We’re off duty today, and so the lovely Nina and I took a long walk this afternoon on the beach at Maguire’s Landing (a.k.a. Lecounts Hollow) here in Wellfleet.
It being December, we had the place all to ourselves. (Well, almost, as you’ll see below.) It was very beautiful. I took a few pictures, shortly before sunset.
Well, the saga continues at Mangan’s. His old blog having risen from its ashes, Dennis has decided to carry on there, while taking precautions to ensure continuity if he is cold-cocked by Google again.
So: http://mangans.blogspot.com it is.
I’ll be traveling today, with scant time to write, but I wanted to let all of you know that Dennis Mangan is back in business:
http://mangans.typepad.com/mangans/
Adjust your links accordingly.
I watched the President’s speech last night. It was not encouraging. It had something for everyone: escalation for the hawks; an exit date for the doves; the usual rot about “distorting and defiling a great religion”, to keep the Muslims off the streets; some bean-counting for the frugal; some American exceptionalism for the true believers; some mulitilateralism for the rest; a little torture-and-Gitmo-loathing for the base; and to wrap up, some right-makes-might for moral uplift.
The problem is that the situation is impossible; there simply are no good options. Never have I felt more pessimistic.
Now here’s something you rarely see: a prominent and powerful male, exposed publicly to have been a duplicitous, goat-footed philanderer — and having thereby humiliated, before a drooling global audience, his dutiful wife and mortified family — makes a sheepish statement (note the shift in declension, from caprine to ovine) in which he reassures us all that he “regrets” his transgressions.
This time it’s Tiger Woods.
It appears that our friend Dennis Mangan has run afoul of Google’s guidelines for acceptable content: as of late afternoon yesterday his blog’s homepage has been replaced by the dreaded Blogger Screen of Death.
This happened also to Jeffery Hodges a while back, though in that case it appeared to be some sort of mistake: it was hard to see how anyone, even a Bay Area leftie, would have been offended by Jeffery’s amiable blog, and as it happened a friend of mine at Google was able to get his site restored. In Dennis’s case, however, I think this was probably a deliberate move on Google’s part. Mangan’s had been attracting a lot of attention lately (and, presumably, links and traffic), and Dennis writes frankly on matters of social and scientific controversy. In particular Dennis often discussed the dangerously radioactive subject of “human biodiversity”, a.k.a. “HBD”: the radical notion that there may indeed be systematic genetic differences of various sorts between human populations, that these variations are a suitable and important topic for scientific inquiry, and that there should be no taboos against such research, or against free discussion of what research already exists. (It is worth noting that an article on the subject was also removed, recently, from Wikipedia.)
In addition to his writings on HBD, Dennis also writes, from a conservative viewpoint, about other contentious topics: multiculturalism and the general decline of Western culture; immigration; religion and atheism — and, as a scientist himself, he often writes with caustic tone about the resistance of the scientific “establishment” to the presentation and discussion of heterodox ideas, particularly in the medical and climate sciences.
In other words: Dennis hasn’t got a P.C. bone in his body. He is always civil, always reasonable, and is motivated only by his sincere concern for ailing Western culture, and by a desire to get at the facts, however “inconvenient” they may be — but I have no doubt that as far as many people are concerned he is quite beyond the pale. His site had also become rather a rallying point for like-minded discontents, and I imagine he became conspicuous enough that someone at Google decided to declare him to be in violation of their terms of service.
I can tell you from personal experience that for a dedicated blogger, having one’s website go down is profoundly disconcerting; I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that it feels like a sudden existential amputation. My advice to any of you out there who have blogs on Blogspot: do yourself a favor and get your own site, especially if you have anything pungent or controversial to express. The cost is trivial — I pay $8 a month for hosting, and registering a domain is even cheaper — but most important of all, you own your content, and for now at least, you cannot be silenced. Blogspot is a free service, and as we have seen you run the risk of being taken down at Google’s merest whim, without even a word of warning.
I have no doubt that Dennis will be back; look for updates here.
In the comment thread to our recent post about John Derbyshire’s book We Are Doomed, commenter JW asked one very good question: why, if increasing ethnic and cultural diversity lead to corresponding increases in tension and strife, does New York City (where I live) manage to function as well as it does?
