We’ll most likely be off the air until Sunday or Monday. Apologies to all.
This will be of zero interest to any of you, but in my little corner of Gotham the corks are popping. Here’s why.
From our old friend Dave Pauley comes a link to some extraordinary photos of the Chaitén volcanic eruption in Chile. As Dave points out in his note to me, a local villager could understandably think there were more than “merely” natural forces at work here. Have a look.
If you haven’t heard, embattled Microsoft has now taken aim at Google Sky with its new application, the World Wide Telescope. Have a look here.
With a hat tip to our occasional commenter Addofio, here is the work of a most remarkable artist. Go have a look.
For those of you who don’t know, our friend Kevin Kim has a new website, created for the purpose of chronicling his upcoming transcontinental walk — a trek whose purpose is to explore the many parallel currents of religion in America, and if possible to help build bridges between them. The walk itself won’t get going for a few weeks yet, but you can’t keep a good blogger down, and Kevin has been posting as regularly as ever. Kevin himself is one of the more unusual religious figures I know: a trained theologian and an elder of the Presbyterian church, he’s also a non-theist.
Today he offers an interesting rumination on the Vatican’s position on Christianity for extraterrestrials; it’s well worth a look.
Read More »
From Jess Kaplan comes this story about the disaster unfolding in Lebanon. Hezbollah, and by proxy Iran, now owns this tormented land.
We’ll carry on with our meditations on free will shortly, but for tonight — it’s been a very busy weekend, with no time for writing — we have, for those of you with an interest in such things, some videos of the great Southern Praying Mantis master Gin Foon Mark, taken during his recent visit to Rome. (I’ve mentioned Master Mark before, here and here; he was the sifu of my first kung fu master, William Chung.) The videos are here, and if you’d like to see some other footage of the great man in action, there are quite a few on YouTube – including this one, which looks like it dates back to the 1970’s.
One of the main reasons that the USA, despite its ethnic diversity, has held itself together as well as it has (well, aside from that little scuffle back in the mid-1800’s) is that we all speak the same English language. But that’s only in the most general sense; American English takes a lush and delightful profusion of regional forms, and nowhere is this more evident to a flinty old Yankee like me than in the folksy and playful argot of the South.
Read More »
This entry is part 6 of 15 in the series
Free WillOne of the most worrisome aspects of determinism, in many people’s minds, is that it means that our deliberation — all our agonizing about the choices we must make in our lives — is a sham. In Daniel Dennett’s book Elbow Room, which I think is one of the best expositions of the “compatibilist” view of free will that I am attempting to defend in this series of posts (and which I have drawn upon liberally all along), he offers three common opinions (pp. 102-103) about this problem. I will paraphrase and summarize them here.
Read More »
Once again the despicable military junta that holds the nation of Burma hostage has forced the world to examine the presumptive “right” of inviolable national sovereignty. A horrifying natural cataclysm has just sheared away tens of thousands of its captive and wretched citizens, and laid its principal city to waste, while hundreds of thousands more — having already been reduced to ignominious poverty by their long years of thralldom to a brutal and criminally incompetent tyranny — now face the certain prospect of lethal famine and pestilence. The civilized peoples of the world stand at their gates, seeking nothing more than to help a ruined and prostrate country bind its wounds, feed its hungry, clear its rubble, and bury its dead. But, jackals that they are, Burma’s captors greet their visitors with a feral and desperate snarl, caring only to defend their kill.
That in the 21st century the world still permits entire nations to be kidnapped and enslaved in this way should shame us all.
For those of you who have been following this somewhat distasteful presidential-election business, here’s Robert Novak’s take on where matters stand in the wake of Barack Obama’s strong showing yesterday.
Before I forget, here is another item on the subject of improving the memory: it’s just one of those breezy little magazine-style top-ten lists, but some of the items merit a closer look.
My daughter ChloÁ« has sent along a link to an article about Piotr Wozniak, the inventor of SuperMemo, a software application that uses some neglected facts about the workings of human memory to help users retain more of what they learn. The system is designed to remind users at specific intervals of items they have studied; the spacing of these reminders is carefully tuned to occur just as the material would normally be about to be forgotten. Wozniak has dedicated himself with single-minded zeal to applying this system to himself; it appears to be effective, but is clearly not for everybody.
It’s an interesting story; you can read it here.
