Posted
on February 8, 2010, 10:23 am,
by Paul,
under economics, politics.
‘Theodore Dalrymple’ is the pen-name of Dr. Anthony Daniels, retired British doctor, contributing editor for the City Journal, author, and eloquent conservative observer of contemporary culture. Recently, Daniels was invited to give the annual John Kenneth Galbraith Lecture at Memorial University in Newfoundland. The Galbraith Revival is a reflection on that experience.
Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, and is the director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She earned her doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University, and is a licensed clinical psychologist. She writes about the “subjective side” of the relationship between people and technology.
I first read The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit nearly twenty years ago, and have used it in various courses. Turkle describes how children often employ computers as evocative objects — “things to think with” — which assist them in understanding their own capacities and limitations. The sense of self that emerges in children who have grown up with computers, for instance, can be quite different from that of children who have grown up, say, with animals and pets. Instead of the traditional Aristotelian notion of being a “rational animal”, the experience of such children can lead them to formulate a new genus and specific difference, to conceive of themselves as “feeling machines.” Such radical change in our understanding of who we are, it seems to me, could have profound consequences for our culture. It is important that we consider the possibility that technology might induce deep change.
Posted
on January 10, 2010, 1:51 pm,
by Nathan,
under Nathan, music.
Verdi’s Otello is a work very much of its time, and this is true nowhere more than in its treatment of love and the erotic. The simplest illustration of this may be found in the stark contrasts between the opera and its source.
Shakespeare’s Othello, more than any other play, is haunted by the theme of sexual disgust. A.C. Bradley writes of the way in which “the matter of a play seems to go on working in Shakespeare’s mind and reappears, generally in a weaker form, in his next play.” [1] But the reverse process may also obtain, wherein a theme appears in one play in nascent form, only to be revisited on a far vaster scale in the next. Thus the appalled fascination with sexuality in Hamlet, which lies behind both the title character’s ambivalent treatment of Ophelia and his famous castigation of his mother,
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty! [2]
is echoed on a far vaster scale in Othello, taking root in the very first scene, in Iago’s mockery of Desdemona’s father, and growing until it all but dominates Othello’s mind.
Posted
on January 5, 2010, 1:28 am,
by Paul,
under philosophy.
Stephen Toulmin died last month. He studied with Wittgenstein and was a reader, with Kolakowski, of Phil’s dissertation. Toulmin was probably best known for his 1958 book, The Uses of Argument, and for his seminal work on the philosophy of science. In a long and distinguished career, he taught at Oxford, Melbourne, Leeds, Brandeis, Columbia, Michigan State, Chicago, Northwestern, and USC. Here is the NYT obituary.
All three of us have been greatly influenced by a book that Toulmin wrote with Allan Janik in 1973 called Wittgenstein’s Vienna. A fascinating account of Viennese culture at the turn of the century, it is an indispensable book that everyone should read.
Posted
on January 3, 2010, 2:33 am,
by Paul,
under science.
In an article for Wired, Uranium is So Last Century, Richard Martin touts the promise of thorium fueled nuclear fission. Unlike uranium, thorium is plentiful in nature and produces a “miniscule” amount of radioactive waste. It is also an effective breeder and lacks the weaponization potential of uranium. The technology is called LFTR — for Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor — and seems to be fairly well understood. There is a blog called Energy from Thorium, by Kirk Sorensen, which keeps up with the latest news and has useful links and discussion.
LFTR in 16 minutes
Like Polywell fusion, the development of thorium reactors could be funded at a small fraction of the anticipated cost of cap and trade. If we are serious about the threat of carbon-induced warming, then we ought to explore serious energy alternatives.
Posted
on December 14, 2009, 11:55 pm,
by Paul,
under poetry.
by William Wordsworth (1807)
Ode
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.
Posted
on December 5, 2009, 5:52 pm,
by Paul,
under music.
Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888) was a composer and virtuoso pianist who lived in Paris and knew both Chopin and Lizst. He was an orthodox Jew, and the legend is that he died when one of his bookcases fell on him (also a hazard in academic life).
This is Alkan’s transcription of the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #3, in c minor. The piano plays both the orchestra and piano parts. I like how pianist Marc-André Hamelin, the master of this ferociously difficult repertoire, delineates the orchestral and solo voices. But the remarkable thing about this piece is clearly the extraordinary cadenza that Alkan wrote — it is bizarre and breathtaking.
The piano enters at 3:06, the cadenza begins at 11:34.
BeethovenAlkan.mp3
Live performance by Marc-André Hamelin at Wigmore Hall, London, June 1994
Last week an unknown hacker — or inside whistleblower — distributed on the internet emails and documents apparently taken from the computers of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. The CRU and its director, Phil Jones, were central players in establishing the theory of anthropocentric global warming that is endorsed by the IPCC. In conjunction with the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office, they maintain HadCRUTv3, one of the principal datasets of global temperature.