Why indeed? To the visitor or casual observer it does seem that New York is the perfect poster-child for the ideology of Diversity: an extraordinary amalgam of people from every corner of the world, a confluence of colors and cultures on a scale unmatched anywhere on Earth. If critics of Diversity are right, it shouldn’t last another day. How can it possibly work?
A recent item in the Long War Journal informs us that it appears that al-Qaeda is consolidating a Waziristan-style presence in Eastern Syria. Nothing happens in Syria without the consent of the Ba’ath Party, and the story does indeed tell us that there appears to be a working partnership in place between al-Qaeda and former Iraqi Ba’athists.
This has to be an uneasy alliance, I should think. For starters, there has been considerable tension in the past between the Iraqi Ba’ath Party and the original Syrian branch, although I would expect that with the party banned in Iraq that particular hatchet is likely buried for the moment. But there are very deep ideological rifts between the Ba’athists, who are more or less secular pan-Arab Marxists, and al-Qaeda, who obviously have as their goal the restoration of an Islamist theocracy. (Indeed one of the Ba’ath Party’s founding intellectuals, Michel Aflaq, was a Christian who saw in a secular, trans-national Arabist movement a way to avoid minority status under Islam — and in principle the Ba’athists, by favoring a secular state, are in violation of one of Ibn Wahhab’s Ten Voiders of Islam, and are thereby apostates.) Complicating things further, the Syrian Ba’ath Party has been led for decades by Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar, who are Alawi Shi’ites; al-Qaeda, of course, is a Sunni organization, has no love for the Shi’a, and has been responsible for many attacks on Shi’ites in Iraq and elsewhere. (To get a feel for the depth of this animosity, read Section 3, for example, of this 2004 letter from Osama bin Laden’s deputy Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to his chief.)
It is often pointed out that the Islamic world is far from monolithic, and that there are many orthogonal axes along which alliances (and fractures) can develop. These two players have common ground as Muslims, and as Arabs, and as enemies of the United States, and it seems that’s enough for now. I suppose they figure they can sort each other out once we’re out of the picture.
Story here.
I’ve just begun reading John Derbyshire’s dour and mordantly funny new book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. The first chapter deals with our bizarre and destructive obsession with Diversity — a liberal viewpoint, now thoroughly hegemonic at all levels of societal administration, that Mr. Derbyshire sums up as The Diversity Theorem:
Different populations, of different races, customs, religions, and preferences, can be mixed together in any numbers or proportions at all, with harmonious result. Not only will the result be harmonious, it will also be beneficial to all the people thus mixed. They will be better and happier than if they had been left to stagnate in dull homogeneity.
There’s all sorts of interesting scientific news today, including several stories from recent Science Daily newsletters.
First up: there is further supporting evidence that the Toba volcano, which I have written about before, indeed caused far-flung devastation when it blew a gigantic hole in the island of Sumatra 73,000 years ago. The explosion is believed to have brought our species very close indeed to the edge of extinction. Learn more here.
Second: I’m sure most of you have never thought about just what most people mean when they use the word “most”. (I can assure you, at least, that I never have.) But Prof. Mira Ariel of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Linguistics has apparently been thinking about it very hard indeed, and it turns out that it means 80 to 95 percent. For now, at least. Story here.
Third, it appears that the Milky Way, the charming spiral galaxy we call home, is crashing another galaxy even as you read this. You probably hadn’t noticed, because the other galaxy, it turns out, is invisible. Here.
There’s much, much more — these are interesting times! — but that’s enough for now.
David Duff is having a nice gloat over the Climategate kerfuffle — which I must say is unfolding rather gratifyingly, for those of us who thought we already had enough religions in the world and didn’t see the need for any expensive new ones.
Here.
While I was away this weekend, paying scant attention to the news, a serious brouhaha seems to have erupted in the global-warming community. Apparently a hacker got hold of, and made public, emails and internal documents from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia — a major center for AGW study — and they appear to contain evidence of grave improprieties involving the rigging and politicization of research and publication. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
Blogger Dennis Mangan has already picked up the story (his post’s title may somewhat overstate the case, though again it may not); have a look here.
You know you’ve been spending way too much time programming when you suddenly see the people making sandwiches at the deli counter as a thread pool, and the single slicer as a synchronization object.
