Here’s an odd little fact about philosophy and linguistics, my two areas of ‘expertise’.

In linguistics, or at least in semantics which is what I mostly read, it is quite common to see PhD dissertations cited in research articles. This is true even when the dissertations have been turned into books. (Which they often are, and which are often widely cited.) To take one prominent example, I think the canonical work on negative polarity items is still William Ladusaw’s 1980 PhD dissertation, which is cited in just about every paper on negative polarity.

In philosophy this kind of thing is very rare, at least in the areas in which I work. I can’t remember the last time I saw a dissertation cited that wasn’t written by one of the authors of the citing paper. (Perhaps there were some were the dissertation was by a student of the citer, but I can’t even remember one of those.) And this isn’t because dissertations are published so the books that come out of them are cited. In the areas I work in, many if not most people do not publish their dissertation as a book, and those that do are often much less widely cited than the journal articles by the same authors. (There’s one prominent recent exception.)

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Just catching the news about the power outage in New York and — reportedly — also in a number of major cities along the east coast, up into Canada and even into the midwest. I wonder why this is happening, especially if the early reports of outages in other major cities are accurate. Apart from the obvious (but I imagine unlikely) explanation that we all don’t want to jump to because we’re responsible people, the other thing that springs to mind is the network structure of the national grid. This is a topic of which I of course know nothing. But in his book Small Worlds I seem to remember (it’s a pain not having access to my library) that Duncan Watts has a discussion of power grids and the potential for serious cascading failures under certain conditions. The idea is that small failures can spread rapidly through networks with the right properties. Here’s the Google cache of one of his working papers on this topic, that treats power grids as a sample case. I wonder if this is what’s happened.

I guess I’ll just have to keep watching the news (like all the other bloggers who are reminded of their dependency on primary media sources).

Update: CNN is now reporting that the Niagara/Mohawk power grid may have become overloaded and then failed. Score one for CT analysts over that jumpy guy on CNBC that I just saw. He was clearly hoping for terrorists. You could see the hungry gleam in his eye. So, although the Sociology Department isn’t at the top of your list of places to call for comment on events like this, someone should give Watts a ring. Except they can’t, because, um, he teaches at Columbia and there’s a blackout.

Does anyone know who was John Rawls’s PhD dissertation advisor? This question came up in discussion around here (a propos of nothing much at all) and no one knew, but I imagine at least one reader, if not a fellow Timberite, will know.

Le Monde ran a story yesterday about the ‘Russians’ in Guantanamo who are begging NOT to be extradited. The Russian government is trying to have 8 prisoners – including Chechens and Tartars – sent to Russia to face trial on terrorism charges. Meanwhile, the mothers of two of them are begging the US not to send their sons to Russian prisons where they could face torture and death.

America has certainly fallen well below its own standards of justice and fair treatment in Guantanamo. But to a prisoner who’s already known jails in Chechnya, Russia and Afghanistan, the prison camp evidently measures up to the best of Russian sanatoriums.

Radio Free Europe ran a piece on this last week. The story was then picked up and a further corroborating interview added by a Russian tv station, and that seems to be where Le Monde’s reporter saw it.

Jacob Levy hits it with his thoughts on Daredevil:

“I’m also, finally, ready to stop taking on faith that Affleck is a good actor. I’ve cut him years of slack based on Chasing Amy, but I think his talents run to hammy comedy. His looks mean that he’s not going to get cast in those sorts of roles as a matter of course, unfortunately.”

I toddled over to IMDb to see just how long it is since Ben’s been convincing in any half decent film. For my money, that would be Shakespeare in Love where he played, ahem, a hammy over-actor. And that’s 5 years ago. In Chasing Amy and GWH, he played very affecting losers. I think Ben’s essentially quite goofy, but success means being cast in rather straight, square-jawed, leading man roles.

And while we’re at it, perhaps it’s finally time for me to accept that Keanu Reeves had only one Prince of Pennsylvania in him…

BTW I think Jacob’s right on target about Colin Farrell too, but I’ve gushed too much on that already.

Jacob Levy hits it with his thoughts on Daredevil:

“I’m also, finally, ready to stop taking on faith that Affleck is a good actor. I’ve cut him years of slack based on Chasing Amy, but I think his talents run to hammy comedy. His looks mean that he’s not going to get cast in those sorts of roles as a matter of course, unfortunately.”

I toddled over to IMDb to see just how long it is since Ben’s been convincing in any half decent film. For my money, that would be Shakespeare in Love where he played, ahem, a hammy over-actor. And that’s 5 years ago. In Chasing Amy and GWH, he played very affecting losers. I think Ben’s essentially quite goofy, but success means being cast in rather straight, square-jawed, leading man roles.

And while we’re at it, perhaps it’s finally time for me to accept that Keanu Reeves had ony one Prince of Pennsylvania in him…

BTW I think Jacob’s right on target about Colin Farrell too, but I’ve gushed too much on that already.

Maureen Dowd writes today about how bland and trite US political bloggers have been to date, and how it heralds the death of the internet. Right.

