The hackneyed story about technology is that the young are always faster to pick it up than us old folk. So you’d expect in an academic department the graduate students would be the ones leading the way, and the professoriate would be constantly learning tricks from them. And while that’s true sometimes (I had to recruit Paul Neufeld of “ephilosopher”:http://www.ephilosopher.com/ fame to get started on Movable Type) my impression based on anecdotes as casual observation is that really doesn’t seem to be the general run of things. And certainly there’s lots of things about grad students could learn about technology from computer specialists. This suggests a professional question. How much technical knowledge/ability should we _require_ our graduate students to have.

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Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day so I wanted to take a few moments to remember. Although numerous members of my family were killed during World War II, my father survived and a few years ago decided to write his story. He did this in a fairly unconventional way. Each chapter in his book begins with a snippet from a Nobel Laureate’s life (with whom he had conducted conversations). Later in the chapter he then relates this biographical story to something in his own life. Reading the book takes us on a journey through the lesser-known moments of many famous scientists’ lives and the details of one Hungarian Jew’s life affected by the events of over 60 years ago.

Here I share with you some snippets from my father’s book. I start with a section told by my uncle about his experiences when he was 11 in a concentration camp. Then I quote the section about my father’s visit in 2002 to the camp he had been in and how poor the remembrance is there.

Excerpts from “Our Lives: Encounters of a Scientist” by István Hargittai, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 2004

[this quote in the book is from my uncle who was 11 at the time — EH]

The first day after our arrival [in the camp] the people got their work assignments. Mother was directed to be helper to a roofing master who turned out to be a humane Viennese man. He often shared his sandwich with Mother who pretended to eat it and brought it back for us. Children younger than 10 years old stayed behind in the camp during the day. Children above the age of 15 were considered adults and went to work with the rest. Children between 10 and 15 years old formed a special labor unit. I was in this unit, which had about 20 children. We were taken to bombed-out buildings, immediately following the bombing. We had to reach places that adults could not have reached. We had to bring out cadavers and wounded people and all the valuables. If we found just limbs or other body parts we had to bring them out as well. It was a cruel and frightening job and dangerous too.

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Just a quick plug. I’m just back from watching Errol Morris’s “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0001L3LUE/junius-20 . For those who don’t know about it, the film is a long (and cold) confessional interview with McNamara interspersed with documentary footage from WW2, from his time with Ford and from the period when he was Secretary of Defense (including the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam war). The film is structured around a series of “lessons” which focus on the fallibility of leaders. There are some chilling moments, such as when McNamara contemplates the incinteration of hundreds of thousands of human beings in the firebombing of Tokyo and leaves open the question of whether he and Curtis LeMay committed war crimes. There’s a good page on an event at Berkeley with McNamara and Morris “here”:http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/02/05_fogofwar.shtml . Get to see it if you can.

For the longest time I’ve been meaning to post something grand and insightful on the timely meta-theme of academic blogging. Since Brian and John got the ball rolling below, this will have to do.

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Ahmed Chalabi, being interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Commission,, and urging that Australian troops remain in Iraq, had this to say (emphasis added).

I think that we wasted a year now. The security plan for Iraq that was put forward by the Coalition has collapsed. We must face this fact and we must involve Iraqis right away in the training and the recruitment of the police. I believe that a year to 18 months of hard work on the right track will be sufficient to train an important and significant security force.

Obviously, this assessment suited Chalabi’s argument on the day, but it’s closer to the truth than anything anyone else associated with the Administration has been willing to say.

Following up on Brian’s post, I looked at this much-linked piece by Camille Paglia, and was struck by its dated references to television and the 60s[1]. She goes on to talk about computers, but apparently sees the computer as nothing more than a turbocharged TV set. This impelled me to dig out a piece I wrote nearly ten years ago, making the point that far from privileging visual media, the computer, and particularly the Internet are contributing to a new golden age of text. Blogs weren’t thought of when I wrote this piece, but the argument anticipates them, I think.

fn1. Oddly enough, although the main argument is a restatement of positions that were familiar 50 years ago, the piece is full of references to the young, as though the current generation of young adults has been, in some way, more saturated in TV than were the baby booomers.

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Good question from Roger Ailes:

It’s also interesting to see that the Moonie Times has placed scare quotes around “marriage” in Sully’s item on gay marriage and polling. Seriously: why does Sully allow these bigots to tamper with his work product?

As if there’s any other kind.

There’s been a ton of “blog commentary”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bu.edu%2Farion%2FPaglia_11.3%2FPaglia_Magic%2520of%2520Images.htm&sub=Go%21 on this “piece by Camille Paglia”:http://www.bu.edu/arion/Paglia_11.3/Paglia_Magic%20of%20Images.htm, which seems somewhat overrated to me, for much the reasons “Mark Liberman”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000772.html gives. But, as “Nicole Wyatt”:http://scribo.blogs.com/scribo/2004/04/blogs_and_argum.html notes, it raises an interesting question about what we’re doing when we’re blogging.

