From the monthly archives:
And I thought only philosophers played games with “general” descriptions like this. Via Think Progress:
And while Republicans have proposed several compromise amendments, most of their provisions seek to delay the mark-up process and undermine the bill. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), for instance, introduced an amendment (Hatch F7 [pdf]) to “add transition relief for the excise tax on high cost insurance plans for any State with a name the [sic] begins with the letter ‘U.’”
“Scott”:http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_03/4337 reviewing David Harvey’s latest at BookForum (free reg. required).
bq. It is unlikely that anyone has ever confused a page of Thomas Friedman’s with one of Immanuel Kant’s, but between them it is possible to triangulate a prevailing sensibility of the past two decades. Call it managerial cosmopolitanism. It celebrates the idea of a global civil society, with the states cooperating to play their proper (limited) role as guardians of public order and good business practices. The hospitality that each nation extends to visiting foreign traders grows ever wider and deeper; generalized, it becomes the most irenic of principles. And so there emerges on the horizon of the imaginable future something like a world republic, with liberty and frequent-flier miles for all.
The core insight here is sufficiently close to the “Forty Days and a Mule”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/09/15/40-days-and-a-mule/ post of last week as to suggest a competition. Winner will get the usual prize (a year’s free subscription to CT). Rewrite some of Immanuel Kant’s _Perpetual Peace_ in the style of Thomas Friedman’s _The World is Flat._ Or, if you prefer, Thomas Friedman’s _The World is Flat_ in the style of Immanuel Kant’s _Perpetual Peace._ Or any contemporary purveyor of bollocks in the style of some more learned and wordy philosopher with whom he or she may be said to have an intellectual connection, however tangential. Or vice-versa. Or plausible and amusing variations on any of the above; you get the idea.
“Cory Doctorow in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/15/cory-doctorow-3d-movies:
bq. Somewhere in the past year or so, it seems as though every studio exec has decided to greenlight one or more blockbuster in 3D, using a pretty impressive technology that employs polarised glasses to give a reasonably convincing illusion of depth. … And the 3D is … nice. … But I’m sceptical. … Up is a tremendous movie; it made me laugh and cry, and was intended to be seen in 3D … Nothing was obviously missing from the 2D experience that made me feel like the 3D was a must-have.
bq. And of course, that’s true of all 3D movies. Movies, after all, rely on the aftermarket of satellite, broadcast and cable licenses, of home DVD releases and releases to airline entertainment systems and hotel room video-on-demand services – none of which are in 3D. If the movie couldn’t be properly enjoyed in boring old 2D, the economics of filmmaking would collapse … he economics just don’t support it: a truly 3D movie would be one where the 3D was so integral to the storytelling and the visuals and the experience that seeing it in 2D would be like seeing a giant-robots-throwing-buildings-at-each-other blockbuster as a flipbook while a hyperactive eight-year-old supplied the sound effects by shouting “BANG!” and “CRASH!” in your ear. Such a film would be expensive to produce and market and could never hope to recoup.
Noticing in the school newsletter that 80% of the 7th graders with a 3.75, and 75% of those between a 3.5 and a 3.75 were girls, I asked my daughter why she thought this was. She retorted something like “duh, what do you expect?”. Then, adopting her pre-and-(I hope)-post-teen persona, she said that she thinks it is partly that the teachers like girls better (not because they are nicer — this my daughter rather sensibly doubts — but because they prudently reserve their nastiness for people who don’t control their grades) and partly because the boys just mess around because they don’t care about doing well.
So I was very interested in the findings in Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities
I just got Masterpiece Comics
UPDATE: Before accusing me of misreading Fish, please consider whether this comment satisfies you.
Some thoughts, related to Michael’s ‘going pro’ post and Kieran’s recent post on impact factor. To what extent is the whole internet afflicted with the Matthew Effect? “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” If you want to be a bit more specific, to what degree are search results afflicted by it?
