | Comments (6)

No Praise, No Blame

September 8, 2007 – 10:17 pm

In last night’s post I tried to make clear that disbelief in God need not be correlated with the sort of spritual tone-deafness that Dr. William Vallicella argued for in a recent essay.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion | Comments (2)

Sweet Soul Music

September 7, 2007 – 11:55 pm

We have just passed the 10th anniversary of the death of Mother Teresa, and much is being made of letters, recently publicized, that indicate that she had grave doubts about the existence of God, and was deeply tormented by her own lack of faith.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion, Pretty Good Posts | Comments (11)

Don’t Get Up

September 7, 2007 – 12:20 am

I am not, nor have I ever been, a “morning person”. I enjoy the peace and solitude of the nighttime; it’s my only opportunity to think long, slow thoughts without interruption.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (9)

That Oughta Do It

September 5, 2007 – 1:45 pm

From Reuters, by way of our friend Jess Kaplan, comes a reassuring item about airline safety. Have a look here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (6)

Tempest in a Teapot

September 5, 2007 – 12:29 am

We note with grave concern that the legendary Shaolin Monks, the state-sponsored Chinese “wushu” outfit, have got their saffron-hued knickers in a knot over some incendiary remarks made by an anonymous commenter in an online forum of some sort.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Martial Arts, Pretty Good Posts | Comments (0)

This Magic Moment

September 2, 2007 – 10:52 pm

In Kevin Kim’s excellent book Water from a Skull (which I will be commenting on in greater detail as time permits — meanwhile, follow this link and buy a copy), he quotes Mark Salzman’s book Iron and Silk, in which kung fu master Pan Qingfu says “live each moment as if it were your last.”

Kevin’s book is fascinating, and I have already learned a great deal from it, but this aphorism, while not without a certain dashing appeal, is simply not good advice. If nothing else, you’d never have any groceries in the house.

I offer this instead:

“Live each moment with a conscious awareness of its proper context.”

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (7)

In Startling Development, World Ends

September 1, 2007 – 10:02 pm

I realize, to use an apt metaphor, that when it comes to sports reporting lately here at waka waka waka, we’ve dropped the ball. Sure, we’ve covered some important events from time to time (see here, here, and even here), but when the deadline arrives each day, we usually find ourselves running other material: a narrow-minded and insensitive screed about religion, some sort of reactionary and poorly researched political polemic, or other twaddle. But today, we’re going with a story that is clearly on a par with the Hindenburg disaster, the wreck of the Titanic, or any other of history’s most depressing calamities:

The Michigan Wolverines ((Disclosure: I am a Wolverines fan.)), the number-5-ranked team in the nation — considered by many to be serious contenders for the national championship, and a virtual lock for the Big Ten title — were defeated today, in their season opener, by Appalachian State University, 34-32.

At home.

By “Appalachian State University”.

At home. That’s the Big House, friends. In Ann Arbor.

Appalachian State. Have you ever even heard of “Appalachian State”? Not me. They are from North Carolina, or someplace, apparently.

Want to learn more? Whaddya want from me, a link? Go ask your search engine. I’ll be in the kitchen, with my head in the oven.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Happy Birthday Kevin!

September 1, 2007 – 12:46 am

It’s been a long day of work and travel, so we won’t be going to press tonight.

However, please join all of us here at waka waka waka in wishing our friend Kevin Kim a very happy 38th birthday!

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

September Song

August 30, 2007 – 11:07 pm

Labor Day weekend is here, and while a lot of folks are moping about summer coming to an end, you won’t hear any griping from me. Just as the advancing weeks of May and June fill me with a gathering dread each year as the heat and fetor approach, when I get to the end of August I begin to realize — with woozy incomprehension at first, but then with a growing sense of elation — that deliverance is at hand, and that against all the odds I have staggered and sweated through another summer in New York without taking my own life (or anyone else’s).

Now come the most beautiful months of all: September and October, when a reliable succession of Canadian fronts will drape, in graceful catenary arcs, across the weather maps in the Times, sweeping the skies clear of summer’s viscous murk. The air will sparkle and invigorate, the gentle harvest sun will bathe the countryside in its golden radiance, and our mighty city will rouse itself from its sweltering torpor and get about its important business once again. The days, clear and mild at first, will turn cool, then crisp, and the leaves will flare again with impossible, incandescent beauty.

