Sean Carroll is “moving to Caltech”:http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/04/06/going-to-california/ as a Senior Research Associate. Congratulations to him. I was out at Caltech a couple of years ago. I gave a talk on weak first order deconfinement transitions in (2+1)-dimensional SU(5) Yang-Mills theory. No of course I didn’t. I was in Pasadena because my significantly smarter other was at a conference, and I wandered over there. Looking to get oriented, I found a map of the campus. The buildings were numbered and there were two keys: an alphabetical index and a functional index. Obviously the engineers are in charge here, I thought.
I teasingly announced in my class on political policy and education reform that next week I shall be defending NCLB; “Brighouse defends Bush” was what I promised them. I told my family the same at the dinner table, and confronted the following rebuke by my 9 year old: “But dad, you’re not supposed to use your teaching to persuade your students about politics. That’s bias”. This was, I thought, a bit rich from someone who slavishly adopts her teacher’s views, and criticizes me every time I use the word “Indian” for what she regards as “using stereotypes”. But I agree with her basic point. So why is it ok for me to defend NCLB in class?
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“Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007399.html#119570 in comments on _Making Light_
Won’t change their minds [creationists] . They’ll say it’s a fake.
So maybe that means they won’t have to deal with it; but they’re just begging to have their kids suffer a catastrophic loss of faith when they discover that it’s demonstrably not a fake. You can only go so far in inculcating denial. Beyond that, the person has to want to deny the evidence.
bq. Or that it was put there by God to test our Faith.
God Almighty is infinite truth and light, but the God we deal with here on earth is lying to us? Doesn’t that make them some unpleasant variety of Gnostic?
Also, could they please explain what other apparently solid data is eligible to be dismissed in that fashion? Yes? And how they can tell the difference? One step past that point in any direction, they’ll fall into _”some parts of creation are More Real than others”_ : a muddy, fetid philosophical swamp that breeds errors by the swarm.
_”What do we know, and how do we know that we know it?”_ : There’s a reason it’s a classic.
bq. Or worse, it was put there by the Foul Deceiver to undermine said Faith.
Ooooookay, so Satan is a creative force, and had a hand in the creation of the world? That can’t be anything but Manichaeanism: a recurrent Christian heresy, explicitly rejected as doctrine by all the major denominations.
There’s your real problem with Creationism: it’s incompatible with Christianity.
Update: as Teresa points out in comments, I should make it clear that she’s responding to an earlier comment by “Serge”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007399.html#119561.
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I’ve been doing some research trying to find out the sizes of schools in different countries (I want to know the average size and the median size of schools — anyone know this for the US, UK, and a couple of other randomly chosen countries? Tell me below). Anyway, in the course of this I have found this document at the DFES site. Unless I am reading it wrong (which I must be, surely) it says that in 2004-5 there were sixty 5 year old children attending secondary schools in England and Wales, fifty 6 year olds, and 110 seven year olds (see table 2b on p. 9). “Secondary” includes schools “deemed middle” so the numbers of 8 year olds and above are less startling, but it is very odd, no? Can anyone explain this? Or am I going to be reduced to asking my dad?
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Jon Mandle points to one anticipation of Thomas Kuhn. Here’s another – this one about the romance of paradigm shift vs. the pedestrian dullness of ‘normal’ science:
In a philosophical view, consistency is a certain level at all times, maintained in all the thoughts of one’s mind. But, since nature is nearly all hill and dale, how can one keep naturally advancing in knowledge without submitting to the natural inequalities in the progress? Advance into knowledge is just like advance upon the grand Erie canal, where, from the character of the country, change of level is inevitable; you are locked up and locked down with perpetual inconsistencies, and yet all the time you get on; while the dullest part of the whole route is what the boatmen call the ‘long level’ – a consistently-flat surface of sixty miles through stagnant swamps.”
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For some reason someone thought this clip from _Rachel’s Holiday_ by Marian Keyes was something Henry and I should read. I can’t imagine why.
And although we didn’t want to … we traipsed over behind him. Where we had to do the Irish person meets other Irish person abroad thing. Which involved first of all pretending that we hadn’t realized the other was Irish. Then we had to discover that we had been brought up two minutes’ walk from each other, or that we’d gone to the same school, or that we’d met on our summer holidays in Tramore when we were eleven, or that our mothers were each other’s bridesmaids, or that his older brother had gone our with my older sister, or that when our dog got lost his family found it and brought it back.
