February 1, 2006 – 12:52 am
My good friend Jess Kaplan has just sent me a link to a transcript of a 1985 lecture by the late Julian Jaynes. I’ve been meaning for a while to mention his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and now seems as good a time as any.
I first came upon this book many years ago, in early days of my own interest in the question of consciousness, and was drawn in by its lengthy and mysterious-sounding title. I thought it would be a summary of mainstream research, but it it turned out to be quite the opposite. It is, instead, a detailed and closely-argued brief for a radical theory of human history and development.
Jaynes, who died in 1997 at the age of 77, was a professor of psychology at Princeton University. But he is best remembered now for his claim, fantastic at first hearing, that our consciousness – the ordinary self-awareness that we are accustomed to – is in fact a very recent acquisition, and that within historical times humans were quite unconscious.
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January 31, 2006 – 12:24 am
I’ve alluded rather obliquely in some of my posts to various schools of inner development, without going into a lot of detail. I’d like to begin to talk about one such system with which I have had various levels of contact all of my life. The ideas in question are those brought to the West by the Greek/Armenian teacher G.I. Gurdjieff.
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January 30, 2006 – 11:17 am
Here’s an image I ran across this morning. All that’s missing are Dorothy and her little dog.
January 29, 2006 – 8:27 pm
Here in New York City the Sanitation Department will pick up pretty much anything you leave out for them. Unwanted furniture, old stoves, Christmas trees, paint cans, wooden planks, TV sets, you name it – just leave it at curbside and it’s gone the next day, gobbled up by the big white truck’s insatiable hydraulic maw. But a while back I managed to find the one thing that you can’t throw out.
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January 28, 2006 – 6:22 pm
Tonight is the beginning of the Year of the Dog, lunar year 4703. It is called “bingxu” in the “Stem-Branch” system, which repeats a name every 60 years.
To translate: Congratulations, and may you prosper.
January 27, 2006 – 11:52 pm
Having written a post earlier about James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces, I probably should remark on the recent brouhaha about the story, which you would have had to have been in a persistent vegetative state not to have noticed.
It turns out that Mr. Frey’s tale of recovery from multiple addictions was perhaps as much fiction as fact. Among other things, he wrote of jail time that he never in fact served. He fabricated an excruciating account of undergoing multiple root-canal procedures without anaesthesia. He concocted a tragic backstory about being responsible for an adolescent girlfriend’s death. In other words, he simply made a lot of stuff up and passed it off as the truth. A lot of people are pretty upset, not least of whom is his principal benefactor, the towering Oprah Winfrey, who dressed him down before the Entire World yesterday.
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January 26, 2006 – 11:40 pm
It being Chinese New Year this weekend, it is a bit of a busy time for kung fu schools, and Yee’s Hung Ga is no exception. Tonight we had a lion dance to do in Manhattan; I’ve only just got home to my Park Slope chÁ¢teau, and it’s after 11.
I’m just too worn out to write much tonight, but I certainly don’t want you all to go away empty-handed. So, as we prepare to ring in the Year of the Dog, I offer some exceptionally beautiful photographs of far-off Cathay’s exotic landscape. I do hope you enjoy them.
January 25, 2006 – 11:38 pm
Well, after last night’s gloomy post, redolent with the odor of the crypt, I think it’s time for a little comic relief. This comes by way of comedian Kip Addotta, who sends me little tidbits from time to time.
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January 24, 2006 – 11:53 pm
I am haunted tonight by a link sent to me by my friend and coworker Eugene Jen. I had decided earlier this evening not to mention it here, because I thought it might have the same rather harrowing effect on some readers that it has had on me. But that left me still having to write this evening’s post, and try as I might I couldn’t deflect my thoughts. So if you don’t want to read a disturbing item, just amuse yourself in some other way tonight, perhaps by browsing our fascinating archives. waka waka waka will be back to its usual cheery self again tomorrow, I promise.