Above all, though, as I’ve said before, what I love the most about the fall is the gathering rush of change, as the massive pendulum of the seasons, having rested briefly in the summer’s heat, turns and begins its ancient transit once again, taking us all along for the ride.

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Pretty Good Posts | Comments (1)

Growth Potential

August 29, 2007 – 10:28 pm

As one who has taken, shall we say, a rather nonstandard path through life, I’m always gratified to see mavericks and autodidacts come through with the goods, and I’ve just run across a particularly noteworthy example. Inventor John Kanzius, of Erie, PA, who is battling leukemia, has developed a technique, using nanoparticles and radio waves, that may be a powerful new weapon against cancer. Learn more here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (1)

Nasty By Design

August 28, 2007 – 1:18 pm

In a rather heated post a little while back, I railed against the notion that a merciful God would permit suffering such as that of little Abigail Taylor, the six-year-old girl who was recently disemboweled in a horrifying accident. The universal, reciprocal cruelty of the natural world also offers bountiful evidence that even if some sort of God exists, He cares not a fig for the torment of the living beings for whose existence He is reponsible.

In yesterday’s mail, correspondent Edward Babinski sent along a link to a website that extends this line of reasoning even farther than I had thought to take it; arguing that God is not indifferent, or nonexistent, but malicious. Have a look here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion | Comments (8)

Wafa Sultan

August 26, 2007 – 8:37 pm

With a hat tip to our friend the Big Hominid, we direct you to a remarkable video clip, of the apostate Muslim gadfly Wafa Sultan engaging in a heated debate on al-Jazeera television.

Sultan characterizes the struggle between jihadis and the West:

The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.

This is a brave woman. Apparently this clip has been making the rounds for a while, but I hadn’t run acroos it before, and perhaps you haven’t either. See it here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Foreign Affairs, Religion | Comments (5)

Weather’s Fine, Wish You Were Here

August 25, 2007 – 10:40 pm

We are still more occupied with sun and surf than the glowing screen, but will be back in town, with nose reapplied to grindstone, this week.

Meanwhile, a rather odd item from the frontiers of astrophysical research: it appears that there is an enormous hole in the visible universe, a billion light-years across. Lately it seems that the more we see of the cosmos, the less we know. Learn (a little bit) more here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, Shameless Filler | Comments (3)

Service Notice

August 23, 2007 – 4:52 pm

The publication schedule here at waka waka waka may be a little gappy for the next few days: we are off on a family vacation (a rarity these days, with both kids entering early adulthood), and squinting at the computer for hours on end fits poorly into our activities schedule. We will, however, post up whatever weightless froth and insubstantial rubbish we can offer without exercising ourselves unduly; here, for example, is a dirt-digging news item that identifies the real culprits in the global-warming case — a poorly-assimilated community of large, hairy and flatulent Norwegians.

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (3)

Ghosts in the Machine

August 21, 2007 – 4:13 pm

A few days ago we made passing mention of the Oxford philosopher of science Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument, which makes the claim that we are probably living in some sort of Matrix-like computer program. This dismal notion, which we looked at a bit more closely back in May, was also the subject of a brief article in last week’s New York Times.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Mind and Brain, Science | Comments (6)

Bloody Fools

August 20, 2007 – 12:01 pm

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Rubbish | Comments (2)

No, No, No, You’re Wrong

August 19, 2007 – 10:20 pm

Many, perhaps most, fans would, if asked, name Sgt. Pepper’s as the greatest Beatles album of them all — and it was, without question, a work of coruscating brilliance. But many of us who grew up during that extraordinary period in musical and cultural history feel that it was the album immediately preceding that was the Beatles’ most significant creative breakthrough — the most audacious departure from all that had come before, both musically and technically. I’m talking, of course, about the 1966 release Revolver.

Why am I bringing this up? I’ve just stumbled upon a marvelous little book about this revolutionary recording, and I wanted to share it with you all. Go and have a look here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (5)

Heil Hugo!

August 18, 2007 – 10:46 pm

We note with sadness, if not surprise, recent reports that the vainglorious popinjay Hugo ChÁ¡vez is further consolidating his dictatorship of Venezuela by seeking to eliminate Constitutional term limits.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (6)

Gelernter on AI

August 17, 2007 – 12:07 am

Yale’s David Gelernter, the well-known computer scientist, has written an article in Technology Review on the problems that bedevil AI research. He has some interesting things to say — not only about AI, but also about consciousness itself — and it’s well worth your while to read it.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Mind and Brain, Inner Work, Technology | Comments (1)

It’s Alive!