Many more such questions are raised by Geoff Nunberg’s nice FreshAir piece on Blogging – “The Global Lunchroom”:http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/lunchroom.html. Geoff notes how cliquey the language bloggers use can be.

bq. The high, formal style of the newspaper op-ed page may be nobody’s native language, but at least it’s a neutral voice that doesn’t privilege the speech of any particular group or class. Whereas blogspeak is basically an adaptation of the table talk of the urban middle class — it isn’t a language that everybody in the cafeteria is equally adept at speaking.

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It’s that time of year again, time for 18-26-year-old Jews who have never been on an educational trip to Israel to sign up for a free trip. I went four years ago and it was truly an experience of a lifetime. I realize I went when things were calmer, but people have been going for the past four years without problems. Although at some level there is an underlying agenda – the organizers would like visitors to enjoy their time and develop an interest in Israel – there is nothing forced about the program. Many students who go are secular or have little connection to their Jewish heritage and keep questioning many things while there. We had very interesting discussions both amongst ourselves (you travel with a group of students and a few organizers) and with people we met there.

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I linked to this at John & Belle, but let me share it here – and advertise it a bit more strenuously: philosophy action figures!

I like Plato (with divided line® accessory). “Enemies progress from imagining to believing to knowing they’re in trouble!” And Gottlob “Ain’t afraid a-ya” Frege “with both Morning Star® and Evening Star® accessories (only one accessory included).” Spinoza’s good too. “The order and connection of his fists is the same as the order and connection of his enemies’ pain!” Ouch! That’ll take the everlasting joy out of life!

Reminds me of my own good old Philosophical Abecedarium. Please feel free to leave your poetical contributions in the comments box. (I’ve got two K’s – Kant and Kierkegaard – so I could use more.)

And speaking of all sorts of mind-body problems, here’s your philosophical puzzle for the day: can ‘carnal knowledge’ be adequately defined as ‘justified, true carnal belief’? Answer either as Dan Savage or Edmund Gettier.

The local alt weekly, the Houston Press, can be hit or miss, but it’s a good week. Worth reading:

* The cover story on Islamica News, a Muslim Onion-style spoof website that’s not bad. Headlines include “Halal Butcher Loses Finger, Hopes No One Notices“, “Muslims Form New Bloc Vote Organization: ‘Get Backstabbed 2004“, and “Man Blames Everything on Jews“.

* Music writer John Lomax tells the story of Nirvana’s three Houston shows. It includes this anecdote:

“The day after the Houston gig, the band was supposed to play an electric in-store at Waterloo in Austin, but the Waterloo staff spaced and forgot to get amps. Someone in the audience furnished Cobain with an acoustic guitar, which he destroyed at the end of the show.”

My affection for Kurt Cobain just went way, way down. I don’t care if you’re Jimi Hendrix, you don’t smash a fan’s guitar.

* Finally, there’s an eerie story about one of Spalding Gray’s worst performances.

UPDATE: In comments, Basharov says that he attended the Spalding Gray show described in the article, and tells his story.

A lot of people use fake, or altered, email addresses on comments threads, presumably because they want to avoid being flooded with spam. But it turns out that these are actually not that vulnerable to spammers harvesting.

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Left-wing partisans: file this story away somewhere. You never know when you’ll need it. Thanks, Steve.

When I first posted on Matt Cavanagh‘s Against Equality of Opportunity, a lot of the discussion focussed on the way Cavanagh’s views on race and gender discrimination were being used by The Guardian as a stick with which to beat UK Home Secretary David Blunkett, who had recently hired Cavanagh. Unlike Chris, I wasn’t sufficiently closely attuned to UK politics to pick up on this, and, in any case was most interested in the general issue raised by the book’s title.

It took me a while to get hold of the book from our library, but I’ve finally been able to read it. Having done so, I agree with Chris and others that the Guardian story was a dreadful beat-up. Cavanagh’s views on anti-discrimination policy are unexceptionable, and his main concern is on working through the reasons why we might support laws prohibiting racial and gender-based discrimination while opposing a general principle of meritocracy.

On the other hand, I see no reason to change the (pre)judgement I made, based on the reviews I had read, that,

Cavanagh seems to take the naturalness of capitalist property relations as a given, and argue against equality from there, in the manner of Nozick, though not with the same commitment to pushing premises to their logical conclusions.

Given that he is dealing with issues that have been debated for well over a century, the extent to which Cavanagh’s analysis takes for granted assumptions that (on the left at least) have been widely accepted only in the past fifteen years or so, is truly striking. The main change I’d make is to substitute “employment relations” for “property relations”.

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