Let me illustrate with a couple cases I’ve personally noted, which I suspect are representative. [click to continue…]
One of the odd and not-very-well-known-by-non-Irish-people things about Ireland is that every day, at 6pm, the main television station broadcasts the Angelus – one minute precisely of church bells ringing – for people to pause, reflect (and at least according to the original intentions of those who instituted it), pray.1 Back when I was growing up in Ireland, and the vast majority of my compatriots claimed that they went to Mass every week, the Angelus bells were accompanied by still shots of paintings of the Holy Family. As the country began to modernize a bit in the 1980s and 1990s, the Angelus gradually became more pluralistic, titillating religiously adventurous viewers with the occasional picture of a Russian Orthodox icon or whatever. But what to do after the supplanting of Roman Catholic hegemony by a bog-standard West European post-religious society? The “Irish Times”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2009/0919/1224254866639.html has an interesting short article on the politics of the Angelus in the modern era.
bq. THE ANGELUS will from next Monday be changed – though not utterly. Under a revamping of the evening pause for prayer on RTÉ One television, the gongs will remain the same. …the same ones as have been heard since the Angelus was first broadcast on RTÉ radio in 1950, and which originated with the bells at Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral … seven “episodes” in a new Angelus mini-series of visual reflections … oblivious calm amid the hue and cry … while he sketches an image of a pair of praying hands. … mother in Sixmilebridge, Co Clare, as she polishes a memorial stone to her drowned son … grandparents Tess and Pascal Finn feeding fussy swans on the Shannon at Limerick and Enniscorthy fisherman John Keating, who is shown out at sea in his trawler … Namucana Nyambe from Zambia as she gazes contemplatively towards the Phoenix Park … grist to the mill for those avid letter writers who have been campaigning for years to get the Angelus taken off the schedule of the State broadcaster.
It’s interesting how little bits of the previously dominant religious culture can weather the storm of progress – but only through the transfiguration of their content. If the Angelus didn’t already exist it would never be instituted in a society like contemporary Ireland – but since it does exist and would be difficult to get rid of without upsetting people (still-believing Catholics; once-were-Catholics who fancy they would miss it if it were gone) it has been gradually transformed instead into something that maintains the form of the original (still the old church bells), but few of the original religious valences.
1 Italy’s _Rai Uno_ has something similar as I recall (although timed not to interfere with the celebration of the true national religion, soccer).
It’s time to blog about bloggers blogging about blogging! Let’s start with <a href=”http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909u/professional-bloggers”>Benjamin Carlson’s recent account</a> of “the rise of the professional blogger”:
<blockquote>In early July, Laura McKenna, a widely respected and longtime blogger, <a href=”http://www.apt11d.com/2009/07/the-blogosphere-20.html”>argued on her site, 11D</a>, that blogging has perceptibly changed over the six years she’s been at it. Many of blogging’s heavy hitters, she observed, have ended up “absorbed into some other professional enterprise.” Meanwhile, newer or lesser-known bloggers aren’t getting the kind of links and attention they used to, which means that “good stuff” is no longer “bubbling to the top.” Her post prompted a couple of the medium’s most legendary, best-established hands to react: Matthew Yglesias (formerly of <i>The Atlantic</i>, now of ThinkProgress), confirmed that blogging has indeed become “institutionalized,” and Ezra Klein (formerly of <i>The American Prospect</i>, now of <i>The Washington Post</i>) concurred, “The place has professionalized.” </blockquote>
This confirms what I’ve been hearing from people like <a href=”http://maudnewton.com/blog/index.php”>Maud Newton</a> (whom I met last spring) and <a href=”http://fauxrealtho.com/”>Lauren Bruce</a> (whom I met last week while sightseeing in West Lafayette, Indiana). Because of course, when I meet bloggers in real life, we take the opportunity to talk about blogging. (Well, actually Maud and I were <i>supposed</i> to do that — it was a forum at Penn State on blogging and the arts.) Note, by the bye, that all three of these bloggers are (1) widely respected, (2) longtime bloggers (Lauren, of course, invented blogging in 1985), and (3) women. So of course we have to ask them: where were all the women bloggers?
An especially delicious offering for the start of the new academic year.
