Good Riddance

Ted Kennedy Dies of Brain Cancer at Age 77

It's about time.

-M.

Les Paul, 1915-2009

I've been a day or so behind for the last week, so I just learned, after stopping by Myrhaf's, that the great Les Paul has passed away. A brilliant musician and innovator, there is no rock and roll without this man. He developed one of the first (and eventually most ubiquitous) solid body electric guitars as well as developing overdubbing, multitracking, delay and phasing effects, as well as innovative playing styles. 

A great man whose influence will live as long as rock and roll. Rest in peace, Les Paul. 

Thank you, Les.

-M.

Hall of Fame

Well, Shannon Sharpe has been snubbed from the Hall of Fame. I shouldn't be surprised. The Denver Broncos just get routinely snubbed from Canton. Floyd Little, Haven Moses, Tom Jackson, Steve Atwater, Karl Mecklenburg. RANDY GRADISHAR. It's obscene really.

From what I understand, there is a lot of backroom politics bullshit that goes on with the pile of fools who are tapped to vote for the inductees. Just look who else isn't in Canton: Cris Carter, Steve Tasker, Alex Karras, Ken Stabler and Jerry Kramer. Kramer's snub is particularly shameful. I acknowledge some bias, being a former offensive lineman myself, but this man really was the greatest guard to ever play the game. And he kicked field goals!

Now, I have a whole season of being disappointed by the Frankenstein monster that Jeff McDaniels has turned my team into.

Onward.

-M.

Really swingin', man...

I had always assumed that people swinging their arms when they walked was somehow a balance thing. I never gave it much thought though. Pendulums are often used to keep the balance of tall, skinny structures and that is what arms essentially are when you're walking: swinging pendulums.

Now, I read this article, which states that arm swinging is largely believed to be an evolutionary carry-over "from when we used to go about on all fours," but now a new paper reveals that the purpose of arm swinging may actually be balance and energy economy. Really? That former was the default theory? Huh.

"Rather than a facultative relic of the locomotion needs of our quadrupedal ancestors, arm swinging is an integral part of the energy economy of human gait."

Well, yeah. Didn't you ever try to walk with your arms straight your sides when you were a kid just to see what it felt like? I was under the impression that this was a near-universal childhood curiosity.

This is not the first time in recent memory that I've read about an allegedly interesting scientific paper making some common sense claim that was causing a stir. A few months ago I read an article about a computer science professor named James Crook who claimed to have an algorithm for solving sudoku puzzles.

His system requires players to mark up empty cells in a Sudoku grid with all possible remaining numbers and, by comparing number sets, to labour through a tree of options that eventually produces a solution.

That's pretty much the method I, and everyone else I know, use to solve sudoku puzzles. Am I missing something?

-M.

Ligatio in caritas

For those of you who can stomach it, the Pope's new encyclical, Caritas in veritate, is here.

It's quite long and I have not made my way through the entire thing yet, but it is disgusting. 

As Gus Van Horn points out, the new screed from Benedictus reminds one eerily of John Paul's Populorum Progressio, which Ayn Rand annihilated in "Requiem for Man" in Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal. Indeed, it is essentially Populorum Progressio updated for 2009. It even discusses Populorum Progressio in detail at many points. 

Of course, the call for what would essentially be a world government is the most jarring. 

Take a good hard look at everything, kids. And I mean everything. This is fast becoming the world many of you asked for. So, don't flinch. You are not spectators, you are part of the spectacle. And you will not be forgiven. 

-M.

Ahmadinejad warns Obama

Ahmadinejad tells Obama not to interfer in Iran

It doesn't matter who the president is, kids. As long as he is the American president, there will be trouble.

Listen--

Obama could get down on his hand and knees and lick the feet of Ahmadinejad and all the Iranian mullahs and it would not make a damn bit of difference. Their problem is with the West in general and America in particular. To these medieval mystics, Obama is still the president of the Great Satan and anything he is says will only be interpreted as "Western filth" and aggressive American "imperialism" and "interference".

There is no coming to terms with a violent pile of religious crazies.

-M.

Reading list

I know it seems like I've abandoned this blog, but, I assure you, I haven't. It's been a hectic semester.

I will resume blogging with some regularity soon, but in the interim perhaps my reading list will be of interest to some. I noticed, near the end of the semester, that my usual pace in getting through books had slowed considerably. Now that my schedule has loosened up a bit, I'm trying to get back on my usually schedule.

RECENTLY READ

-------------------------

Gottfried Leibniz, Philosophical Essays

I've never liked Leibniz, as you can imagine. 300 pages of blathering about "windowless monads" didn't change that.

Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, What Nietzsche REALLY Said

An entertaining, though occasionally annoying in its sympathy, explanation of much of Nietzsche's more obtuse and oft-misunderstood nonsense. I have spent years away from Nietzsche and this book is one of the last in my attempt to reacquaint myself with his thought.

Nietzsche's books are what introduced me to philosophy when I was in high school. However, though I was initially impressed, the more I read the more I began to despise him. The final straw (well, straws) was his belligerent criticism of Darwin and defense of Lamarck--which, oddly enough, he made in a manner identical to the manner of defense he often criticized. And--in "Human, All Too Human", I believe--him saying that there are no absolute truths. One is tempted to ask, "What do you think you've just uttered, Fred?" The most frustrating aspect, of course, is that Nietzsche was fully aware that he was wallowing in contradictions. He didn't care.

Unfortunately, since my particular interest in philosophy is the philosophy of history, I will encounter a lot of Nietzsche.

Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect

This book should have been much better than it was, especially given its topic, which is the intellectuals' betrayal of the intellect. After reading "From Dawn to Decadence", I expected more out of Barzun.

Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Again, the philosophy of history--and historiography. White is one of the five biggest names in the field in the past fifty years (despite not actually being a philosopher; he is more of a literary theorist masquerading as a historian). Of course, he concludes, after much seemingly endless rambling, that "tropes"--styles of discourse, such as synecdoche, irony, metaphor and allegory--are what determine the nature and content of histories (that is, historians' writings on history). I don't think I have to point out the postmodern relativistic historiography that this implies. And I don't think I have to point out that I find the whole pile of nonsense insufferable.

I did write a review of this... book. I may put it up here if I thinks its up to snuff after I give it a good once-over.

Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

As far as books on Soviet history go, as well as books about the horrors of Stalinism, you could do much better than this book. See Tucker's "Stalin in Power"; most of the work by Robert Conquest on Soviet Russia--especially "The Great Terror -- A Reassessment"; "The Black Book of Communism" by Courtois, et. al.; "Russia under the Bolshevik Regime" by Richard Pipes.

This book is a dreadful read. I don't know who taught Amis to write (hopefully, it wasn't his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, who was not the greatest writer himself, but certainly better than the choppy, meandering prose of "Koba").

Ayn Rand, The Foutainhead and Atlas Shrugged

It's been two years since I last read "Atlas Shrugged" and four since I last read "The Fountainhead". I needed to read these, for spiritual fuel.

READING

--------------

Robert Mayhew (ed.), Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

This just came in the mail and I am enjoying the hell out of it so far.

Alva Noe, Out of Out Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness

I bought this after reading Harry Binswanger's review on HBL. I have to say, interesting so far. It's fun to watch one of the new breed of philosopher/neuroscientists calling everyone else in his milieu on their bullshit, and coming up with good arguments against them on top of it.

Keith Winschuttle, The Killing of History

Rereading this one. Some of Windschuttle's arguments could strike deeper, on a more fundamental philosophical level (given the errors in is his own philosophy, I didn't expect as much going in anyway). But this is still a striking polemic. And it's all kinds of fun reading his fisking of all the literary critics, social theorists and sundry postmodern and relativist entities that pass for intellectuals these days.

IN THE QUEUE

----------------------

Laura J. Snyder, Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society

Emanuel Derman, My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance

A.O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas

Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Revolutio

Victor Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power

Ralph Lerner, The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic

David S. Wyman, A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust

Jim Powell, Bully Boy: The Truth about Theodore Roosevelt's Legacy

John Clive, Not By Fact Alone

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution

Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder

I read three books a week on average, so I like to keep the list of "on deck" books at about 10-12.

I have plenty on my plate as it is, but any suggestions are welcome.

-M.

Faith and Force

As if history weren't replete enough with vivid examples:

Man charged with murder in church shooting of Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller

Gunman Kills Soldier Outside Recruiting Station

Faith and force are corollaries, kids. When you abandon reason, you pick up a gun.

-M.

Told ya...

North Korea says it has restarted nuclear facilities.

Really, is anyone surprised by this?

-M.

Just so you know...

To reiterate what I said elsewhere earlier today:

"Just so no other slobbering environmentalist or whiny mystic ever asks me again: NO, I do NOT feel any sort of reverence when staring blank-eyed at nature or "the heavens". You want to impress me? Level that patch of trees and put up a skyscraper and then pierce those heavens with a satellite and tell me the structure of galaxies."

So, stop asking. 

-M.