We’ve set aside our musings about free will and moral responsibility for a while now, but a story making its way around the grapevine certainly seems relevant. It’s an insanity-defense case from Texas in which the defendant killed his wife and two children.
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March 20, 2009 – 11:11 pm
I’m not much of a basketball fan, but you’d have to be out cold not to notice all the bracket-related hoop-la every March. One thing that has always struck me as odd about the NCAA tournament, though, is that to a disinterested observer, the point of the whole thing seems to be the semi-finals. The entire nation gets itself, for some curious reason, into such a tumescent state of arousal over the antepenultimate “Final Four” that the Final Two, and the Final One, seem to be, more or less, merely an afterthought. This is, as far as I know, unique in the world of sport, and if anyone cares to explain it to me I will be most grateful.
March 19, 2009 – 11:14 pm
With a hat tip to reader J. Kapok, we have an interesting item in which a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls argues that the putative authors, the ascetic cult called the Essenes, never existed.
Learn more here.
March 18, 2009 – 11:14 pm
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has written a series of posts lately about just what atheism is. In particular his aim has been to rebut the notion that atheists merely lack a positive belief in God, and that the burden of proof naturally falls upon the theist.
I am not going to take up the burden-of-proof argument here, other than to say that my sympathies do not coincide with Bill’s in this case: I see a natural world all around me, and no evidence of any gods, so it seems fair enough to me that the onus probandi lies with those who claim that such intangible entities are real.
But after reading this post and the ensuing discussion, I am left wondering: just what is “belief”, anyway?
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March 17, 2009 – 11:14 pm
I am more than a little concerned about our new president’s stewardship of the vital friendship between the U.S. and Britain. Mr. Obama gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown the cold shoulder during his recent visit, saying he was “too tired” for a state dinner, and later a Foggy Bottom staffer blithely dismissed the snub, saying “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”
This is not only shamefully, mortifyingly rude, and a gross factual absurdity, but shockingly clumsy and stupid as well. It is, however, revealing, I think.
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March 17, 2009 – 10:16 pm
There is an agreeable interval between childhood and marriage during which a man may eat what he pleases.
March 17, 2009 – 11:14 am
Perhaps a more accurate description would be “dim-witted claptrap”.
March 16, 2009 – 10:57 pm
I’ve just got back from a whirlwind visit to Welland, Ontario — and a most interesting and unusual trip it was (details and photos to follow shortly).
It’s late, though, so rather than a meaty post, I can only offer a diverting little bon-bon, courtesy of my son Nick, for you cartoon fans out there.
March 15, 2009 – 12:28 pm
Traveling today, minus laptop. Back tomorrow or Tuesday.
March 14, 2009 – 10:21 pm
The “Monty Hall problem”, which we looked at in a recent post, is a revealing example of the ways in which, despite our vaunted intelligence, our cognitive intuitions are often misleading, or simply wrong. This is worrisome: just how extensive is the problem? If we can’t trust our intuitions about simple probabilities, then what else can’t we trust?
Answering this question is made more difficult by the fact that in making this inquiry, it is our suspect cognitive apparatus itself that must perform the inspection. How can we be confident that this machinery can reliably detect its own defects and limitations? The problem requires careful and disciplined attention.
We like to think that we are fully rational decision-makers, that we make our free choices in the illuminating glow of conscious awareness, and that we do so by way of a transparent and defensible process of reason. This is utterly wrong, of course: we spend most of our time in a kind of waking sleep, we react to almost everything in an entirely mechanical way, and nearly all of our cognitive processes are altogether inaccessible to our introspection.
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March 13, 2009 – 10:34 pm
Not much time for writing this evening, so it’s time for some Shameless Filler. In tonight’s edition: The 50 Worst Cars Of All Time.
We humans perform a great many hard cognitive tasks with astounding ease. We form sentences, recognize faces, detect patterns, read body language, and accomplish without effort an astonishing variety of complex feats that turn out to be very, very difficult to program computers to do. This is because our brains have evolved a powerful collection of processing modules whose workings — “under-the-hood” operations that are quite inaccessible to our introspection — have been tuned to a high degree of reliability.
