It’s another warm day here in Seattle. Back in Boston, the official definition of a heatwave is “three successive days over 90°F”. Seattlites tell me that the local equivalent is “three successive days over 75°F”, in which case we’re enduring a scorcher. So this morning I decided to get out on the water: I walked down to Pier 52 and took the 8:45 ferry to Bremerton. This is a really good deal: it’s a one hour trip, and for pedestrians it costs $6.70 westbound. Eastbound, it’s free. So I got to cruise across Puget Sound for a couple of hours, including breakfast. On the way out, the boat was almost empty, but on the return trip it was full of baseball fans of all ages. (I guess the Mariners are in town.) I took a few photos, and finished the last couple of chapters of Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean Carroll’s introduction to “Evo-Devo“. (Verdict: I liked it a lot, but it left me looking around for the next book that I can read to get more detail on some of the mechanisms.)
Words in a Time of War
This commencement address ((Hat tip Scott via Marty.)) was given to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May 10, 2007. It is simply brilliant.
Edward KaSpel and the Dresden Dolls
What happens when you search YouTube with the names of two of your favourite bands? If you’re lucky, you find something like this:
Edward KaSpel from the Legendary Pink Dots, on stage with the Dresden Dolls. Twisted Brecht. Excellent.
"Shift happens"
A thought-provoking video is making the rounds. Turn the sound down a bit before you start…
I’m unconvinced about the final predictions (related to the computational capacity of the human brain), but the rest of it is spot on. Complacency is not an option. Tommy‘s world is going to be very different from mine.
(Hat tip to Charlie.)
"Verschärfte Vernehmung"
Andrew Sullivan points out the way that the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” was viewed half a century ago – before Cheney, Rumsfeld and “24” turned torture into a spectator sport. Money quote:
Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I’m not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture – “enhanced interrogation techniques” – is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.
However, I don’t believe in the death penalty. Life imprisonment will do just fine, thank you. And for those of you who are minded to scream about Godwin’s Law, check out Marty’s thoughts on the subject.
More DotMatrix
Back in February I mentioned a cool Mac application called DotMatrix by B-L-A-C-K-O-P, ((They also have this neat free screensaver, BlackenedPixels, which turns the screen black and then tries to power down the displays. I have a PB15″ with a Samsung SyncMaster 940MW on the DVI port. BlackenedPixels was able to power down the internal display, but not the Samsung. Still saves a lot of heat and power.)) which allows you to mix images from your iSight camera (or any other source) with a bewildering array of effects: distortions, colors, cut-outs, masks, half-tones, and so forth. If the sheer number of possibilities is too daunting, don’t worry: the program includes hundreds of templates, many contributed by enthusiastic users. I’ve just upgraded to version 1.006, and I’m having way too much fun for a Monday evening. Here are a couple of quick tests that illustrate the ability to mix a sequence of shots into a single image:
And here’s a touch of wanderlust….
OK, I’ve got to work on that one just a bit, but that’s what makes it fun.
Weinberger on "Everything is Miscellaneous"
Must-watch video: David Weinberger, talking about the ideas in his new book Everything is Miscellaneous.
(Hat-tip to my Sun buddy, Paul Lamere.)
UPDATE: The Prologue and Chapter 1 of the book are now online.
Falwell's legacy of stupidity and bigotry
Poland to probe if Teletubbies are gay:
Poland’s conservative government took its drive to curb what it sees as homosexual propaganda to the small screen on Monday, taking aim at Tinky Winky and the other Teletubbies. Ewa Sowinska, government-appointed children rights watchdog, told a local magazine published on Monday she was concerned the popular BBC children’s show promoted homosexuality. She said she would ask psychologists to advise if this was the case.
Apparently others in the Polish government are worried about her…
… making public comments “that may turn her department into a laughing stock.”
May? Too late, I’m afraid.
The longest running soap opera in the philosophy of religion
Regular readers of my blog will remember that a couple of years ago we were discussing the supposed “conversion” of the English philosopher Antony Flew. Here’s how I summarized it a year ago:
The Anthony Flew brouhaha
Of all the subjects I’ve blogged on, the one that has generated the most discussion is the sad case of the English philosopher, Antony Flew. The short version: eminent atheist philosopher (Antony Flew) gets taken in by a charlatan (Gerald Schroeder) peddling an “irreducible complexity†argument about DNA; eminent philosopher concludes that this may be evidence for a designer; triumphalist creationist huckster (Roy Abraham Varghese) persuades Flew to go public at a conference; creationists crow about the “conversion of the most famous atheistâ€; Flew talks to some real scientists, and makes a half-hearted retraction, apologizing that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
This first piece attracted 53 comments; later entries included More on Antony Flew, Carrier on Flew, and Antony Flew: at last, the book. The discussion ran on from December 2004 until May 2005, and I was still getting email months after that.