By now the purloined files have been disseminated throughout the internet, and have created quite a stir. The original zip file (62 MB) is here; when unzipped it contains about 160 MB of information, with over 1000 emails and 2000 other documents. The blogosphere has primarily focused on the emails, which include exchanges between Phil Jones and many leading climate scientists. There is now a searchable database of the emails and Bishop Hill provides a synopsis of some of the more interesting cases. The other documents — with data, code, and financial records — will probably have a greater impact over the long run. There are questions, for instance, about coding practice — see here. Evidence so far seems to indicate that all of this material is genuine; many recipients have confirmed the accuracy of emails, and as yet nothing has been disputed.
Posted
on November 12, 2009, 4:10 am,
by Paul,
under uncategorized.
Golf Dreams is John Updike’s brilliant collection of stories and essays about the game of golf. In the title story, Updike describes a golf dream — a dream in which targets mysteriously recede, hazards materialize out of thin air, balls change into cylinders, and clubs develop an odd flabby appendage which prevents them from contacting the ball crisply. Nonetheless, he observes, the dreamer “surrenders not a particle of hope of making the shot.”
After all, are these nightmares any worse than the “real” drive that skips off the toe of the club, strikes the prism-shaped tee marker, and is swallowed by weeds some twenty yards behind the horrified driver? Or the magical impotence of an utter whiff? Or the bizarre physical comedy of a soaring slice that strikes the one telephone wire strung across three hundred acres? The golfer is so habituated to humiliation that his dreaming mind never offers any protest of implausibility. Whereas dream life, we are told, is a therapeutic caricature, seamy side out, of real life, dream golf is simply golf played on another course. . .
Posted
on November 8, 2009, 10:46 pm,
by Paul,
under poetry.
by W. B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Posted
on October 29, 2009, 3:38 am,
by Paul,
under music.
During May and June I listened to the live webcasts of most of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition. I am not sure what to think about competitions in general — perhaps they are a necessary evil — but it was a good opportunity to hear wonderful young musicians and some remarkable performances. Early on, I was captivated by the music of 19 year-old Haochen Zhang of China, who eventually shared the gold medal. Here is his performance of the Beethoven Sonata in A flat, Op. 110:
ZhangOp110.mp3
In the semi-finals, Zhang programmed the complete Chopin Preludes, Op. 28. Here is the “Raindrop” Prelude:
Posted
on October 23, 2009, 3:54 pm,
by Phil,
under Phil, philosophy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked rhetorically, Do we bring up our children because we have found it pays? [1] This sounds absurd, yet in many ways our expressed thinking about children is utilitarian and fails to take them seriously as ends in themselves.Perhaps we are no longer driven to produce family heirs, but when we want to draw attention to the importance of educating children we still speak of them as “the leaders of tomorrow.” If we argue that the importance of children derives from the fact that they are future adults, we neglect to recognize any inherent value to childhood itself. We look back with horror at Puritans who expected children to behave like little adults and viewed play as sin, but many developmental theories are still prone to analyze childhood as a series of stages leading to adulthood. In this case the mature adult remains the measure and the end of analysis, and childhood is just a means. Play is acceptable in children because we have recognized that through play various capacities are developed that we value in the mature adult.Does such thinking respect childhood, or have we raised the reductionism of our Puritan forebears to a new level of sophistication and subtlety?This is not to suggest that developmental models are not important and illuminating, but only that taken alone such models are inherently reductive and that perhaps we have not yet earned the right to look down on Puritans.
Posted
on October 22, 2009, 8:24 pm,
by Paul,
under poetry.
by W. B. Yeats
ALL the words that I utter,
And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,
And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
Storm-darken’d or starry bright.
Posted
on October 21, 2009, 1:26 pm,
by Paul,
under science.
Several weeks ago I went on a binge reading about Polywell fusion. The brainchild of Dr. Robert Bussard, Polywell fusion is a variety of inertial electrostatic confinement, a combination of the inertial confinement (IFE) and magnetic confinement (MFE) approaches to plasma containment. The idea is to use a polyhedron of electromagnetic coils into which electrons are introduced. The electrons become concentrated by the magnetic and electrical fields at the center of the device, creating a well of electrostatic potential that confines the ions for fusion. Advantages claimed for this approach are that it does not release any radioactive byproducts, and that it is highly scalable. One consequence of the latter is that the time and expense required for development is considerably less than with, e.g., the Tokamak design. For more information, see the Wikipedia entry on Polywell fusion and the Talk-Polywell discussion forum.
In 2006, Dr. Bussard gave a talk at Google — primarily to solicit funding. This talk is interesting not only as an introduction to the idea of Polywell fusion, but also for Dr. Bussard’s remarks on aspects of the institutional culture of science.
