December 18, 2006 – 10:33 pm
It might seem odd, given my background as a recording engineer, but I don’t own an iPod or similar device. I admire their sleek and efficient design, and the sound quality is acceptable, but I haven’t got one.
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December 17, 2006 – 4:13 pm
Friday’s post (sorry for yesterday’s service interruption; I had a very long day of recording and mixing) mentioned the “Beyond Belief” convention sponsored by Edge.org, and alerted readers to the availability of streaming video feeds of the presentations. I’ve been watching them myself as time permits, and the discussions, if not exactly balanced — the speakers generally regard the influence of religion on society as something that we ought be outgrowing sometime around now — are calm, thoughtful, and considerate of the centrality of religion in many people’s lives.
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December 15, 2006 – 11:51 pm
I’ve mentioned Edge.org previously; it is one of my favorite spots on the Web. The site exists to provide a forum where scientists, philosophers, and other thinking types can discuss topics at the intersection of science, technology, and culture, and it attracts many of the world’s brightest minds.
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December 14, 2006 – 6:31 pm
I call the attention of readers to two recent posts on the subject of “equality”. The first is by Dr. William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher; the second is by the inimitable Deogolwulf, writing at his website The Joy of Curmudgeonry. Both make the same excellent point, which I shall reiterate here.
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December 13, 2006 – 11:11 pm
One does not usually think of two-wheeled vehicles as being particularly well-suited to transporting cargo, but where there’s a will there’s a way. From my co-worker Jay Chang comes an amusing collection of photographs from Vietnam, showing what can be done when need impels.
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December 12, 2006 – 1:42 pm
In yesterday’s post we noted the difficulty people naturally have in grasping the immensity of the timeframe at which evolution occurs. But despite the zoomed-in view our fleeting lifespans impose upon us, we can still detect the occasional tick of the evolutionary clock. Just such an observation has recently been made regarding the genetic trait known as lactose tolerance.
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December 11, 2006 – 10:38 pm
I often wonder why some people are so resistant to Darwinism. The idea, once grasped, would seem to have everything going for it: it is elegant and simple, but despite its simplicity has amazing depth and explanatory power. It has been abundantly confirmed by a diverse and mutually supporting body of evidence, and provides a sturdy framework for our understanding of all life on Earth.
Nevertheless, the fact of Darwinian evolution is flatly rejected by a majority (!) of Americans. One obvious reason for this is the persistence of fundamentalist Biblical literalism in our country, with its insistence upon the Old Testament creation story. But the acceptance of such folklore as fact is abetted by another, quite natural difficulty: people have, generally, absolutely no concept of deep time.
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December 10, 2006 – 5:51 pm
Once again, the chess World Champion has played a match against a computer, and lost. This time the victor was Deep Fritz 10, and the victim was the 31-year-old Russian Vladimir Kramnik.
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December 10, 2006 – 2:45 pm
Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet has died in Santiago at the age of 91.
It’s supposed to get up to around 86° in Santiago today, but it will be even warmer where he’s going.
December 9, 2006 – 10:00 pm
As I have mentioned before, my house in Brooklyn is just a few paces away from Prospect Park, a lovely, rolling expanse of forest, lake, and greensward landscaped by the great Frederick Law Olmstead.
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December 9, 2006 – 1:51 am
I receive a number of daily newsletters. Among them is one from Physorg.com, a website that serves as a clearinghouse for news on various scientific fronts. The stories are generally brief, rarely very technical, and their purpose is simply to alert the reader to the fact that that some new development or other has occurred in the field at hand; the curious reader may then, having been given the scent, follow it to its source on his own initiative. The whole thing is usually very professionally done, and is an excellent way to keep abreast of current events in science and technology.
Imagine my disappointment, then, to observe that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, the utter incomprehension of which we may sadly take as a “given” among its many detractors in religious circles, is also a source of confusion, even at the broadest and most superficial level, to the editors of the Physorg newsletter. I refer to the following headline, found atop a story in yesterday’s issue:
Do galaxies follow Darwinian evolution?
