Spotted in “Whole Foods” while shopping this afternoon.

!https://www.crookedtimber.org/images/batard.jpg!

“P.Z. Myers”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/sexist_calvinism/ saves me a great deal of trouble by writing the post I had in mind about Larry Summers’ under-informed views about the gender division of labor. I’m particularly glad he takes the time to deal with Steven Pinker’s “much quoted”:http://www.thecrimson.com/today/article505366.html line that “Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is “offensive” even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don’t get the concept of a university or free inquiry.” As Myers says, “If people started walking out on presentations of fact-free, unsupported hypotheses, Pinker wouldn’t have a career.”

In the spirit of adding a bit of empirical data to the discussion, have a read of Erin Leahey and Guang Go’s paper “Gender Differences in Mathematical Trajectories” which reviews a lot of evidence about the gender gap in math and analyzes some big data sets to find that it’s not nearly as large as you might think. (Erin is a colleague of mine at Arizona, by the way.) And to echo one of Myers’ points, the relationship between the distribution of measurable properties like math scores and the “phenomenology of attainment within the social structure”:http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.so.21.080195.000555 is (a) a very difficult question, and (b) something you might want to read up on, if you’re inclined to throw hypotheses around innate differences between women and men.

I saw Clint Eastwood’s _Million Dollar Baby_ last night – an extraordinary, savage little film – but there was one element that left me puzzled. When I read the Washington Post’s “review”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55030-2005Jan6.html of the film a couple of weeks ago, I’d been amused by the reviewer’s description of Eastwood’s character, Frankie, as someone with ‘hidden depths,’ who “reads Yeats in Gaelic.” I’d assumed that this was a mistake made by the reviewer – Yeats didn’t write in the Irish language, and if my memory is correct, his ability even to read in the language was scanty to non-existent (unlike his friend, Lady Gregory, whose translations of Irish myths Yeats relied upon). But the reviewer was correct – the film does depict Frankie as reading what seems to be an Irish language book of poetry, including Yeat’s “The Lake-Isle of Innisfree.” The film leaves the viewer with the very strong impression that the Irish language version of the poem is the original – Frankie starts reading it in Irish, and then gives the English language version for the benefit of his non Irish speaking audience. I’d put this down to traditional Hollywood ignorance except that Eastwood is a careful film maker, and the meaning of another Irish phrase is at the heart of the film. So what’s going on? A little bit of dramatic license (the most probable explanation – but a bit disappointing)? Or is Frankie a little bit of a fraud (certainly when he reads the Irish language aloud, it’s almost unrecognizable – he doesn’t know how to pronounce it at all)? Or is there something else going on entirely?

Update: some spoilers in the comments thread below.

I know it’s considered poor sport to shoot fish in a barrel, but what on earth is David Brooks talking about?

With that speech [i.e., the inaugural offering], President Bush’s foreign policy doctrine transcended the war on terror. He laid down a standard against which everything he and his successors do will be judged.

When he goes to China, he will not be able to ignore the political prisoners there, because he called them the future leaders of their free nation. When he meets with dictators around the world, as in this flawed world he must, he will not be able to have warm relations with them, because he said no relations with tyrants can be successful.

His words will be thrown back at him and at future presidents. American diplomats have been sent a strong message. Political reform will always be on the table. Liberation and democratization will be the ghost present at every international meeting. Vladimir Putin will never again be the possessor of that fine soul; he will be the menace to democracy and rule of law.

Because of that speech, it will be harder for the U.S. government to do what we did to Latin Americans for so many decades – support strongmen to rule over them because they happened to be our strongmen. It will be harder to frustrate the dreams of a captive people, the way in the early 1990’s we tried to frustrate the independence dreams of Ukraine.

It will be harder for future diplomats to sit on couches flattering dictators, the way we used to flatter Hafez al-Assad of Syria decade after decade. From now on, the borders established by any peace process will be less important than the character of the regimes in that process.

I mean, I love Austin as much as the next girl (well, OK, a lot more than the next girl), but it has always been my distinct impression that the scope of things you can do with words has been, hmm, let’s say, overstated by his would-be popularizers. Naming ships? Hell yeah. Transforming U.S. foriegn policy by shaking democracy-supporting fairy dust on everything? Not so much. Or maybe we’re on a 40’s crooner tip, with the classic “Wishing Will Make It So“? Seriously, though, does Bobo believe this, or what?
Note to outraged defenders of liberty: I think it would be great if the U.S. stopped coddling dictators in the name of stability or anti-terrorist bona fides, but that’s because I’m a silly, utopian leftist. What’s your excuse?

UPDATE: from the Washington Post, “Bush Speech Not a Sign of Policy Shift, Officials Say; Address Said to Clarify ‘The Values We Cherish'” Right.

Friday’s Australian Financial ReView section (subscription only) runs my review of Bjorn Lomborg’s new book. CT readers won’t be surprised to find a lot of criticisms of the Copenhagen Consensus project that produced the book. But I found a fair bit to praise as well. The review, pretty lengthy, is over the fold. Comments appreciated.

[click to continue…]

“Mark Dery”:http://www.markdery.com/archives/media_burn/000032.html on the political blogosphere:

bq. But bloggers who want to remedy what ails the corporate McMedia monopoly should grab a clue from Chris Allbritton and haul their larval, jack-studded flesh up out of their Matrix-like pods and do some goddamn reporting instead of just getting all meta about Instapundit’s post about The Daily Kos’s post about Little Green Footballs’s post about the vast left-wing media conspiracy’s latest act of high treason. It’s the Yertle the Turtle syndrome: Pundits stacked on top of pundits on top of pundits, all the way down, and, at the very bottom of the heap, the lowly hack who kicked off the whole frenzy of intertextuality: the reporter who dared venture out of the media airlock to collect some samples of Actual, Reported Fact.

