People to Watch- David Berlinski

He is the author of numerous books, including The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and It Scientific Pretensions (Crown Forum, 2008; Basic Books, 2009), Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics for the Modern Library series at Random House (2004), The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky (Harcourt, 2003), The Advent of the Algorithm (Harcourt Brace, 2000), Newton’s Gift (Free Press, 2000), and A Tour of the Calculus (Pantheon, 1996). William F. Buckley Jr. said of The Devil’s Delusion that “Berlinski’s book is everything desirable; it is idiomatic, profound, brilliantly polemical, amusing, and of course vastly learned.

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Non Muslims and Koran

Robert Wright makes an interesting point about interpretation of scriptures;

All the Abrahamic scriptures have all kinds of meanings — good and bad — and the question is which meanings will be activated and which will be inert. It all depends on what attitude believers bring to the text. So whenever we do things that influence the attitudes of believers, we shape the living meaning of their scriptures. In this sense, it’s actually within the power of non-Muslim Americans to help determine the meaning of the Koran. If we want its meaning to be as benign as possible, I recommend that we not talk about burning it. And if we want imams to fill mosques with messages of brotherly love, I recommend that we not tell them where they can and can’t build their mosques.

Of course, the street runs both ways. Muslims can influence the attitudes of Christians and Jews and hence the meanings of their texts. The less threatening that Muslims seem, the more welcoming Christians and Jews will be, and the more benign Christianity and Judaism will be. (A good first step would be to bring more Americans into contact with some of the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are in fact not threatening.)

You can even imagine a kind of virtuous circle: the less menacing each side seems, the less menacing the other side becomes — which in turn makes the first side less menacing still, and so on; the meaning of the Abrahamic scriptures would, in a real sense, get better and better and better.

-The Meaning of the Koran

Intolerance, and Inhumanity?

World Press Photos 2009 via the blog

Advice to Young Muslim

Find the right role models.

I grew up in a part of the world where George Orwell's Animal Farm was banned. It was also banned in the former Soviet Union. The Kremlin banned it because as a totalitarian regime, it did not want democratic messages to be spread within its borders. The censors in the USSR chose to go beneath the surface of the allegory, understand the message in the book and ban it accordingly. In my neck of the desert, it was banned because there was a pig on the cover. Go figure.

The Holy Qur'an was revealed in an Arabia that was alive with the richness of Jahiliya (pre-Islamic) period poetry. The miracle of the Qur'an was not only in its message, but also in the complexity of the syntax used to communicate that message. Its prose is unmatched in the history of the Arabic language. It is an absolute shame that the Qur'an continues to be held hostage by those who favour the idolatry of words over the depth of their meaning and the elasticity of the human intellect.

- Dr. Naif A. Al-Mutawa

Science Podcast of the Day

THE MEASUREMENT PROBLEM IN PHYSICS;

The most famous fruit in physics is an apple, but the most famous animal in physics is a cat. It belongs to Edwin Schrödinger, a theoretical physicist who in the early 20th century helped to develop the radical theories of Quantum Mechanics. Schrödinger’s cat does not actually exist – it is the subject of a thought experiment – in which the rules of quantum mechanics make it appear both dead and alive at the same time.

The problem of a cat that is both dead and alive illustrates the challenges of quantum physics and at the heart of this apparent absurdity is a thing called the measurement problem.

The measurement problem arises because we don’t really understand how the atoms that constitute our world behave. They are fundamentally mysterious to us, even shocking, and they defy our attempts to measure and make sense of them. Possible solutions range from the existence of multiple realities to the rather more mundane possibility of an error in our mathematics - but a solution, if found, could transform our understanding of reality.

For Debate

Corseting female sexuality

The whole article is pitched to support that old tired cliché of sexuality that 'women are complicated, men are simple' and it uses the differences in research findings to suggest women are enigmatic, complex, they don't know what they want, or are torn by competing sexual desires.

What do these enigmatic women want?;

Here, we know the score: Diamond arguing women want intimacy, Meana that they want a real man to take them, and Chivers that women want it all, even if they don’t realize it and contradict themselves.

The irony is that, with such a tangle, the conclusion is foreordained: women will seem enigmatic, inconsistent, and irremediably opaque. As I’ll suggest in this, I think that the conclusion is built into the way the question is being asked. If a similar question were asked about nearly any group, in nearly any domain of complex human behaviour, and then a simple single answer were demanded, the questioner would face nearly identical frustration.

Forgive and Forget?

Keith Olbermann's tribute to Bush

Matt Taibbi takes on Thomas Friedman

In The World is Flat, the key action scene of the book comes when Friedman experiences his pseudo-epiphany about the Flat world while talking with himself in front of InfoSys CEO Nandan Nilekani. In Hot, Flat and Crowded, the money shot comes when Friedman starts doodling on a napkin over lunch with Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine. The pre-lunching Friedman starts drawing, and the wisdom just comes pouring out:

I laid out my napkin and drew a graph showing how there seemed to be a rough correlation between the price of oil, between 1975 and 2005, and the pace of freedom in oil-producing states during those same years.

