September 2009
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What is it like to be a bat? →
A classic, relatively short paper by Thomas Nagel. I’ve searched before, but couldn’t find it online until now.
Nagel argues that the essential feature of consciousness is that there is something it’s like to be conscious. A bat is conscious, so there’s something it’s like for a bat to be a bat. Bats are sufficiently similar to humans that we can be pretty sure...
The Luminist →
In researching my Crewdson review, I found this profile of Jeff Wall in the NY Times Magazine. It’s long, but interesting, and touches on a lot.
Some of Wall’s recent productions are even more extreme than Crewdson’s. For one picture, he had the entire facade of a nightclub reconstructed down to the smallest detail, because he couldn’t get a clean shot of the original....
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Crewdson, Beneath the Roses
(This post contains lots and lots of images, so you’d be missing out if you read it in the Tumblr dashboard or in RSS or something. Some of those images contain nudity — this is art we’re talking about. And it is long, but again, lots of pretty pictures.)
Gregory Crewdson might not need an introduction, and if he does, I’ve written about him before. In short, he makes...
Oklo: Natural Nuclear Reactors →
In the Oklo mine in Gabon, West Africa, nature beat physicists by 1.7 billion years. That’s how long ago a natural nuclear reactor started splitting atoms. It’s believed that ground water cooled down the neutrons in the uranium-rich mineral deposit, allowing them to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. The heat from the reaction boiled the water, slowing down the reaction until the water...
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The Etymological Fallacy is the error of assuming that the current meaning of a word is necessarily related to its original meaning. Often, it occurs when there’s an argument about the meaning of a word, and someone drags forth the original meaning of the word to settle the matter.
Fun example: the word silly. Here is the progression of the word, originally gesælig in Old English, courtesy...
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“Some lose all mind and become soul, insane. Some lose all soul and become mind,...”
– Charles Bukowski.
Metaethics, a relatively short intro
(This post contains jargon, which I’ve tried to explain as we go along, but it can probably be safely ignored if you don’t understand it. Everything important is explained in plain text. Metaethics is the study of what we mean when we discuss morality, the nature of moral facts and properties, and how we come to know them. It’s a topic I’ve been interested in for a long...
More hits than you can shake a stick at →
These are some of my archived treasures; the entire list, in fact. It’s not everything, but it’s what I found on a stroll through my own archives. I’m thinking I’ll update it every once in a while and let you know, but not so often that it becomes “me, me, meeeee!” Like before, I encourage everyone to do something similar, for their own sake and for their...
“It’s a common misperception that for some reason we should be telling stories...”
– Stephen Elliott.
Covering treasure in piles of new treasure
A while ago, Cursive Buildings wrote:
Creating a good blog is like writing a good book that no one reads past the first page. creating a good blog is like hiding your treasure under piles of new treasure. creating a bad blog is like burying your trash under piles of new trash.
Today, this article has been making the rounds, and it advises us:
It’s time we create meaningful indexes and put our...
Stockholm cash depot hit by helicopter heist →
I sense a heist movie waiting to be filmed: robbers landed a helicopter on the roof of a cash depot just outside Stockholm early this morning, blew their way into the vault and got away. The helicopter was found outside Stockholm a few hours later. Speculation has it that the vault could have housed one billion Swedish kronor (about $145 million).
Interview with Rebecca Solnit →
Apolitical is a political position, yes, and a dreary one. The choice by a lot of young writers to hide out among dinky, dainty, and even trivial topics—I see it as, at its best, an attempt by young white guys to be anti-hegemonic, unimposing. It relinquishes power—but it also relinquishes the possibility of being engaged with the really interesting and urgent affairs of our time, at least as a...
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In Quechua, a language of South America, the future is behind us and the past in front of us. And it makes perfect sense: we can see (remember) the past, but not the future. Having a long life behind you means you’re young, while in English it would mean you’re old.
How we break up semantic space — the (imaginary) space of all things that could or do exist, everything that could...
Mock us gently
Plato famously imagined utopia to be ruled by philosopher-kings. Though he was democratically elected, Antanas Mockus — who served two terms (1995-96 and 2001-03) as mayor of Bogotá, capital of Colombia — is a professor of philosophy and mathematics. Bogotá in Mockus’s hands didn’t turn into Plato’s fabled Kallipolis, but it did lead to a number of interesting...
