November 4, 2006 – 10:29 pm
I’m afraid I’m a bit under the weather tonight, and won’t be offering much of interest. I had a session today with my periodontist — Dr. Louis Franzetti, a good man, whom I like very much — that lasted from 10 a.m. until almost 5 o’clock. He addressed the left side, upper and lower: peeled away my gums, scraped and blasted the exposed bone, did some rather extensive bone-grafting, drilled a titanium implant into my lower jaw, and sutured my gums back on. He is a kind man, and a master of his art, but let me tell you, the experience was not entirely pleasant, and were it not for the blessings of organic chemistry I would be contemplating an untimely exit from this world right about now.
We’ll be back on the air again soon, perhaps even tomorrow.
November 3, 2006 – 11:36 pm
Recently I was given a century-old copy of the immense Merriam-Webster International Dictionary of the English Language. This 1906 edition’s title page continues:
BEING THE AUTHENTIC EDITION OF WEBSTER’S
UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY, COMPRISING
THE ISSUES OF 1864, 1879, AND 1884
THOROUGHLY REVISED AND
MUCH ENLARGED UNDER
THE SUPERVISION OF
NOAH PORTER, D.D., LL.D.
WITH A VOLUMINOUS APPENDIX
TO WHICH IS NOW ADDED
A SUPPLEMENT
OF TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND WORDS AND PHRASES
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November 3, 2006 – 12:35 am
From Duncan Werner comes a link to an old memory — the story of Jose Feliciano’s performance of the Star-Spangled Banner at a World Series game between the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals, way back in 1968.
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November 2, 2006 – 1:51 am
In a typically interesting discussion over at the Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella says at one point that the “wholly nonlinguistic fact of Santa’s nonexistence cannot depend on a linguistic fact about a word.” Now the subject in question is a rather technical one — it’s about the philosophical difficulties of references and their referents — but it reawakened for me some nagging questions about “facts”, about Platonism, and about the degree to which we are justified in assuming that the categories we impose on the external world are independent of our own minds.
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November 1, 2006 – 11:49 am
The lugubrious, thatch-crowned Ent John Kerry, who so loves his own orotund bombast that he simply cannot, even for the sake of his own sallow hide, shut his pie-hole, has made a fool of himself again. This cadaverous windbag just won’t go away, and one of these days some good Democrat is going to find a hammer and a wooden stake and do the right thing.
October 31, 2006 – 10:44 pm
I am glad to see that NASA has decided to send a shuttle mission to service and augment the Hubble Space telescope. A decision had been made to abandon the instrument due to safety concerns in the wake of the 2003 Columbia mishap, with the agency choosing to focus instead on building out the international space station. Like many, many others, I was as mad as a cut snake to hear that the telescope was going to be left to die, and it’s good to see that the timorous administrators at NASA have changed their minds.
In addition to repairing aging gyroscopes, replacing batteries, and other routine maintenance, the shuttle crew — whose mission is scheduled for early 2008 — will add two new imaging devices: the Wide Field Camera 3, and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which will allow the telescope to see farther, deeper, and in a broader spectral range than ever.
the Cats’s Eye nebula (photo: NASA/STScI)
I think the Hubble is one of mankind’s most splendid creations, a worthy counterpoise to such embarrassments as processed cheese and the jukebox musical. You can view a stunning gallery of Hubble images here.
October 31, 2006 – 12:53 am
When I wrote a few days ago about a pelican eating a pigeon in a London park, I thought I was picking up an insignificant, out-of the-way item that readers would almost certainly not have heard about otherwise. It seems that I was mistaken; a search on Google a moment ago turned up “about 339,000” results, and the story has reverberated through the blogosphere as well. Think of that: a bird eats another bird somewhere in the world, and within a day hundreds of thousands of people, all around the globe, have published some comment on it, which means that the news itself — a bird ate a bird in a park in England — has probably reached tens of millions. This is such an abrupt discontinuity from the entire social history of the human race that I think it bears noticing.
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October 29, 2006 – 2:54 pm
Last night we added an extra hour in our return to Standard Time. Like most people, I heartily approve; I enjoy the notion, however illusory, of gaining a line on the moving finger. Now if we could just persuade Congress to “fall back” three hours a night in perpetuity, I might even get rid of these bags under my eyes.