What is it that bothers me so? Read on.
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December 8, 2006 – 12:22 am
It’s been an awfully busy week, both day and night. I’ve had scant opportunity to write, and probably won’t get much of a break until the weekend. So for today, we will simply comment briefly on two items drawn from today’s issue of Gotham’s newspaper of record.
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December 5, 2006 – 4:19 pm
Poking around at Mangan’s Miscellany a moment ago, I saw that Dennis had linked to a blog maintained by Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak. I dropped by for a visit, and Mr Sajak’s musings are whimsical, thoughtful and articulate. It is gratifying to see solid evidence of a Hollywood celebrity with a rational mind. Onto the sidebar it goes.
December 4, 2006 – 1:23 pm
If you haven’t noticed, there are a growing number of scientists, authors, and other thinking sorts who have decided to stand up in public and question the enormous influence that religion still exerts in 21st-century affairs. Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, and, of course, Richard Dawkins are leading the charge, but others are growing bolder as well, and are adding their intelligent and articulate voices to the gathering chorus. One of these is Natalie Angier, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her science writing at the New York Times, and author of several outstanding books.
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December 3, 2006 – 12:49 am
I’ve just returned from a visit to Slate.com, having absorbed Diane McWhorter’s article about the similarities between the America of the new millennium and the Third Reich.
The gist of the essay is that the current administration, rather than being incompetent, or overweening, or imperialistic, or all three, is in fact a gang of Nazis, and we’d better wise up. The author, aghast at our complacency, seeks to rouse us from our stupor by pointing out — breaking news! — that the Germany of the 1930’s became utterly evil, in large extent, of its own volition, and she suggests that the same is happening here.
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December 2, 2006 – 12:16 am
In a characteristically pointed essay, Steven Pinker comments on Harvard’s forthcoming Report of the Committee on General Education. While he is generally laudatory, he has “two reservations”: first, about the characterization of the place of science in a general education, and second, about the “Reason and Faith” requirement in the core curriculum.
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November 30, 2006 – 3:18 pm
Political disagreements, such as those that have been taking place lately in comment threads here at waka waka waka, exhibit a property not unlike that ascribed by astrophysicists to the hypothetical “dark energy” that is thought to permeate the cosmos: they exert a mysterious repulsive force.
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November 30, 2006 – 12:41 am
You may have heard of the Antikythera Mechanism: a mysterious clockwork device, over two thousand years old, that was found in a Mediterranean shipwreck in 1902. Archaeologists have puzzled over it ever since its discovery, and the atavistic doohickey has meanwhile fueled many an Atlantean’s febrile imaginings. Now, a team of researchers have announced that they have determined exactly what the Mechanism does, but the mystery of how such a thing came to exist at all in 80 B.C. has only deepened.
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November 29, 2006 – 1:59 pm
In “Losing the Enlightenment”, a speech given at a recent dinner honoring Winston Churchill, and reprinted as an OP-Ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, Victor Davis Hanson argues that the West is suffering from a “loss of confidence of the spirit”.
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November 28, 2006 – 11:43 pm
I don’t do a lot of recording these days; the music industry having gone through rough times in the 1990’s, I took up software engineering about six years ago, and now make my living writing code. I still do two or three records a year, though, and I am occasionally reminded of one of the other reasons I was inclined to switch careers: the hours can be grueling. Yesterday’s session at Avatar — a new album for my old friend, the guitarist Steve Khan — started at ten a.m., and when I left sometime after one in the morning, Steve was still wrapping up a few loose ends in Pro Tools with our outstanding assistant engineer, Brian Montgomery.
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November 28, 2006 – 8:26 pm
Upon hearing someone use the expression “sang-froid” the other day, I was reminded of an old joke:
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November 28, 2006 – 12:19 am
A long day of recording today, at New York’s Avatar Studios with my old pal Steve Khan. We’re in Studio ‘C’, working on Steve’s latest effort, with trumpeter Randy Brecker and percussionists Marc QuiÁ±ones and Bobby Allende. It’s getting late, and it doesn’t look like we’ll be done anytime soon, which of course leaves me scant opportunity for lengthy bloviation.
