waka waka waka

Here’s Peggy Noonan once again (do forgive me for generating so little original content during this vacation), commenting on the speeches made so far at the democratic convention. She offers a simple but accurate insight:

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Surrounded as I am by family and friends while on holiday, I continue to find time alone for writing to be in short supply. But here’s a gem for the “Shameless Filler” category: the “Old Perfesser” himself, the great Casey Stengel, testifying on July 8th, 1958 at the Senate Anti-Trust and Monopoly Subcommittee Hearings. This is priceless.

Perhaps best of all: Mickey Mantle’s opening remark (last line of the transcript).

Here’s the latest in lethal technology: the wasp knife.

It’s late in the day, and it’s been a long, full day: up early this morning to drive our son back to college, then an evening memorial service here in Wellfleet for a truly remarkable woman — Ellen Rafel, our next-door neighbor here on Hiram Hill, who lost her fight with cancer this spring. So for tonight I want to direct readers to an ongoing discussion at The Maverick Philosopher on what is perhaps the most intractable social and political dilemma of them all: abortion.

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We’ve had a demanding schedule today: lolling and body-surfing at White Crest Beach, then the daily swim at Great Pond — and still to come this evening, our friend Larry Horowitz’s latest opening at the Cove Gallery, followed by dinner at Winslow’s Tavern. But a free moment having presented itself, I’ll take this opportunity to catch up a bit.

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A quiet, lazy midday having presented me with an opportunity to switch on my laptop, I thought I might, at the very least, offer those readers who’ve made the effort to stop by (and I think them for doing so) a tidbit or two.

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We are on holiday at our little seaside retreat, and the schedule is simply so demanding — sleeping, loafing on the beach, swimming in Wellfleet’s cool and limpid kettle ponds and the backshore’s bracing surf, sampling the area’s toothsome viands, strolling through town, visiting with friends, brushing up my Iron Wire out on the deck, playing music, and reading — that it’s hard to find the time for serious bloggery. There will be rainy days ahead, though, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, some amusing fluff: the periodic table of the elements, in an easy-to-use video format.

There seems to be little doubt that the world’s oceans are in trouble. Here in Cape Cod, which was named for shoals of fish once so numerous that you could “walk across the water on their backs”, the fishing industry is all but gone, the result of near-total depletion of a fishery that once seemed limitless. It now appears, as we read here, that fertilizer runoff is leading to algal blooms that cause oxygen-deprived “dead zones”, and in this article we read about the “rise of slime”:

Areas that had featured intricate marine food webs with large animals are being converted into simplistic ecosystems dominated by microbes, toxic algal blooms, jellyfish and disease.

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Pat Buchanan is a paleoconservative and an isolationist, albeit a thoughtful and articulate one. Here, presented without further comment (I’m too preoccupied at the moment with packing up and getting on the road), is an essay in which he describes recent events in Georgia from a perspective that is far more sympathetic to Russia than anything you are likely to read around here.

A reader calls our attention to an item that is making the rounds today: in a startling breakthrough, researchers have found that when we drink alcohol, it can make others appear more attractive!

This astonishing result may even just be the tip of the iceberg: apparently booze can even make things just generally seem more beautiful.

Once the word gets out, of course, drinking alcohol might catch on to the point that it actually becomes a popular activity: why, I could even imagine that there might be some business opportunities here. If the idea really takes off, there might be money to be made manufacturing beverages that contain alcohol, or even selling the stuff to adventurous sorts on a per-drink basis.

As for me, I might have to stop drinking for a few hours to see if what they are saying is really true. I’ve been thinking the world was a beautiful place all along, but now I’m not so sure.

According to today’s Physorg.com newsletter, fascinating things are afoot at the University of Reading. Researchers are growing little biological brains made of rat neurons, and training them to control robots by way of a Bluetooth connection.

The scientists have in fact created several of these wee brains, which even seem to have their own personalities.

“It’s quite funny — you get differences between the brains,” said [professor Kevin] Warwick. “This one is a bit boisterous and active, while we know another is not going to do what we want it to.”

It is still early days, and the homegrown brainlets, however boisterous, are nonetheless capable so far of only the most rudimentary mentation, roughly equivalent to a record-company executive, Biblical literalist, or member of Congress. But the project shows great promise. Learn more here.

