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A recent spate of DVDs by David Attenborough's nature series on the life of the mammals brought new questions and ideas to the children's mind.
Ocho realized that nuts were seeds, which made him even more suspicious of almonds.
And Venti wanted to know whom I had to fight before being able to marry ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) _mwife_.Current Mood:  pleased |
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It occurred to me this evening (after a particularly wine-laced meal) that one of the powerful contributions of the de-coherence of cafeteria style spirituality is the way it inoculates on against having one's religious beliefs manipulated for political agendas by others.
After all, regularity of behavior leads to predictability, which forms an avenue of attack to those wishing to invade ones privacy or steal ones identity.
In short, maybe the non-sequitur structure of pick-and-choose spirituality conveys the same level of security as highly randomized pass-phrases.Current Mood:  thoughtful |
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I am still exploiting the goodness of Google books by feasting on Robert Plot's Natural History of Oxfordshire, specifically the section starting around page 112, where he goes into the arguments for interpreting fossils as stones of a unique type (lapidaris sui generis) or of objects molded by the existing shells of animals from mud, clay and "petrifying juices".
The conceptual infrastructure that is in the way of Plot's thinking for puzzling out a more appropriate interpretation of fossils is prohibitive in the extreme.- Plot thinks there is a continuity from then-observable geological processes, e.g. with respect to earth quakes (p.114, paragraph 100), to past behaviour, thereby excluding the possibility of geo-morphological processes such as mountain formation, which do lift sea beds to mountain tops. It will take Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology to rip that cobweb for good.
- Plot thinks it impossible that the Creator would ''drop the ball'' on a species, so to speak:
It if be said that possibly these Species [of shells] may be now lost, I shall leave it to the Reader to judge, whether it be likely that Providence, which took so much care to secure the Works of the Creation in Noah's Flood, should either then, or since, have been so unmindful of some Shell-Fish (and of no other Animals) as to suffer any one Species to be lost. (p.115; Plot's own emphasis)
With that infrastructure, Plot is basically sunk. Since no species can be lost (though the argument is rhetorical in the extreme), any fossil that matches no then-known species (or part thereof) is yet another argument against developing a theory more in line with present-day views of how fossilization works. Of course, the rejection of that position does not vindicate the theory of lapidaris sui generis; that only follows from Plot's strict either-or of juxtaposing these theories.
Plot is also hampered by the fact that the opposition theory, of petrified casts from shell molds is so patently bogus, since the fossils, as Plot observes correctly (p.115-116), exhibit the exterior shape of their models, but not their interior.Current Mood: thoughtful |
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In a recent post, I had discussed the stance of interactive communion with the Divine that the Pilgrims had and how that informed their stance on giving thanks. Sometimes these descriptions are very abstract and come across as over-generalizing. Historians usually counter this with going back to some source.
Since I am currently reading the Dinosaur Papers, the excerpt from Dr Robert Plot's Natural History of Oxfordshire (written in 1676; published 1705) will do very nicely. Plot was an Oxford professor and Museum keeper, and a fellow of the Royal Society--arguably one of the more learned people of his time. Nevertheless, these are not our modern day notions of scientific research and the most significant overlap is with his ability to describe well and to remember precedence.
In the History of Oxfordshire, Plot is working on classifying the stones. He divides them into those formed by man and those formed by Nature. The purpose of the stones formed by man is to delight aesthetically; the purpose of those formed by Nature (and therefore indirectly by the Divine) is to instruct man. Putting it more prosaically, Plot is actually arguing that God littered the environs of the Oxfordshire with rocks that look like tear glands and section of the human brain where the nerves attach and heart ventricles and what have you to educate man on medicinal insights. From the lack of rhetorical effort that Plot has to expend on this stance it becomes immediately obvious how commonly held and agreed upon this stance was. (Temporally, we are only 50 years after Plymouth Rock.)
it is of little surprise that in that framework, the leap from an odd bone to a then-unknown species is impossible. Thus, Plot's famous description of the femur of the megalosaurus devolves into pinning it on the giants of old (which have Old Testament support, for example). And it is when rattling over the list (almost two pages in my edition) of citations from the ancients regarding giants that it becomes clear where the scientific interests really lie.
So here we have a top rate scientific mind of his time wandering through Nature in an attempt to pick up communications from the Divine that are assumed to be surrounding them continuously. In that framework, everything is subjected to the ongoing discussion between the human and the Divine, and every non human aspect--be it inanimate or animate--is a discourse contribution. That is the level of interaction and agentiveness that the Pilgrims would have been comfortable with.Current Mood: thoughtful |
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I spent a good part of the Thanksgiving Weekend trying to puzzle out how the disparities in the world view that 21st century folk entertain and the world view of the Pilgrims cash out for the problem of gratitude.
To play fast and loose with the philosophical tradition of the linguistic turn, gratitude seems to be a ternary relationship between two agents and a situation of some sort, where the first agent is grateful for the involvement or contribution of the second agent in bringing about the situation directly or indirectly (e.g. by contributing to its preconditions).
Most people in not too terrible circumstances are not too hard pressed to identify events or situations that they are grateful for--in my friends' blogs, the continued well-being of various family members was a popular and easily understood one. It is the second agent slot, the auteur position, that gives pause.