As good as it is, however, this machinery not perfect (how could it be?) and can, when given tasks for which it was never optimized during our evolutionary history, give wrong answers that we are strongly, even irresistibly, inclined to trust.
One area where these weaknesses are evident is the estimation of probabilities, and a fine example is the “Monty Hall problem”.
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March 11, 2009 – 11:38 pm
In his latest post, Jeffery Hodges has brought to our attention, and commented upon, a very interesting article by Roger Scruton about some of the fundamental distinctions between Islam and the West. I do hope you will go and read it.
March 11, 2009 – 10:19 pm
I think one of the most amazing gifts of the technological revolution of the past few years has been the use of satellite imagery to create dazzling applications like Google Earth. I just love it, and I love it even more with each improvement in coverage and resolution.
But now, according to a recent item on CNN, California Assemblyman Joel Anderson wants to put at least part of the genie back in the bottle.
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March 10, 2009 – 10:52 pm
You may have heard of a physicist and mathematician by the name of Stephen Wolfram, a man of remarkable gifts who was doing important work in particle physics by age 17, had his doctorate from Caltech by 20, and who went on to build an enormously successful business venture around a software product called Mathematica.
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Minimum-wage laws are often thought of as a boon to the least fortunate, and a moral rebuke to Dickensian free-market sorts — but they do not always confer the blessings their sponsors desire. A recent government report about a sharp rise in minimum-wage mandates in Honduras shows us something about unintended consequences.
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From the AP comes a fine example of the moral rectitude of Islamic law. A woman from Iran was attacked with acid by a suitor she rejected (which seems, by the way, to be an increasingly popular way to brutalize Muslim females these days, and I expect Middle-Eastern acid merchants are doing well even in this tough economic climate). The assault left her badly burned, and blind.
Now in an enlightened act of justice, an Iranian court has decreed that her dog-in-the-manger assailant should be blinded with acid as well — but only in one of his eyes, because, as we know, a woman is worth only half a man.
This little vignette is repugnant to the modern Western mind in so many different ways that I think I will leave it to the reader to enumerate them, like one of those “how many triangles can you find in this figure?” puzzles.
You can read the story for yourself here.
Anyone who has been paying any attention to world affairs will by now have heard of the traffic “accident” Friday in which Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai was injured, and his wife killed.
Tsvangirai has been a thorn in dictator Robert Mugabe’s side since leaving the ruling party, Zanu-PF, in the early 1990’s. Since then he has been, on various occasions, arrested, tortured and driven into exile, and has survived several attempts on his life. The brutal megalomaniac Mugabe, bowing to domestic and international pressure, grudgingly agreed to accept Tsvangirai as his PM a few months ago, but obviously wants him dead, and this latest misfortune can hardly be anything but a deliberate attack. (Indeed, even if Mr. Tsvangirai were to be struck by lightning it would be hard to imagine that it wasn’t somehow Mugabe’s doing.)
Given that this is so transparently another try by Mugabe to rid himself of his brave and persistent foe, it will be interesting to see how things go from here. The fact that Tsvangirai’s wife Susan was killed in this latest assassination attempt may add a sensational, emotional dimension that could get the attention of a world that has so far had too many other things on its mind to care much about the tragedy of Zimbabwe.
Or not.
In the wake (perhaps too ominous a word) of my little medical adventure last summer, a highly regarded New York cardiologist, noting that my total cholesterol was, at 248 (with a cholesterol/HDL ratio of 3.4), too high for his liking, put me on a low dose (7.5 mg/week) of the statin drug Crestor. I was none too thrilled — an angiogram had shown that I was free of any coronary stenosis, and this was a purely preventive measure — but went along.
I don’t usually talk about personal issues here, let alone health-related ones, but I’m mentioning this because a great many people take statins regularly, and Dennis Mangan has just raised again, over at his website Mangan’s Miscellany, the question of whether their risks outweigh their benefits.