I see (via Tim Dunlop) that Troy Kennedy Martin is dead. There’s a lot to remember him for, but, like Tim, the work that will always stay with me is Edge of Darkness, one of the top six drama serials ever on TV. [fn1] Tim has a good clip and a link to a few more. The mid-1980s in Britain were a scary time, with Thatcher and the Tory party utterly and arrogantly dominant, the miners facing a brutally determined state, mass unemployment, nuclear standoff, vicious cuts in public spending, hmm, a bit like what we’re all in for soon. Bob Peck was terrific, but the real iconic figure was Joe Don Baker as Darius Jedburgh. Superb.
[1] The others being Heimat, Heimat 2, The Singing Detective, The Wire, and Our Friends in the North
I’m lecturing on cosmopolitanism tomorrow, so the mind turns to origins and starting points. Diogenes said he was a ‘citizen of the world’ – that is, kosmopolitês. But it occurred to me today that, actually, that’s not a good translation. Better: citizen of utopia. Or, a bit more modestly: citizen of the well-ordered state. Or: citizen of wherever they’ve actually got good government. I can’t get the Perseus Project to load right now, so I’ll settle for this. ‘Kosmos’ originally meant harmony, well-orderedness (in a military or ornamental sense). Pythagoras may (or may not!) have given the term its earliest astronomic usage, inspired by a sense of the gloriously ornamental orderliness of the heavens; it seems doubtful that Diogenes could have accessed that new sense sufficiently to extend it to mean ‘the world’, and, by further extension, ‘all of humanity’. He was just saying his allegiance was to the truly good and proper. This naturally goes together with cosmopolitanism, in our sense, because it’s a reproach to ‘my country, right or wrong’ sentiment. But ‘I’m a citizen of the best country’ just isn’t the same thought as ‘the best country would be a universal brotherhood of man’. Not that it’s exactly a burning issue, what this guy Diogenes thought. He’s dead (no, I don’t know where you can send flowers). Still, it’s kinda interesting. Am I missing something? Someone probably already wrote a paper about it anyway. That, or I’m missing something.
I’m starting now on what will I think be the hardest and most controversial chapter of my book – the argument that the search for a macroeconomic theory founded on (roughly) neoclassical micro, which has been the main direction of macro research for 40 years or so, was a wrong turning, forcing us to retrace our steps and look for another route. As always, comments and criticisms accepted with gratitude.
“Fabio Rojas”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/the-two-social-sciences/ at Orgtheory.
In general, there seem to be to two mindsets in the social sciences. The first I call “precision modeling.” The attitude might be summarized this way:
bq.
Social science should focus on simple & clearly defined concepts. Real science is when you formalize these simple concepts into models. The height of empirical research is clear identification of cause and effect mechanisms implied by such models.The second attitude I call “thick accounts.” Here’s my summary:
bq. Social science should be built around a tool box of flexible concepts. These flexible concepts can be juxtaposed, elaborated and rephrased. The height of empirical research is when researchers can use this tool box to interpret an otherwise opaque complex social domain. … these people can’t stand tool-centric theories that can’t accommodate meaning and eliminate complexity.
I’ve always thought that the loveliest expression of this dualism is set out in Italo Calvino’s _Invisible Cities_ (I’m relying here on William Weaver’s grave and lovely translation). [click to continue…]
Paul Krugman’s piece on “Why did economists get it so wrong” has attracted a vitriolic response from John Cochrane, reproduced here. Krugman’s piece was strongly worded, but the reply ups the ante, and I expect further escalation. Economics conferences in the next few years are going to be interesting events.
Given that, as Krugman himself notes, disagreements between economists were notably mild until the crisis erupted, what is going on here?
I’m visiting Berkely at present and just had a chat with Brad DeLong. These are some of the thoughts I had about the great macroeconomics wars as a result.
Goldstone’s “report”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8257301.stm on Cast Lead is out. Google blog and news searches show that the people who were always going to say “It’s not trooo!” (and worse) have begun to do so in large numbers. So it goes.