As always, however, I hate to send visitors away empty-handed, so here is an excellent post by Scott Carson on moral responsibility and the “false cause” fallacy.
November 25, 2006 – 11:44 pm
However you may feel about Richard Dawkins’ recent campaign against religion, he is indisputably among the greatest living scholars of natural history. One of the many topics he discusses in his richly informative book The Ancestor’s Tale is the notion that “evolvability” itself may be amenable to natural selection. He suggests that certain watershed developments in life’s history greatly increased the facility of organisms to adapt, and that such developments would themselves have been adaptive. There is tricky footing here; it is important to keep in mind that natural selection never “looks ahead”. But, as Dawkins writes near the end of the book, “we might find with hindsight that the species that fill the world tend to be descended from ancestral species with a talent for evolution.” There are a number of developments that Dawkins cites as having improved life’s “evolvability”: among these are the birth of eukaryotic cells, multicellularism, segmentation, and sex. He also discusses another, less obvious milestone: bottlenecking.
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November 25, 2006 – 1:17 am
Here’s something wonderful, brought to our attention by my son Nick. From YouTube, it’s a clip of the Hawaiian ukulele master Jake Shimabukuro playing George Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
Enjoy.
November 24, 2006 – 7:38 pm
Bush 41 adviser James Baker, a co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, was one of the men behind the decision not to oust Saddam in 1991. Apparently he has been feeling pretty pleased with himself about that lately, and Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, suggests that he oughtn’t. I agree. Read his article here.
November 23, 2006 – 6:58 pm
To all of you. I thank you for visiting, reading, and commenting, and I hope this day finds you at peace, in good health, and in the company of those you love.
November 23, 2006 – 1:12 am
The New York Times yesterday featured on its front page the story of a college student by the name of Brian Stelter, who has risen to outstanding success with a blog about the TV news industry.
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November 22, 2006 – 7:04 pm
Well, if not, perhaps it will make you stronger:
The Nietzsche Family Circus.
November 22, 2006 – 1:11 pm
Here’s yet another entertaining website (and another hat tip to Jess). It is maintained by an outfit calling itself SurveyUSA, and is an interactive map of the current mood of the nation, taken state by state, regarding possible 2008 Presidential election pairings. Here’s what they’ve done:
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November 22, 2006 – 12:28 am
No time tonight for a long post, so I’ll offer another interesting morsel from the Web. Here are the opinions of 50 leading scientists — from Aleksander to Zeilinger, from de Waal to Walker to Weinberg to Whipple to White to Wilczek to Wilson to Witten to Wolfram to Wolpert to Wood, about what the biggest breakthrough of the next half-century might be.
November 21, 2006 – 2:23 pm
For you Wodehouse fans (count me as one), here’s a topical item from the New Yorker — brought to my attention, as are so many wondrous and faraway things, by my friend Jess Kaplan.
November 20, 2006 – 5:58 pm
Here’s something that happened to me a while back — around 1983 or so, if memory serves. I was reminded of it a few days ago, and thought it might be worth a post.
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November 19, 2006 – 2:05 pm
I’ve mentioned oysters before in these pages (I should probably give posts about them a separate category by now), but while scooping a few dozen of them out of Wellfleet Harbor this weekend, I noticed something about them that I hadn’t realized before, which is that they seem to exhibit a consistent chirality.
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November 18, 2006 – 2:38 pm
If you enjoy music, and have a broadband Internet connection, then I must recommend an outstandingly clever website, Pandora. The site allows you to create virtual streaming “radio stations” that you seed with music you like — after which the system analyzes your choices and uses its proprietary algorithms to scan its vast collection to find other music that it thinks you will be likely to enjoy as well. It’s a smart idea, and done very well, with a simple and intuitive user interface. Take it for a spin. One caveat: no classical music yet. Apparently the analysis and assortment of classical music is a more difficult problem. They’re working on it.