You’ve been hired as the program director at a new satellite radio station. You’ll be playing songs that should have been huge hits, but weren’t. You’re looking for songs from any period that you liked the first time you heard them, songs that are immediately catchy and pleasurable, songs that would please your coworkers rather than the clerk at the local independent record store. The artists could be obscure or famous, but the songs should not be in regular rotation on terrestrial radio stations.

There are a lot of buried “Hey Ya!”s, “Tainted Love”s, “Gin and Juice”s, and “You Shook Me All Night Long”s out there. Help your station find them. Bonus points if you can help us understand why you like your obscure song by connecting it to a more popular song that shares its appeal.

I’ve invited some of my favorite mp3 bloggers to play along, and I’ll update this post with their responses as they come in.

[click to continue…]

Having recently read W.G. Sebald’s “The History of Natural Destruction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375504842/junius-20 , I found myself referring to Michael Walzer’s “Just and Unjust Wars”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465037054/junius-20 and his discussion of the “supreme emergency exception”. I was _slightly_ relieved by what I found there. Walzer doesn’t justify the bombings of Dresden (1945) or the firebombing of Hamburg (1943) but rather holds that Britain, with no other effective means of waging war against the appalling evil of Nazi Germany, and facing the threat of national annihilation, was only justified in the area bombing of German cities — in violation of the prohibition on attacking noncombatants — until early 1942. Nevertheless, what Walzer calls “the supreme emergency” exception is there, and the grounds for it are reasonably clear: necessity. The bombers were the only weapon available to leaders the continued independent existence of whose people was mortally jeopardized.

Surfing over to “a blog post by Oliver Kamm”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2005/01/livingstone_and.html , concerning our old friend Sheikh Al-Qaradawi, I find Walzer invoked as an authority against Qaradawi’s apologia for suicide bombing.

[click to continue…]

Earlier this week, I attended a Creative Commons conference at QUT in Brisbane, including the launch of the Creative Commons licence for Australia. The main speaker was Larry Lessig, who gave two papers and joined a panel discussion as well. Lessig is a great speaker with really effective presentations, a point on which I hope to post more later. There was a lot of food for thought, and I’ll start with the opening presentations.

In this talk, the central idea was remix, taking bits and pieces from the existing culture and recombining them to produce something new. My summary of the core argument

1. text is the past, video and audio are the future
2. the set of rights surrounding text has always allowed for a lot of remix, including direct copying for fair use, parody and so on
3. because of digital rights management technology and strong IP, the current trend is to suppress remix for video and audio, thereby depriving our culture of one of its historic sources of validity

[click to continue…]

Gary Farber of Amygdala could probably use some help.

Last night, I attended a presentation by Ray Takeyh, Senior Fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations, on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It was put on by the Houston World Affairs Council about Iran’s nuclear program. (Short plug- Houstonians with sufficient interest in public affairs to read blogs really ought to look into HWAC. It’s one of the best deals in town.)

Shorter Ray Takeyh: Iran is unlikely to stop weaponizing its nuclear program. From our perspective, all options stink.

Longer Ray Takeyh after the break.

[click to continue…]

Iranians are stocking up on candy and flowers with which to bestrew invading US troops, according to Thomas Friedman who says “many young people apparently hunger for Mr. Bush to remove their despotic leaders, the way he did in Iraq.”. His evidence for this proposition is the following

n Oxford student who had just returned from research in Iran told me that young Iranians were “loving anything their government hates,” such as Mr. Bush, “and hating anything their government loves.” Tehran is festooned in “Down With America” graffiti, the student said, but when he tried to take pictures of it, the Iranian students he was with urged him not to. They said it was just put there by their government and was not how most Iranians felt.

Iran, he said, is the ultimate “red state.”

Oddly enough, when I last visited America, I met plenty of people who “love anything their government hates,” and assured me that the kind of thing I saw on Fox was not really the way most Americans felt. They didn’t feel able to confess to me that they were longing for the arrival of a Franco-German liberation army, but no doubt if I’d had the benefit of an Oxford education, I would have been able to detect their eagerness for an invasion, civil war and so on.

I’ve gotten myself involved in something a little unusual (for me, anyway). I’m on the program committee of OOPSLA ’05. Specifically, I’ll be reading submissions in the ‘essay’ track. These are supposed to contain "in-depth reflections on technology, its relation to human endeavors, and its philosophical, sociological, psychological, historical, or anthropological underpinnings." I’m announcing it here because academic folk with solid but untechnical essays that fit the bill might not necessarily think to submit to a conference nominally devoted to object-oriented programming. I’m quite curious what sorts of things I’ll be reading. Should be fun.

The latest terrorist bombings in Iraq came closer than usual to home for Australia, with two soldiers suffering (reportedly) minor injuries in an attack on the Australian embassy[1], while 20 more Iraqis were killed, adding to the tens of thousands already killed by both/all sides in this terrible war, which seems to get more brutal and criminal every day.

It’s pretty clear by now that Iraq is approaching full-scale civil war and that, as is usually the case in civil wars, the presence of foreign troops is only making things worse. But rather than arguing about this last point, it might be better to put it to the test. This NYT Op-ed piece by three researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests a referendum on US withdrawal to be held soon after the forthcoming elections. They make a pretty good case that it would be hard for the Baathists to justify disrupting such a referendum, though no doubt some would do so anyway. At least, this would be true if the main Shiite parties adhered to their previously stated position of favoring withdrawal.

[click to continue…]