David Chalmers just blogged about an Australian radio show entitled The Mind-Body Problem Down Under, and I’ve just finished listening to the podcast. It was prompted by the 50th anniversary of the publication of U.T.Place’s ground-breaking paper “Is Consciousness A Brain Process?”. Although Place himself died a few years ago, they were able to interview Jack Smart and a number of the other architects of the identity theory – and Chalmers, of course, who has abandoned identity in favour of a (rather shaky) dualism.
Leaving aside the inevitable(?) bits about “as with sport Australians punch above their weight in the international philosophy community”, it’s a very nice account of how philosophy broke out of the quagmire of “the linguistic turn” and started moving towards a balanced accomodation with the physical sciences, especially neuroscience. Definitely worth listening to.
Japanese Grand Prix
I won’t spoil things for those who are time-shifting this; let me just say that the result was delightfully unexpected – and breaks a six year record* for Michael Schumacher….
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* The BBC story suggested that it was the first time since 2001, but as the SpeedTV team pointed out, that incident wasn’t exactly comparable.
The end of transition
When I left Sun back in March, I started a new blog category Transition to document the transition to… well, back then I didn’t really know. I wasn’t worried about it, anyway.
Tonight I think I’ll post the last entry in that category. Tomorrow I have to return the rental car SUV that I’ve been using as part of my relocation package. I’m pretty much up to speed with my new job at Amazon.com, the furnishing of my apartment at Uwajimaya Village is essentially complete*, and I’ve joined Flexcar**.
OK, there are some important things that I haven’t got around to yet. I haven’t signed up with a physician or a dentist, for instance. Nor have I chosen whether to sell my Subaru or ship it from Massachusetts, but I don’t have to decide that for a few months.
And next week I’ll be making my first trip back to Brookline since I moved out here. I’m really looking forward to seeing Tommy and his parents. I’ll get a chance to see what Merry’s been doing to the house, and check out the condo that she’s hoping to buy in the New Year. And inevitably there are a few things that I want to bring here from Brookline; I’ll probably be shipping back a box or two.
So, overall, things are in great shape. The process of relocation has been virtually glitch free, and I’m way ahead of where I expected to be at this date. (Were I superstitious… but I’m not.) Here ends the transition – I’m already working on the next chapter.
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* I’ve still got to get one more bookcase, a stand for the TV (something like this or this would do), a few more lights, and some curtains to hide the rather ugly blinds. IKEA owes me a slip-cover for the sofa. Nothing urgent.
** I’m still waiting for my membership materials. I’m looking forward to trying out this system; I’ll be sure to blog about my first trip.
Counting chickens prior to hatching?
From today’s New York Times
Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success†in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, the money was not spent.
New web quiz: "Benevolent leader"
Via an Amazon colleague, here are my personal dna results. Apparently I’m a “benevolent leader”. Mouse over the graphic for details….
An interesting example of the web-quiz genre, with some nice (AJAX?) graphical choice widgets.
Victoria, Werner, roses, and seaplanes
My friend and former colleague Kate has been visiting for the last few days, and on Sunday we decided to visit Victoria, BC, to see an old mutual friend. It takes a couple of hours on a fast catamaran ferry, and we got there at 11:15. Werner Bahlke met us at the terminal, and we headed into town for lunch.
The three of us used to work together at Sun Microsystems in Chelmsford and Burlington, MA. Werner moved to Victoria about four years ago, and after some interesting “virtual company” experiences he’s really settled in there. (His office is in a wonderful location overlooking the outer harbour.)
After lunch, Kate and I explored Victoria, cameras in hand. You can see a selection of the pictures we took here. I’ve merged the two sets of pictures, then sorted them by the time they were taken, so occasionally you’ll see different shots of the same object. Two sequences of pictures are worth noting. First, we visited the rose garden next to the Empress Hotel, and I tried a series of macro shots. Then we took a path along the west side of the inner harbour, from where we could see the constant arrival and departure of ferries, kayaks, harbour taxis, sailing boats – and seaplanes! This stretch of water may look like a harbour, but it’s really an airport – and a very busy one.
Our northbound ferry had been almost empty, but when we lined up to board the return, we could see that the boat was going to be pretty much full. Presumably a number of people had been in Victoria for the weekend, perhaps as an “add-on” to an Alaska cruise package. In the depressingly prefab terminal building we saw new security equipment – airport-style metal detectors and X-ray machines – installed but not yet operational. There were also signs everywhere about the plans to require US citizens to carry a passport when visiting Canada; there are fears that this will hit the tourist business very hard. For now, Kate was able to simply show her driver’s license; I had my passport and green card.
Despite the crowds, we found good seats and had a smooth journey back. At one point everybody crowded out on the stern deck to see the bioluminescent diatoms that turned our wake into a shimmering silver trail. Very cool. What a great day.
"King John hath issued a signing statement at Runnymede…."
How to be a Man of Principle(TM)
Exhibit A: Senator Arlen Specter.
Step 1: First excoriate proposed legislation in no uncertain terms:
Specter said hearings before his Judiciary Committee showed that the military Combatant Status Review Tribunals do not have an adequate way of determining whether suspects are enemy combatants.
He charged that by striking habeas corpus rights for terrorism suspects, the bill “would take our civilized society back some 900 years” to a time before the Magna Carta was adopted. He said this was “unthinkable.”
“What this entire controversy boils down to is whether Congress is going to legislate to deny a constitutional right which is explicit in the document of the Constitution itself and which has been applied to aliens by the Supreme Court of the United States,” Specter said. If the bill passes without habeas corpus protections, it will be struck down
by the high court…
Step 2. Vote for it anyway.
(President Bush as King John? Not implausible…..)
Just when you thought the Democrats were AWOL….
Sully has the video of Hillary’s Break-Through Speech against the Bush Cheney administration’s policy on torture.
UPDATE: Russ Feingold was there too.
At last! TECO!!
OK, all you EMACS devotees. Who among you know what EMACS stands for? “Editor MACroS”, that’s right. But what language were these macros originally written in? Thanks to Good Math, Bad Math, you can now read all about the World’s Greatest Pathological Language: TECO. I first encountered it in 1970, when the Essex University PDP-10 was delivered.
This extract will pique your curiosity, or send you running for cover. I’ve modified it a bit from the original piece, because when I tried to quote it, some of the special characters were interpreted as bits of HTML. Besides, it looked all wrong to me; anyone who actually used TECO will remember that the ESCAPE key was echoed as $:
[…] The print command to print a string is control-A; so the TECO hello world program is: “
^AHello world^A$$“. Is that pathological enough?
Commands to remove text include things like “D” to delete the character after the pointer; “FD”, which takes a string argument, finds the next instance of that argument, and deletes it; “K” to delete the rest of the line after the pointer, and “HK” to delete the entire buffer.
To insert text, you can either use “I” with a string argument, or TAB with a string argument. If you use the tab version, then the tab character is part of the text to insert.
I still remember the illicit thrill that ran through the Computing Centre when we learned that someone had created a TECO macro to invert a matrix. In retrospect, I blame the freely-available hallucinogens and too much Hunt the wumpus….