October 28, 2006 – 11:06 pm
Feeling a bit cooped up earlier today, I took myself for a longish walk in Prospect Park, which begins right at the end of my block here in Brooklyn. It was was just what the doctor ordered; few prescriptions can rival in therapeutic value the simple act of getting outside.
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October 27, 2006 – 8:17 pm
I’m sure that almost all of you, by now, are familiar with Google Earth. This fantastic tool, which requires nothing more than a good Internet connection and a free software download, allows the user to zoom in on high-resolution satellite images of any location on the Earth’s surface. The resolution varies from place to place, but will only get better with time, and already there are large patches of the planet that are represented in astonishing detail. The pictures aren’t live, of course, but are snapshots taken on clear days over the past three years or so.
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October 26, 2006 – 2:00 pm
Here’s a heartwarming little story, and a brief diversion from weightier matters: according to an item in Tuesday’s Daily Mail, visitors to London’s St. James Park were witnesses to an epic struggle as a pelican grappled with a pigeon. According to the report, it took the venturesome waterfowl — pelicans customarily dine exclusively on fish — fully twenty minutes to engulf its peristeronic snack. The enpouched pigeon (with worried look in image below) fought vigorously, but vainly, to escape, and ended up, apparently still alive, in the larger bird’s belly.
worth two in the bush (photo: Cathal McNaughton)
Read all about it here.
October 25, 2006 – 10:49 pm
James Taranto, in today’s Best of the Web newsletter, has published a letter he received from a U.S. army sergeant stationed northwest of Baghdad as part of an intelligence-gathering team. This sergeant, whose daily job is to interact with Iraqis and his fellow soldiers in order to “help put together the intel picture”, is in a better position than most people, including President Bush and his inner circle, to have a clear idea of what’s really going on over there, and what approach we ought to be taking in order to mitigate this worsening disaster.
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October 24, 2006 – 2:16 pm
If you’ve been wondering how folks in South Korea feel about their bouffanted and bellicose neighbor to the north, the irrepressible Kevin Kim has captured the nation’s sentiment in a touching little verse. Do take a look.
October 23, 2006 – 9:47 pm
Yesterday’s post was about “ring species”, both as interesting natural phenomena in themselves, and as a reminder that the persistent human tendency to impose discrete categories on continuous phenomena can lead us, if not to outright error, at least to an inaccurate model of the world. Keeping in mind that we are all inclined toward this prejudice — Richard Dawkins calls it the “tyranny of the discontinuous mind” — can help us to avoid not only taxonomic pitfalls, but philosophical ones as well.
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October 22, 2006 – 10:51 pm
One of the obstacles that some people face in understanding evolutionary theory is the natural tendency to think in excessively discrete terms, insisting on parsing the continuity of the world into distinct categories. Richard Dawkins, in his book The Ancestor’s Tale, addresses this problem — which he calls “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind’ — and offers some examples of how the categories we see in the natural world are often not sharply bounded, but merge seamlessly into one another. I have promised to write about some of the fascinating ideas in this book, and this topic seems a good one to begin with.
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October 21, 2006 – 11:55 pm
Well, we finally made it to Michigan. We caught an 11:45 flight out of Gotham, and got to Ann Arbor in time to join the procession of the faithful down State Street to the Big House, which, just for the record, really is big — it is the largest American-football stadium anywhere, and, according to this Wikipedia article, is the 29th-largest sports venue in the world (the larger ones are mostly racetracks). For today’s contest we were joined by 110,923 other spectators, and let me tell you, that’s a fair-sized crowd — numbering only slightly fewer than the population of Ann Arbor itself. And we were not disappointed; Michigan triumphed as expected, 20-6, even without the services of star wide receiver Mario Manningham, who is nursing a banged-up knee.
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October 20, 2006 – 11:48 pm
Old Rabbie Burns was right: things never turn out quite as planned. After spending many hours at LaGuardia Airport this evening, we were sent home, our flight to Motown canceled due to high winds. We will try again early tomorrow; our goal is to be there watch the Maize and Blue trounce the Iowa Hawkeyes at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor at 3:30 p.m. tomorrow.