November 17, 2006 – 1:58 pm
The front page of today’s New York Times features an outstanding photo, a real peach. In the foreground are the presumptive Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and her intraparty foe Steny H. Hoyer. Ms. Pelosi, who has yet even to take up the gavel, has already shown outstanding political ineptitude in her attempt to foist Pennsylvania pork broker and Mideast defeatist John Murtha upon the House as majority leader. The Democratic caucus, in what many see as a telling lack of fealty and a sign of party disunity, decisively rebuffed her, installing Mr. Hoyer, currently the minority whip, instead.
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November 17, 2006 – 12:09 pm
As noted below, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, the Brights, and other godless infidels have been strengthening their insurgency against the Believers. Meanwhile, however, followers of the fourth-largest religious group in Britain are petitioning for official recognition. Story here.
November 16, 2006 – 11:50 pm
There is a gathering groundswell of resistance to the colossal influence exerted on human affairs by organized religion. An increasingly visible and vociferous alliance of scientists, journalists, and philosophers are going on offense — quite justifiably so, given that the world’s intractable conflicts and most deeply seated hatreds seem to be rooted in religious differences, and given, also, the degree to which religious myths are interfering with the teaching of science in our schools, and slowing the pursuit of potentially revolutionary medical research.
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November 15, 2006 – 3:36 pm
Some of you may recall the amazing Honda ad that was making the rounds a couple of years ago; it was a film of an elegant and complex Rube Goldberg device made entirely of car parts, and it was filmed live, with no computer animation. Well, it appears that the Japanese educational-TV program Pitagora Suichi has been collecting viewer-submitted videos of similar homemade constructions, and my colleague Jay Chang informs me that an entertaining and amusing collection of them has been made available on YouTube. Have a look here.
November 14, 2006 – 11:21 pm
This story, one of the enormous body of Mulla Nasrudin folk-stories, is taken from The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, by the late Sufi writer and teacher Idries Shah.
Nasrudin found a weary falcon sitting one day on his windowsill. He had never seen a bird of this kind before.
“You poor thing, ” he said, “however were you allowed to get into this state?”
He clipped the falcon’s talons and cut its beak straight, and trimmed its feathers.
“Now you look more like a bird,” said Nasrudin.
November 14, 2006 – 12:49 am
The Earth’s temperature rises. The assignment of blame, one of Man’s most tenderly cherished hobbies, naturally ensues. The usual whipping boys — Western civilization generally, and capitalist America in particular — are piously flagellated by the guardians of “the planet” for the misfortunes we have inflicted upon innocent humankind, such as industry and transportation.
It does indeed seem that there is something happening that we should be concerned about. The evidence is clear enough. Is the answer, though, going to be the wholesale dismantling, as some would have it, of the technological infrastructure that undergirds our advancing civilization? Should we rip up the roadways, outlaw the automobile, and spend our declining years reading Baudrillard by candlelight? Of course not. Doomsayers ever since Malthus have prophesied the collapse of our species, and they have always made the same error, which is to underestimate Man’s technical ingenuity. The answer to the very real problem of global warming is not going to be the abandonment of our technology, but its improvement. It is a matter of engineering.
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November 12, 2006 – 11:53 pm
A savory morsel from Tocqueville:
Foreign policy demands scarcely any of those qualities which are peculiar to a democracy; on the contrary it calls for the perfect use of almost all those qualities in which a democracy is deficient. Democracy … can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy or await their consequences with patience. These are qualities which are more characteristic of an individual or aristocracy.
– Alexis de Tocqueville; Democracy in America, 1835 ed.; Pt I, Ch. 5
November 11, 2006 – 8:12 pm
I’m back in Cape Cod this weekend, and as always it is restorative to be here. The effect is rather like pulling off at a scenic overlook during a long motor journey to stretch the legs, breathe deeply, and take one’s eyes off the road.