Friedman then draws his napkin-graph, and much to the pundit’s surprise, it turns out that there is almost an exact correlation between high oil prices and “unfreedom”! The graph contains two lines, one showing a rising and then descending slope of “freedom,” and one showing a descending and then rising course of oil prices.

Friedman plots exactly four points on the graph over the course of those 30 years. In 1989, as oil prices are falling, Friedman writes, “Berlin Wall Torn Down.” In 1993, again as oil prices are low, he writes, “Nigeria Privatizes First Oil Field.” 1997, oil prices still low, “Iran Calls for Dialogue of Civilizations.” Then, finally, 2005, a year of high oil prices: “Iran calls for Israel’s destruction.”Take a look for yourself: I looked at this and thought: “Gosh, what a neat trick!” Then I sat down and drew up my own graph, called SIZE OF VALERIE BERTINELLI’S ASS, 1985-2008, vs. HAP- PINESS. It turns out that there is an almost exact correlation! Note the four points on the graph:

-Flat N All That

THE ART INSTINCT

THE ART INSTINCT-Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
By Denis Dutton

Denis Dutton is the founder and editor of the hugely popular Web site Arts & Letters Daily, named by the Guardian as the best Web site in the world. He also founded and edits the journal Philosophy and Literature, and is a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

10 Moral Paradoxes

I shall argue that sometimes it is morally permissible not to be sorry when bad things happen. It is even permissible to be happy about it. But how CAN morality say this? ["On Not Being Sorry About the Morally Bad", p.59]

Saul Smilansky and Will Winkinson on Blogging Heads

10 Moral Paradoxes
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Fortunate Misfortune
2. The Paradox of Beneficial Retirement
3. Two Paradoxes About Justice and the Severity of Punishment
4. Blackmail: The Solution
5. The Paradox of Nonpunishment
6. On Not Being Sorry About the Morally Bad
7. Choice-Egalitarianism and the Paradox of the Baseline
8. Morality and Moral Worth
9. The Paradox of Moral Complaint
10. Preferring Not To Have Been Born
11. A Meta-Paradox: Are Paradoxes Bad?
12. Reflections On Moral Paradox
Postscript: The Future and Moral Paradox

Go Fug Yourself

Finding the "Ultimate Blogs": An interview with Sarah Boxer

Blogs- a book review;

We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture
compiled and edited by John Rodzvilla, with an introduction by Rebecca Blood

Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
by Lee Siegel

Republic.com 2.0
by Cass R. Sunstein

Blogwars
by David D. Perlmutter

The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
by Daniel J. Solove

We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Lawin the Internet Age
by Scott Gant

Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World
by Hugh Hewitt

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture
by Andrew Keen

Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, foreword by Tom Peters

Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture
by David Kline and Dan Burstein

Inside USA

US Agriculture


American Education

David Horowitz vs Hussein Ibish

What would an Obama loss mean?

Obama Pessimism with Glenn Loury and John McWhorter

Who would you hire- an economist or a psychologist

Charlie Rose asks some of the best macroeconomists;

'If in fact you just simply want to make a lot of money,.. would you rather have a mind that is brilliant about the economy or would you rather have a mind that is brilliant about understanding human psychology'

Related;
Bubbles, entry in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics

IT Age and narrowing of science?

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship
James A. Evans

Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print—scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse—electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.

From Russia with bombs

UN Plaza: Georgia on Our Mind-from Blogging Heads

Related;
Georgia update
A Time for ‘War,’ and Also ‘Peace’
Eyewitness: Scenes of panic in Gori
War erupts in Georgia;

As Russian gets involved in the war with Georgia, the disposition of political forces within the Kremlin itself may shift. Russia’s prime minister Vladimir Putin, who is in China, indicated that Russia would retaliate against Georgia’s aggression. Mr Medvedev may not be best pleased to start his presidency with a war in Georgia: it suggests that he may have to submit to the wishes of the hard-line military and security services. But Mr Putin has a fierce dislike of Mr Saakashvili, Georgia’s maverick president, and seems determined to replace his government.

Mr Putin may also want to deal with Georgia in good time before Russia hosts 2014 winter Olympic games in Sochi, a Black-sea resort town only few miles from the Abkhaz border. A military conflict in Georgia will also derail for a long time Georgia’s aspiration to join NATO—something that Russian finds deeply unpalatable.

The Return of History

Fukuyama and Kagan debate The Return of History and the End of Dreams at Blogging Heads

The Debate - Is Google Making us Stupid

Herb Simon, "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr

Conversation continues on Britannica Blog, The Edge

For sense on the topic listen to this podcast on EconTalk with Hal Varian

Debate of the Day

A Historian, a Lawyer, and the Heller Decision