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January 23, 2006 – 11:30 pm
It wasn’t until I began blogging that I realized how different it, and journalism generally, is from what one usually has in mind when one contemplates taking up writing. We have a mental image of the writer toiling in solitude to leave his brilliant existential mark; one thinks of the words, once set down, as going up on permanent display for the delight of the ages, and this is indeed the case for the successful author of books. But the journalist’s or blogger’s work is more like the chef’s – meant to be consumed as soon it is prepared, it is served up in single portions, with a new dish offered every day. I have to admit that there is, though, a tug of sadness at seeing a favorite post work its way down, and eventually off, the screen.
But for those who seek enlightenment, blogging is the perfect avocation. Like the elaborate sand mandalas prepared by Tibetan monks, it teaches us that life is a process, not a destination, and helps train us to avoid the attachment to the results of our efforts that is such a spiritual trap.
On the other hand, if you are Oprah Winfrey, and think that The Best of waka waka waka has a nice ring to it, do get in touch. In training oneself to avoid attachments, it’s always good to have something substantial to work with.
January 23, 2006 – 10:46 pm
My friend Salim Ismail has written a good post about the evolution of the Internet (in fact, the piece has the imaginative title “Evolution of the Internet”) over at his excellently named blog, You’ve Got Ismail! In it he talks about the three kinds of uses to which the Internet has been put.
The first was messaging, which just involves transmitting a packet of data from one place to another. This was the underpinning of the first big-time Internet application: e-mail, which got rolling in the 1980’s. The second was request-response, which is what HTTP is all about, and which made possible the explosive growth of the World Wide Web in the 1990’s. The third, which is just getting underway, is publish-subscribe, in which content on the Internet, which up until now has had to be actively fetched by the user, is able to announce itself to all interested parties.
Salim gives a clear and cogent account of it all. He has also added a post today, I see, in which he explains the important distinction between prospective and retrospective search.
Do take a look; what he is describing is the Next Big Thing.
January 22, 2006 – 11:09 pm
Yesterday we had a visit from my mother-in-law, Lily Phillips. She has had quite a remarkable life – she grew up in Vienna in an educated family of Jewish heritage, and was separated from her parents just before the beginning of World War II. Although she was technically too old – she was already in her late teens – a place was found for her on the Kindertransport, and she was evacuated to England, where she worked, utterly displaced and alone, as a servant in a succession of strangers’ homes. After the war she made her way to New York City, where she was reunited with her parents, who had managed to escape the ovens as well, and where, as a talented artist, she found work as a comic-book illustrator – an extremely unusual occupation for a woman at the time. She was nearly the only one.
Lily is very intelligent and well-read, and has kept her mind active in her later years by taking courses in philosophy and literature at Hunter College. Widowed since 1982, she lives alone on East 72nd Street, in the apartment where my Nina grew up. Her late husband Randolph, himself an extraordinary man, was, among other things, the first chairman of the Committee to Impeach Nixon (before Watergate). He argued before the Supreme Court, despite not being a member of the bar, and was the defendant in a landmark conscientious-objector case during WWII that set the precedent that objectors may refuse combat service on purely ethical, rather than religious grounds.
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January 21, 2006 – 4:20 pm
I’m fond of books. I tend to accumulate them, and at this point have between one and two thousand of them on shelves, in piles on the floor, and scattered about. But I do have to admit that they are bulky and old-fashioned. In a conversation yesterday with PubSub CEO Gus Spathis, an avid reader himself, he referred to my attachment to physical books as “quaint nostalgia”.
Gus makes a good point. There are few technologies – and the printed word is, of course, a technological artifact – that have survived so long essentially unchanged. Books are large, they are heavy, and they are made at considerable cost from wood and cotton and soot. The information represented by a book is, by Information Age standards, completely sessile, and the hard drive of my laptop, which is smaller than almost any book, could easily hold the contents of even the most avid collector’s personal library.
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January 20, 2006 – 10:33 pm
I am increasingly aware of how different my twenty-first century life is from the world I grew up in, and in fact from the life led by anyone more than a very few years ago. When I was a young boy, color televisions were a big deal. I remember the introduction of push-button telephones, audio cassettes, digital watches, and hand-held calculators. But the real revolution, of course, is the Internet.
