Author: geoff
Crumbs!
Merry complained that I’m always blogging about unpleasant things – why can’t I blog about something nice? How about the crumb test dummy? I think that qualifies. Now, how do I get my hands on some of those McVitie’s Milk Chocolate and Orange Digestives?
Republican or Islamist? Beats me….
Don’t miss this fascinating piece by Juan Cole: “The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them.”
The similarities are remarkable.
"Freedom is on the march" – unless you're a woman
From a Reuters piece on threats against progressive women: “Pharmacist Zeena Qushtiny was dressed in the latest Western fashion and wearing a sparkling diamond necklace when she was taken at gunpoint from her pharmacy in Baghdad by insurgents. Her body was found 10 days later with two bullet holes close to her eyes. She was covered in a traditional abaya veil preferred by Islamic conservatives…. During Saddam Hussein’s regime, women could dress less conservatively in the big cities and would not be punished, according to female activists. But now women say they are no longer safe and decapitated female corpses have begun turning up in recent weeks with notes bearing the word ‘collaborator’ pinned to their chests”
Was this what America Bush and Blair went to war for?
(Via Juan Cole.)
That was then….
Salon.com Politics: “As Republicans plotted congressional intervention last week to extend the life of Terri Schiavo, a Texas woman named Wanda Hudson watched her six-month-old baby die in her arms after doctors removed the breathing tube that kept him alive. Hudson didn’t want the tube removed, but the baby’s doctors decided for her. A judge signed off on the decision under the Texas futile care law — a provision first signed into law in 1999 by then-Gov. George W. Bush. Under the 1999 law, doctors in Texas can, with the support of a hospital ethics committee, overrule the wishes of family members and terminate life-support measures if they believe further care would be futile”
Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #162
From today’s Houston Chronicle.com: “Iraq needed fuel. Halliburton Co. was ordered to get it there — quick. So the Houston-based contractor charged the Pentagon $27.5 million to ship $82,100 worth of cooking and heating fuel. In the latest revelation about the company’s oft-criticized performance in Iraq, a Pentagon audit report disclosed Monday showed Halliburton subsidiary KBR spent $82,100 to buy liquefied petroleum gas, better-known as LPG, in Kuwait and then 335 times that number to transport the fuel into violence-ridden Iraq.”
(Via TomDispatch.)
(And Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #162 is Even in the worst of times, someone turns a profit.)
What the bleep was I doing?
For reasons that I won’t go into, I found myself watching the DVD of What the Bleep Do We Know? this evening. After nearly an hour of increasingly nonsensical stuff, my blood pressure and I could stand it no longer. I skipped to the last DVD chapter to watch the credits, to find out which reputable scientists and philosophers had given their support to such hokum. Fortunately, the answer seemed to be “None”.
The writers weren’t even that creative in the way the fabricated the bleeping stuff. They mostly relied on two tricks:
- Take a term such as “observer”, “consciousness”, “unity”, etc. and then use it interchangably in metaphorical and literal senses.
- Consistently use the term “possibility” in place of “probability”, conveying a subtle suggestion of unboundedness and unpredictability.
So, if you want to get really drunk really quickly, get a bottle, a glass, and this film and take a shot every time someone recycles a metaphor as literal truth, or opens vistas of boundless possibility wherever a probability distribution belongs. Otherwise, stay away. (I thought we got all that New Age stuff out of our system last century, but I guess not….)
How to make sense of the world….
As I do most weekends, I phoned my mother in Oxford today. After exchanging family news, the subject turned to my philosophy course. “I just caught a story on BBC Oxford about a new philosophy group here,” she said. “Of course wasn’t able to read about it in the paper,” [because of her blindness] “but I think it was about the study of consciousness.” As we spoke, I quickly searched and came up with the obvious hit. “Are you talking about the Oxford Centre for Science of the Mind,” I asked. “The project that Susan Greenfield… sorry, Baroness Susan Greenfield is heading up? This led to a short digression about Tony Blair’s habit of handing out life peerages like school prizes, and then discussing our disappointment at the lack of rigour in many of Greenfield’s publications. After that, I told my mother about OXCSOM’s approach:
Initially there will be eight academics on the payroll of the Centre from six different departments: Anatomy, Pharmacology, Philosophy, Physiology, the Ian Ramsey Centre (Theology), and the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. The researchers will employ a wide range of techniques, including functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.