August 15, 2007 – 10:42 pm

Longtime waka waka waka readers will recall that I used to work for an outfit called PubSub. It was an immensely promising idea, with truly revolutionary potential, but despite the fact that first-tier VCs were lining up around the block to give us money, the company perished in a spectacular (and wincingly public) implosion. I think of it as the USS Thresher of Internet startups.

The concept was simple enough; PubSub did “prospective search”, which turns the Google-type search paradigm on its head.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (4)

Face Time

August 14, 2007 – 10:56 pm

I’ve been working long hours this week, and have had scant leisure for thinking or writing. I hate to send you away empty-handed, though, after you’ve made the effort to check in, so here, courtesy of our friend The Stiletto, is an online test of your ability to remember names and faces.

I actually did rather well, to my surprise; it has seemed to me that my memory for such things has been slipping away in recent years, a decline I have probably done my fair share to accelerate.

There’s a rather tart saying about the loss of memory that attends old age:

“First you forget names; next you forget faces. Then you forget to pull up your zipper, and then you forget to pull down your zipper.”

For me, so far it’s mostly faces.

By Malcolm | Posted in Marginalia | Comments (10)

From A Reader: Korean-Hostage Links

August 13, 2007 – 10:39 am

A reader who calls himself William has left an extensive comment on our recent post about the Korean hostages, in which he left quite a list of relevant links, prefaced by the follwing remarks:

Hi, I’m also trying to learn what on earth these Koreans have got themselves into. Without passing any judgment on the articles nor their subjects, here are a bunch of links to articles on their (mis-)adventure which I have found so far (I’ve tried to fix any broken link – sorry for inconvenience caused).

I have pasted in the corrected links that William later added; the list is below.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Religion | Comments (12)

NASA Spaces Out

August 11, 2007 – 5:49 pm

Here’s another interesting item about climate change, sent our way by Mike Zaharee. It appears that some of the data about which of the past hundred years or so have been the warmest may have been a bit off. See this post as well.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (4)

Freeman Dyson on Climate Change

August 10, 2007 – 10:33 pm

Freeman Dyson, one of our greatest living scientists, has always been known for the originality and independence of his thinking. I’ve just read a remarkable essay by this formidable man, and hope you’ll read it too.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (6)

Hitting Machine

August 8, 2007 – 2:11 pm

The revised and enhanced Barry Bonds, as some of you may know, broke Henry Aaron’s career home-run record yesterday by knocking the ball out of the park for the 756th time.

His place in history is a controversial matter, however, due to his Bruce-Banner-like transformation from the wiry and slender athlete he was in the early 1990’s to the beefy slugger he is today.

Barry Bonds then…

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Sport | Comments (3)

War and Peace

August 7, 2007 – 5:05 pm

In yesterday’s New York Times, the cultural critic and polymath Edward Rothstein discussed the central idea of Lee Harris’s book The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West, namely that the Enlightenment faith in the progressive ascendancy of reason in human affairs is a false hope.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

Gather Those Rosebuds

August 7, 2007 – 10:42 am

Kevin Kim, in today’s edition, outlines the typical career arc of a successful stand-up comic, from early aspirations at the microphone to washed-up Hollywood star.

After spending many years doing freelance recording for the music-for-hire houses here in New York, I can offer a similar timeline, The Life of a Jingle Singer.

Let’s say his name is Kyle Simms. His career unfolds as follows:

  1. “‘Kyle Simms’?? Who’s Kyle Simms?”

  2. “Get me Kyle Simms!!”

  3. “What we need for this is a young Kyle Simms…”

  4. “‘Kyle Simms’?? Who’s Kyle Simms?”

Yes, it’s a brutal life, friends. But at least it’s short.

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Music and Recording | Comments (3)

Giant Steps

August 6, 2007 – 9:49 pm

With a hat tip to my old pal and fellow Power Station alumnus, engineer extraordinaire Larry Alexander, comes a mesmerizing animation of this John Coltrane classic, one of the high-water marks of Western civilization. Tommy Flanagan, piano; Paul Chambers, bass, Art Taylor, drums, and of course John Coltrane on tenor. If there is anything more sublime than music of this quality, I don’t know what it is. Heraclitus would have loved this one, by the way.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (5)

Obama on Foreign Policy

August 5, 2007 – 11:54 pm

Here, from the journal Foreign Affairs, is Barack Obama’s obligatory term paper on foreign policy. (Thanks to my friend Jess Kaplan for sending the link our way.)