When this whole, messy business subsided in early 2005, I didn’t expect to hear any more about it. After all, as Flew wrote to Richard Carrier, “I am just too old at the age of nearly 82 to initiate and conduct a major and super radical controversy about the conceivability of the putative concept of God as a spirit.” And it seemed unlikely that Flew would want to revisit a topic over which, in his own words, “I now realize that I have made a fool of myself”, and “I have been mistaught” by a charlatan who “appeared to be so well qualified as a physicist (which I am not) that I was never inclined to question what he said.” One would expect that Flew would prefer to draw a discreet curtain over a painful and embarrassing episode.
Well, it seems that one would be wrong. You can now pre-order There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, ((I have to confess that I first read the subtitle as How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Lost His Mind. My bad…)) authored by Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese. It’s scheduled to be published in November, 2007. So far it’s attracted little attention, apart from one rather triumphalist blog entry.
It will be interesting to see what Flew has to say for himself at this point. Back in 2005 he was emphatic that he was tentatively embracing a form of deism, and he vehemently rejected any traditional Christian conception of God:
Q But there’s also, Professor Flew, a great yearning to have someone of your previously held scepticism on board for a Christian God, a participating God, a God of goodness, and so on. Now can you tell me what your reaction is to that?
A Well I don’t think I have offered the slightest reason for believing in a good God. You know, if that’s what they want – a good God in any ordinary sense of the word ‘good’ – it seems to me it is inconsistent with what they believe this good God is going to do. I mean to torture anyone eternally is a violation of the most fundamental principles of merely human justice.
Q So this is the tortures of Hell, which you would reject entirely?
A Well this appalling nightmare, you know. If it was proved that I was wrong in this book ‘The Logic of Mortality’ I would myself get worried because it seems to me entirely possible that the universe around us was created by an evil figure who would do this sort of thing.
Q So you reject the Christian concept of God?
A I follow what has become the universally accepted definition by Richard Swinburne of the entire English-speaking philosophical world which includes a very large part of the philosophical world.
Q So you don’t believe in life after death?
A Certainly not, no….
Q What view do you take of what is happening in America – where presumably you’re being hailed now as … one of them?
A Well, too bad (laughs). I’m not ‘one of them’.
It’s hard to imagine a huckster like Varghese being associated with a book that rejects Christianity. We’ll just have to wait and see. Of course, none of this has any effect on anything except Flew’s reputation: most atheists that I know have little respect for arguments from authority.
Great Monaco GP; shame about the post-race nonsense
Without any real competition from Ferrari, today’s Monaco Grand Prix was a chance for McLaren to put on a splendid show, and they did. Alonso drove beautifully, and Hamilton continued the unprecedented string of performances that are causing people like Jackie Stewart to tip him for true greatness. They lapped all their rivals up to Massa in third place (and Massa himself lapped his team-mate Raikkonen), but they never eased off. It was fascinating to watch the difference in their styles: Alonso was absolutely consistent, lap after lap, while Hamilton was always seeking to push just a little harder, relying on his extraordinary car control to recover when he stepped over the limits.
Having said all that, this was Monaco. Passing is almost impossible. Alonso took the pole, led from the start, and only a mistake would have allowed Hamilton to come in first. But that didn’t stop people from moaning that McLaren had prevented Hamilton from getting the win. From the BBC:
“I’m sure everybody feels – and a lot of people will feel it in England – that there is favouritism or some penalisation that is given to either Lewis or Fernando,” Dennis said.
“We are scrupulously fair at all times in how we run this Grand Prix team.
“This circuit has to be addressed in a team way, and that is why we have won 14 races here.
Exactly. I’m confident that Hamilton is going to win a GP this season, and he has a good shot at the championship. Let’s not get melodramatic.
Speaking of melodramatic, WTF is happening to Ferrari? Paging Ross Brawn. And these super-soft tyres look like a really bad idea.
UPDATE: Oh dear, here come the FIA bureaucrats.