“I wonder how the theologians will get on with fMRI,” I mused, and my mother assured me that that as Oxford theologians they would embrace it enthusiastically. “By the way,” I said, “do you know where OXCSOM is getting its money? It’s hosted by the IAN RAMSEY CENTRE [studying the relationship of religious belief and science], and funded by the John Templeton Foundation.” Both of us vaguely recognized the name – something about underwriting a scientific study of prayer. [Turns out he’s a Tennessee-born investment manager.]
As we talked, I clicked on a few links… and then I couldn’t contain myself any more. “So, let me tell you about another Templeton project I’ve just come across. It’s called The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love.” “What on earth do they mean by ‘unlimited love’, and how do you do research in it?” said my mother. “It all sounds very flakey.” I clicked the About us link. “No problem,” I said. “They’ve got all that covered. By ‘unlimited love’, they mean ‘love for all humanity without exception’. And as for research, ‘Just as we investigate the force of gravity or the energy of the atom, we can scientifically examine the power of unlimited love in human moral and spiritual experience.’ Easy.”
My mother sighed. “You know, a friend of mine, a newspaper columnist, told me that he was giving up on satire,” she said. “He feels that nothing he can write matches up to the reality of today’s world.” And we agreed that satire is dead, and set a time for our next conversation.
The First Day of Spring
Today is the Spring Equinox, the first day of Spring*. It’s the season when people have honoured various deities: Aphrodite from Cyprus, Hathor from Egypt, Ostara of Scandinavia, and others. Here in Brookline, Massachusetts it’s a beautiful, sunny day, around 48°F or 9°C. It’s really bright out, in part because the sun is reflected off the high banks of snow left by the snowploughs. In such circumstances, it seems almost churlish to note that the weather forecast for tonight and tomorrow calls for snow….
Oh no, not MORE bloody snow!!!
OK, I’ll stop whining. I really will. It’s a beautiful day, and the snow won’t amount to anything, and the first robins have appeared…. **
* However when I was growing up, I was taught to reckon these things by the month. So winter was December, January and February, while spring included March, April and May. C’est la vie.
** Robins. That’s another thing that’s hard to wrap my head around. Back in England, robins were these cute (yet fierce) little birds that were resident the year round; many Christmas cards included pictures of “robin red-breast” in the snow. (Obvious religious connotations.) Here in the US, robins are simply a variety of thrush, with vaguely rust-coloured breasts, and they’re wimps when it comes to severe weather. I find it hard to think of them as robins. Hmmm: perhaps this was all part of a fiendish plan by the first professors of Philosophy at Harvard back in the 17th century: they wanted to set up an ambiguous referential situation for their lectures on cognition. “Consider the mental representation robin. In England, this refers to…”. Cue Jerry Fodor (closely followed by Dan Dennett).
Creative accounting at Microsoft
Tim Bray has been reading Brad’s analysis of Microsoft’s numbers. While Brad is bemused by the R&D (where’s the beef ROI?), Tim is shaking his head over the SG&A, which seems to be out of control. (From FY2000 to FY2003, revenue rose 45%, R&D rose 77%, and SG&A zoomed 131%.)
My theory is that most of it is going in “special promotions” to try to prevent large-scale defections. (You may choose different terms; I’ll stick to my euphemisms.) Beyond that, MSFT is clearly doing everything it can to keep the bottom-line income number down, to (1) resist shareholder pressure for even higher dividends, and (2) avoid further (mostly Euro) anti-trust challenges. However they don’t seem to be too successful….