Viva la Evolución!

Creation, a Darwin biopic starring the wonderful Paul Bettany, came out recently. In a disgusting development, the majority of US distributors have refused to pick it up. This is a film which would tear the nation apart, apparently. It would prove so hugely controversial in this, our country of Big Macs, guns and superstition, that they could only lose money on it.

That's my charitable interpretation, and the most likely scenario.

The uncharitable one, and the idea that fills me with fear, is that they are simply willfully ignorant, backwards people themselves. The elites, the presumably well-educated potentates who mandate what we see and hear and experience - because media is far more powerful than politics - could themselves be prey to the same regressive pettiness that the rest of us proles face. As a shameless elitist myself, I suppose I had more faith in the sinister media oligarchy.

Numbers after the jump.

Non-human persons

There's an AAAS conference coming up in San Diego, focusing on the ethical implications of dolphin intelligence. Several very interesting people will be speaking. A few of them are quoted in this article, which outlines the ongoing controversy about intelligence and animals and what it means, or should mean, to us. The abstract for the conference:

The dolphin brain has a large cerebral cortex and a substantial amount of associational neocortex. Most anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain. More important, recent research in marine science has revealed that dolphins have a remarkable degree of cognitive and affective sophistication. For example, dolphins can recognize their image in a mirror as a reflection of themselves -- a finding that indicates self-awareness similar to that seen in higher primates and elephants. These and other studies, which have found that dolphins are also capable of advanced cognitive abilities such as problem-solving, artificial language comprehension, and complex social behavior, indicate that dolphins are far more intellectually and emotionally sophisticated than previously thought. Considerable research indicates that they are significantly different from fish and other marine species, and this research has significance for commercial policy and practice. This symposium will present the scientific findings and explore their ethical and policy implications.

Fitna فِتْنَةٌ‎

Geert Wilders goes on trial today, accused of incitement and discrimination against Muslims. His film, Fitna, presents suras from the Qur'an... and scenes of atrocities committed by people inspired by them. He could be fined or jailed if convicted.

Really?

Hideous pandering and audiovisual aids after the jump.

Morally perfect

I haven't been posting that regularly. The internet's been a bit of a sterile promontory recently, and I haven't found anything to get that worked up about.


In fact, that's sort of the problem. There are a great many social things I probably should be actively involved in, fighting against, agitating for, etc. But I'm not. I have good friends who are very much invested in society and politics and injustice, but I can't even get it up for international news. There's a distinct sense of unworthiness that comes of hanging out with feminist vegans, a kind of realization that my morality perhaps doesn't extend as far as it should.

Guilt and rationalizations after the jump.

Blueshift

So, it looks like I've got a job next year. And a PhD program lined up after that. That's six years. 2016. That's the future... they'll have flying cars by then. I'll be 28.

This is ridiculous and scary and perhaps the best, most meaningful opportunity I've ever had. I've got so much work to do on myself before I can even contemplate becoming the sort of person who is knowledgeable/educated/going places/self-sufficient/in charge/responsible for things and yet it seems that I already am?

The future is here. It's rushing up at me in an alarming, delicious way. Everything is suddenly blue-shifted. And blue is my favorite color.

A curious constitution

Back at the old place of employment, with wonderful big beasties frolicking around, biting each other, doing flips and trying to mate with the pool toys.

Now it's back to a schedule, with bedtimes and alarm clocks and such. Real life, in other words. What a relief.

I am not tired. I have a curious constitution. I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.

Sherlock Holmes, from "The Sign of the Four"

The Sokal Affair

Long ago, the Sokal affair put Alan Sokal on my list of people I want to be when I grow up. Someone reminded me of him today, and I thought I'd share the wonderful. The Wiki page (linked above) is really worth reading, as is Steven Weinberg's analysis of the paper and the situation.

Sokal, a physicist and mathematician, wrote an essay in the postmodern style, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", arguing - tongue firmly planted in cheek - that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct. The paper was swallowed hook, line, and sinker by a respected humanities journal. On the day it was published, Sokal announced that it had been a hoax: in his words, "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations [he] could find about mathematics and physics" made by postmodernist academics. It was a bad day for bullshitters everywhere.

Steven Weinberg, another physicist, summarized it:

The targets of Sokal's satire occupy a broad intellectual range. There are those "postmoderns" in the humanities who like to surf through avant garde fields like quantum mechanics or chaos theory to dress up their own arguments about the fragmentary and random nature of experience. There are those sociologists, historians, and philosophers who see the laws of nature as social constructions. There are cultural critics who find the taint of sexism, racism, colonialism, militarism, or capitalism not only in the practice of scientific research but even in its conclusions. Sokal did not satirize creationists or other religious enthusiasts who in many parts of the world are the most dangerous adversaries of science, but his targets were spread widely enough, and he was attacked or praised from all sides.

I've posted about this before (see "The White Stuff"), but the anti-science squawking of the academic far left is almost as irritating, if not as dangerous, as convergent nonsense excreted by the Know-Nothing far right. Education, it seems, don't cure stupid. It merely gives you the means to elaborate on stupid for pages and pages and pages.

On that note, for the linguistically inclined, the Chomskybot is also worth playing with.