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If you are like me, you will, on extremely rare occasions, find yourself having had a great deal to drink the night before, and greeting the day with a challenging “hangover”. I have done a little independent research into this predicament over the years, and believe I have settled on the right approach to it. Having just recommended it to a friend, I’d thought I ought to share it with all of you.
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I’ve always liked Dick Cavett. His career as a prominent public conversationalist began in 1968, when I, as twelve-year-old, was only beginning to understand how grownups could possibly enjoy just sitting around talking. My mother used to watch his show, and I found, to my surprise, that I enjoyed watching it too. He is a charming, witty man, with a nimble and curious mind, and he was a fine example, I thought, of what it was to be a civilized adult.
Over the years everyone who was anyone was a guest on Mr. Cavett’s show, and he has now done us a favor by extracting from the vault a recording of a program from October 14th, 1981, when his guests were two of America’s foremost authors, John Cheever and John Updike.
Take a little break from the swirling maelstrom of 21st-century American media, from Rush Limbaugh and Rod Blagojevich, from Octomom and The Bachelor, from Alex Rodriguez and Bernie Madoff, from Soulja Boy and Travis Barker.
Here.
Here’s something odd. I’ve seen this a few times before, but this is the best example yet:
If you aren’t sure what you’re looking at here, it’s an ice-tray I just pulled from the freezer. I’ve occasionally wondered how these odd stalagmites form, but until tonight I had no idea how, or what special conditions are required. It only took a moment or two of poking around online just now, though, to find the answer.
A knowledgeable and inquisitive reader, having joined me in puzzling over the strange “blacklisting” errors we have just experienced here for Asian IPs, thought I might find a certain year-old Slate article interesting. I did indeed. It describes the findings of one Babak Pasdar, a network-security expert who was called in by a major telecommunications firm (Verizon, we are led to believe) to revamp their firewall. In the course of his work he noticed a point of entry, with full access to everything, that was not secured in any way, and was referred to as the “Quantico circuit”. (Quantico, Virginia, is, of course, the home of the FBI academy.) When he suggested closing this vulnerability — a security flaw that was, in his expert opinion, quite extraordinary, and entirely unacceptable — he was told to back off. He has since gone to Congress with his concerns, and has signed an affidavit detailing his observations.
The article is here, and the affidavit is here.
There is rather an amusing ruckus underway in the Republican Party, which has been floundering in disarray since the presidential race. The titular head of the GOP, Michael Steele, has been going mano a mano with Rush Limbaugh over who is really the party’s leader. Steele may have the official position, but he made a mistake by dismissing, in a recent interview, Limbaugh’s de facto stewardship, and has since made an obsequious apology to El Rushbo. This is hardly the way to consolidate one’s hold on power, or inspire fealty in the party apparatchiks (try to imagine Stalin quailing as Steele did), and I shouldn’t be surprised if Steele’s suzerainty is effectively over.
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I’ve received two emails today from readers living in Asia, both telling me that they had received the error “HTTP Error 403 – Forbidden” when trying to access this website. One thought that I had intentionally blocked him from visiting the site, something I would be very unlikely to do.
I don’t know what the problem is. My server at Bluehost is equipped with an IP blocker, but it isn’t blocking anything. The IPs listed in my logs as having received the error are from a single IP range, 122.154.100.xxx, which is assigned to the Asia Pacific registry.
Anyway, to anyone who might have had the problem, and has managed to get back here later on, I do apologize. I have, so far, no idea what’s going on.
I’ve mentioned that I have sort of a drummer’s crush lately on Porcupine Tree / King Crimson batteur Gavin Harrison — who, I have decided, may not be human (I’m well acquainted with others of his alien species: Dennis Chambers, Keith Carlock, Peter Erskine, etc.). Here he is again.