Our recent post on the need for cultures to have, like any organism, an effective “immune system” has led to an interesting discussion with our friend Kevin Kim. It continues here.
I’ve been writing an awful lot about the decline of the West lately, and in particular about how our crazy obsession with “diversity” affects our prospects in our ancient conflict with Islam; one might think that’s the only thing on my mind, which it certainly is not. I also think that I’ve begun to give some readers the impression that I am some sort of narrow-minded bigot, seething with genocidal hatred, which is very far indeed from the truth. Really, I’m just worried, that’s all, and I don’t want to see Western civilization and culture — which I unabashedly believe to be the highest achievement, to date, in humanity’s long struggle to raise itself above the apes and brutes from which we are all descended — fall in ruins. At least not on my watch.
I think I’ll try to lay off the subject a bit for a while; I’ve been neglectful of many of the topics we used to cover here often. (I also haven’t had a whole lot of time to write, lately, and may have none at all tomorrow, as I will be traveling.)
For tonight, then, something completely different; an interesting item on the technology front: road trains. Here.
I’m working late again this week, and have had no time to write. But reader JK has sent along a link to an informed and thoughtful post about the Obama administration’s decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in the criminal court here in New York City. Here is an excerpt:
The Fort Hood massacre has got people talking, and it even seems suddenly to have dawned on a lot of people — as a startlingly new idea — that perhaps there might even be appropriate limits to our liberal infatuation with multiculturalism and radical non-discrimination: that “diversity” might not only not be the summum bonum of an enlightened culture, but that carried too far it might in fact be cultural suicide.
Cultures are much more than mere philosophical abstractions: they are, in a sense, living organisms, and like any living organism they must be discriminating about what they ingest. Without such habits of caution, and in the absence of an immune system that can distinguish between “self” and “other” and so protect the system from pathogens and parasites, an organism will die — and a species that is so maladapted as to lack these essential capacities will go extinct.
As I write, the Wolverines are collapsing yet again, this time against Wisconsin. How I miss Lloyd Carr.
Apparently I am not the only one who is upset with Rich Rodriguez, as you can see below.
I have to say: YouTube is amazing. Here’s something for you music lovers “of a certain age”: a clip from the old TV series F Troop, in which the folks at Fort Courage were visited by a musical act calling themselves The Bedbugs.
As it turns out, the leader and drummer of The Bedbugs are none other than the great Lowell George and Richie Hayward, respectively, whom the cognoscenti among you will of course know as founding members of Little Feat.
Recently Bill Vallicella excerpted, and I commented briefly upon, some passages from philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s essay On Being Conservative. Wishing to refresh my memory of a few points, I opened it up again today — and was impressed once more by what a fine piece of writing it is, and by how well it limns the conservative disposition.
Tonight we note with sadness the death of photographer Evelyn Hofer, who although not nearly as well known as some of the prominent photographers of her day, was widely regarded as one of the greatest photographic artists of the 20th century.
I did not know Ms. Hofer well, though I met her on a couple of occasions, and she attended my wedding in 1982. She was, however, a very close friend of my mother-in-law Lily Renée Phillips (who is a gifted artist in her own right). Several of Evelyn Hofer’s beautiful photographs, including portraits of my wife’s family, adorn our home.
You can read her New York Times obituary here, and see more of her work here.
Economist Thomas Sowell offers some sensible remarks about the health-care juggernaut now bludgeoning its way through Congress:
One of the strongest talking points of those who want a government-run medical care system is that we simply cannot afford the high and rising costs of medical care under the current system.
First of all, what we can afford has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of producing anything. We will either pay those costs or not get the benefits. Moreover, if we cannot afford the quantity and quality of medical care that we want now, the government has no miraculous way of enabling us to afford it in the future.
If you think the government can lower medical costs by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse,” as some Washington politicians claim, the logical question is: Why haven’t they done that already?
Over the years, scandal after scandal has shown waste, fraud and abuse to be rampant in Medicare and Medicaid. Why would anyone imagine that a new government medical program will do what existing government medical programs have clearly failed to do?
If we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs now, how can we afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs, in addition to a new federal bureaucracy to administer a government-run medical system?
