March 2016

I’m writing a much longer piece on Trump. In the meantime, some clips from the cutting-room floor.

1. At last night’s debate, Trump said of Rubio, “And he referred to my hands—if they are small, something else must be small—I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee you.” Lest you think we’re tumbling down a new rabbit hole here, once upon a time, the king’s body and the body politic were thought to be, if not one and the same, then in some kind of alignment. Trump’s reference is as much pre-modern as it is post-modern. Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic book on the topic, The King’s Two Bodies, was subtitled “A Study in Medieval Political Theology.”

In any event, I’d rather hear Trump’s opinions about his penis than his views on Muslims and Mexicans.

2. You often hear that the rhetorical brutality of Trump is unprecedented. Never before have we seen a candidate so cruel. I’m not so sure.

You also hear that we’ve never had a leading politician who so shamelessly, if rhetorically, flirted with violence. Again, I’m not so sure. [click to continue…]

This Dahlia Lithwick piece on the Supreme Court abortion case, Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt, is interesting in itself, and suggestive for the near future. We have an even 4-4 conservative-liberal split on the court but Thomas doesn’t talk, and Roberts, the Chief, regards it as his duty to be Chief. Roberts seems to care about being remembered as an effective Chief Justice more than he cares about being remembered as a reliable ideological partisan (like Scalia); this significantly constrains his self-presentation in oral argument. Anthony Kennedy is – Anthony Kennedy. Libertarian, hence mostly conservative, in that idiosyncratically reliable way of his. That leaves Alito, the rock-ribbed Republican voice on the court, if you will. On the other hand, we have Breyer-Kagan-Sotomayor-Ginsburg. Their collective partisan profile is moderate-left Democrat. They are much more judicially restrained than, say, Scalia. But the very fact that they do not espouse philosophically extremist positions – they are not judicial philosophical activists, to coin a phrase – means there are fewer cross-currents and counter-currents within their overall, moderate-left flow. They aren’t going to make bold, contrarian leaps; they’ll keep right on saying moderately liberal things, more or less in unison.

So we may see more cases in which the oral optics (pardon a synaesthetically mixed metaphor!) are: Republican Party (Alito) double, triple or even quadruple-teamed by the Democratic Party. Oral argument isn’t voting. It’s still 4-4 for voting, most days. I doubt Clarence Thomas is going to start voting with the liberals, even if he sees liberals dominating oral argument. I also don’t suppose Roberts will stand for seeing his partisan side being out-talked in some dramatic way. But his position constrains him. Possibly we will be hearing more from Thomas. That would be interesting, to say the least.

Scalia always had enough oral argument in him for any three Justices. Now it occurs to me that might have been literally the case.

I don’t really have a good sense about how the dynamics of oral argument feed into the obviously much more extensive, behind closed doors activities that result in decisions. But I’m sure it means something, if the character of oral argument shifts dramatically. What do you think?

On Wednesday, I had the great fortune to attend the closing keynote at the annual CSCW conference given by Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, a photo-sharing site now owned by Facebook, but still operating largely independently, at least from the user’s perspective. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Instagram now has 400 million active users (75% outside the US) sharing 80 million photos and videos daily. Those are some serious numbers folks. And while they require considerable technical chops, I am glad Mike spent his time at CSCW talking about the design elements and human-computer interaction aspects. I share some nuggets below. (I failed to take notes so I’m skipping all sorts of info, sadly, and welcome corrections/additions in the comments.)

As old-timers here may recall, I am a big photo enthusiast and was a huge Flickr fan for quite some time. More recently, however, I have started getting into Instagram and now use it daily. Having thought about how these services differ and how I ultimately ended up using Instagram so much more these days than Flickr, it was a real treat to hear the brains behind the service share many of the conversations and decisions that went into making it what it is today. It was genuinely interesting to learn about the many aspects that he and his collaborators discussed and continue to ponder as they enhance the app.

In the first few minutes Mike shared some of his background, including his failure to get a paper into CSCW during his early days. I mention that as a reminder that people should not take the occasional setback too seriously.

Mike and his co-founder Kevin Systrom had worked on an earlier app called Burbn. The Atlantic has a few notes on this. This was the era of check-in apps so they focused on check-ins, but the app barely took off (we’re talking no more than about a thousand users). The aspect of the app that seemed to appeal to folks most was its photo-sharing capability. So they set out to focus on that primarily.
[click to continue…]

First things first: thanks to everyone who dug deep (or shallow) to purchase (or just freely download) a copy of Reason and Persuasion, allowing us to enjoy evanescent ecstasies of semi-upward-mobility into the 5-digit sales range on Amazon for a period of some days now. Now please keep that Amazon aspidistra flying for the next several years running and we’ll have ourselves a standard textbook! (Sigh. I know. No hope. If I want sales like that, I have to update Facebook more than once every 4 years. And be on Twitter. Shudder.)

As I was saying: it is also fun to watch the (no doubt CT-fueled) evolution of the ‘customers who viewed this item also viewed’ Amazon scrollbar, associating our Plato book with all manner of comics and science fiction. I hope the present post shall further enrich that eclectic mix.

Back in December I posted about how I would like a history of semi-popular philosophy of mind, to complement the history of science fiction. Many people left genuinely useful, interesting comments, for which I am sincerely grateful. Today I would like to strike out along a semi-parallel line. Science fiction film, with its special effects, has a strong phenotypic and genotypic relation to stage magic. Georges Méliès was a stage magician. But sf is older than film; stage magic, too. We might enhance our sense of the modern origins of the former by coordinating with the modern history of the latter. I just read a good little book, Conjuring Science: A History of Scientific Entertainment and Stage Magic in Modern France, by Sofia Lachappelle, that doesn’t make the sf connection, but makes it easy to make. (It’s an overpriced good little book, I’m sorry to say. Oh, academic publishing. But perhaps you, like me, enjoy library privileges somewhere.)

It contains some nice sentences, certainly. For example: “While Robertson was presenting his phantasmagoria in an abandoned convent and professors of amusing physics were performing their wonders, scientific and technological innovations were impacting the world of the theater at large.” (118)

As I was saying: history of modern stage magic. I’ll quote passages, and comment, and supplement with relevant images. [click to continue…]

I enjoyed Maria’s D&D thread. So here’s a trivia question for you. Before there was the AD&D Monster Manual, what single popular work of imaginative fantasy contained all the following fabulous creatures: hydras, furies, nighthawks, giants, goblins, ghouls, titans, magi, monks, grand turks, dragons, wizards, cyclops – not to mention kludds and kligrapps, all lurking in Dens, found spread through a number of fantastic Realms and Provinces within a single Empire that is, as it were, a reimagined, multi-leveled parallel version of our own world? Answer under the fold. [click to continue…]