Living and working, as I do, in New York City, is to spend each day in a hyperkinetic environment of entirely human manufacture, wrought at an exclusively human scale. But here in Wellfleet, on this tiny spit of land flung out into the restless Atlantic, one finds oneself in the presence of physical immensities that offer the tightly clenched spirit room to unfurl. To step outside, as I did last night, to stand in silence under a moonlit sky, pine-framed and ablaze with stars, and then to stroll this afternoon along a deserted beach beside the limitless ocean — a scene entirely devoid, in chill November, of even the slightest trace of Man’s teeming presence — is to enjoy a trans-physical unconfinement, a Lebensraum of the soul, that many denizens of the congested antheaps we call cities no longer realize we require for our normal development.
November 10, 2006 – 1:38 pm
We’ll be traveling this weekend, and Internet access will be iffy, so waka waka waka will most likely be off the air until late Sunday, or perhaps even Monday.
You never know, though.
November 10, 2006 – 1:40 am
I call attention to a new link on the waka waka waka sidebar; it is the website of one Gin Foon Mark, one of the greatest living masters of southern Chinese kung fu.
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November 9, 2006 – 12:49 pm
I am reminded again, by a post at a neighboring and frequently visited site, of what an outstanding weblog is maintained by the Englishman “Deogolwulf”, under the banner The Joy of Curmudgeonry. He writes with style, scholarship, piquancy, and wit, and I urge you all to visit. Stay a while. Sample at random from the archives. Absorb a fewtril or two. Here’s a representative, aleatorically selected morsel, from June 1st of last year:
Sir Elton John is quoted in The Guardian today:
“When the Live Aid concert happened 20 years ago I was pretty much a self-obsessed drug addict. Although I was pleased to be part of a great day, I really wasn’t adult enough or mature enough to realise the full consequences of what we were doing.”
Sir Elton, who over the past twenty years has selflessly dedicated himself to a study of political economy, is now well known for his disdain of material comforts and is justly celebrated for his encyclopedic knowledge; nor is there about him a trace of the pleasure-seeking, narcissistic, moral and intellectual cretin who knows no more about politics or economics or history than does a parboiled titmouse.
The erudite Sir Elton, who in the mid-Nineties proved in a brilliant display of statistical mathematics the inefficacy of supply-side theory, is hoping to demonstrate the absurdity of free trade by playing the piano quite badly in front of a crowd of baying morons.
November 9, 2006 – 12:20 pm
Here’s an interesting bit of convergent evolution: I see from an item in today’s PhysOrg newsletter that tarantula venom targets the same pain-inducing capsaicin receptors that plants such as chili peppers have learned to activate to discourage predators. Learn more here.
November 8, 2006 – 5:01 pm
Well, Election Day is over at last. No more infuriating telephone spam, no more of the juvenile taunting and slanderous invective that, as this editorial rightly points out, should be enough to keep any self-respecting adult out of public service, and no more dithering over which of the available roster of egomaniacs are the ones we ought to hold our noses and vote for.
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November 8, 2006 – 11:49 am
From my old PubSub pal and fellow software engineer Mike Zaharee comes a link to a massively depressing story about the next space shuttle mission. It seems that NASA is considering delaying the launch until after the New Year, because — wait for it — they don’t want the ship to be in space when the calendar “rolls over”, because the shuttle’s software can’t handle it.
“The shuttle computers were never envisioned to fly through a year-end changeover,” space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told a briefing.
Well, on second thought, I can see his point. I mean, that’s a holiday, for Pete’s sake.
November 7, 2006 – 8:22 pm
My friend and kung-fu “training brother” Dan Betz has sent me a link to a remarkable tale about one Michael Oher, a young man from the most unfortunate circumstances imaginable, who, thanks to the intervention of a series of caring and concerned people, has risen from utter abandonment to become one of college football’s brightest prospects.
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November 6, 2006 – 8:24 pm
My friend Eugene Jen has sent me some links to a lively academic discussion. The topic is one that I am keenly interested in — evolutionary psychology — and the question at hand is what the future of the field might be, both here in the USA and in Asia.
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