I watched a little of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics the other day. It was an elaborate spectacle, and quite beautiful: an enormous troupe of drummers, identically clad, playing and dancing in perfect unison. There may well have been thousands of them; there were at least many hundreds.

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It’s quite clear now that Russia is intent on reconquering Georgia, and that their decision to do so is a brazen and flamboyant test of Western power and resolve. What is less clear is how we can respond. We have many good reasons to support Georgia, a staunchly pro-Western nation and participant in NATO’s Partnership for Peace. But we are not likely to be inclined to go to war with Russia over Georgia, and Russia, which still considers the country part of its empire, knows it. Its action calls to mind Germany’s annexation of the Rhineland in 1936.

This is a major event.

In today’s New York Times, William Kristol considers our options. Have a look here.

Our reader Justin K., who, when he puts his ear to the ground, hears more than most, calls our attention to this item about the fighting in and about Ossetia, a conflict that is surely being savored with strategic appreciation by other interested parties in the caves and mountains to the east.

I do hope to resume normal operations before too much longer, and to get back to the fascinating and important topics we’ve been looking at recently. A lingering ennui and lack of mental focus have hampered my attempts to get properly back in harness just yet; I look forward to the salutary effects of sea air, ample sleep, healthful exercise, absence from Midtown, and deliverance from enforced labor — all of which will commence this coming weekend, and last until after Labor Day.

Meanwhile: researcher Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshive University, has been working on the mechanisms by which the body rids itself of accumulating protein wastes. This system of “protein clearance”, like just about everything else, works less well as we get older, and in turn the accumulation of toxins in our cells leads to many of the other indignities of advancing decrepitude.

Dr. Cuervo (with whose cousin Jose I have been all too familiar for a great many years, to the cumulative detriment of my own cellular resilience) has now succeeded in halting the decline of this system in the livers of mice, by introducing a suitable genetic modification. This is, I think, pretty big news, and I think she is starting with exactly the right organ.

Learn more here.

Things are getting hot in the former SSR. Our sources have suggested we follow along here, where readers will find further links as well.

An article in the New York Times a few weeks ago described the results of a Pew survey that inquired as to how the denizens of various nations felt about their governments and economies. Two authoritarian nations — China and Russia — did very well, while the Western democracies fared quite poorly.

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I am eager to pick up our discussion of meaning and morality where it left off a week or so ago. It paused on what I thought was a promising note: a comment by Peter Lupu that aptly summarized the tasks a naturalist account must accomplish.

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The subset of our behavior, dispositions, reactions, and so forth that happens with our conscious awareness and endorsement is trivially small, and one of the areas where we respond most automatically and unconsciously is our interaction with others. We react subliminally to an enormous variety of cues: posture, gesture, tone of voice, choice of words, pupil dilation, odor, and many more. One of our most powerful automatic responses is the “read” we make of a person’s face, and now a pair of researchers from Princeton have done some quantitative research on just what is is we look for. Learn more here.

This is a giddy week for particle physicists: very soon now the Large Hadron Collider, the most potent instrument ever built for the investigation of nature’s most private parts, will be brought on line. (How soon? Have a look here.) [Note: the LHC countdown site now (August 18th 2008) seems to be down. -MP]

There are those who fear that the collider, which occupies a 17-mile-long tunnel straddling the border of Switzerland and France, may kill us all by creating a world-devouring black hole or strangelet. While we can all enjoy a little frisson at the thought of such a gaudy exit, it is not going to happen. Here’s why.

There is an inverse relation between the scale we can examine and the size of the instruments required; we have come a very long way indeed from the first cyclotron, which Ernest Lawrence built for a cost of about $25, and which could be held in one hand. The LHC is an enormous, and enormously complex, triumph of human ingenuity and engineering skill.

I’ve just run across a beautiful collection of photographs of the project; you can have a look at them here.

Finally, our friend Eugene Jen has sent along a YouTube clip of a rap song about the LHC, written by Kate McAlpine, a science writer covering the project. If you think you might enjoy such a thing, it’s here.

It has been alleged in some partisan quarters that the current Speaker of the House of Representatives is a fatuous ninny, a feckless, mealy-mouthed, obstructionist birdbrain. Here is a video clip that may help settle the matter. (Hat tip: BV.)