One last tidbit of wisdom from Sokal:

Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)

Alan D. Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries - Toward a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Social Text
46/47, 217-252 (1996).

Tips from Jack Keroac

Words to live by (or at least puzzle over), taken from his Belief and Technique in Modern Prose. They're really more writing tips than New Year's resolutions, but whatever. Living well and writing well require the same things. They may even be the same thing.

I'm writing now about whether thought requires language. The mind boggles. Are we alive or conscious if we don't encode our thoughts in words? Will we have been alive if these external brains of ours were to disappear? There's always wordless memory, I suppose. But that fades so quickly. Vanity demands something longer lasting.

Anyway, here they be:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in your morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Happy new decade, everyone. 

There is grandeur in this view of life

This is kind of a follow-up to a previous post in which I ranted about Meaning, and how looking for it is a waste of time. Rereading it, it comes across as slightly nihilistic, which doesn't represent my feelings about the matter at all. Or maybe it does, and I'm twisting "nihilistic" to my own purposes.

Anyway, here are two essays that seemed pertinent. The first is a lovely NYT piece on why science is actually wonderful and meaningful and fulfilling. The second is my favorite essay from Daylight Atheism on how the Enlightenment and all that rationalism stands for is responsible for most of the progress we've made as a species since then. There is incredible grandeur in this view of life. It's the view that has always seemed most natural to me, and the one, barring anything truly catastrophic, that I hope to stick to.

Avatar

I enjoyed it, but I didn't think it was that great. It was visually stunning, just beautiful. Zoe Saldana was wonderful. But the characters had no depth and limited development. There were no difficult moral dilemmas and the Noble Savage meme was really overplayed. The bad guys were irredeemably awful, the good guys were idealistic and pure-as-the-driven (and the scientists were right, godammit… I liked that part, but it did irritate me). Above all, the natives were supremely harmonic and peaceful and in balance and such. It was Pocahontas in space. The only thing I didn't quite anticipate was the ending being as treacly as it was. I didn't think Cameron was going to go there. He did. Ordinary white man goes into the woods, learns to paint with all the colors of the wind, gets the girl, out-natives the natives and then saves the world.


So, in sum: absolutely gorgeous, but ultimately a rather transparent white-guilt-redemption fantasy. I came home unsatisfied.


The internet!Right, with hilarious predictability, flips out.


Congratulations, libertarian/contrarian commentators: you are smarter than all of us. You’re wise to the hippie leftist, socialist, pinko-commie Marxist agitprop being churned out by Hollywood in their evil plot to... what was it again?


Linking this to climate change was a smooth move too. Climategate proved beyond doubt that global warming is a liberal fantasy. No truth behind it whatsoever. Even if there is, it’s just science, right? Skinny nerds in the pay of the blue elite pumping out misinformation in a desperate bid for grant money. It’s not really as bad as the pantywaist fearmongers would have us believe. Yeah, ok.


I have some questions about that after the jump.

Dogma (and to all a good night)

Merry Christmas!

I love Christmas. I really do. Lights in snowy darkness, and music and parties and a tree (a tree!) inside your house, just dripping with baubles. Oh, and presents. I love giving presents. Receiving them is nice too, but there's a very ingratiating part of my personality that makes me warm and fuzzy when someone reacts happily to something I've given them.

As secular as Christmas has become (thank goodness), it becomes impossible to escape the presence of tradition around this time of year. We take comfort in ritual as we try to assess what's going on, and how another year could have possibly passed so quickly.

At the dark end of the year, we try to sum up what's past into a coherent package and charge it with meaning. Maybe you'll use it to inform how we live the next year. Or maybe this is the sort of package you can't wait to get rid of.

More packages (and modules!) after the jump.

Sweet freedom

I'm done with finals! And I'm on the internet! On a bus!

This is magical.

No sooner said than gratified

As previously noted, I have been lusting after a rosemary bush for some time. The boy, being lovely, just got me one. It's sitting in my room, smelling wonderful, and I couldn't help decking it out with a few Christmas ornaments. Happiness.

I spent last night making 70+ cookies for a bake sale for Linguistics Society instead of studying for a class I have not attended since the midterm. The textbook is 500 pages long and denser than a fruitcake, and I've got tonight and tomorrow to get through the thing. Most of the theorists featured in the text are fruitcakes too.

So far I'm averaging 9 pages of font size 10 notes per unit. Just a few more to go, then I'll actually start reading the notes. Feh.

Notes, thoughts, and a rant after the jump. Today's special: I think "Meaning" is meaningless.

Finals week madness + sexy links

I've got my schedule for the next two days plotted out to the half hour, but it's all over on Monday. I'm shipping home an hour after my last exam ends. In tow: two computers, enough other electronic devices to keep a small army amused for decades, and an entire suitcase full of Christmas presents.

Many sexy links after the jump. Major tl;dr, but comb through and see if anything catches your eye.

Winter blooms (foliage is love)

I want growing things everywhere. I want vines climbing my walls and I want chloroplasts pumping out oxygen, the better to set things on fire. I want that fragile, green scent in the air and I want to see little buds coming out when everything outside is dead and frozen.

Picspam after the jump.