I work as a software developer for a company that does Web search, so perhaps my immersion is deeper than some people’s, but I am noticing that it feels more and more odd to be “offline”. My life consists more and more of being seated at a computer, managing simultaneous streams of information – email, blog posts, online chess games, instant messages, Skype calls, PubSub alerts, news bulletins, desktop weather data, and so forth. Many times a day I wish to know something or other, and immediately retrieve the datum in question from some or other online source. I can swoop down on any part of the world with Google Earth.
Although this is a natural evolution – our success as a species is due above all to our gift for communication, and the Internet might well, I think, be on its way to being the wellspring of an emergent, collective human intelligence that will begin a new chapter in the history of mankind – we have also increased our risk of losing touch with the very real world around us and inside us.
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January 19, 2006 – 11:20 am
From my friend Steven Cohen comes an interesting link for those of you who tend to accumulate books: LibraryThing. It’s a Web-based system for cataloguing your personal library. You can tag your books according to subject, view other online libraries, see who has collections similar to yours, and so forth. It looks like a fantastic tool for hard-core bibliophiles. Take a look.
January 18, 2006 – 10:48 pm
If you hate shoveling snow, I’ve got good news. Dr. James Lovelock, who brought us the Gaia Hypothesis (a theory in which the biosphere is responsible for both the creation and regulation of Earth’s climate), has announced that our little blue orb, as a result of Mankind’s environmental rapacity, is about to enter a rapid phase of warming that he likens to a global fever. By the end of this century, according to his sunny prognosis, the climate in temperate regions will have heated up by 8° C. (that’s 14.4° F.), most of the tropics will have become scrub and desert, billions of humans will have died, and “the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” And it’s too late to do anything about it, by the way.
You can read the article here.
Oh well, que sera sera, I always say. See you on the boardwalk in Toktoyaktuk! Don’t forget your sunscreen.
January 17, 2006 – 9:41 pm
In yesterday’s post I promised to write an item explaining the difference between “retrospective” Web search, which is what conventional search engines like Google do, and “prospective search”, which is a new and complementary paradigm exemplified by services such as PubSub. As I began, though, it dawned on me that I had already written such a post back in August, on the PubSub house blog, Sandbox. So for those who are interested, here it is.
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January 16, 2006 – 10:37 pm
There’s something new and important you bloggers should all know about: Structured Blogging. Here’s what it is, and why it’s good.
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January 15, 2006 – 9:14 pm
One of the things that people like to do is “boil down” the staggering complexity of the world into comprehensive rules and principles. Surprisingly, the world often cooperates by revealing itself to be, in fact, a rather orderly place that does indeed seem to behave according to laws that are simple enough for us to ferret out.
Some of the rules we have worked out are abstruse, detailed and complicated, yet have held up well under critical examination – quantum mechanics and general relativity come to mind – while others are vague generalities like “there’s a sucker born every minute” and “faint heart ne’er won fair lady”. Some are obviously wrong, like “a watched pot never boils” (try this one yourself), and “the best things in life are free” (not all payment is in the form of money!), or my pet peeve, “everything happens for a reason.”
Sometimes we pick one thing and make it a central organizing principle. My friend Bob Wyman, for example, has worked out a plausible system of ethics entirely based upon the idea of resisting entropy. Another friend, songwriter Larry McNally, has written that “Love is everything – everything else is nothing.” He’s not the first to make the suggestion, but it makes a good song.
Well, I’m not immune to this temptation either, and sometimes I think that the fundamental currency in human affairs – the fungible coin in which the business of mankind is transacted – is attention.
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January 14, 2006 – 6:17 pm
Today the Washington Redskins are visiting the Seattle Seahawks for an NFL playoff game. The contest has been attended with the usual hype, but the sportswriters covering the game for the Seattle Times have faced a peculiar challenge – the paper has decided not to allow them to use the name “Redskins” more than once in their stories. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the only other obvious token by which to refer to the team is the name of their hometown, Washington, which happens also to be the the home state of the home team.
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January 13, 2006 – 10:05 pm
All right, maybe pondering arcane numerical sequences, even the really unusual and interesting ones, isn’t exactly everybody’s idea of a rollicking good time. If you would like an explanation of the one I offered in the previous post, click here.