“One cannot fight solitude, one must make a friend of it.”
– Maurizio Montalbini. He would know:
In 1987 he claimed his first world record after spending 210 days alone in a cave in the Apennine mountains…
Montalbini broke his solo cave-sitting record in 1993 by living a year and one day in an underground base built to study the reactions of...
“In 2001, I started graduate school at the University of Florida, and in 2002, I...”
– The (unintentionally?) subtle Ethan Siegel. (via reddit)
The Bloodbath
When I was in second grade, we had a very outdoorsy teacher who loved to take us on day trips into the forest (didn’t everyone?). One particular trip, we were all playing hide and seek. I was hiding near the top of a hill when I thought I heard someone come my way, so I scrambled down the hill, zigzagging between stones and trees. The hill was quite steep. At one point, I made a jump. Bad...
If one feels one could live without writing, then... →
Maybe you’ve already read Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters to a young poet, written in the beginning of the 1900s. Some of them, I think, are dense and full of ideas that hang too loosely together to be useful. But they also contain wisdom. Maybe it isn’t strange that I find it hard to understand what he’s trying to tell the young poet, given his own views about...
Taiping Rebellion →
I can’t compete with Best of Wikipedia, but I do occasionally stumble over pages that make me wonder how the hell I didn’t know about this already. Like this:
The Taiping Rebellion was a large-scale revolt in China from 1850 to 1864, during the Qing Dynasty, by an army led by heterodox Christian convert Hong Xiuquan. He established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, namely Heavenly Kingdom...
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18th Century and Regency Thieves Cant →
Jack-sprat! Dandyprat! Ben! High-shoon! Rum-ned! Gundiguts! Damme-boy! Rum-cull, oaf of a hen-peckt-frigot! Lolpoop! Shamble-leggd colt-bowler! Captain Queernabs! Groper lord! Stall-whimper titter-totter! Wooly-crown wise man of Gotham! Lockeram-jawed bully-fop! Bundle-tail! Queere-doxy! Fussock! Gill-flurt! Trigry-mate!
Those are all more or less insulting characteristics put together from the...
“Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set...”
– Seneca.
False Power
I’ve only written one post about the Norwegian elections this year. I think I’m allowed one more.
Election day was yesterday. I voted Liberal, and the election was disastrous for the Liberal Party. The Liberals’ leader of many years, who almost single-handedly brought the party — the oldest political party in Norway — back out of obscurity, resigned on live tv. They...
“If you die after selling between 250 million and 700 million records you’ll be...”
– Cynical-C on Norman Borlaug. He was the most admirable man I knew of. (via)
“Your uncle shot himself in the face because of a dead bird. Your uncle found it...”
– Scientific Fact #22: There Are No Reasons To Be Unhappy.
“Being gifted at abstraction and prone to recursion, his mind ran hot” — I like that.
“Basically, quantum mechanics is the operating system that other physical...”
– Scott Aaronson.
“There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such...”
– The eminently quotable Murakami — the first sentence of Hear the Wind Sing.
“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down...”
– Andrew S. Tanenbaum.
Rivaling the 400-page grammar of the Halling dialect of Norwegian (I don’t even speak that dialect, I picked the book up on a whim) in nerdiness, there’s a third edition Operating Systems Design and Implementation on my bookshelf. It turned out to be a bit above my...
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The Gettier Problem →
Consider this: what is knowledge? That’s one of the most fundamental questions in philosophy. Philosophers can and have argued about it for millennia. There are a few things that are generally agreed upon, though: first, knowledge must be true. You can’t know something false. You can’t know the moon is made of cheese; you can believe it, but it’s not knowledge. So knowledge...
In the category of smug, self-important morally concerned besserwissers, the amateur-psychologist linguist is one of the worst — well, probably not, but it’s one of the types I dislike the most, since they’re generally pontificating on stuff that I care about. This is the kind of person who brings unsupported amateur psychology to bear on the way people speak, in the process...
2002 Mecca girls' school fire →
On March 11, 2002 a fire at a girls’ school in Mecca, Saudi Arabia killed at least fourteen students. The event was especially notable due to complaints that Saudi Arabia’s “religious police” (aka the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice) stopped schoolgirls from leaving the burning building and hindered rescue workers because they were not...