We learn from today’s New York Times that the new Grand Poo-bah of Turkmenistan, the fabulously yclept Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, has begun dismantling in earnest the splendiferous personality cult of his predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, a.k.a Turkmenbashi. Mr. Niyazov’s image and idisosyncratic worldview had permeated every corner of Turkmen life during his reign, but no symbol of his absolute ascendancy loomed larger than his gold-plated effigy atop the Neutrality Arch, about which we scribbled a brief post (with photo) on the occasion of his death in December of 2006. The Arch in question, actually a three-legged tower, is the largest building in the capital city of Ashgabat, and the golden statue of Turkmenbashi at its apex was engineered so as to rotate one full circle each day, in order to keep our man facing always toward the Sun.
Read More »
Sam Harris, in a recent article, weighs in on the response to Dutch politician Geert Wilders’ anti-Islamic movie Fitna, which appears to be unavailable online at the moment.
Read More »
This entry is part 5 of 15 in the series
Free WillJeffery Hodges left a comment on our last post about free will (and I do apologize for approaching the subject so circumspectly, over a period of weeks) in which he asked if I was making a distinction between causes and reasons. This is an important question — and indeed I am.
Read More »
This entry is part 4 of 15 in the series
Free WillWe’ve been brooding lately on the subject of free will and determinism. For tonight, just a few brief remarks; more to come shortly.
Everybody wants free will, of course, but the notion itself is one of those things that look clear enough from a distance, but get harder to make out the closer you look. What is a “free” choice, anyway? Apparently the key notion is that not have been caused. Is this really what we want? Let’s say I am presented with a choice to make: say, whether to put my paycheck in the bank or buy some crack.
Read More »
It’s already well-known that affluence and education are positively correlated with any number of desirable outcomes: longevity, general health and happiness, that sort of thing. Now we find that it not is only disadvantageous to be poor and ignorant, it hurts. Story here.
I’ve accumulated an awful lot of books over the past half-century: I can never part with them, and add several each week, it seems. I’ve got lots and lots of books about history and philosophy and science, but there are hundreds of odder ones as well — and one that popped off the shelf into my hand the other day fits that description nicely. It’s just the sort of thing we elitist Northeastern intellectual snobs enjoy: highbrow “inside” humor of a shamelessly Eurocentric sort.
Read More »
April 29, 2008 – 10:15 pm
It is always interesting to me to see which of these posts will generate comments, and which will not. Often a probing and painstakingly drafted essay on a subject of ancient and universal interest will attract no more notice than, say, an important scientific discovery or a bit of good news from Iraq; but dash off two hasty paragraphs about a civil servant with no brain, or simply let it be known that you’ve started reading a book by a conservative columnist, and we’re off to the races.
George Orwell, in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. ” Little has changed since then.
Read More »
April 25, 2008 – 11:45 pm
Sadly, today seems to have been entirely consumed by worldly distractions, and with a busy weekend coming up, we’ll likely be off the air until Sunday or Monday. Apologies to all.
April 24, 2008 – 11:26 pm
This entry is part 3 of 15 in the series
Free WillWhen we talk about the question of free will, it often seems that we approach the subject rather differently from the way we would look into any other unanswered question about the world. Usually, when we don’t know about something, we ask “what is going on here?”, and examine the observable phenomena, form hypotheses, put them to the test, and so forth. But with the questions surrounding determinism and how it might affect our lives, this productive convention is often stood quite neatly on its head.
Read More »
April 23, 2008 – 10:50 pm
According to this story in today’s New York Times, Europe is looking to increased use of coal to meet its energy needs. As you might imagine, this news is not being received warmly by those who are concerned about levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, according to this item by Australian scientist-engineer Philip Chapman, we soon may wish we’d burnt more of the stuff.
Read More »
April 22, 2008 – 11:17 pm
Our commenter Jeanie Oliver has asked why the overwhelming majority of comments at this website are from men, and I’ve often wondered the same thing. I know that there are more than a few female readers out there, and if you are one of them I just want to make it clear to you that you are most welcome. As I mentioned in reply to Jeanie’s remark, my fondest wish for this website is that it be a salon, not a soapbox; my goal in scribbling these posts is not publicity, but conversation, and this place can feel rather like a boys’ boarding-school dormitory at times. I certainly have plenty of opinions about things, but many of them are almost certainly wrong, and my only hope of making any progress in the time I have left is to have intelligent people, of both sexes, to talk about them with.