And for a final – I promise! – note on this topic, here is a really nifty website, where such sequences are studied, catalogued, and explained, and where you can enter a sequence and look up the underlying rule.
January 12, 2006 – 11:56 pm
I few days back I inked a post about Douglas Hofstadter’s fascinating book GÁ¶del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, in which I showed a little item from the chapter Figure and Ground, which is about recursively enumerable systems. The tidbit I offered was a most unusual number series. Here it is again, for those of you who didn’t see it the first time around, or who just passed it by without really thinking about it:
1 3 7 12 18 26 35 45 56 69 …
I admit it takes a minute or two to make sense of it, but it is worth the effort. It is wonderfully strange, and is typical of the little jewels that are everywhere in that amazing book.
And don’t worry, I am not going to make a habit of posting retreads.
January 11, 2006 – 11:16 pm
A frequent topic in here, and in some of the blogs I’m fond of visiting, is the mystery of consciousness. How is it that “mere” matter can become self-aware? Can matter be the engine of consciousness at all, or does it merely serve as a temporary and intermittent host?
There seem to be three avenues by which people approach this mystery – philosophy, science, and mysticism. I have the intuitive conviction that they will, ultimately, give consistent answers – in other words, that they are all three digging toward the same hidden truth, although from different directions, and with different tools. My wish is to try to follow the progress on all three fronts, and to participate actively where I can.
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January 10, 2006 – 10:36 pm
If you have an interest in science (readers may by now have guessed that I do), may I recommend that you subscribe to the daily email newsletter published by PhysOrg.com. It’s a quick read – just headlines with links – and there is always something interesting. Today’s number, though, was a tad dispiriting.
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January 10, 2006 – 12:40 am
In case you were wondering why your dishes were rattling, it turns out that the Milky Way is “flapping in the breeze”. Apparently the Magellanic Clouds, who I always knew were up to no good, have grabbed our galaxy by the dark matter, and are generally making a nuisance of themselves.
Learn more here.
January 8, 2006 – 12:48 pm
Here’s an excellent sentence – a coruscating little gem of pith and understatement – from Wikipedia’s entry Alcoholic Beverage:
People under the influence of alcohol sometimes find themselves in dangerous or compromising situations where they would not be had they remained sober.
Now that’s good writing. Just think of the ocean of individual human experiences captured in those twenty-three words.
Can’t imagine what put that in my mind this morning, but there it is.
January 7, 2006 – 9:37 pm
Tonight, I must confess, I am suffused with a mellow glow of self-satisfaction. Let me explain:
I have described, in an earlier post, my interest in southern Chinese kung fu. I began in 1976, at the age of 19, to study the Lam Sai Wing Hung Gar system under the tutelage of the formidable William Chung, and was awarded a black belt in 1982 or so. But due to various circumstances, which are beyond the scope of this post, I was forced to withdraw from my study with him a few years later, and spent the next nine years practicing on my own, teaching a bit, and attending to life’s other clamant demands, which included establishing both a career and a family. By 1993, however, I was yearning to refocus my martial-arts studies under the guidance of a qualified master, and was lucky enough to meet, in my own neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, one Peter Berman, a Hung-style expert who had learned the Tang Fung Hung Ga system under the renowned master Frank Yee, and I began to reapply myself to the demands of this fierce fighting style. Although the two systems are very similar – Lam Sai Wing and Tang Fung were “training brothers” under the legendary Wong Fei Hung, a century or so ago – they have diverged a bit, and I began with Sifu Berman “from scratch”. My progress was slowed by the many demands placed on my time by work and family, as well as by several nasty orthopedic injuries, and by the difficulty of the style itself. But my previous training was a great help, and I made my way slowly through the system’s lengthy and complex empty-hand and weapons forms.
Today, at age 49, after more than twelve years with Sifu Berman, and with knees creaking, I completed my final test – the Ng Lung Ba Gwa Cheung Spear Form – and attained the rank of Jo Gow, my second black belt, twenty-five years after the first.