Though the paper deals mostly in generalities, its tone is encouraging, and although I doubt Obama will get the Democratic nod next year, I was pleasantly surprised to see how little he pandered to the more extreme elements in the party’s base. He recommends a beefed-up military, troop buildups in Afghanistan, serious pressure on Pakistan, with aggressive diplomacy taking a primary role, but backed by a genuine willingness to act if necessary: in general, a confident, forward-leaning foreign policy, and one that embraces, rather than rejects, the notion that the US ought to be using its unrivaled power, and the beneficent appeal of its core principles, to shape the sort of world we live in. In fact, he sounded rather like a neoconservative in the making!

As I say, something of a surprise, and an interesting move on his part; obviously the Dems are trying to balance getting out from under their soft-on-security image with not just becoming Bush-Cheney Lite. I think he will lose some support on the far Left, but gain some in the center, as a result of this article. I imagine also that some will wonder, as I do, whether he’s just trying it all on, to see how it fits. Do have a look.

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Politics, Foreign Affairs | Comments (1)

Frontier Justice

August 4, 2007 – 7:38 pm

The Gypsy Scholar, Horace Jeffery Hodges, discussed the question of absolute national sovereignty in a recent post. It’s an important and difficult issue, and opinions vary greatly.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Foreign Affairs, Pretty Good Posts | Comments (1)

Yankee Go Home!

August 3, 2007 – 11:07 pm

During Republican administrations there tends to be a steady seepage, across our northern border, of sanctimonious and neurasthenic lefties quitting the littoral zones of the USA to make new lives in Canada, their delicate constitutions overwhelmed by the populist social fluctuations permitted by our nation’s vastly more robust one. The Bush administration, which is pretty bad weather even for the rest of us, seems, unsurprisingly, to have increased the osmotic pressure.

While this may be no great loss for us, for some of our neighbors in the Great White North it is just about the most irritating thing imaginable. Here (by way of our friend Kevin Kim, the “Chosen” One) is a splendid rant wherein the inimitable Skippy vents his capacious spleen upon these latte-fueled epiphytes. Of particular interest is his debunking of the myth of Canada’s status as the El Dorado of socialized health care, where the streets are paved with gauze. Adults only, please.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (1)

Count Your Blessings

August 3, 2007 – 5:42 pm

At least you aren’t a seven-legged, terminally constipated, hermaphroditic ruminant.

By Malcolm | Posted in Marginalia | Comments (1)

Gone, but Not Forgotten

August 3, 2007 – 4:49 pm

Readers will recall that the bloated Bible-beater Jerry Falwell died a little while back; here’s a related item I ran across earlier today. It’s a video clip of Christopher Hitchens offering, to CNN’s ubiquitous Anderson Cooper, a post-mortem opinion of the porcine preacher (whom Hitchens refers to, at one point, as a “Chaucerian fraud”). See below.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Madman Across the Water

August 2, 2007 – 10:56 am

Elton John would like to do away with the Internet.

He laments, as do I, that people no longer get together to make music, but do so now mostly alone, sequestered in their little digital studios. He’s quite right about that part; music has a strongly social component, and good things happen when people play together, and usually don’t when they don’t. But close down the Internet? Dream on. As Tony Soprano said, “you can’t put the shit back in the donkey.”

Anyway, even if he did manage to get the Internet shut down, he’d be pilloried in the blogosphere.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Technology | Comments (0)

Pain, But Maybe Gain

July 31, 2007 – 11:20 am

In the Op-Ed section of yesterday’s New York Times was an optimistic essay on the situation in Iraq by Michael O’Hanlon (of the Brookings Institution) and the well-known Mideast expert Kenneth Pollack (no relation to any of the waka waka waka staff). The article is getting a lot of play today from the government for its relatively upbeat assessment of the effects of the latest security effort. It begins as follows:

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory’ but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

Read the story here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (10)

Walking On Sunshine

July 30, 2007 – 10:50 pm

From my former PubSub colleague Mike Zaharee comes a delightful link: history’s greatest spacewalks.

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (3)

Fit To Print

July 30, 2007 – 10:42 pm

We have learned today that Chief Justice John Roberts, while vacationing in Maine, was stricken by an “idiopathic” seizure, and taken to the hospital. This case is not without precedent, as apparently he suffered a similar episode some years ago, but at a robust 52, he seems the very picture of health. Or, to put it another way, that a man of such sound constitution should experience such an attack seems entirely, well, unwarranted.