Should Google Go Nuclear?
Low-level funding for Polywell fusion was provided to Dr. Bussard’s company, Energy Matter Conversion Corporation, by the Navy from 1992 to 2005. Funding was resumed in 2007, shortly prior to Dr. Bussard’s death. Last month, the Department of Defense announced a contract of $7,855,504 for “validation of basic physics,” to be completed by April, 2011.
We could fund thousands of such ideas for less than the cost of cap and trade.
Posted
on October 16, 2009, 7:15 am,
by Nathan,
under Nathan, music.
octet1.mp3
My String Octet consists of four movements linked together to form one continuous arc. The piece is, in a sense, an extended cantata without words, and each movement but the second alludes, in a different fashion, to the forms of archaic vocal music. The first movement, marked Incipit, is much like the intonation that opens the Catholic liturgy; it begins with a meditation upon a single, elemental sound, which grows from near-silence into an austere, lonely chant. This simple monody is joined by a second and then a third imitative line; the texture growing, at last, into a five-part motet, a dissonant and anguished shadow of the great sacred vocal works of Josquin and Palestrina. This leads directly into the second movement, marked Sinfonia in the sense that word held during the early Baroque period when it implied an instrumental interlude within a cantata or an oratorio. This sharp, violent music propels the piece toward the apex of the arc, the beginning of the third movement. Marked Recitative, it is a feverish soliloquy for the first cellist, accompanied lightly by the rest of the ensemble, and ending in catastrophe. The dying sounds of the third movement fade finally into the fourth, a chorale, in which the music comes as if from a great distance, halting and enigmatic, retreating until it vanishes into the elemental sound with which the piece began.
Posted
on October 15, 2009, 6:18 pm,
by Paul,
under climate science.
In the highly charged debate over climate change, overviews that are both balanced and informative can be hard to find. Chip Knappenberger’s A Cherry-Picker’s Guide to Temperature Trends provides just such an overview of recent temperature trends. Knappenberger first charts all five main data sets*:
He then calculates trends from these data sets — using monthly data and going from September of each year through August 2009 – as simple linear least squares fits. He graphs each trend by starting year, with statistically significant trends (p < 0.05) being indicated by filled circles, and juxtaposes them to the average projected trend of the ensemble of climate models:
Posted
on September 26, 2009, 1:44 pm,
by Paul,
under philosophy.
We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are. –Leszek Kolakowski, from “The Idolatry of Politics”, 1986
We were saddened to learn this summer of the death of Leszek Kolakowski, the brilliant Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. As a professor at Warsaw University, Kolakowski’s courageous criticism of Marxism in the 50’s and 60’s resulted in his books being banned and the loss of his job — and led to his emigration to the West in 1968. Kolakowski taught briefly at McGill University and at Berkeley before settling at All Souls College, Oxford. He also taught on the Committee for Social Thought, at Chicago, and was a reader for Phil’s dissertation. Here is the NYT obituary.
In 1978, Kolakowski published his monumental Main Currents of Marxism, an exhaustive analysis (beginning with Plotinus) of such notions as the labor theory of value, dialectical materialism, and the concept of class struggle. He claimed that Stalinism was not an aberration, but a natural consequence of Marxist utopianism. He was an eclectic scholar whose interests were not confined to political philosophy; his books included: Positivist Philosophy (1971), The Presence of Myth (1972), Husserl and the Search for Certitude (1975), Bergson (1985), God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism (1995), and The Two Eyes of Spinoza (2004). Nathan’s and my initial exposure to Kolakowski was through Tales from the Kingdom of Lailonia, satirical fairy-tales written while he was still in Poland. Phil recommends Metaphysical Horror(1978), a collection of essays on the history of philosophy, and Nathan recommends Religion: If There is no God…(2001).
Posted
on September 6, 2009, 3:10 am,
by Paul,
under photos.
Here are Shelley’s photos of our trip out west this summer. We were gone nearly ten weeks and travelled about 18,000 miles. The photos are arranged in albums. Click on an album cover to view the corresponding album. The right and left arrows on either side of the photos will let you step through the album.
The first album covers from near Gananoque, ON on the St. Lawrence River to Jackson Hole, WY. Our circuitous route took us through northern Ontario, crossing back into the U.S. at Sault Ste. Marie, down through Michigan into Indiana, and back up into Wisconsin where we picked up I-90 going west. We took a side trip down to Aspen, CO and then we headed north through the mountains.
Gananoque –> Tetons
The second album covers from the Tetons in Wyoming to Vancouver Island. We crossed the Teton range into Idaho, and drove up through Montana into the Idaho panhandle. We zig-zagged across British Columbia, with a small detour into Oroville, WA and a stay in Whistler, and then took a series of ferries to Vancouver Island.