January 6, 2006 – 11:27 pm
I never get enough sleep. I get up between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m., get to PubSub’s Lower Manhattan nerve center at about 10, toil at the “bleeding edge” of Internet technology until 7 p.m. or so, then head home.
There are things to do in the evening. Dinner must be prepared and consumed. Often I will train a bit, and one night a week I teach class. There are books clamoring for my attention. My guitar, a winsome Taylor 310, beckons. There are chess games at RedHotPawn to which attention must be paid. Of course, as a husband and father, I spend time with Nina and Nick (and ChloÁ«, when she is home from college). Most of the time there are other lingering details: mail and telephone calls to answer, or little chores to do. Then there are blogs to be read, upon which perhaps to leave pithy and thought-provoking comments. Finally, I must confect the day’s post for waka waka waka.
The result of all of this is that I never seem to retire before 1:30 or 2 a.m., which means that I am usually getting six hours of sleep at best, and often less. I don’t like that at all; I know I’d be sharper if I slept more. But given all these worthwhile and productive occupations, what am I going to throw overboard? The world is just too interesting, and life is too short as it is.
I’ll just have to comfort myself with the old proverb:
“Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool.”
January 5, 2006 – 11:59 pm
I’m just too worn out tonight to do any writing, so I will offer some entertaining fluff for my legions of readers: two links from my friend Eugene Jen over at the PubSub command center.
First, an amusing little diversion. Can you work out the simple trick?
Next, some perplexing scientific questions.
January 4, 2006 – 11:16 pm
I found a note in the mail the other day announcing the demise of yet another outstanding recording studio. This time the decedent was O’Henry Studios (this link might not be good for long, so click it now), in North Hollywood, California. It was one of my favorites, and one of the best.
When I started out in the recording business, back in the late 70’s, things were very different. There were no desktop PCs with digital audio software, there was no MIDI, no samplers, no digital reverbs – pretty much no digital anything. When people wanted to make a record, they had to go to a studio, and they actually had to play musical instruments. In order for the sound to make it onto the tape (yes, we used 2″ 24-track analog tape back then), the services of an engineer were required. That was my job. I worked at a studio called Power Station, on West 53rd Street in Manhattan, where I worked my way up through the ranks to become a staff engineer.
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January 3, 2006 – 11:09 pm
Do you have a recording of Chopin’s Preludes? I listened to them today for the first time in quite a while. They are an odd collection, not preludes to anything really, despite the name, but each a unique meditation. About them, Liszt said:
“Chopin’s Preludes are compositions of an order entirely apart. They are not only, as the title might make one think, pieces destined to be played in the guise of introductions to other pieces; they are poetic preludes, analogous to those of a great contemporary poet, who cradles the soul in golden dreams, and elevates it to the regions of the ideal.”
and Schumann:
“I would term the Preludes strange. They are sketches, beginnings of Etudes, or, so to speak, ruins, individual eagle pinions, all disorder and wild confusions.”
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January 2, 2006 – 11:55 pm
It suddenly dawned on me this evening that I had not yet written a post formally introducing my readers to The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The world first learned of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s role in the creation of all that is when one Bobby Henderson, a “concerned citizen”, wrote an open letter to the Kansas School Board in which he explained that humans received the spark of life from His Noodly Appendage, and described the teachings of Spaghetti Monsterism. Mr. Henderson quite reasonably requests that the Pastafarian account of the origin of life be taught alongside Intelligent Design and Darwinism:
One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.
In his letter he also insists that the correct presentation is essential:
Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. I cannot stress the importance of this enough, and unfortunately cannot describe in detail why this must be done as I fear this letter is already becoming too long. The concise explanation is that He becomes angry if we don’t.
In addition to the revealed Truth (which includes scientific evidence that “global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s”), the site also offers some nifty merchandise, and even a festive holiday card. Don’t wait another minute.
January 1, 2006 – 11:32 pm
One of my favorite books is the astonishingly imaginative Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter. This Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, published in 1979, is an extended meditation upon the underlying connections between the work of the three men mentioned in the title – Johann Sebastian Bach (who needs no introduction), the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, and mathematician Kurt Gödel. Hofstadter, who inherited the prestigious editorship of Scientific American’s Mathematical Games column from the incomparable Martin Gardner, has described his inspiration for the project:
“I realized that to me, Gödel and Escher and Bach were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence. I tried to reconstruct the central object, and came up with this book.”