Nothing is easier for politicians than to rail against the profits of pharmaceutical companies, the pay of doctors and other things that have very little to do with the total cost of medical care, but which can arouse emotions to the point where facts don’t matter. As former Congressman Dick Armey put it, “Demagoguery beats data” in politics.
Economics and politics confront the same fundamental problem: What everyone wants adds up to more than there is. Market economies deal with this problem by confronting individuals with the costs of producing what they want, and letting those individuals make their own trade-offs when presented with prices that convey those costs. That leads to self-rationing, in the light of each individual’s own circumstances and preferences.
Politics deals with the same problem by making promises that cannot be kept, or which can be kept only by creating other problems that cannot be acknowledged when the promises are made.
Read the rest here.
For those of you who were puzzled by the sudden withdrawal of challenger Abdullah Abdullah from the runoff election in Afghanistan the other day, the Asia Times has the answer: he did so under U.S. pressure, as part of a complex deal brokered by our Secretary of State during her recent visit to Pakistan. Mr. Abdullah was considered by Islamabad to be a potential ally of India, and in order for the U.S. to strengthen its ties with the Pakistani army and the ISI, he had to go.
The agreement also confirms a tilt in US policy toward the real power in Pakistan — the military and intelligence services — and away from the titular democratic authority of President Zardari, who will become increasingly marginalized as events unfold.
What does the US get for this? The possibility of a way out of Afghanistan, with an uneasy “arrangement” of some sort brokered between the Taliban, the Pakistani Army, and a biddable Hamid Karzai, who presumably will be content with whatever arrangement allows him to maintain his agreeable lifestyle.
Read all about it here.
From the AFCEA Nightwatch newsletter for November 5th:
The Taliban in Afghanistan now operate in more than 220 of the 400 districts in Afghanistan, compared to fewer than 30 five years ago. A new Pakistani Taliban movement has sustained insurgency in the Pakistan border regions and spread terror east of the Indus River boundary and threatened to carry it to India.
Iran and North Korea have continued to proliferate weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems. Lebanon has no government. Most Central Asian states have returned to the Russian fold. Western China has become less stable and more unpredictable. Yemen is fighting a low level civil war that has now required Saudi Arabian air force assistance. Iran continues to send arms to its proxies in Lebanon, Gaza, Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia. New Iranian made rockets now held by Hamas in Gaza can reach Tel Aviv, and maybe Dimona. Iran’s nuclear program continues to expand.
The tally does not look like progress towards stability.
Our former Lieutenant Governor, Betsey McCaughey, offers a brief survey of some of the just-passed House healthcare bill’s salient points. Here.
In a recent post we mentioned that some of the boffins at CERN had begun to suggest, apparently seriously, that the problems that have dogged the development of the latest generation of high-energy particle colliders — first the Superconducting Supercollider here in the US, and more recently CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — might actually be the result of some causal interference reaching backward in time to prevent some sort of Earth-shattering disaster.
The LHC has been under repair since last year’s breakdown, and is getting close to being ready to run once again. But to the folks at CERN, it must be starting to seem as if cosmic forces really are arrayed against them. Have a look here.
The topic of the day is obviously the massacre at Fort Hood. The news agencies have rather a hot potato in the essential fact of this story, namely that an apparently radicalized Muslim, a member of our own armed forces, launched a murderous attack upon servicemen who were about to be deployed to fight fundamentalist Muslims.
There will of course be those who will present the accused as nothing more than an angry, disaffected, garden-variety “mucker” — we must respect Islam, after all, and all diversity is always good, no matter what — but it is hard to see this as anything other than what it clearly is: an act of jihad, provoked by the intolerable stress of mixed loyalties: to the U.S. Army of which he was a member, and to his Muslim faith and brothers. It would be less ambiguous in the public eye, perhaps, had he donned an explosive vest for the job in the signature style of jihadist martyrs, but both cause and effect are nevertheless the same.
This story is not going to go away, nor should it. There is now going to be a terrible strain between liberal multiculturalists, who will see any reaction to this murderer qua Muslim as racist Islamophobia (it is neither), and those flyover-country sorts who will argue that it is folly to have an increasing number of devout Muslims embedded in an army (or for that matter a nation) that is at the forefront of the latest spasm of this ancient and sanguinary conflict with Islam. We are about to see a loud argument taking shape.