Going to a game at the Big House is quite an experience; I hope to have a report to file later this weekend.
October 20, 2006 – 3:05 pm
We’ll be traveling to Ann Arbor, Michigan this evening, and waka waka waka may have to lie fallow for a day or two. Visitors are encouraged to browse our archives in the meanwhile, and we’ll be back as soon as we can.
October 19, 2006 – 11:47 pm
This past Friday, President Bush signed into law H.R. 4411, the Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act, which prevents U.S. financial institutions from transferring money to online gambling services. For the Senate vote, the bill was sneaked, in typical sausage-and-legislation fashion, into the SAFE Ports Act (H.R. 4954 As Amended), where it passed 98-0, with two abstaining (Sens. Chafee and Akaka).
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October 18, 2006 – 11:36 pm
At the apex of the southern Chinese Hung Ga system of kung fu is the Iron Wire form, sometimes referred to as the Iron Thread. It was created by Tit Kiu Sam, one of the legendary Ten Tigers of Canton, and its main purpose is to cultivate internal power.
The Iron Wire is practiced under controlled tension; it derives its name from the feeling one has during many sections of the form that one is stretching an imaginary cord between the hands. Each movement is carefully synchronized with the breath, and at many points in the form there are particular sounds that the practitioner must utter. These sounds are intended to direct the breath (or “chi”) to various organs and muscles. If performed incorrectly or without understanding, this combination of moving tension and controlled breathing can, in fact, cause serious harm, and as a result the form is taught only to advanced students.
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October 17, 2006 – 11:03 pm
In a recent post, I recommended that readers with an interest in biology pay a visit to the Tree of Life Web Project, an interactive display of the taxonomic relationships linking all life on Earth. Upon seeing the post, one of our commenters, microbiologist Andrew Staroscik, mentioned that he had rather a low opinion of the ToL website, and, when I asked him if he would explain in more detail, offered a detailed and piquant critique of the way the tree is organized and presented. We are fortunate to have experts such as Andrew among our readership, and rather than let his response languish in the comment thread, where many of you might not have seen it, I am republishing it here.
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October 16, 2006 – 2:41 pm
As readers will recall, this past weekend was the occasion of Wellfleet’s annual Oysterfest. It was a splendid event, as always. The weather was just beautiful – cool and crisp, with a deep blue sky and golden autumnal sunshine, and thousands of visitors were on hand, drawn to our charming seacoast village by the promise of happy company, good food, rivers of beer, amusing special events, local arts & crafts, and of course a limitless supply of sweet and succulent Wellfleet oysters, served up in every imaginable configuration.
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October 14, 2006 – 12:01 pm
As I mentioned a while back, one item getting frequent play in my rotating reading stack is the hefty volume The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins, and as I expected, it is hugely engaging and informative. I’m about halfway done with it – the backwards pilgrimage is currently marching through the latter Carboniferous period, where we mammals have just been joined by the Sauropsids (including all reptiles and birds). I’ve already learned a great many interesting things, and will be sprinkling some of them about these pages in days and weeks to come. For today, however, I’ll call the attention of any of you who have an interest in natural history to a marvelous website, the Tree of Life Web Project. Onto the waka waka waka sidebar it goes.
October 13, 2006 – 5:52 pm
Our post a couple of days ago about the ruthless Kim Jong Il drew a visitor who left a link to a dramatic image, reproduced below:
Presumably this is a nighttime sattelite photo, showing the luminous metropolis of Seoul and the prosperous, well-lit Republic of Korea to the south, and the veiled, darkling, and preposterously named Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north. The emotional power of this image is immediate, and tragic.
The picture comes from the UK paper the Daily Mail, so I assume it is genuine. The person who left it signed in only as Kim, which narrows things down in Korea about as much as if he had announced himself as “Jim” over here. The current waka waka waka WordPress settings require commenters to leave an email address, and the comment form also offers them the option to submit a link to their own websites; the email address left by Kim was from the gov.kp domain, and the website linked to was the official DPRK government website (which is well worth a look, by the way).