Reader J. Kapok, knowing that I have been out of touch the past few days, and concerned that I not overdo it so soon after my recent misadventures, has kindly sent some blog fodder my way: items that he knows would have attracted my attention had I not been distracted by larger and more clamant issues of human frailty (mine). Both are from the New York Times.

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Well, it’s Friday afternoon, I’m back home, and it appears that I might not be “falling off the branch” just yet after all.

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In the comment thread in the previous post I mentioned that I felt unwell enough to visit the hospital on Tuesday. I haven’t left yet. Here’s the story.

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A couple of weeks ago I posted an essay in response to a post of Bill Vallicella’s on whether life might have an objective meaning. In his piece Bill argued that any attempt to offer a purely subjective interpretation must lead to an infinite regress, and therefore must be false. I responded, drawing on work by Daniel Dennett, that the regress argument might not block a suitable naturalistic account. This led to a long discussion in the comments thread, with over a hundred entries. Toward the end, philosopher Peter Lupu offered some extensive criticisms of my position, which I would like to begin to address here.

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There was a significant debut on the Internet today: a search engine that may well give mighty Google a run for its money. It is the brainchild of Anna Patterson, who had previously written a search application that impressed Google so much they bought it in 2004, and hired her as a technical lead, when their own product needed a lift.

This one’s not for sale.

There seems to be something going round the blogosphere lately; a number of folks seem recently to be afflicted by a debilitating malaise, an enervating ennui, that has made it hard for them to carry out their duties. Dennis Mangan is on open-ended leave; Deogolwulf has expressed his own weariness with the undertaking; Bill Vallicella recently decided to lay off for a month — and here I am, missing several days in a row.

What begins with optimistic fanfare and a sense of novelty and excitement can often begin to feel routine, and while we bloggers all know that we are under no contractual obligation to keep generating “content”, we also know that steady output is essential for maintaining a connection with one’s hard-won readership. But there seems to be a hump to get over at about the four-year mark, and it is interesting to note how many of us seem to be flagging just a bit.

But for all that, there’s nothing like writing down one’s thoughts for getting them in order, and nothing like airing them in public for finding out how sound they are. So blog we must, and blog we will (well, most of us, anyway). Bill V. explains nicely here.

After all, how are we supposed to know what we think unless we see what we say?

I’ve been very busy with work and travel, so I might have scant time for attending to my duties here for the next few days (though I will as time permits). I have also been given plenty to mull over in our ongoing meaning-of-life dust-up.

Back by Monday or so, if not sooner.

Meanwhile, the estimable Deogolwulf has weighed in on physicalism with a meaty post of his own — one that will, I think, need responding to. Have a look here.

We’ve been giving morality, and the universality of moral intuitions, a good going over lately (particularly in this discussion, which now has over 100 comments). Readers with an interest in this topic might like to have a look at Harvard University’s Moral Sense Test. Feel free to share your thoughts here.

Note: Don’t read the comments below before you take the test!!

Don’t like having your freedoms infringed? Worried about the economy? Forget the Patriot Act and the credit crisis; here comes the EPA.

Our reader JK continues to deliver: in this case a highly unsettling article about the possibility of a devastating collision with an asteroid or comet. Because such objects often strike the ocean, or detonate in the air, leaving no crater at all (as in Tunguska 1908), our estimates of their frequency may be far too low.

Learn more here.

On the opinion page of today’s New York Times is a worrisome assessment of the clouds gathering over Iran. Here.

With a hat tip to Bill Vallicella for the link, we direct you to the current issue of the American Physical Society’s newsletter Physics and Society, in which this august body announces its wish to get to the bottom of the hotly debated issue of anthropogenic climate change.

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I’ve long been puzzled by ambiguous figures, ever since I saw the famous Necker cube as a boy. What changes in the brain when the perception “flips”? (There had better be something.)

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If, against all odds, I make it to the age of 80, I might have quite a birthday. A smallish asteroid called 99942 Apophis (which will also be making a close flyby the day I turn 73, on Friday, April 13th, 2029), might be blowing out my candles for me.

Have a look here, and for far more detailed information, here.

Here’s the latest political newsletter from Robert Novak. (Feel free to comment, but no Valerie Plame, please.)

Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an editorial item about the belated and largely symbolic response to the depredations of the Sudanese government. Here.

In today’s Times, John Tierney calls our attention to the possibility that the government may soon be imposing “Title IX” requirements on university science departments, because there aren’t “enough” women going into fields like physics and engineering.