On the front page of today’s Times is a story I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about before. It seems that the Iraqi security forces are using a bomb-detection gizmo that seems, quite obviously, to be nothing more than an expensive, tarted-up divining rod.
The gadget in question is called the ADE 651, and the Iraqis have bought at least 1,500 of them, despite their costing tens of thousands of dollars apiece. They are made by a British outfit called ATSC (currently their site says “Website under repair”), which so far has only managed to sell them to “developing nations” — which ought to tell you something right there.
With a hat tip to my friend and former employer Bob Wyman, here’s a clever way to get people to take the stairs.
I’m old enough to remember Pan American World Airways, which throughout my early years was America’s foremost airline. I flew Pan Am on many occasions (including, once, all the way to Japan for a recording project), and through the misty lens of memory I recall the service and comfort being far superior to the cattle-car treatment you get from most carriers today.
Apparently, nostalgia for this iconic brand lingers also in the mind of one Anthony Toth, a resident of Redondo Beach, California. Over the last 20 years Mr Toth has assembled, in his garage, a meticulous reconstruction of a Pan Am 747’s first-class cabin, using parts foraged from a jetliner junkyard in the Mojave Desert. Have a look here.
The other day our comrade in bloggery Horace Jeffery Hodges offered a post with a link to some old Calvin and Hobbes strips. I’ve always been a big C&H fan, and among my favorites among Bill Watterson’s many recurring themes were the strips in which Calvin’s dad would teach the restless wee lad about science. Featured at Jeffery’s post was an item about testing the load-limits of bridges, but following the link I found quite a few other instructive entries — in which we learn, amongst other facts, that the sun sets near Flagstaff, Arizona, and that the theory of relativity only works if you’re going west.
My favorite, though, is the final strip, in which Calvin’s dad explains why old photographs are in black and white. Go follow the link at Jeff’s place to learn more. (Philosophy buffs may end up wondering why the old photos weren’t in grue and bleen.)
And if you want more (how could you not?), another favorite of mine was Calvin’s “dark snowmen” series. Here.
I must confess to being, along with several million of my fellow Gothamites, a tad distracted this evening; if you can’t guess why I’m not going to tell you.
So here’s a link, sent today by a reader, that those of you with an interest in matters military, and in our current predicament in Afghanistan, might find interesting: a publication called Schools for Strategy: Teaching Strategy for 21st Century Conflict, from the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army’s War College.
“General” seems an appropriate category for this one, I think.
Not tonight, anyway. So make your way straight over to The Joy of Curmudgeonry, where our friend the estimable Deogolwulf has just published a formidable essay on the auto-genocide of the West.
Here.
On the front page of today’s Times there’s a photo from Pakistan: Hillary Clinton — the West’s most powerful diplomat, an inspiration to women everywhere, and an essential symbol and embodiment of Western liberty, strength, and confidence — in a Muslim headscarf. Again.
Oh well, at least it will be a few years before she feels the need to wear a burqa.
Well, our theme for this week notwithstanding, this is certainly anything but “shameless filler”: Bill Vallicella, over at his website Maverick Philosopher, has presented some pithy excerpts from Michael Oakeshott’s essay On Being Conservative, in support of his thesis that conservatism is first a matter of temperament and inveterate disposition, and only thereafter a matter of philosophy.
Among the extracts Bill has selected is the following:
. . . what makes a conservative disposition in politics intelligible is nothing to do with natural law or a providential order, nothing to do with morals or religion; it is the observation of our current manner of living combined with the belief (which from our point of view need be regarded as no more than an hypothesis) that governing is a specific and limited activity, namely the provision and custody of general rules of conduct, which are understood, not as plans for imposing substantive activities, but as instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration, and therefore something which it is appropriate to be conservative about.
[. . .]
And the office of government is not to impose other beliefs and activities upon its subjects, not to tutor or to educate them, not to make them better or happier in another way, not to direct them, to galvanize them into action, to lead them or to coordinate their activities so that no occasion of conflict shall occur; the office of government is merely to rule. This is a specific and limited activity, easily corrupted when it is combined with any other, and, in the circumstances, indispensible. The image of the ruler is the umpire whose business is to administer the rules of the game, or the chairman who governs the debate according to known rules but does not himself participate in it.