I rather doubt that our visitor is actually a member of the government of that enslaved nation, nor even a resident; I’d be curious to know more, Kim, if you’d care to drop me a line.
October 13, 2006 – 5:50 pm
Today is Friday the 13th, always a good day for me, as I was born on one, back in 1956. And this year is no exception; my lovely wife Nina and I are back in Wellfleet this weekend, and as always it is balm to the spirit to be here. And as if the cool sea breezes, lovely autumnal light, and serene natural beauty of this New England coastal village weren’t enough, tomorrow is the 2006 Wellfleet Oysterfest, a gustatory extravaganza that draws lovers of our renowned and eponymous mollusc from all over the Northeast. Expect another favorable review.
October 11, 2006 – 11:39 pm
There was a tragic and shocking event here in New York today, as most of you have probably heard by now. Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle, acquired just this summer by the Bombers in the trade with the Phillies that also brought Bobby Abreu to the Bronx, was killed, along with his passenger, when the small plane he was piloting flew into a high-rise apartment tower on East 72nd Street.
I don’t really know what to say about this sad, strange story; I just thought it would be remiss of me not to make note of it. It is always so unsettling to see how some lives end while the rest of us go on, at least for now.
October 10, 2006 – 11:02 pm
One of the least palatable aspects of the situation in North Korea is the humanitarian quandary created by Kim Jong Il’s ruthless game, in which he relies on the misery of his enslaved people for his own protection. North Korea depends for its very survival on foreign aid; the United States and China are the principal benefactors. It is only this largesse that makes it possible for Kim to maintain an enormous standing army, and to play with nuclear weapons; had the Chinese seriously pressured him, he would have had to stand down. They didn’t, though, partly because they are concerned that any further instability, such as might be caused by even deeper poverty and famine, would drive hordes of refugees across their border, but also, I think in large part, because they enjoy the discomfiture that the obstreperous Kim causes the Western bloc.
The US, too, has been reluctant to cut back on the millions of tons of food we send to North Korea, but for quite different reasons — we are well aware that to do so would sentence a great many people to starvation. Kim knows that this leaves us in a difficult position: by refusing to provide any more foreign aid, we could press China to do more about the rogue state that it helps to support, but only at the cost of our conscience. Lacking one of his own, I am sure he is laughing up his sleeve at ours.
October 10, 2006 – 9:59 am
It’ll be lighter fare this week, as I am working rather long hours and will be traveling on Thursday evening. For the moment, two pointed little jokes:
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October 9, 2006 – 9:25 am
With characteristic bluster, the insane despot Kim Jong Il has defied the will of the international community generally, and the United Nations Security Council in particular, by conducting an underground nuclear test, of yet-indeterminate magnitude. He’ll soon wish he hadn’t, because there will be swift and certain retribution from the UN – perhaps even a stern finger-wagging. And if that isn’t enough to teach the impudent little rascal some manners, you can be sure he won’t be spared some severe tut-tutting as well.
He’ll think twice before he tries that again.
October 8, 2006 – 7:00 pm
Thanks to commenter Kevin Kim, I’ve been spending some time poking around in Korean blogs. All cultures, of course, have their odd little quirks and idiosyncracies (the United States is no exception, of course, what with our drive-thru wedding chapels, monster truck pulls, and our penchant for Mespotamian nation-building), and I’ve run across one that seems to be unique to Korea. No, it isn’t kimchi. I’m referring, of course, to fan death.
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October 7, 2006 – 11:12 pm
My old pal, the guitarist Steve Khan, has many friends in Venezuela, and has spent a lot of time down there in recent years. This has given him an opportunity for a first-hand look at the enlightened presidency of Hugo ChÁ¡vez, and unsurprisingly, he is not impressed. Steve sent me, yesterday, links to three items by New York Post columnist Douglas Montero that show some of what life is like in that beautiful Caribbean country under this egomaniacal popinjay. Read them here, here, and here.
October 5, 2006 – 11:51 pm
Another long day today – work followed by a long evening of teaching and training down at the kwoon, and here it is pushing midnight and no post written yet. So rather than bloviate into the wee hours, I think I will offer you all instead a glimpse of New York City life, in the form of a conductor’s announcement that I heard on the F train as I was making my weary way home this past Saturday.