I’m sorry to say this sort of thing happens all the time. For some reason — possibly due to the combination of a small base population, large extended families, general nosiness, and the propensity to talk the leg off a donkey — Irish people are appallingly good at uncovering the normally invisible web of latent network connections that surround us. Out at Langley, teams of NSA analysts are using the most sophisticated computing technology to dredge through terabytes of data using fast homomorphic reductions, Markov graph regressions and Galois lattices in an effort to do what your typical Irish Mammy accomplishes by asking you two or three questions, taking a sip of tea and saying something like “Oh are you related to [your Aunt or Uncle’s name here] then?”
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I recently ran across a quote that I don’t remember ever seeing before, but which expresses pretty clearly a view that is commonly associated with Kuhn. Who said it (and when)? Answer below.
Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply engrained attitudes of aversion and preference. Moreover, the conviction persists – though history shows it to be a hallucination – that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them.
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Here in the UK we’re all being entertained/informed by “BBC4’s 1973 week”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/features/seventies1.shtml . Back in 1973 (I was 14/15) I remember my Dad telling me to pay close attention to the news one day and that people in the future would say it was a big year, a year when everything changed. He was right about that. So far there have been excellent documentaries about the “Poulson Affair”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poulson (1972-4), one about Derek “Red Robbo” Robinson and a fantastic 1973 episode of Panorama with Alistair Burnett where a nurse, a car worker, a “businessman” and a merchant banker are asked what they think about their relative salaries. (Everyone accepting that one of the government’s jobs was to decide fair pay relativities). Naturally, nearly everyone said the nurse should earn most and the merchant banker least. The distance between then and now was also brought home to me by the remark that in 1973 everyone knew the names of the top union leaders. Today almost nobody does. The pervasiveness of the sense of national crisis was well brought out by clips from Blue Peter where Valerie Singleton and John Noakes explained to children facing power cuts to surround candles with earth to make them safer and to interleave the bedding of elderly relatives with newspaper too keep them warm. Revolution (or a military coup) seemed just around the corner ….
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You may have noticed that pro-war blogs have gone kind of quiet about the Oil for Food “scandal’ lately. But unless you follow the Australian press, you probably don’t know why. While the Volcker inquiry turned up lots of instances of oil export licenses given by Saddam’s regimes to various individuals and groups, presumably with some quid pro quo, the real revelation was that Saddam extracted corrupt payments from suppliers of food and other imports. By far the largest party to these dealings was an Australian quango, AWB Limited which, before its privatisation in the late 1990s, was the Australian Wheat Board. Although the story seems complicated, it’s actually fairly simple.
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!http://www.henryfarrell.net/blackandtan.gif!
Via “Sivacracy”:http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/.
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David Bernstein has been “taking a few pot-shots”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_04_02-2006_04_08.shtml#1144185824 at Oliver Wendell Holmes, suggesting that his reputation has declined. (This is part of David’s role as a footsoldier in the battle to rehabilitate “Lochner vs New York”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_v._New_York as one of the Great Supreme Court Decisions.) I have no view one way or the other about Holmes, though I’m surprised that David didn’t throw in the fact that one of Holmes’ last clerks was “Alger Hiss”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alger_Hiss. Anyway, I bring this up because I use Holmes as an example in my undergraduate social theory class, thanks to a comment made to me ages ago by “Mark Kleiman”:http://www.markarkleiman.com/. The goal is to convey to my students that the modern world has come into being in an astonishingly brief period of time. But they think of the 1980s as essentially equivalent to the Paleolithic, so I need a something corresponding to the inverse of Douglas Adams’ line that “You may think it’s a long way down the street to the Chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” Holmes provides it. He died in 1935, and so there are still many people alive today who knew him, or at least shook hands with him. Holmes was born in 1841, and as a boy he met “John Quincy Adams”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quincy_Adams, who was born in 1767. So (I tell my students — maybe I should chew on a pipe when I say this, for added effect) you are just three handshakes away from a man born before the French Revolution, the American War of Independence, and arguably before the Industrial Revolution, as well. There must be many other examples. How far might we go back today with three or four handshakes?
_Update_: Post edited for elementary arithmetic.
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Scott Kaufman has an interesting distributed intelligence project. He’s soliciting suggestions for ‘best introductions to’ various standard topics in literary studies. Feel free to contribute. It’s a nice project. Lots of subjects could do with good lists of this sort.