Wise words. I had not read this essay in its entirety before; Bill’s post inspired me to do so. It is well worth your time. It appears, however, that the link to the original posted by Bill has gone bad; readers may instead find a PDF of Oakeshott’s essay here.
Over at Der Spiegel Online is an interview with Charles Krauthammer, in which he assesses Barack Obama’s stewardship, to date, of our nation’s affairs. I find little to disagree with.
Here are some excerpts.
Heading wearily home on the subway late this evening, I skimmed an item in today’s Times — Waiter, There’s A Gavel In My Soup — in which the author Gay Talese described finding himself at the table next to Chief Justice John Roberts’s last Saturday evening at a cozy little Upper East Side restaurant. As Justice Roberts got up to go, he turned to Mr. Talese to ask if he would like the rest of a fine bottle of wine that the Chief Justice and his companion were not able to finish. Mr Talese gratefully accepted, and got Mr. Roberts to autograph the label as well.
I remarked to myself in passing that New York City is often more like a small town, but then, as I was turning the page, I noticed the name of the restaurant — Lumi — and realized with a bit of a jolt that the lovely Nina, her mother, and I had been there having dinner at the same time ourselves! We had failed to spot the Chief Justice, however, which I suppose is just as well.
Small town indeed.
I admit this is not much of a story, really, but as noted below it’s Shameless Filler Week. Anyway, you get what you pay for.
With deadlines looming over me once again at work, I’m frazzled. It looks like it’s going to be another Shameless Filler Week here at waka waka waka.
Our Muse tonight is Terpsichore, as we present a video clip — sent our way by the lovely Nina — in which we meet Elvyna, a p’tite jeune fille who can really cut a rug.
After eleven hours of heavy lifting at the office, I’m afraid the little grey cells have now called it a day, and a meaty post is simply not in the cards. But readers will know by now that having nothing of any interest whatsoever to say rarely keeps me from posting — and tonight is no exception.
This evening’s offering fits with particular aptness into our “tomfoolery” taxon, having been tossed over the transom today by my old Hung Gar training brother Tom Andrus. So, without further ado:
Can’t find the book you’re looking for? Well, it’s probably because you’re in the:
It’s been a busy weekend, and I’ve had no time for writing. For tonight, then, a curiosity: the effect of visual contrast on gender recognition. Here.
An item in today’s Physorg newsletter describes some remarkable neurological research: scientists at CalTech, by showing pictures to test subjects while monitoring brain activity, have managed to associate individual neurons in the medial temporal lobe with specific perceptions.
We read:
Dr. Moran Cerf of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues conducted their experiment by showing the subjects images of people, places or objects that were familiar to them, including pictures of celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and Bill Clinton. They then looked for the neurons that fired when the subject was shown each image.
In each of the subjects they found individual neurons fired when the person looked at a specific image. So there was a “Michael Jackson neuron”, a “Marilyn Monroe neuron”, and others that fired when the person was shown an image of the Eiffel tower, a spider, or other familiar objects or places.
When the neurons corresponding to particular images had been identified, the researchers hooked the electrodes up to a computer that displayed the image corresponding to the neuron that fired. The subject was then asked to think about one of the images. So, for example, a subject was asked to think about Marilyn Monroe. The Marilyn Monroe neuron in the subject’s brain fired, and the information was relayed to the computer, which then displayed Monroe’s image.
Another experiment designed to test how well the subjects could control the single neurons was a fade experiment in which the subject was shown a combined image of two faces: Josh Brolin (star of Goonies) and Marilyn Monroe, and told to think of Josh Brolin. The electrodes sent data on the Josh Brolin and Marilyn Monroe neurons to the computer, which brightened the image of the one causing most neuron firing. As the subject thought of Brolin, the image of Monroe faded out.
This is an impressive result, with enormously important implications.
Next questions: if I have a neuron in my brain that reliably activates when I see or think of Marilyn Monroe, does it really fire only when I see or think of Marilyn Monroe? I’ll be surprised if neural resources are allocated in such a “dedicated” way — a one-to-one mapping of the kind suggested here, with each neuron representing exactly one intentional referent, and doing nothing else; it seems so limiting. I’ve always imagined that the hardware implementation of our memory and intentionality would take the form of configurations of groups of neurons; it seems you’d get more for less that way. And is this “Marilyn” cell activated if I see a picture of Marilyn Monroe without being conscious of it? How about if I dream about her?