This is dangerous territory, of course; we all remember the shameful pillorying of Harvard president Lawrence Summers for merely suggesting that there might be innate reasons for the asymmetrical distribution of men and women in science. His perfectly reasonable remarks were taken as an outrageous and impermissible thought-crime, and he was hounded from his post.

Now the dispute turns on whether there might be fewer women physicists and engineers simply because women are inherently less attracted to these disciplines, or whether it is a symptom of a lingering and pernicious discrimination that must be remedied by intrusive government action.

Learn more here.

It’s too late for a serious effort here tonight: the memsahib and I spent the evening in Prospect Park, enjoying the New York Philharmonic’s annual outdoor concert.

It was a splendid event, and well worth the arduous half-block trek to the park. The weather, by some freak accident, was delightful, with balmy breezes and a spectacular sunset, and the program could hardly have been better: Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, and Sibelius’s Finlandia, with the rousing overture from Carmen as an encore, and an exuberant fireworks display to cap off the show.

The Bach in particular, played just as the sun sank below the horizon, was so very beautiful. It would be easy, in the presence of such sublime genius, such staggering artistic splendor, such incomparable musicianship, to imagine that such gifts must be a clear sign of a transcendent and loving Mind from which such blessings flow, that they simply must come to us from some higher source than the coarse material processes of the natural world.

Naaaaaaaaah.

This afternoon the lovely Nina and I, realizing that today was our last chance, took in the Takashi Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum, which is just a short stroll from our home. If you aren’t familiar with Murakami’s oeuvre, it is both lighthearted and disturbing, playful and serious, and squashes high and low art, fine art and pop culture, and the sublime and the commercial into a single genre he calls “Superflat”. Some of the works are enormous graphic panels featuring a profusion of laughing daisies and psychedelic, multi-eyed mushrooms; others are anime-styled plastic scuptures, still others are Luis Vuitton bags (for sale). In one room little children say in the floor happily sketching a gigantic, happy panel of his trademark polyocular fungi; in the next was a lifesize plastic statue of a laughing, golden-haired masturbator playfully twirling a lariat of his own making.

Murakami’s skill and creativity are enormous; no less so, apparently, is his business acumen: more adeptly than any artist since Walt Disney, he has made not just a name for himself, but also a brand.

If you’d like to see some of his work online, the simplest thing would probably just to do a Google image search under his name. In fact, don’t bother: here, I’ve done it for you.

Our reader JK, a Navy man who is a steady source of all sorts of information, has provided us this link to an item about gathering tensions with Iran. The source is the blog Information Dissemination, whose focus is naval matters. We read:

Following an attack on Iran by Israel, Iran is not going to find much success trying to sink the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) in the Indian Ocean, but they might have a great deal of success killing you and me here in America. We don’t believe for one second that Iran is going to abide by the Geneva Conventions and not intentionally support the killing of American civilians in North America. If war happens, they are as likely if not more likely to attack here than in the Gulf. Whether you like it or not, there was absolutely no way the Democrats, including Barack Obama, were going to leave the possibility open that Israel attacks Iran, and the US gets hit by terrorist attacks inside the US while the FISA bill wasn’t passed.

This is a key point. The Democratic Party in mass shifted from a core position. This doesn’t happen without keen awareness to some strategic condition. Clearly some outside force has produced conditions which are far outside the scope of national politics, because nothing short of insight and real concern for political survival would Democrats find inspiration for such a massive policy shift with virtually no explanation to its core constituency. This is a major reason, and to Democrats scratching still their heads, an obvious sign we believe that Israel has demanded a time table.

Also from this item: “[T]he conditions for war are indeed being met.” Let’s hope not.

Barack Obama has, since Hillary Clinton “suspended” her campaign, adjusted his position on quite a few important issues — heeling to starboard on every one in a most sensible and gratifying way. Indeed, the more I see of him, the more he seems to be a man who is actually willing to study complex issues, and who has considerable intelligence to bring to the task. I’m warming to the guy, even if Jesse Jackson wants to “cut his nuts off”.

His rightward slide, however, has the far Left in fits, and he is being bastinadoed in their media organs as a vile betrayer. All very enjoyable. What on earth did they expect?

Gail Collins asks the same question in a delightfully tart piece in today’s Times. Here.