April 22, 2008 – 10:41 pm
This entry is part 2 of 15 in the series
Free WillYesterday’s musings about free will led us to the question of where our decisions actually come from. Even in our own inner experience, our choices seem simply to float up into our consciousness, and indeed, experimental results strongly suggest that our awareness of our decisions comes after they are already made. Our commenter Pat Goldsmith remarked upon his consciousness “observing” and “using” his thoughts — and, interestingly, “taking the reins”, which agrees with the notion that we only have a sort of veto power over our volitional choices, which themselves bubble up from unconscious processes. In other words, then, our consciousness is at most a bridle, not a spur. (As V.S. Ramachandran put it, compared to what we usually imagine as “free will”, this seems more like “free won’t“.) Likewise, commenter Jess Kaplan remarked that as far as free will is concerned, our ex post facto consciousness of our decisions is “neither here nor there”. We seem, then, to have moved toward the view that whatever might turn out to be necessary for our decision-making, consciousness seems not to be on the list.
Read More »
April 21, 2008 – 11:57 pm
This entry is part 1 of 15 in the series
Free WillThe question of free will has been in the air around here lately, and more than one voice has been heard decrying the awful prospect of determinism. I have a rather blithe attitude toward the problem: I don’t think there’s any need to be upset by the notion that our minds are a product of our brains, which are themselves physical systems that operate according to the same natural laws that govern the rest of the world. But my insouciance regarding this matter is, apparently, a minority view. So I think it would be profitable all round to ruminate on this in public, and see where it gets to.
Read More »
April 20, 2008 – 11:35 pm
…but not forthcoming, I am afraid. Worn out and feeling a little under the weather, I am neglecting my duties here for at least another day. Apologies to all.
April 18, 2008 – 10:48 pm
As suddenly and astoundingly as ever, it is Spring again in New York. The weather these past few days has been simple perfection, and the trees and flowers, having awakened in a celebratory mood, are getting about their morning’s work with extravagant exuberance. But not all is renewed, and even as the living world stirs and quickens, we must pause to mark two sad events.
Read More »
April 17, 2008 – 11:43 am
Having toiled at my Midtown office until 3:15 a.m. last night — and with a joint-locking seminar to attend this evening at the kwoon, and a long mixing session coming up on Saturday — published content may be rather thin these next few days. I apologize: in particular, I owe the estimable Deogolwulf a better explanation of why our lack of free will, as traditionally (and implausibly) imagined, isn’t such a big deal — but there are only so many hours in the day.
April 15, 2008 – 11:12 pm
What is strange to me now, after 15 years of steady Internet use — during which time an truly ungraspable immensity of information has become available to all — is when there is something I can’t get hold of online. Sometimes it is a particularly obscure quotation, or passage from a book that I would rather paste than transcribe. At other times it is a person I would like to track down, or of whom I want to see a picture. Tonight it’s a band by the name of Baxter’s Glass Eye.
Read More »
April 14, 2008 – 10:54 pm
An awful lot of people attach tremendous importance to the notion that our decisions are somehow the uncaused product of our consciousness: that they happen not amongst the deterministic web of brain tissue, but impose themselves on that tissue, somehow, from without. I’m not one of them.
Read More »
April 14, 2008 – 12:23 pm
We note with sadness the death of this great scientist. He was one of the giants of 20th century physics, and mentor to an extraordinary assortment of disciples. His New York Times obituary is here.
April 12, 2008 – 10:08 pm
It’s my birthday this weekend, on Sunday, April 13th. (I’m 52.) I’ve been taking a little break: just reading and puttering around up here in Wellfleet, and scrupulously avoiding any serious brainwork or controversial posts (I love the rough-and-tumble of a good debate, but the little grey cells needed a rest). So here’s another undemanding item.
Read More »
Last Tuesday’s New York Times carried a tragic and fascinating story. It was about Anne Adams, a scientist who was sticken by a degenerative and ultimately lethal brain disease called FTD, which is an acronym for frontotemporal dementia. The disease attacks particular portions of the brain only, with the effect that as the damaged parts atrophy other parts grow and thicken to pick up the slack. Because of the functional differention of different brain regions, this means that as deficiencies develop in some abilities, for example speech or mathematical reasoning, other talents may emerge, in some cases remarkable musical or artistic creativity. In Dr. Adams’ case, the disease gave her a gift for painting.
But the strangest part of the tale has to do with Dr. Adams’s growing fascination with the music of Maurice Ravel. Go and read about it here.