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October 4, 2006 – 11:47 pm
We’ve all heard of the “out-of-body experience” (“OBE”), in which a person has the sensation of detachment from the physical self. These are often reported in situations where a subject hovers close to death; people will recount, upon returning to normal consciousness, that they were floating near the ceiling, looking down upon themselves and others in the room (who are often doctors and nurses struggling to keep the patient from dying).
Yesterday’s New York Times carried an interesting report of some new neurological observations of this phenomenon.
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October 3, 2006 – 11:07 pm
The technological infrastructure here at waka waka waka is provided by an outstanding hosting outfit called BlueHost. Among the many excellent services they provide for the absurdly low fee of $6.95 per month is a versatile website-statistics package. It occurred to me earlier this evening that it might be amusing, in lieu of coughing up yet another grim and controversial entry about the accelerating decline of civilization, to look over some of the search-engine phrases that have brought visitors here over the past year.
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October 2, 2006 – 11:24 pm
The other day I ran across an item from the Boston Herald about a jihad-related kerfuffle in France. The story is about a high-school teacher named Robert Redeker, who has been driven into hiding after publishing an essay in Le Figaro suggesting — how dare he! — that Islam is trying to impose its cultural will upon Europe.
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October 1, 2006 – 10:22 pm
OK, as promised, politics entirely aside for the moment (although just for the moment, I’m afraid, as there’s just too much material out there, and more every day).
Sure, the war in Iraq, and the jihadists’ campaign to bring down the West generally, get most of the headlines. But today’s item is about a new weapon in a much older war – the fight against hiccups.
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September 30, 2006 – 11:19 pm
It was a long and busy day today – kung-fu testing and seminars all day in Chinatown, and a glorious victory by the Michigan Wolverines this evening in Minnesota. So the waka waka waka staff are taking a much-needed break. We’ll be back soon, most likely tomorrow, but possibly not until Monday.
September 28, 2006 – 10:23 am
I know I said I was going to lighten up on the political stuff, but the fact is, there’s too much of it, and it’s too important. Here is an excellent piece by Fouad Ajami, from the Wall Street Journal, in which he discusses recent intelligence reports, addresses some misconceptions about the situation in Iraq, and argues that we must not “give in to despair.” Do take a look.
September 27, 2006 – 3:33 pm
I’ve been posting a lot of political items lately; too many, really, as I don’t want political issues to dominate here. I also think I am giving the impression that I am far off on the right, when actually my opinions vary widely on an issue-by-issue basis – I tend to side with the Left on most social issues (gay marriage, church/state, abortion, drug laws, environmental and energy policy), with the Right on some others (affirmative action, gun control, border control, and a general aversion to socialism), and with the neoconservative Right on one issue only, which is foreign policy (to the extent that US influence is fairly and honestly brought to bear in a struggle against tyranny). I have defended, at length, our our decision to knock Saddam off his perch, but I agree also that the job was catastrophically bungled, and that certain heads that still issue orders should have rolled long ago. I also share the Left’s low opinion of George Bush generally – his swagger, his smug religiosity, his inarticulateness, his lack of intellectual subtlety, and his inability to admit and correct error – as I have made abundantly clear in any number of posts.
So I’ll try to ease off on the political rants. But not just yet; here’s one more.
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September 26, 2006 – 1:48 pm
In my previous post, I mentioned my alarm at seeing so many people taking antidepressant medication. My friend Jess Kaplan, in an email, points out that I have rather glibly lumped together an entire spectrum of mental disorders. He is quite right, and I should address his criticism.
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September 25, 2006 – 11:21 pm
I’ve noticed that an awful lot of people around here are taking antidepressants. Admittedly, I live in New York City, but still, it seems a little creepy. I haven’t bothered to hunt down any statistics, but even just counting the number of people who are casual enough about it to have mentioned it to me (and I figure it’s safe to say that at least half the folks who take them don’t let on) it’s starting to look pretty rampant.
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September 25, 2006 – 12:27 am
From Ornette Coleman:
There is no bad music, only bad performances.
This idea unfolds nicely.