I have been harping a lot lately, it seems, on cultural conflicts: immigration, racial and ethnic disharmony, and above all the struggle between Islam and the West. These are of course important topics, but the tagline of this blog (taken, as is the title itself, from Fela Kuti’s Coffin for Head of State), is “I go many places”, and it seems lately that the itinerary has been rather short.
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February 28, 2009 – 12:25 am
In today’s email, a friend has sent me some photographs of angry Muslims demonstrating on the street in what appears to be London. They are carrying signs, glowering menacingly, brandishing their fists, and shouting. The messages they carry are clear enough, if rather unimaginatively monotonous:
SLAY THOSE WHO INSULT ISLAM. BUTCHER THOSE WHO MOCK ISLAM. BEHEAD THOSE WHO INSULT ISLAM. ISLAM WILL DOMINATE THE WORLD. EXTERMINATE THOSE WHO SLANDER ISLAM. EUROPE YOU WILL PAY. YOUR 9/11 IS ON IT’S [sic] WAY. BE PREPARED FOR THE REAL HOLOCAUST.
In one of the pictures, a policeman stands nearby, dutifully making sure that the protestors are kept safe from harm as they cry out for Western blood. This adds a note of irony to my favorite placard of the lot, which says FREEDOM GO TO HELL.
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February 26, 2009 – 11:30 pm
There’s an interesting little item in the news today: paleoanthropologists have found Homo Erectus footprints 1.5 million years old that record the earliest known example of anatomically modern human feet — feet that are designed solely (so to speak) for walking, and not for grasping.
It is hard to imagine anything more evanescent than a footprint left in the mud, yet these have lasted 150 times as long as the entire span of recorded history. Think of all the forgotten generations that have lived and died and turned to dust, and more recently the empires that have risen, triumphed and fallen, while those fragile impressions — nothing at all, really, just some wet feet on a rainy day — slumbered in the stone. It must be an eerie feeling to walk in them.
You can read a brief account here, or watch a truly riveting video here.
Meanwhile, new analytical tools are making it possible for linguists to identify the oldest words still in use, and to make predictions about which ones will last. Learn more here.
February 26, 2009 – 12:04 am
When I began learning southern Chinese kung fu toward the end of 1975, there were still very few Chinese masters who were willing to teach “roundeyes”; my sifu at the time, William Chung, and his sifu Gin Foon Mark, were among the earliest to do so. But the one who first opened the door, as far as I know, was Grandmaster Wong Ark Yuey (1899-1987), who opened a school in Los Angeles in 1964, and began teaching Westerners the following year.
Back then few people in the West had even heard of kung fu; this was before Bruce Lee introduced us all to it in his role as The Green Hornet’s astonishing sidekick Kato. Most people, if asked about the Asian fighting arts, would have named the Japanese systems of judo, karate, and jiu-jitsu.
Now Black Belt Magazine has put some of its old back issues online, and in the January 1965 edition is an interview with Master Wong himself. Have look on page 11, here. And check out those sneakers!
February 24, 2009 – 11:14 am
With a double hat-tip to Dymphna and the Baron at Gates of Vienna, here are several items of interest on the clash-of-civilizations front.
First, Geert Wilders is in town, fresh from being turned away at the door by the supine and craven British Government. He paid a visit to TV host Glenn Beck, and you can watch the interview here.
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February 23, 2009 – 12:47 pm
In an editorial piece at CNN’s website, Michael Eric Dyson praises Eric Holder’s recent speech on race relations as “courageous and honest”, and suggests that Holder’s “nation of cowards” remark, which a great many morally stunted people have found tendentious and gratuitously offensive, has been “taken out of context”.
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February 22, 2009 – 11:36 pm
If I told you that I knew there were invisible beings directing the flow of traffic on the highway, or that I had just seen someone rise from the dead and ascend into the sky, you’d want some proof — and if I had none to offer, you’d begin to doubt my sanity, and might start looking for the door. If the President of the United States were found to be making decisions based on such assumptions, you’d be gravely concerned for the safety of the nation.