Here’s another item from Physorg.com: it appears that there might have been something to the old saying after all.
I’ll be traveling later today, and off the air until tomorrow at the earliest. So for now, here is an enormous, time-wasting distraction to keep you occupied.
Since the Big Bang was first proposed as a cosmological model for our universe — a model that has since been accepted with confidence by the astrophysical community — it has been assumed that it might well be impossible in principle to say anything about the state of the world prior to the initial singularity. But according to a story in yesterday’s Physorg.com newlsetter, a promising theory known as Simplified Loop Quantum Gravity now suggests that the previous iteration may have left readable traces in our present environment, and that this relic information indicates that the previous go-round was a time-reversed mirror image of our own.
Read More »
If you’re like me, you like nothing better than tucking into a heaping plate of short-snouted seahorses. Problem is, they’ve become annoyingly rare. Well, I’ve got good news! Story here.
While looking over the latest from our friend The Stiletto (who, by the way, has just been chosen as a Webby Awards Official Honoree for her “tart” political commentary), I ran across a story about Arizona’s efforts to deal with its enormous influx of illegal aliens. I was struck by one passage in particular:
[E]nough immigrants have left that the government of Sonora, the Mexican state bordering Arizona, has complained about how many people have arrived on its doorstep.
Read the story here.
As a paternalistic and morally deficient bigot, I of course have a collegial interest in the ideological shortcomings of others — an interest that is not limited to my own species. So I was gratified when a recent item over at Dennis Mangan’s place led me to an engaging and informative piece about the extent to which my own failings of social conscience are replicated throughout the animal kingdom. Have a look here.
I must apologize to the reader for the lack of variety around here lately; our little clash of civilizations has occupied me almost exclusively in recent days. I’m afraid that this post will not interrupt the streak, but it will be brief: I just want to call attention to an outstandingly informative series of posts about Islamism that our friend Jeffery Hodges has been offering over at his website, The Gypsy Scholar (as proudly featured on our sidebar). You can start with today’s offering about suicide bombing, and work your way backward through the links.
As long as I am to be pilloried as a racist and reactionary xenophobe anyway, I might as well carry on. Here’s the latest cave-in, this time from Britain.
No matter what your reaction — snarling in defiance, as are the conservative voices of the West, groveling in awe, as are the liberal governments of Europe, or exulting, with growing confidence, as in the mosques and madrassas — radical Islam is rising. Those who see it, rightly, as a potentially lethal threat to all that Western civilization stands for, argue for a variety of responses: restriction of immigration, economic boycotts, intolerance of non-assimilation, expulsion of seditious agitators, ethnic profiling, intellectual debate, military intervention, and the republishing of cartoons. One hears somewhat less, however, about another sort of response, one that might be the most effective of all: the education and empowerment of Muslim women.
Read More »
In a recent post, Silence!, we remarked upon the indictment of an Austrian politician, Susanne Winter, for her having suggested that there might have been a whiff of sexual impropriety in the Prophet Mohammed’s taking of the six-year-old Aisha as his wife (though to his credit, he did not consummate the marriage until she was nine). We first learned of the story by way of the website Gates of Vienna, which exists for the purpose of reporting on the current phase of the “very old war” between Islam and the West.
Read More »
I’m sorry to have been off the air yesterday; I spent a long day with the promising young band Bulletproof Soul at Avatar Studios, mixing some of the material we recorded a few weeks ago. I am also working at the office all day today, so can’t write at length now either — but it appears that our recent post about the distinction between democracy and government-by-consent has sparked a discussion that it would be interesting to continue.
Read More »
Christopher Hitchens weighs in, with customary acerbity, on Hillary Clinton’s audacious Tuzla whopper. Here.
I have often, in posts having to do with foreign policy, expressed the sentiment that it is in our interest to foster “democracy”. It has occurred to me, however, in the course of a recent conversation, that the essential point is to promote regimes that rule with the consent of the governed. I’m not sure that this is an important distinction, but it might be, so I thought I’d make it.
For the crime of expressing dissatisfaction with his government, Chinese freethinker Hu Jia has been sentenced to prison, despite an international chorus of protest. His wife remains under house arrest.
Meanwhile, when not distracted by its ongoing bludgeoning and suffocation of Tibet, China preens in the global spotlight as the host of the impending Olympics. It would behoove the rest of us not to show up, I think.