OK, not really. But Steven Pinker’s talk at Town Hall Seattle this evening explored three ideas:
How language reveals our sense of “folk-physics”
How swearing helps us understand emotions
How innuendo explains the way we construct relationships
These and other themes are from his new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. In his persuasive analysis of the forms and role of swearing, Pinker used five of George Carlin’s Seven Words with a frequency and academic precision which had the (standing room only) audience rolling in the aisles. If this book tour brings him to your home town, do go along and see him – unless you’re easily offended, of course. And on Thursday we have James Watson at the Pacific Science Center.
British Airways has placed an order for 34 new aircraft – the largest the airline has made since 1998. The airline is buying 12 Airbus A380 superjumbos and 24 Boeing 787s. It also has options for a further seven A380s and 18 of the 787 planes.
Now that BA has made the move to the A380, which of the US airlines will be the first to crack? My guess is United, for their trans-Pacific routes.
This story would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.
The head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique has told the BBC he believes some European-made condoms are infected with HIV deliberately. Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio claimed some anti-retroviral drugs were also infected “in order to finish quickly the African people”.
I love Norm’s so-simple-it’s-elegant laptop stand. I’m not worried about the heat from my laptop damaging my desk (which has a glass top), but cooler is definitely better. Unfortunately it looks like the kind of thing you’d need a workshop to build, especially routing the channels in the bottom of the box to accomodate the aluminium strips. Hmmm…
Yesterday, everybody’s favourite atheist scientist blogger expressed regret that he couldn’t be in Seattle, because he’d learned that the Burke Museum at UW was going to be holding an opening day celebration for its new exhibit, In Search of Giant Squid. I’d been meaning to visit the Burke… what a perfect opportunity. So this morning I hopped on a #70 bus and headed across to UW. Professor Alan Kohn opened the exhibit, and answered questions, and then at noon a team from the Seattle Aquarium turned up to entertain us all with the dissection of a Humboldt squid. There’s a selection of photos in my gallery. ((Some are from my Casio EX-S600 and some from my iPhone – hence the variable quality.)) The organizers were, I think, quite startled by the size of the crowd: it was standing room only, with about 130 people there at one point. I wonder how much of that was due to PZ’s blogging. ((Can you say “squid flash mob”?!)) As you can see from the pictures, there were several kids who were completely mesmerized by the proceedings, and ignored parental injunctions to sit down or stay back. On balance I think I’d prefer obsession to indifference… After the dissection, Professor of Oceanography John Delaney gave a talk about Project Neptune, a fascinating – and incredibly ambitious – plan to cover the Juan de Fuca Plate with a network of robotic laboratories connected by a power and fibre optic grid, supporting a huge range of stationary experiments and sensors as well as a fleet of AUVs – autonomous underwater vehicles. Oh yes, and all the data is to be accessible in real time via the Internet. Delaney is a thought-provoking and wide-ranging speaker, though perhaps a little unfocussed. (A bit more attention to content and less to fancy presentation graphics might help.) Nevertheless, I liked the fact that he began with a haiku from Basho, cited Proust to explain the essence of science, and closed with T. S. Eliot. He made much of the fact that many of the capabilities needed to build Neptune exist today; maybe, but it’s not clear whether the economics work just yet. (And declaring something a “30 year project” doesn’t get rid of the question.) I’d have liked to ask him about what he sees as the greatest technical challenges to success – RoboCup notwithstanding, there’s a lot of work still needed to create real AUVs – but we were 20 minutes over time, and I needed some lunch.
What really has to come to a complete stop — in ‘serious’ journalism as well as ‘sleb trash’ — is referring to women by their age, hair colour and physique for no reason at all. This should not be allowed under any circumstance. When was the last time you saw an article that referred to a man in such an objectified way? All these stories today about Mourinho leaving Chelsea, and yet none have dipped to the requisite level if the articles were about women… “Jose Mourinho ’44, with just a hint of wrinkles at the corners of his deep hazel eyes’, his ‘sexy salt-n-pepper hair slightly tousled after a long hard day at the Club’ resigning after a glittering three-year reign as Chelsea’s manager. Long-standing differences with the club’s owner, ‘lantern-jawed 41 year old brunette billionaire’ Roman Abramovich, have re-emerged so strongly that they have forced ‘Mourinho, with his model-esque looks and toned physique’, into the drastic step of leaving the club. The Portuguese ‘hottie’ contacted his captain, ‘fit 26 year old spiky-haired bit of rough’ John Terry, and other senior players at Stamford Bridge last night to indicate that he would be going.”
Terry just posted a piece about UUCP, blogging, and digging back in Google Groups for early signs of life… The first UUCP posting that I can find of mine is dated November 20, 1985 – but that was just an administrative posting, announcing the addition of “suneast” to the UUCP network. My first real posting was to net.unix on December 4, 1985, asking if anyone knew of an unencumbered version of the Unix “crypt” command – even then, source code licensing was an issue. And my first contribution on a non-work topic was to net.followup, on April 27, 1986, about Reagan’s decision to bomb Libya. ((Re-reading this, I’m struck by how close it is to the piece I just posted about “No End in Sight”. As Terry put it, “While one can’t step twice in the same river, from the banks it looks much the same.”))
Inspired by Andrew Sullivan’s review, I went to see the documentary “No End in Sight” this evening. As Andrew writes…
… it is worth seeing again what Baghdad was the morning after it was liberated: still a viable city, still a place where sane, non-sectarian Iraqis with education and decency could see, if only dimly, a way forward. You see and hear also from the many good people who did their best in this effort across the government and, of course, in the military; and the many Iraqis who were eager at first to join hands and build a new country. Even then, it would have been very, very hard. We’ll never know for sure if it was going to be impossible. But we do know that, with this president and vice-president and defense secretary Rumsfeld, what chance we had was consciously, arrogantly, recklessly, criminally thrown away. The toll in human life, in American honor, in American power, in financial waste, and in the war on terror will be up to historians to measure. But it is immense.
As Andrew says, we’ll never know what might have been; nevertheless, it is very clear that a few key decisions, taken by a few reckless ideologues, ((One of the most critical decisions was Paul Bremer’s disbanding of the Iraqi army. Earlier this month, Bremer published an op-ed piece in the NYT in which he defended the decision. Now Charles Ferguson, producer of “No End in Sight”, has posted a devastating video rebuttal of Bremer’s piece, with specific testimony from many of the principals. It’s clear that Bremer and Slocombe are lying, probably to deflect criticism from Bush and Cheney that they were asleep at the switch.)) during a few months in 2003, virtually guaranteed the disastrous results with which we must now contend. Criminal incompetence doesn’t begin to describe it. After leaving the cinema, I couldn’t shake the feeling that for many of the Bushies, this whole thing was some kind of ghastly videogame: exciting, but unreal, and ultimately trivial. Rumsfeld’s giggling over his silly jokes. The brand-new graduate from Georgetown, dropped into the Green Zone to take charge(!) of the planning for Baghdad traffic (and whisked away again after a few weeks.) The CPA spokesperson who couldn’t speak Arabic!!! Is this the best that America could do?
