Maureen Dowd op-ed in the NY Times (actually written by Aaron Sorkin):
OBAMA What would you do?
BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!
Well done, sir.
The state of the world, especially of the US right now, is not kind to artists.
David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.
Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the department, said Wallace’s wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself.
Link to LA Times obituary. Link to Infinite Jest at Powells.com.
Week 3 of the Fall Semester and I’m already being asked to schedule Spring classes! Madness.
So, which one should I teach?
Course (1): “Experiments in Cognition and Consciousness” which would draw on psychological literature to look at lab experiments and philosophical literature dealing with thought experiments all aimed at the question of what the mind is and how it works (visual illusions, Twin Earth, Chinese Room, etc.). Course (2): “Current Topics in Cognitive Science: Technology and the Brain” which would deal with the increasingly broad body of work in psychology showing how the brain takes up our tools and technologies in physiological ways (neural plasticity) and in philosophy where these moves have been widely hypothesized and extrapolated in the service of questions about minds and bodies (Andy Clark, Merleau-Ponty).
Mr. Slippery had often speculated just how the simple notion of using high-resolution EEGs as input/output devices had caused the development of the “magic world” representation of data space. The Limey and Erythrina argued that sprites, reincarnation, spells, and castles were the natural tools here, more natural than the atomistic twentieth-century notions of data structures, programs, files, and communicaations protocols…. Vernor Vinge at Powells.com.
I’ve been excited and worried about the new game Spore for at least a year now. When I first heard about it, I was immediately concerned that a game was trying to mimic evolution by including the guiding hand of design. I haven’t played it yet (and doubt I’ll get to play it for quite awhile) but Carl Zimmer’s discussion of it in the NY Times this week eases my mind a bit. Maybe I’m getting worked up over nothing. I still worry that the game takes for granted the fact that the layperson will know the difference between the game’s mechanisms and the mechanisms of evolution.
Even as scientists praise Spore, they voice concerns about how the game does not match evolution. In the real world, new traits evolve as mutations arise and spread gradually through entire populations. Winning Spore’s DNA points does not work even as a remote metaphor.
“I do hope that it doesn’t confuse people as to what evolution is all about,” said Charles Ofria, a computer scientist at Michigan State University and a creator of Avida.
Spore may also mislead players with the way it is set up as a one-dimensional march of progress from single-cell life to intelligence. Evolution is more like a tree than a line, with species branching in millions of directions. Sometimes species become more complex, and sometimes they become less so. And sometimes they do not change at all. “There’s no progressive arrow that dominates nature,” Dr. Prum said.
I bet it’s still damn fun though.
“The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle inquiry, though it must be admitted that this is sometimes not a very apt designation. The irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for the struggle to attain belief.” Charles Sanders Peirce (from Popular Science Monthly, November 1877).
This month’s masthead is a throwback to April’s, since I’m still planning a site redesign whenever I manage to find 10 spare minutes in a day. You’ve seen it before!