September 23, 2006 – 11:22 pm
I’ve just come home from the movies. I don’t get out to the pictures as often as most people seem to, and I miss a lot of flicks I know I would have liked. Other activities (reading, writing, playing chess, practicing/teaching kung fu, playing music, introspective brooding, etc.) always seem to win out.
Tonight though, a new documentary by filmmaker Heidi Ewing (an acquaintance of my lovely wife Nina) opened at the Angelika Film Center on Houston Street in Manhattan, and we went to see it. It’s called Jesus Camp.
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September 22, 2006 – 11:59 pm
Well, time to lay off politics for a moment – although there is plenty to talk about, in particular that narcissistic moonbat Hugo ChÁ¡vez’s statesmanlike performance at the UN, and the heartening domestic response in which even familiar left-wing drones such as Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel paused in their bastinadoing of the C. in C. to circle the wagons. “Hey! You can’t slander the President of the United States,” they cried with one voice. “That’s our job.” Clearly, what is needed for world peace is an attack from space.
But there will be ample opportunity to get back to world affairs soon enough. Yes, the clash of civilizations rages on, the polar icecaps deliquesce, insane despots smirk approvingly as atom bombs roll off the assembly line, and the Pope lays his plans for the Rapture, but all that must wait:
I whacked a mouse.
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September 22, 2006 – 12:25 am
I have mentioned Bernard Lewis in these pages before; he is perhaps the West’s greatest living scholar of Islamic history and culture. This evening, as I was poking around over at the Maverick Philosopher’s place, I ran across, in a comment by Sam Graf to a post about appeasement of our foes, a link to a lecture given by Lewis earlier this year. In it he talks about the meaning of freedom and justice in Islamic societies, and of the historical events and forces that have brought us to our present crisis. The essay is brief, but Lewis is peerless, and you will learn more from these few paragraphs than from a year’s worth of the self-serving partisan din that passes for political debate these days.
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September 20, 2006 – 9:45 pm
A recent astrophysical result has cosmologists scratching their heads. Apparently the microwave shadows that galaxy clusters ought to be casting aren’t showing up as predicted by our current understanding of Big Bang theory, and nobody knows why.
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September 20, 2006 – 11:08 am
Avast, ye scurvy bilge rats. Just in case you didn’t know, today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
[Oooops. My mutinous readership has just pointed out to me that International Talk Like a Pirate Day was yesterday. Well, now you have plenty of advance notice for next year, ye thievin’ sea dogs.]
September 19, 2006 – 11:12 pm
By now you may know that there has been a coup in Thailand, the 17th since World War II. General Sonthi Boonyaratkalin made his move while Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was out of town, visiting Gotham for one of those occasional UN hootenannies that so effectively maintain idyllic peace and stability in the world (and do an even better job of reducing every thoroughfare east of Seventh Avenue to a state of total vehicular thrombosis for days on end).
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September 18, 2006 – 11:43 pm
As you’ve no doubt heard, the Muslim world has its knickers in a twist once again, this time over some remarks made by the Pope during the recent “APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI TO MÜNCHEN, ALTÖTTING AND REGENSBURG”. It’s been making the rounds that the Pontiff suggested that Mohammed, in the later verses of the Qur’an, had wrongly advocated the use of violence in the defense and propagation of Islam. To imply that peace-loving Muslims are prone to violence is, of course, so preposterous that Muslims the world over, in protest of this baseless and blasphemous insult, and in defense of their faith, are erupting in violence once again.
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September 17, 2006 – 8:47 pm
String theory, which has been touted for decades as the best hope for unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity, is taking some heat these days. Critics complain that the model has yet to generate any testable predictions, meaning that experimental confirmation remains out of reach, and that progress has been slower than we might have expected if string theory is really the right description of the world.
Recently Lee Smolin, an enormously gifted physicist and cosmologist (and the author of the fascinating book The Life of the Cosmos, to which I ought to devote a separate post), and Brian Greene, who is actively engaged in string-theory research (and who has written the clearest popularization yet of the subject, The Elegant Universe), appeared on NPR to talk about this issue. If you are interested in these matters you might like to listen to the program; you can do so here.