And then the much harder question: why that neuron?
Read the story here.
Over at CNN today we learn that the Coalition of Reason, an association of godless heathens, has purchased some advertising space in Gotham’s subway system. Their ads will point out the plain empirical fact that it is possible for people to be good without religion.
What’s telling about this is not the story itself, but that the story — interest group buys advertising — was considered newsworthy in the first place. After all, nobody batted an eyelash when Pastor Ock Soo Park ran an ad suggesting that we should all forsake our faculties of reason and join the Bible Crusade.
I’ve suggested before that if religion is, as I believe, an evolutionary adaptation that improves the relative fitness of human groups, then atheism — its truth-value notwithstanding — may be maladaptive. This ad campaign’s making the news might be seen as an example of the social organism’s immune system at work.
Read the story here.
Over at Mangan’s today, Dennis reports on pressure being applied to the journal Medical Hypotheses (and its editor Bruce Charlton) in an attempt to suppress a controversial paper on AIDS. Here.
The model of the modern mind, it seems, is one that can attend to many things at once, effortlessly picking up new tasks as completed ones are dropped. This new-and-improved kind of mind features an agile attention that is almost entirely without inertia, dancing nimbly upon flickering streams of incoming data without fatigue or failure.
My mind isn’t like that. I can only think effectively about one thing at a time, and furthermore I don’t think I’m really all that different from anybody else. I’ve always thought that people who pride themselves on their “multitasking” are actually operating at a rather superficial and mediocre level.
According to an article published a few weeks ago in the Times, it turns out I’m right. Learn more here.
Time travel is a persistently tantalizing idea, and has been a recurring theme in literature and other cultural media since at least as far back as the Mahabarata. Today it lives at the very edge of scientific plausibility: never entirely ruled out, but subject to persuasive objections. One of the most problematic is the “grandfather paradox”, which asks what would happen if you were to go back in time and kill your own grandfather in his boyhood. He would, then, never have grown to adulthood, and would never have become a father — which means, of course, that you would never have existed. But then you wouldn’t be able to go back in time to do the dastardly deed in the first place! There seems no way out of the loop, and to many that means that time travel itself must be forbidden by the fundamental order of Nature. But this objection doesn’t cover ordinary, non-murderous tourism; perhaps it is simply in some way impossible to perform actions that disrupt the continuity of the time-stream. Or perhaps our consciousness can travel in some purely observational way that lacks causative power; after all, to physicists the very “flow” of time itself appears to be just some sort of illusion presented to our consciousness. (In relativistic physics time doesn’t “move”; it is, in a sense, all there at once: just one of the axes in the space-time framework.)
Stephen Hawking asked: if we were to become able in the future to learn how to travel to the past, where are all the tourists? Shouldn’t we see them here now? But perhaps they are hiding, or simply aren’t visiting, or perhaps they can only travel back to regions of time that lie after some point in the future where we learn to make suitable cosmological arrangements. And of course there have been various allegations of actual time travel; perhaps the most curious and interesting one, though almost certainly a hoax, is the strange story of “John Titor”, which you can read about here.
But lately the idea has been popping up again, and in rarefied circles. Some physicists, noting the oddly unproductive history of super-high-energy particle colliders — first the startling de-funding of the Superconducting Supercollider here in America (an “anti-miracle”, in one scientist’s words), and then the suprising breakdowns at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — have suggested, and apparently seriously so, that operating these devices above a certain energy threshold may lead to such horrifying calamities that some sort of causal agency has actually reached backward in time to prevent them from getting up and running.
Learn more here.
We’ve been off the air for a couple of days, having holed up in Wellfleet for a long weekend.
The weekend after Columbus Day is when the town hosts its annual Oysterfest, a two-day celebration of our renowned local mollusc. As you can see from the schedule of events, there are concerts, lectures, exhibitions and competitions (including a lively oyster-shucking contest and the annual Spelling Bee); there are also dozens of booths set up along Main Street where local artists and craftsmen hawk their wares, and where local charities do lucrative sheep-shearing. First and foremost, though, there is food, and above all there are Wellfleet oysters everywhere, plucked fresh from their briny slumber in our scenic harbor and served up in every way imaginable.