All of this stands on its head, of course, when the subject is religion. So powerful a system for social cohesion is religion that, regarding religious notions, one is not only granted a waiver for holding bizarre beliefs on no evidence, but one is looked upon with wary suspicion (or worse) if one does not hold such beliefs: if one does not exempt these ideas from the rational scrutiny that is in all other matters the touchstone of sanity itself.
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February 21, 2009 – 4:04 pm
Every now and then I am reminded of just how exotic the most ordinary scientific notions seem even to the average “educated” American. For example: in Thursday’s New York Times, there was a story about some feeble little earthquakes along the Ramapo Fault.
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February 19, 2009 – 11:24 pm
There is quite a ruction today about Attorney General Eric Holder’s calling America “a nation of cowards” for its reticence to speak frankly about race (transcript here). I wonder what he really means, and what he really wants. At the very least, it seems a tad atrabilious for the nation’s first black attorney general — who serves under the nation’s first black president, at a time when the leaders of both major parties are black men as well — to greet his new constituency so charmlessly.
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February 18, 2009 – 10:40 pm
Automakers, at least the ones that still have employees, are scrambling to design alternative-fuel vehicles. On the drafting board, or already out on the road, are cars powered by electricity, ethanol, natural gas, hydrogen, and even french-fry grease. But while I was poking around online the other day I discovered that even as early as the 1950’s the Ford Motor Company was already way out in front in the hunt for an alternative to fossil fuels. Have a look at the Nucleon.
February 17, 2009 – 11:02 pm
For those interested in the mortal struggle between Islam and the West (viz. those with the wit to acknowledge that such a struggle even exists), it’s been an eventful few days. The biggest story has been that the government of Pakistan has now surrendered the valley of Swat to the Taliban. The story in the Times claims that certain concessions were given — that schools will not be closed, and so forth — but obviously that is nonsense. This is defeat, and retreat, and we should have no doubt that the Taliban are going to do as they please.
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February 16, 2009 – 11:39 pm
One of the enjoyable quirks of the Outer Cape is Provincetown’s own radio station, WOMR (“Outermost Radio”). The station is everything you might expect from a place as full of artists, writers, musicians, eccentrics, oddballs, and misfits as the far end of Cape Cod is, and the playlist is eclectic, and seldom boring.
A particular treat is the show “AOR”, which airs every Friday evening from 9 until midnight. The host, “G. Orcalimbo Jones”, is a connoisseur and collector of lesser-known recordings from the long and ramified history of rock music, and each week’s program is a little guided tour of some of the curiosities in his collection. His show also features a call-in segment in which listeners vie to identify the week’s Mystery Guitarist.
I realize most of you are not within radio range of Provincetown on any given Friday, but take heart: you can listen to a live stream of the show here. Nine to midnight, Eastern time.
February 16, 2009 – 10:46 pm
We congratulate Maverick Philosopher and Normblog for making the Times Online list of 100 best blogs.
Cream does rise, it seems.
February 15, 2009 – 2:22 pm
We are in Wellfleet for the long weekend, and the Lower Cape seems particularly tranquil and beautiful under the blue winter skies. Yesterday the memsahib and I took a little spin up to Provincetown, at the outermost tip of the Cape, and along the way stopped at Longnook Beach in Truro to take a quick peek at that loveliest of littoral landscapes.
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February 14, 2009 – 10:28 pm
A reader has emailed us this link to a pithy, bullet-point summary of America’s security situation by retired general Barry McCaffrey (now Adjunct Professor of International Affairs at West Point). It’s terse, and worth reading.
February 14, 2009 – 9:58 pm
Tomorrow is a big day in Venezuela: a vote is scheduled on a term-limits referendum intended to assist the swaggering egomaniac Hugo ChÁ¡vez in the further consolidation of his fascist dictatorship.
It appears that “El Comandante” is slightly in the lead. It will be interesting to see what happens if he loses.