A visit this evening to Jeffery Hodges’ website paid a double dividend: not only further coverage of the ongoing Fan Death crisis, but a link to a collection of “Outlandish Proverbs’, taken from a book of the same name published in 1640.

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Dr. William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, is back in harness after a month-long layoff from blogging. I’m glad he’s back on the job: he is as interesting and provocative as always. I’d like to weigh in on this post in particular, in which he argues that meaning, in particular the meaning of life, must either have an objective basis, or founder in an infinite regress.

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After a splendid repast with my lovely wife Nina at an outstanding local eatery, I sat down at the computer late this evening resolved finally to get a meaty post written on at least one of the topics I’ve had in my sights this weekend. At the front of the queue are responses to provocative recent essays by Bill Vallicella (to this one in particular I have a crisp response I want to set down) and Horace Jeffery Hodges. But instead, I spent my time in the comments thread of our earlier item about the Tunguska Event, writing a wordy and bloated response to an incisive comment by reader Andrew Staroscik.

And now it’s late, and I’m tired. And tomorrow we’ll be on the road all day, and won’t get home till the late evening. And then a busy work-week begins.

Oh well. Life is harsh, but at least it’s short.

There’s so much to talk about: politics, moral responsibility, and even the meaning of life. But these holiday weekends are so full of amusing diversions and distractions that it’s hard to get down to business — which, I suppose, is really not such a bad thing at all.

So for now I’ll just wish you a happy Independence Day, from lovely Wellfleet, MA, where we had a whale of a 4th.

Feeling tired? Listless? Maybe all you need is some concentrated water. Just add water.

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Democracy has obvious drawbacks, not least of which being that at its worst it is nothing more than mob rule. As William Alger said, “a crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.” So the leader of a democracy, depending upon his aims and his talents, can seek to lead by addressing his people as individuals amenable to reasoned argument and capable of rational deliberation — or he can appeal to their sentiment, their prejudices, their greed, their pride, and their social allegiances in all their coarsest forms.

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Tomorrow, June 30th, marks the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska Event, an immense cataclysm that occurred, mercifully, in a remote and mostly uninhabited region of central Siberia. Its cause is still debated, but it is generally agreed to have been an “air burst”, equivalent to 10 or 15 megatons of TNT, that occurred at an altitude of about five miles.

Over the years various explanations have been attempted. The most likely is a strike by a meteoroid or comet fragment, but some have imagined that the cause was a black hole or blob of antimatter passing through the Earth, or even a UFO crash. A more recent, if dubious, hypothesis is that the Event was caused by a titanic release of methane gas.

Whatever it was, it was a stupendous detonation; if it had happened a few hours later, once western Europe had rotated into the descending object’s path, it might have pulverized a major city. As it was, very few died, and otherwise it merely knocked over a great many trees.

But now we learn (with a hat tip to reader JK) that there may have been other consequences as well. Vladimir Shaidurov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has raised the possibility that the Tunguska Event may be to blame for the apparent global warming of the last century. Water vapor is a more influential greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and Shaidurov suggests that it may have been not human emission of carbon dioxide, but rather the Tunguska object’s effect on high-altitude ice clouds, that altered the planet’s heat economy.

Learn more here.

From my friend Wayne Krantz comes a link to a story that will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times: apparently some of Barack Obama’s younger and more enthusiastic supporters, having noticed that his middle name — Hussein — has been a heavy cross to bear, have decided to make it their own middle name as well.

This comes as Mr. Obama continues to be vexed by rumors that he is a closeted Muslim. He appears, quite reasonably, to regard these allegations as slanderous calumny (which they almost certainly are), and has done all he can to distance himself from that troublesome religion — including going so far as to have a pair of bescarfed Muslimahs removed from the stage during a recent campaign appearance. For him actually to be a Muslim, of course, would be political suicide: it would be hard to imagine anything more viscerally repugnant to the average US voter, short of being a rational secularist with no religion at all. (That said, there is in fact one Muslim member of Congress: Representative Keith Ellison, a Farrakhan supporter who represents the anomalously tolerant district of Minneapolis — but the politically astute Mr. Obama has so far had the good sense to fend him off with a boathook whenever he approaches.)

One girl’s father was appalled, his heart blackened by fear that his daughter might actually be converting to Islam. But he needn’t have worried: it’s all in good fun, of course. Whee!!

Read the story here.