Author: geoff

Lime Rock photos

I had a great day at Lime Rock yesterday. I’ve posted some of the photos in my gallery; I also shot some video clips which I may post later. After staying overnight at a motel in Lee, I blasted back to Brookline this morning. Traffic was pretty light: for most of the way I set the cruise control to 75 and relaxed (to Amplified Heart by Everything But The Girl), using a little extra right pedal to overtake.
Winning car in the Rolex Cup event Oops! Turn 1 strikes again Familiar sponsorship?

Random 10

Several excellent tracks here, and one that’s not so great.

  • “Bhinna Abhinna” by Sheila Chandra (from The History of Indipop)
  • “Bird on the Wire” by Leonard Cohen (from The Best of…)
  • “Donegan’s Gone” by Mark Knopfler (from Shangri-La)
  • “Evelyn (The Song Of Slurs)” by No-Man (from Dry Cleaning Ray)
  • “Insomnia” by Faithless (from Reverence)
  • “Last orders for Gary Stead” by Saint Etienne (from Tales from Turnpike House)
  • “Nine Shades To The Circle” by the Legendary Pink Dots (from 9 Lives To Wonder)
  • “Somebody To Love” by Queen (from Fantasic 70s)
  • “Talking Vietnam Potluck Blues” by Tom Paxton (from The Best of…)
  • “Ways & Means” by Snow Patrol (from Final Straw)

There’s a lot of really great stuff here. If you’ve never heard “Talking Vietnam Potluck Blues”, nag your friends until you can find a copy. Tracks like “Bird on the Wire” and “Somebody to Love” are classics, and deservedly so. “Insomnia” is one of the best by Faithless: Maxi Jazz’s quietly insistent rapping pulls you into his sweaty nightmare. And I love everything by No-Man (what Steven Wilson does when he’s not leading Porcupine Tree).
And then there’s the track from that Mark Knopfler album, Shangri-La. I bought it from iTMS without previewing all of the tracks: I was hoping for something as good as Golden Heart or Sailing To Philadelphia. Unfortunately it really didn’t work for me. Shucks.
But this leads me to a question. Suppose you buy an album via download from iTMS or some other service, and then you decide that you don’t really like it after all. With a physical CD (complete with jewel case) you can sell it, or pass it on. But with a download, what do you do? Delete it? But do you back it up first? In which case, have you really got rid of it…?
Odd, innit?

British understatement

Here’s Andrew Sullivan, in the [London] Sunday Times, writing about the current interest in whether Al Gore will run for President in 2008:

Gore’s penchant for detail, for policy wonkery, has also, in the wake of Bush, come to seem less of an irritant and more of an asset. After watching the incompetence in Iraq and after Katrina, Americans are beginning to want a president who is interested in how government works. Bush never has been. That was his charm. It has also proved his undoing.

Hmm. Competence. Professionalism. What strange, alien concepts in 21st century America….

Theodicy

It’s easy to ask the question, hard to follow through to the logical conclusion. From the BBC:

Pope Benedict XVI has made a historic visit to the former Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau at the end of his four-day tour of Poland. […]
It was particularly difficult for a Christian – a German pope – to speak from such a place of horror, he said.
“In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence – a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?” he said in a speech in Italian.

If Benedict’s conception of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity is compatible with such horrors, then he’s delusional. Mind you, he’s in distinguished company. Pretzel logicians all. They’d rather hang on to their world of make-believe instead of simply admitting the truth. Human beings did these horrible things to other human beings, and it’s up to us human beings to prevent such atrocities from happening in the future. No supernatural agent is going to save us from ourselves: we have to grow up, take responsibility, and sort it out on our own.

AWOL

Now this is something that I hadn’t really thought about: “More than 1,000 members of the British military have deserted the armed forces since the start of the 2003 Iraq war, the BBC has discovered.”
Anyone know what the figures are for the US armed forces? The nearest thing I could find to a real study is this, which suggests a much lower (proportional) rate of desertion than the British military is seeing. However it needs to be brought up to date.

A good primer on the mind-body problem

Last year I posted a list of all of the philosophy of mind books in my library. (Since then, I’ve added half a dozen more.) If you’re curious about what is probably one of the most controversial areas in contemporary philosophy, check out Alex Byrne’s survey piece entitled What Mind-Body Problem? in the latest Boston Review. (Alex is at MIT, where I’ve been attending some of the Friday philosophy seminars.)

Vroom! Vroom!

The nearest decent motor racing circuit is Lime Rock, down in north-west Connecticut. I’ve been down there a couple of times before, and I’ve just decided to drive over for Monday’s events. (For those outside the US, Monday is the Memorial Day holiday.)
schedule for monday
It’s about 155 miles from Brookline to Lime Rock, so I’ll set off around 5:30am. However I’m not planning to drive all the way home at the end of the day. (Yes, I’ve done it before. No, it isn’t fun – it rather spoils the day. Besides the holiday traffic on I-90 will be awful.) Instead I’ve reserved a motel room in Lee, Massachusetts, and I’ll head home on Tuesday. I can’t dawdle, though: I’m meeting a former colleague for lunch at 11:30am in Chestnut Hill, and I’ve got a phone call at 12:30pm.
Expect lots of photos. And memo to self: take lots of water and plenty of sunscreen. It’s forecast to get close to 90F on Monday.

Schumacher's convenient mistake

I just watched the qualifying session for Sunday’s Grand Prix in Monaco, including Michael Schumacher’s convenient “error” at the last corner on the last lap which prevented Alonso from taking pole position. Schumacher cut the apex too close, ran wide, and stopped short of the wall, which brought out a local yellow flag. As the BBC reports:

The manner of Schumacher’s mistake provoked claims from many of his rivals that he had deliberately stopped on the track to prevent anyone from challenging his pole position.
The way his Ferrari ran wide looked very unusual, and he then stalled the engine while making an apparently ham-fisted attempt to reverse it out of the barrier.

My assessment was that Schumacher could have completed the turn without stopping, and that his “mistake” was too uncharacteristically sloppy – and too “convenient” – to be anything other than a deliberate attempt to block his rivals. Of course he’s under investigation. By the time you read this, we’ll know if Schumacher is going to be first or last on the grid….
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[UPDATE: He’s going to start last! A good call by the officials, I think. Perhaps they noticed that little smirk on Schumi’s face during the post-qualifying interview.]

How science is done

If you have 10-15 minutes to spare, click through to this beautiful piece by P. Z. Myers entitled “Pycnogonid tagmosis and echoes of the Cambrian”. Sounds terribly esoteric and dry, doesn’t it? But it’s not: it’s a delightful example of how science is done. It begins:

The evolutionary foundation for the organization of many animal body plans is segmental—we are made of rings of similar stuff, repeated over and over again along our body length. That’s sufficient to make a creature like a tapeworm or a leech (well, almost—leeches have sophisticated specializations), but there are further steps involved in making a fly or a spider or a human. There is an arrangement of positional information along the length of an animal, so one segment can recognize whether it is near the head or the tail, and the acquisition of new patterns of gene expression based on that positional information that cause the development of specialized structures in different segments. That process of specializing segments is called tagmosis. It’s how a fly forms mouthparts in head segments, legs and wings in thoracic segments, and no limbs at all in abdominal segments.

And then he dives into an account of the pycnogonids or sea spiders, and how their heads are structured, and how we know (hint: it involves enervation), and how this structure evolved. Even if (like me) you’re not familiar with all of the terms or concepts, that’s OK: Myers’ writing is accessible, satisfying, surprising, funny, and really elegant. If you enjoyed Dawkins’ The Ancestors’ Tale, you’ll love this.