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December 31, 2005 – 11:04 pm
waka waka waka wishes all of you happiness, good health, and good luck in 2006.
December 30, 2005 – 11:31 pm
The new Moon of December 31st will be the second one this month; the first having been on December 1st. When two full Moons occur in the same calendar month, it’s called a “Blue Moon”, but till now there has been no name for this inverse phenomenon. The folks at Spaceweather.com asked for suggestions for their readers, and the winner was “Ebony Moon”. Like Blue Moons, Ebony Moons happen about once every two-and-a-half years. The next one will be in August of 2008.
December 30, 2005 – 12:43 am
As I was walking home from the kwoon this evening, having spent a pleasant few hours first enlightening my students as to the subtleties of the “crane’s wing”, and later practicing the Ng Lung Ba Gwa Cheung, I noticed some books lying in the street, about to be ruined by the rain. I took a closer look, and what I found was the Sixth Edition of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, a fabulous resource published in 1975, and what appears to be a first-edition hardcover copy of Lewis Copeland’s The World’s Great Speeches (from Pericles to Roosevelt), published in 1942.
How can anyone just throw such treasures overboard? Onto the shelf they go.
December 29, 2005 – 12:17 am
Mullah Nasrudin was on his hands and knees in the street. A friend saw him, and came over to ask what he was up to.
“Mullah! What are you doing?”
“I’ve lost my key.”
“Well, where did you last see it?”
“In my study.”
“So why are you looking for it out here in the street?”
“Because the light’s better here, of course!”
December 28, 2005 – 12:24 am
Educational and psychological theories of the mid-20th century saw the human brain as an infinitely flexible learning machine, with no “factory presets”. But the picture that is now emerging of our mental apparatus is of a suite of prewired cognitive modules, located in various areas of the brain, each of which has been shaped by natural selection for some useful task. These modules provide us with a common a priori framework for organizing our model of the world, and each module contributes an intuitive description of some aspect of our environment.
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December 25, 2005 – 12:18 am
To all of you. May your homes be havens of peace and love, may you grow in wisdom and understanding, and may fortune smile upon you in 2006.
-Malcolm
December 24, 2005 – 4:02 pm
There are many in the scientific community, including some of its most prominent spokespersons, who seem to have embraced a rather militant form of atheism. Richard Dawkins seems to be the most visible just now, but there are many others.
I used to be a strongly committed atheist myself, but my viewpoint has softened, and I would categorize myself now as a curious agnostic. One of the reasons that I abandoned the atheist position is the simple fact that reason itself is silent on the question of God’s existence. Efforts have been made to put faith in God onto a solid naturalist or philosophical foundation, but the fact remains that there is still no way to compel either belief in or denial of the existence of God.
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December 23, 2005 – 11:55 pm
One of the things that people who dislike George Bush often mention as something that particularly bothers them is what they call his “swagger”. I too have found myself vaguely irritated by his carriage, without realizing what it was that bothered me. I’ve now put my finger on it.
I’ve noticed in the past that both hypertrophic bodybuilders and the grossly obese share a postural trait – the arms, when hanging at one’s sides, not being able to lie closely against the body, are pushed out and forward, which rotates the hands so that the palms, instead of being turned toward each other, face straight backward. This is also how gorillas and troglodytes are always drawn, knuckles dragging on the ground. If you look at most men of normal girth you will see the hands hanging with the palms facing the body, more or less, but when George Bush walks his palms face generally aft. It has a marked, if subliminal, visual effect.
Not having heard anybody point this out before, I thought I’d better mention it here.
December 22, 2005 – 11:59 pm
Science, the official organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has published its Top Ten list of scientific breakthroughs for 2005. The winners are:
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December 22, 2005 – 12:41 am
This transit strike has the city clenched and writhing like a spider stuck by a pin. Businesses are withering, traffic is packed solid from river to river, and municipal and union officials are locked in a snarling impasse, while Gotham’s hapless and frozen workforce staggers to and fro across the city’s bridges in their hundreds of thousands. And all of this four days before Christmas.