It’s true, blogs by Tom Daschle, Howard Dean, John Kerry, etc. are just another outlet for relentless campaign-speak. Even Dean’s guest spot on Lessig’s blog was dull, dull, dull. All that talk about political blogging opening up new opportunities for ‘engagement’, ‘debate’, and creating a truly participatory democracy etc. etc. is a bit of a nonsense when you think of how risk-averse the average candidate is. But before we worry that blogging is being taken over by The Establishment, let’s consider; are these people really bloggers at all?

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So I’m working away this afternoon (not blogging, no sir), getting ready to make a quick trip to Atlanta for the American Sociological Association’s annual meetings and this guy comes in the door…

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Amitai Etzioni has an odd post about the supposedly pernicious effects of The Matrix on impressionable young minds. It’s about four fans of the movie (and presumably its atrocious sequel) who committed violent crimes and talked afterwards about their obsession with the film. One guy shot his parents to death with a 12-gauge shotgun. “[Josh] Cooke’s lawyer characterized his client as “obsessed” with the Matrix, and supported the appointment of a psychiatrist to determine whether Cooke was sane when he committed the murders.”

The post doesn’t have anything in the way of analysis, it just invites you to blame the film for the crimes. Important bits of information (e.g. “whether Cooke was sane”) don’t seem to me to get the kind of weight they deserve. It wasn’t as if the guy beat his victims to death with the the DVD case, either — there’s that shotgun he had.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, subscription required) asked Stanley Hauerwas and two other people to comment on the “Brights“. Hauerwas was withering:

Quite frankly, I find the kinds of things that Dennett is saying to be remarkably stupid for such a smart man. He says that what we [sic] brights represent is the denial of all supernatural explanations — well, when did he get the idea that Christianity and Judaism are about supernaturalism? That has very little to do with classical Christian convictions… The brights just don’t know dip about classical Christian theology…. It never occurs to them that we are looking at a 2,000-year-old tradition, and it takes a hell of a lot of study to even begin to think you know what you’re talking about, and yet they think that they can sound off because they’re pretty sure it’s about supernaturalism. Give me a break.

That sounded somewhat reasonable to me, since I certainly don’t know dip about classical Christian theology. But I began to have my doubts when I saw the notable Christian theologian Karol Wojtyla’s solution to the European heat wave: “I exhort all to raise to the Lord fervent entreaties so that He may grant the relief of rain to the thirsty Earth.”

“Tyler Cowen”:http://volokh.com/2003_08_10_volokh_archive.html#106060688626674065 has a nice, short piece on art and Western civilization, which gently takes a forthcoming Charles Murray book to task. The Murray book, by Cowen’s account, concludes that Western civilization has an overwhelming advantage over its non Western equivalents in music and the arts. As Cowen says, it’s hard to sustain this argument with great confidence, because the surviving evidence is grossly skewed. Since many forms of non-Western art haven’t survived, or went unrecorded until very recently, we can’t say with any degree of certainty that, say, John Dowland was any better than his Gabonese equivalents.

But there’s a second issue, which is very nearly as important – a version of what anthropologists refer to as Galton’s problem. The quick and dirty version of Galton’s argument is that there’s something very iffy about the assumption that cultures are self-referential, coherent wholes, which are absolutely isolated from each other. Western art didn’t evolve in isolation from its non-Western equivalents : at crucial points in its history, encounters with non-Western art drove it in new directions. Peter Conrad’s definitive study of 20th century art, _Modern Times, Modern Places_ has an entire chapter on how African art deeply influenced various modern greats. Conrad claims, and I have no reason to doubt him, that it’s simply impossible to understand Picasso without taking account of the influence of African mask art from Congo and the Gabon.

The Sydney Morning Herald recently ran a long profile on the Hungarian-Australian philosopher George Molnar. Australian philosophers can be a weird lot sometimes, but Molnar stands out quite a bit even by our standards. I met him a few times at conferences after he returned to philosophy, but I never knew how many things he’d done outside philosophy. Somehow I don’t think a life in the academy with some blogging on the side will lead to quite the same kind of newspaper reports about me any time down the track.

It’s a while since I discovered a blog that satisfies so deeply as Transport Blog which I discovered thanks to Natalie Solent on Samizdata.

How can you not jump right into entries that start;

“A new tube torture

Ever since I first saw automatic ticket selling machines, in Germany in the eighties, and then saw them arrive in the London Underground or the “tube” as we call it here, and then saw these machines sporting “OUT OF ORDER” or “EXACT MONEY PLEASE” messages, I know that there is no machine, no matter how Teutonically efficient in its apparently inherent nature, that the tube wouldn’t find a way of mucking up and rendering English.

Yesterday I observed a new version of this syndrome, in the form of a new London Underground torture inflicted by means of automatic train doors.”

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Helen Szamuely reacts in EU Observer to Jan-Werner Muller’s reaction in European Voice to the Habermas/Derrida manifesto on a European identity. (pause for intake of breath) Muller’s article can’t be got at unless you’re a subscriber to European Voice, which is a shame – he seemed to be saying that Habermas was calling for a kind of historicism that would have Benjamin spinning in his grave. I have a special hatred for articles that end with that hoary old chestnut ‘we need a debate’, but as Muller’s piece is unobtainable by the masses, Szamuely’s is worth checking out.

By the by, I can’t bring myself to fork out for a subscription to EV. It costs almost as much as the Economist but often reads like a provincial gossip sheet. EU Observer is only available online and seems to draw on a wider pool of commentators.