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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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…
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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.
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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:
- “‘Kyle Simms’?? Who’s Kyle Simms?”
- “Get me Kyle Simms!!”
- “What we need for this is a young Kyle Simms…”
- “‘Kyle Simms’?? Who’s Kyle Simms?”
Yes, it’s a brutal life, friends. But at least it’s short.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
From my former PubSub colleague Mike Zaharee comes a delightful link: history’s greatest spacewalks.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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As it happens, your humble correspondent was approached on the street by a Washington Post reporter yesterday, an affable young fellow who asked for an opinion about Wednesday’s events. I did offer a few observations, which found their way, with some looseness as to accuracy and context, into today’s edition.
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Recently blogger Dennis Mangan, the proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, offered his readers information suggesting that animal products in the diet are the cause of numerous health woes. It grieves me to offer more grist for his mill on this one, as I am a carnivore’s carnivore ((I’ve even considered attempting a diet that consists solely of animals that are themselves carnivores, just to get right up on the tippy-tippy top of the food chain.)), but he might be interested in this, which accuses meat-eaters of causing global warming.
Well, after all the excitement in midtown yesterday, things are mostly back to normal, save for a few “frozen” blocks right around the site of the explosion (including, sadly, all of the places I usually go for lunch). We all know that one of these days we’re in for the real thing again, but this wasn’t it — and so we get right back to our routines, with just an occasional glance over our shoulders.
Life goes on, unless it doesn’t.
I can see why living in New York City isn’t for everyone, and today was a good example. If nothing else, the weather, as is so often the case around here this time of year, was awful. Gotham is currently straddling a stalled frontal boundary, and with customary perversity we are just on the warm side of it, so the air is thick with greasy moisture. It wasn’t as hot today as it often gets around here this time of year, as it managed only the middle eighties, but under these Amazonian atmospheric conditions that’s plenty: one is miserable even standing still, and copious sweating attends the slightest exertion.
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Here’s a stunning headline, from the Toronto Star:
Toronto’s Population Ages
What were they expecting?
In Peter Berkowitz’s response to Christopher Hitchens’s god Is Not Great, he make some worthwhile points, but also trots out some familiar and flimsy ones as well. Let’s have a go at those first; we’ll take up his better arguments — and he does indeed make some — in a subsequent post.
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In today’s Wall Street Journal is an essay aimed at the advancing ranks of atheist authors. The names mentioned are Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Victor Stenger, but the brunt of the artillery is directed at Mr. Hitchens (who is evidently a friend of the author, Peter Berkowitz, a fellow of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution). It is a good response, and raises a number of worthwhile points. I expect that Christopher Hitchens can be counted on to respond, but I have a few comments to make as well, which I will offer shortly. Meanwhile, read the Berkowitz item here.
Given recent comments and emails, I should probably clarify my thoughts about religion’s place in the world. Though I have written rather disapprovingly on the topic lately, and although I do indeed think that religion is, and has been, an enormous retrograde influence on civilization’s progress (some lovely music and architecture notwithstanding), and an inexhaustible wellspring of sanguinary conflict and brutal repression, I have never argued, as some seem to think, for its forcible abolition. Not only would that be just as wrong, in just the same way, as the many dogmatic and bullying excesses that organized religion itself has been guilty of throughout its long and shameful history, but it would also, quite obviously, be utterly impossible to achieve. It’s an absurd idea, and I certainly didn’t mean to give the impression that it’s what I had in mind.
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It is a poorly kept secret that I am deeply skeptical of religious beliefs and institutions. The empirical question of whether their net effect is a boon or a blight upon our wretched species is, one could conceivably argue, still an open one, and I do acknowledge that religion provides a harmless existential anodyne for many people, one that it might indeed be cruel to deny them. But every glance at the news — not only the rivers of blood spilled each day over religious disputes worldwide, but also the cheap and tawdry spectacle of US politicians, their eyes glinting with ambition, elbowing one another out of the spotlight to bray about their “faith” — inclines me toward the view that civilization as a whole would be far, far, better off if we could somehow just be shut of the whole sodding mess once and for all.