New York is rightly renowned for taking such things in stride, but this one is going to get old in a hurry.
December 22, 2005 – 12:26 am
One of my favorite left-clicks in all of cyberspace is WikiPedia’s Random Article link. Here’s a typical sequence:
Hagop Hagopian
1636 in literature
Mutawintji National Park
Pindall, Arkansas
United States Chess Federation
Anita King
Historicity of Jesus
You never know what you’re going to get.
December 20, 2005 – 10:12 pm
The campaign by Biblical literalists to have their mythology masquerade as science in the public schools has been dealt another setback. In a welcome and much-needed decision, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones has struck down the Dover Township, PA school board’s attempt to smuggle “Intelligent Design” into the biology curriculum.
You can read the judge’s opinion here.
December 20, 2005 – 12:43 pm
Well, the bus-and-subway strike is on. New York depends on mass transit more than any other city in the country, and this is going to be very bad indeed, especially given the timing.
The strike might last a while, as the two sides – the government and the Transport Worker’s Union – seem unable to do anything more constructive than to huff and puff and wag their fingers at one another. And as usual the ones who will suffer the most are the blameless working folks, into whose faces the weather always blows, regardless of which direction the wind comes from.
December 20, 2005 – 1:08 am
From Hans Zinsser’s scholarly and delightful book Rats, Lice, and History: Being a Study in Biography, Which, After Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensable for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals With the Life History of Typhus Fever comes the following:
More than any other species of animal, the rat and mouse have become dependent on man, and in doing so they have developed characteristics which are amazingly human. In the first place, like man, the rat has become practically omnivorous. It eats anything that lets it and – like man – devours its own kind, under stress. It breeds in all seasons and – again like man – it is most amorous in the springtime. It hybridizes easily, and, judging by the strained relationship between the black and the brown rat, develops social or racial prejudices against this practice. The sex proportions are like those among us. Inbreeding takes place readily. The males are larger, the females fatter. It adapts itself to all types of climates. It makes ferocious war upon its own kind, but has not, as yet, become nationalized. So far it has still stuck to tribal wars – like man before nations were invented. If it continues to ape man as heretofore we may, in a few centuries, have French rats eating German ones, or Nazi rats attacking Communist or Jewish rats; however, such a degree of civilization is probably not within the capabilities of any mere animal.
The book is lighthearted, erudite, and without question the best book about vermin and pestilence you have ever read.
December 19, 2005 – 11:05 pm
I expect that most of you have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but you may not have seen the preface that he wrote for a Ukrainian edition. The preface was censored in England, and was not added to most English translations. I certainly hadn’t seen it before my friend Duncan Werner sent me a link to it today.
Orwell’s prolegomenon talks about self-imposed literary censorship in midcentury England regarding the USSR and Josef Stalin, who was greatly admired by the intellectual Left.
The English intelligentsia, or a great part of it, had developed a nationalistic loyalty towards the USSR, and in their hearts they felt that to cast any doubt on the wisdom of Stalin was a kind of blasphemy. Events in Russia and events elsewhere were to be judged by different standards. The endless executions in the purges of 1936-8 were applauded by life-long opponents of capital punishment, and it was considered equally proper to publicize famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in the Ukraine.
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December 18, 2005 – 5:34 pm
President Bush yesterday owned up to having authorized the N.S.A. to monitor the private communications of US citizens without the need to obtain a court order. I realize we are at war, but this is wrong, and I am angry about it. I am annoyed not only because it is exactly the sort of thing that goes on in the Orwellian police states we are supposed to be setting ourselves in opposition to, but also because I have at considerable social cost defended the Bush administration’s foreign policy for years now, while he can’t even manage to keep up his end of the bargain by not appearing at every opportunity to be exactly the conniving and hubristic autocrat his more hysterical opponents have always made him out to be.
Obviously his political foes will seize hungrily upon this. I think it is going to be a very serious problem for him, and rightly so.