Month: February 2010

by Chris Bodenner

A new tumblr:

Tutorial here.

by Patrick Appel

Fallows isn't entirely happy. From his follow up:

I consider the new layout of "personal" blog pages to be a serious step backward, since it makes all sites look the same and drains them of personality and visual interest, plus making them much harder to read. I hope, and think, that this part of the design will be re-visited.

TNC gives his take on the redesign here. If you have problems that have not been addressed, you can comment on this thread. The Dish is still getting many emails along these lines:

The idea that quoted segments should be offset by four different mechanisms (light gray background, dark gray text, change of font to sans serif, and indentation) is just far too jarring. It is akin, in my opinion, to TV having text scrolling across the bottom of the screen while having a split screen with action on the right and info about the speaker on the left. Too many things to watch/listen-to at the same time.

by Graeme Wood

Muammar al-Qadhafi chooses an interesting set of enemies. He banned Canadians last fall, after the Canadian PM criticized him for releasing the Lockerbie bomber.  And he has had a particularly durable grudge against the Swiss, ever since 2008, when Geneva police arrested his son Hannibal and daughter-in-law Alina for allegedly thrashing two maids at the Hotel President Wilson with a belt and coat-hanger.  (That grudge is partly why Red Cross staff can't fly Afriqiyah.)  The Colonel has also suggested that Germany, Italy, France, and Austria each absorb part of Switzerland, and obliterate the country altogether.  None of those countries has expressed much interest.

Now he wants jihad:

"Any Muslim in any part of the world who works with Switzerland is an apostate, is against (the Prophet) Mohammad, and God and the Koran," he told a meeting in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.

In his rambling address he added: "The masses of Muslims must go to all airports in the Islamic world and prevent any Swiss plane landing, to all harbours and prevent any Swiss ships docking, inspect all shops and markets to stop any Swiss goods being sold."

by Patrick Appel

Nope:

Although negative expectations may have the benefit of softening the blow when a negative event occurs, they also have the cost of making people feel worse while they are waiting for that event to happen. Three studies suggest that the cost of negative expectations is greater than the benefit.

by Jonathan Bernstein

Mark Kleiman asks an interesting question: "Who in America has moral authority?"  Kleiman suggests Barack Obama, but it's a fairly half-hearted answer, as I read it.  He asks for nominations. I read through his comments, and I was mostly not sold on any of them.

I suspect America might be, for the most part, too big for the question.  Too many subgroups, too many categories.  I mean, just speaking for myself, if Bob Dylan said that something was just wrong, I'd listen pretty carefully…but really, at the end of the day I don't know that I'd want to argue that he's a moral authority, as opposed to some other kind of national treasure.  Perhaps.

The other group that comes to mind for me are the people who took a stand against torture during the last administration, especially those inside the administration or the military.  But of course an awfully big group of Americans, I guess, disagree.  Again, subgroups and subcultures.

At any rate, to me there's only one fairly obvious answer to the question: the gentleman from Georgia, John Lewis.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I noticed your blog post about Sam Harris discussing science and faith. I thought you'd be interested in a TV show for PBS called "Closer to Truth," which features conversations with many top thinkers on religion, science and philosophy:

Can Science Deal With God?
What Can Science Say About God?
Do Science And Religion Conflict?

They have hundreds more interviews about many of the topics the Dish covers. Here's a full list.

by Patrick Appel

Ryan Blitstein reports on musical AI:

Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because [David Cope] managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?

Cope’s answers — not much, and yes — made some people very angry.

Blitstein has a couple beautiful tracks from Emmy's daughter program embedded in his article. An AI composing program doesn't make me angry; David Cope is the composer, not the computer. He says it well:

[Cope] just thinks of [Emmy] as a tool. Everything Emmy created, she created because of software he devised. If Cope had infinite time, he could have written 5,000 Bach-style chorales. The program just did it much faster.

“All the computer is is just an extension of me,” Cope says. “They’re nothing but wonderfully organized shovels. I wouldn’t give credit to the shovel for digging the hole. Would you?”

(Hat tip: 3QD)

by Patrick Appel

Jonathan Rée wonders about moral progress:

[If] you can see vice where others find nothing but virtue, or degeneracy where they see improvement, or corruption where they see probity, you can become a Person of Principle at no cost to yourself, while everyone else will look like a tiresome Trimmer, an exasperating Polyanna or an impermeable Pangloss. “Men are fond of murmuring,” as Voltaire once put it; “there is a pleasure in complaining,” he said, and “we delight in viewing only evil and exaggerating it.”

As a matter of fact, moral optimism is not as dead as you might think: it often floats to the surface of contemporary common sense without occasioning much comment.

When people want to protest at contemporary horrors – torture, say, or forced marriage, human trafficking, or racial violence – they are likely to condemn them as “Victorian”, “medieval”, “primitive” or “antiquated”, while expressing astonishment that they should still be countenanced in the twenty-first century. The notion that the epochs of past time can function as terms of moral opprobrium, or that the present date constitutes some kind of moral standard, testifies to a stubborn faith in something like Kant’s doctrine of progress.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

by Patrick Appel

Freddie's view of atheism:

Atheism is not a project. It has no purpose. It proceeds towards no end. It has no meaning beyond the simplicity of absence. It has as little negative presence as positive and demands no philosophy. Sam Harris's life is dominated by religion. It's what he thinks about; it's what he writes about; it's how he pays the bills. He speaks all over the country about religion, he opines on it constantly, denying it is his constant endeavor. His intellectual and philosophical life could hardly be more centered around religion if he were a monk.

Me? I go weeks without thinking about religion or God. And why would I?

by Graeme Wood

Australians are furious over the Dubai hit squad's use of three forged Aussie passports.  Ex-Mossad trainee Victor Ostrovsky says Australia is a common false-flag:

He said agents had little trouble passing themselves off as Australians as few people in the Middle East have much knowledge about the country.

"Consider the fact that Australians speak English and it's an easy cover to take, very few people know very much about Australia," he said.

"You can tell whatever stories you want. It doesn't take much of an accent to be an Australian or New Zealander, or an Englishman for that matter.

"And I know people had been under Australian cover not once (but) quite a few times. So why not use it (again)?"

[…]

"Except for James Bond, who actually pronounces or announces his arrival at the scene by saying, 'I'm Bond, James Bond', most people who work in the intelligence field don't present themselves by their real name," he said.

To detect fake Australians, Arab intelligence agencies could always just feed suspects Vegemite and release anyone who doesn't retch.

When Israelis used Canadian passports to get close enough to spray nerve toxins into Khaled Meshaal's ear in 1997, Canada recalled its ambassador, and relations between the countries were temporarily strained. So far, Australian PM Kevin Rudd has summoned the Israeli ambassador to issue a protest, but the Australian ambassador in Tel Aviv remains in place.  Australia also has a separate investigation of suspected Australo-Israeli spies going on.