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I’m thinking about issues of copyright and fair use – specifically, the rather unfortunate lack of clear legal precedents in certain areas. The inability to be sure a given use is fair has an unfortunate dampening effect. (But this situation is no doubt mirrored in other areas where black letter implications are unclear, and precedent is thin on the ground.) What is to be done? Could you engineer the setting of precedents like so: semi-staged, lowball lawsuits. That is, someone claims ‘fair use’, in the secure foreknowledge that they won’t be sued for huge damages (because this has been informally settled or determined with the plaintiff in some manner, in advance.) So the defendant doesn’t have to risk catastrophic loss, just – say, a couple thousand dollars, plus legal fees (not trivial, but not crippling to certain folks.) The suit needn’t be strictly a fake, in that there could be real disagreement between the parties about what constitutes ‘fair use’. But the main idea is making it attractive as fairly low-stakes gambling for both parties. Presumably this would work best if both parties felt that setting a relevant precedent would be a considerable value in itself. Obviously aspiring fair-users will see the value of this; but some rights-holders will, too, if only because they may foresee wanting to make confident fair uses themselves; or perhaps because they are just plain idealistic. So you arrange for such parties to sue each other … slightly.
I can see that the law, in its majesty, might frown on this as slightly disrespectful of its aforementioned majesty. There is something frivolous about agreeing to disagree, just for the sake of taking up some judge’s time. But the goal – setting a precedent – is distinctly non-frivolous. Is there any precedent for setting out to set precedent in this way?
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Anyone want to discuss the Hammer’s announcement of withdrawal from the race [Time, NY Times)? There’s a thread developing at Redstate. Realamerican writes:
Look, I’ll be honest. I don’t care if DeLay broke a few laws. He was good for our side, and I’d rather have a corrupt Republican than an honest Democrat (not that there is such a thing).
But by dropping out, he might as well put on a T-shirt saying, “Yes, I AM guilty!” This will paint the entire Republican Party in a bad light, and put our majority in real jeopardy. The honorable thing for him to do would have been to resign before the primary. By waiting until now, he makes it look as though Earle or someone has something really damaging on him. Even if he’s innocent, he looks incredibly guilty.
This is bad. Just really, really bad. Truthfully, I think we just lost the House.
Interesting use of the word ‘honorable’. To be fair, realamerican is getting a bit of pushback from the others in the thread. Not as much as one would hope for, however.
I think Powerline nails it about right:
It’s too bad, I think. DeLay was an effective leader, albeit too liberal in recent years. It’s possible, of course, that he did something wrong along the way. But there is no evidence of that in the public domain; as I’ve often said, the politically-inspired prosection of DeLay by Travis County’s discredited DA, Ronnie Earle, is a bad joke. As far as we can tell at the moment, DeLay appears to be yet another victim of the Democrats’ politics of personal destruction–the only politics they know.
As to my post title. I’ve used that joke before, but it seems extra super appropriate today.
And just to be clear: realamerican and hindrocket are mostly here to provide black humor. You don’t need to talk about them unless you want. You might consider discussing levels of denial of Republican corruption problems, however.
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via “Steven Berlin Johnson”:http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2006/03/dan_hill_has_a_.html, Dan Hill has written a “blogpost”:http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2006/03/why_lost_is_gen.html on the creative (but slightly creepy) ways in which _Lost_ is beginning to invade the real world.
bq. Some have speculated that the show is only being produced a few episodes in advance, as the screenwriters are wrangling the numerous ideas generated in fans’ forums into the script … But the most sophisticated tactic I’ve seen deployed thus far lasted for a few seconds on-screen, and has yet to play out fully online. In series 2, episode 13 (‘The Long Con’), the Hurley character is casually seen reading a tattered manuscript found in one of the suitcases washed up on the beach. He shows the name of the prospective book: Bad Twin by a ‘Gary Troup’, and makes an off-hand complimentary comment on the content. And the scene moves on. However, this book, Bad Twin, “actually exists in Amazon.com”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401302769/102-7191170-2490510?v=glance&n=283155. Scroll down and check the ‘About the author’ section to discover that Lost’s fiction and Amazon’s facts have collided …
Time to get cracking on that essay on Sir Thomas Browne’s _Urn Burial_ methinks.
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