February 13, 2009 – 12:43 pm
Things are not going well in Afghanistan. A resurgent and emboldened Taliban has been harrying the Karzai government and its Western allies with renewed truculence, even going so far as to make a brazen attack this week in the heart of Kabul. Meanwhile the Russians, who have for centuries vied with the West for dominant influence in the region, testing the steel of the new administration, have gotten us expelled from our Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan, a vital supply station. Suddenly we are back on our heels. What are our options? In this essay, Pat Buchanan argues that they are few, and grim.
February 13, 2009 – 12:34 pm
Today is Friday the 13th. Having actually been born on such a day, way back in 1956, I’ve never been given to friggatriskaidekaphobia myself, but anxiety about Friday the 13th lingers as one of our more persistent superstitions (taking a distant back seat to religion, of course). It’s said that to have been born on such a traditionally inauspicious day is the ticket to a star-crossed life, but looking back over my 52 years I’ve been, I think, more fortunate than most. (I’ve sometimes wondered what notable characters also belong to this odd little granfaloon, but so far the only ones I know of are Christopher Plummer, Steve Buscemi, and Alfred Hitchcock.)
On a whim I decided to look up “Friday the 13th” on Wikipedia this morning, and was not surprised to find a fascinating article, with an equally interesting collection of links at the bottom of the page. Have a look here.
February 12, 2009 – 10:45 am
If Charles Darwin were alive, he’d be 200 years old today, and there has been an enormous outpouring of ink commemorating the great man’s bicentennial. From reader JK comes a link to a Pew Research Center article on the degree to which acceptance of his “dangerous idea” — in many people’s opinion the most important scientific insight ever had by anyone — is still obstructed by religious belief (and in particular, Protestant and Muslim belief). Here.
February 11, 2009 – 11:59 pm
We’ve had some noisy conversations here recently on the subject of immigration. My own position has been that we should admit those, and only those, who will be assets rather than liabilities — and that we need to cultivate in ourselves the discernment to tell the difference. We want intelligent, motivated, creative, hard-working people who appreciate what America is and what it offers, and who yearn to participate not only in our prosperity but also in our culture. I would rather have these bright and energetic people working hard over here than over there, and lifting our economy as they are already lifting those of their own countries. In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman tells us, if I am reading him correctly, that he feels more or less the same way. (What he is not telling us, however, is whether he would restrict immigration to only those so qualified, as I think we should, or leave the doors flung agape as they presently are.)
His column is here.
February 11, 2009 – 11:28 pm
I suppose this was bound to happen: two satellites have collided in Earth orbit. Somebody’s insurance is going to be going up.
February 10, 2009 – 11:48 pm
It being the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth on the 12th of this month, this week’s Tuesday science supplement in the New York Times offered an engaging crop of Darwin-themed articles. Have a look here, here, here, here, here, and here.
February 10, 2009 – 8:35 pm
Apparently the British government has now refused entry to the Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Wilders, who has made a name for himself with his outspoken criticism of Islam, and by his vociferous opposition to its increasing presence and influence in the dangerously multiculturalist West, has lived under police protection in Holland since the release of his provocative film Fitna, which showed news footage of fundamentalist Islamic violence and rage against a backdrop of Koranic text.
Wilders is already facing prosecution in his home country for daring to voice his opinions, and now the Crown, upon whose mighty empire the sun formerly never set, is apparently so weak-kneed the prospect of Muslim outrage that it feels it must bar the gate against a member of the Dutch Parliament. This pigeonhearted decision is further evidence of Western Europe’s abject and continuing surrender of what we in America still view, for now at least, as fundamental freedoms. What would Churchill say?
If you haven’t seen Fitna already, you can do so here. And as always, you can keep abreast of the ongoing decline of Europe by visiting Gates of Vienna.
February 9, 2009 – 11:03 pm
Kevin Kim mentions, in a post published this evening, his curiosity about what he refers to as “real-time searching”. If things had gone a little differently back in 2006, real-time search would be a lot farther along than it is: this is exactly what the start-up company I used to work for, PubSub Concepts, was all about. We were all set to take over the world.
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