You’d think he’d know his Fourth Amendment rights.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Do Rights Trump Wrongs?

July 28, 2007 – 11:18 pm

Should there be a bedrock principle, in international affairs, of unchallengeable sovereignty? Should the international community allow the rulers of nations to do whatsoever they wish within their own borders, without interference, and without exception? I think the answer is no. H. Jeffery Hodges takes up the question here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (2)

OK, Human

July 28, 2007 – 1:20 pm

A recent post on the cold-blooded murder of a Korean hostage by the Taliban drew a great deal of commentary. We’re on the road today, but having a free moment and online access, I thought I’d re-examine the original post in the light of some of the criticism it has received.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (16)

Service Notice

July 26, 2007 – 11:34 pm

We will be away from the waka waka waka command center from Friday afternoon until Sunday or Monday, with no guarantees of having either Internet access or anything worthwhile to say. We’ll be back in harness as soon as possible, but meanwhile please do browse our richly diverting archives, and be sure to visit the many excellent websites linked to in our sidebar.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Power From The People

July 26, 2007 – 11:15 pm

Here’s a good idea: to harvest the restless energy of crowds of people. Two MIT graduate students have a plan to do just that.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

Murder Most Foul

July 25, 2007 – 1:31 pm

The Taliban have now begun slaughtering their South Korean hostages, according to recent news reports.

Much has been made, not without good reason, of the monumental stupidity and arrogance of the hostages themselves. For these lunatics to imagine that their mission to convert fundamentalist Muslims to Christianity would accomplish anything other than to get themselves killed, or to create an excruciatingly unpleasant situation for their own government (it now looks as if they have succeeded at both), was staggeringly, unsurpassably idiotic. A troupe of voles might, with equal prospects of success, have visited a viper’s nest to lecture its residents on the rewards of being small, warm, and furry.

But for all that the Korean missionaries are imbeciles, they are gentle and harmless. The Taliban, on the other hand, are neither, and that they are willing to execute these helpless wretches — however unsurprisingly, considering their routine policies of brutal oppression and casual violence in the name of their execrable cult — places them, I think it is fair to say, outside the circle of humanity itself. May the civilized nations of the world spare no exertion to rout and extirpate these beasts.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (48)

Diverse Dan

July 24, 2007 – 11:15 pm

I make no secret of my admiration for the philosopher Daniel Dennett. His intellectual interests coincide nearly exactly with my own: the puzzle of consciousness, the theory of evolution, the phenomenology of religion, and the question of human freedom in a world apparently ruled by a combination of deterministic and probabilistic laws. He has tilled and seeded these fields for decades now, yielding a bountiful harvest of books, academic papers, lectures, and philosophical insights for the nourishment of interested laymen like me. One needn’t always agree with him — in particular, his “eliminativist” account of consciousness has many harsh critics — but agree or not, there is no denying the unusual fecundity of his intellect, and his remarkable ability to cut away the conceptual underbrush that often surrounds these persistent philosophical conundrums, and to bring what is unclear about the questions themselves sharply into focus.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Mind and Brain, Society and Culture, Reason and Philosophy, Religion | Comments (1)

No Jokes, Please

July 23, 2007 – 11:47 pm

By way of my friend Eugene Jen comes a remarkable story: a civil servant with practically no brain. Have a look here.

I’ve heard of cases like this before. What I’m curious about — and I hope someone is going to look into this — is how the various functional parts are represented, how such a brain actually works. A study using a PET scan or fMRI would be most interesting, I would think.

By Malcolm | Posted in Mind and Brain | Comments (21)

The Kung Fu Bug

July 23, 2007 – 12:29 am

I haven’t written about martial arts much lately, but I thought I’d like to give readers a glimpse of a kung-fu style they may not have heard about: Southern Praying Mantis.

Although I have devoted myself pretty much exclusively to Hung Gar for the past twenty-five years or so, the sifu I studied with when I began my kung-fu education back at the end of 1975, Master William Chung, had been trained in both Lam Sai Wing Hung Gar and Kwong Sai Jook Loom Praying Mantis. His Praying Mantis sifu was the famous Gin Foon Mark, and in addition to making sure that we had a solid foundation in the Hung system, Master Chung saw to it that we learned some Praying Mantis as well.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Martial Arts, Pretty Good Posts | Comments (5)