A little while back the polymath Jonathan Miller presented on the BBC The Atheism Tapes, a series of interviews with some very intelligent and articulate unbelievers, along with, for balance, a prominent theologian. Like almost every other video clip in existence, these conversations have found their way to YouTube. Below is a list of the people Miller spoke with, and links to the interviews.
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With a hat tip to Kevin Kim, here is a wonderful example of the power of punctuation to alter the meaning of written English.
On Sunday, the New York Times published a long editorial, The Road Home, declaring the US effort in Iraq an utter failure, and insisting that we withdraw forthwith. Many agree. Of course, many of those who agree do so more from a visceral loathing of this administration and distrust of government in general, an inchoate pacifism and aversion to military action of any sort, or a view of the US as a swaggering bully with no moral standing, than from a sophisticated understanding of the labyrinthine historical, political, diplomatic, cultural, religious, strategic and tactical complexities of this extraordinarily difficult engagement. But, that said, complementary prejudices animate many of those on the other side, and there are certainly many sophisticated observers who do indeed share, in whole or in part, the pessimistic position taken by the Times.
The opposing viewpoint is expressed with succinctness and clarity by Victor Davis Hanson, who responds to the Times editorial, point by point, here.
Regardless of your opinion as to whether the action in Iraq was justified in the first place (I am of the opinion, along with Tom Friedman and others, that it was, but that the postwar management was catastrophically bungled), this is an agonizing and crucial debate; we stand now at a major historical crossroads. Whatever your current view of the way forward — and reasonable people may differ — Hanson’s essay is worthwhile reading.
Those of you with an interest in astronomy, and a fondness for order, might like to take a look here.
In a post a while back I explained why I don’t own an iPod or similar such gadget, the main reason being that I don’t enjoy the acoustic isolation they impose. Well, it turns out that there’s another reason you might want to doff those ear goggles from time to time; learn more here.
We seem to have been delivered, however briefly, from the suffocating heat and humidity that have tormented us for the past few days. During the afternoon a robust frontal boundary made its way Gothamward across the Keystone and Garden States, and at about 5:30 or so the sky turned as black as an old bruise, the heavens burst asunder, and a cataract of rain pelted the sizzling sidewalks with such force that it bounced knee-high. I’m sure that in our northern suburbs, and other places where trees can live, many were blown down — and doubtless there are those in such leafy districts who are without electrical power as a result — but here in the city the relief is palpable, and I am sure I speak for many others when I say that after another day or two of the weather we’ve just had, Death himself, in any but his most appalling forms, would have been greeted warmly at the door.
I’ve spent thirty summers in New York City, and know beyond hope that this is just the fleetingest lull, a moment’s ease whose purpose is only to enhance the effect when Torquemada seizes his instruments once again. But hey, we’ll take it.
I’m not quite myself tonight. Not only has the ghastly heat and fetor here in Gotham reduced me to a gibbering wretch, but at the end of the day I visited my periodontist, Dr. Louis Franzetti, who implanted two small screws in my upper jaw as part of an ongoing cakehole-reconstruction project roughly on the scale of Boston’s Big Dig. Dr. Franzetti is a man of Christlike mercy and incomparable skill, but in the dolorous aftermath of such a skull-piercing I have decided to forgo mental acuity in favor of the palliative blessings of organic chemistry. So no post tonight.
I wouldn’t want you to leave empty-handed, though! So here is a little video clip I’m sure you will enjoy, with a hat tip to Dr. F. himself.
The other day, my mind restless with the somber news of the world, and its echoes of familiar themes, I took from the shelf The Gathering Storm, the first book of Winston Churchill’s incomparable six-volume History of the Second World War. I say “incomparable” because there is really nothing else like it in all of historical literature: an account of the greatest armed conflict of all time, written by a man who was not only one of the foremost masters of the English language ever to lift a pen, but who was also the man who led, by his command of the spoken word, his enormous military expertise, and the sheer power of his personality, the armies of freedom to their ultimate triumph.
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I’m a peaceable fellow, but it was not without a wee quickening of my Scottish heart that I read (with a tip of the tam o’shanter to Dennis Mangan and his commenters) of the reception given a couple of jihadists recently up in Glasgow.
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More stern stuff from Hitchens on the British terror plot, here.