Not to the Pilgrims of course. Standing firmly in the Calvinistic tradition, their potential for free will had already been sacrificed to the majesty of their Lord, who had pre-ordained the successful and the failed lives before the beginning of time and was merely enforcing that Divine plan on a day-by-day basis, not unlike a watch wound up winding down. (There are more sophisticated forms of this argument to take, but the basic structure appears to me to be appropriate and befitting the pilgrims' self conceptions.)
In this setting, gratitude was also not a voluntary contribution of the human being, potentially even heart-felt, that had been gifted with salvation by the Divine, but an appropriate response that was befitting the majesty of the Divinity. Just like modern taxes are not a vote of confidence or even an expression of consent in the spending patterns of the nation state governments that extract them, the gratitude of the believer was a way to bring themselves in line with the Divine plan, even if that Divine plan did precisely not contain what they had wished for or wanted. The mere fact that fasting was required before it was possible to show ones gratitude properly points in that direction.
Between that stance and the present times lies like two consecutive gaping pits the Enlightenment and the Romantic era, if nothing else. The Enlightenment eliminated the notion of the day-to-day involvement of the Divine in the actual mechanics of existence. The Romantic era replaced the cognitive approach to dogmatic validation once and for all, through borrowing from the Pietistic and the Mystical traditions, with the heart-felt justification of whatever topic happened to be under discussion.
This inverted the relationship, in that the expression of gratitude was now a fundamentally personal and emotive act of the agent, akin to a commemorative charitable donation, instead of an act of self-submission that brought the individual in realignment with the Divine plan. The liturgical pattern of self-denial and sanctification through the Divine intervention was replaced by a heightening of the individual self-experience that finds additional emotional pleasure in "counting its blessings".
At the same time, the Deistic drift (Spinoza's deus sive natura, "god or nature") eliminated any agentive power to put into the position of the auteur to whom thanks were due, or even possible. To be thankful to Nature for a forest in spring bloom becomes more an expression of a lack of appreciation for how inevitable the physics and chemistry of plant growth are than an expression of cutting-edge, modernist piety.
This Romantic tacking runs fully aground on the criticisms of underlying conceptualization of the idea of God, as expressed by Kant, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and continued, though with very different emphasis, in the writings of Dawkins and other evolutionary atheists. The Calvinistic conception of the (almost orientally) despotic God as the Supreme Ruler of the Universe (in all-caps) is a useful device to ward off alternate claims, typically from nation states, to ultimate rulership--be it by the 17th century absolute monarchs or the 20th century fascistic states in Europe. With their God, the pilgrims could at least be certain that the Godhead actually cared about them (even if through the indirection of its Majesty). But in the modern democratic polity, which does not permit such forms of despotism from anyone, the construction appears bizarre and unhelpful.
Which leaves the whole setup vulnerable to the problem of theodicy. It is only the maximally involved Godhead that can demand gratitude for the absence of deeds that would have seemed exceedingly desirable to the potential beneficiaries. It is only the Divine master plan that can justify the absence of intervention in a situation where the suffering of the world is plastered across every news website. (How successfully the demand and or the justification are received coram publico remains a separate issue.)
Thus, the 21st century person finds themselves stuck with the dilemma of either lacking a recipient for their heartfelt gratitude for the acceptable aspects of their life, or lacking a moral justification for why what they are grateful for is all that their Godhead could muster.Current Mood: thoughtful |
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These days it is really difficult to find the time to keep any social interactions going, even such straight forward ones as posting to ones blogs and friend sites.
If this were the beginning of the year, I would make a New Year Resolution to post more regularly. I will also aspire to read more regularly what you all have to say--sorry for being a curmudgeon on that end too.
Nov. 30th, 2009 @ 09:58 pm
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| » true similes |
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My daughter's kindergarten class was learning about similes, so they made posters and hung them across from the library in their school in the hallway. Since the posters are anonymous, I can present my three favourite similes without any appearance of bias.
- My plant stem is as brown as a bear walking into a purple forest.
- My plant is as soft as a dead bear rug at a home.
- My plant is as purple as a bird flying for its baby bird to get its food.
Oct. 14th, 2009 @ 11:33 pm
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| » just the facts please |
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The NY Times Magazine, last week, ran an article enticingly entitled The Holy Grail of the Unconscious, about a soon-to-be-revealed book apparently authored by C.G. Jung himself. The article caused excitement among the C.G. Jung acolytes, leading to interesting letters in this weeks edition.
Karin Barnaby of Sea Cliff, New York, writes:
Jung himself had no illusions about the reception of his work and keenly felt his isolation in the face of his contemporaries' incomprehension and rejection, but this does not alter the hard facts of is discoveries. Those who are expecting the promised hard facts, however, are severely disappointed by the following:
The facts are these: Every human impulse, feeling, thought or action, for good or ill, originates in the unconscious human psyche. Even minus the "for good or ill", in my book, that's the deductive formulation of what presumably started out as an abductive postulate--or, more supportively, an insight. I would call this a premise, a background assumption or an axiom of Jung's theory. To be honest, it is not even clear to me how Jung could ever roll things so that this would be a hard fact. Compare this to the sentence: Every human blood cell originates in the bone marrow. I wonder whether any medical professional would be willing to treat this sentence as a fact. Current best hypothesis, for sure; maybe they would also secretly admit that they dont really mean hard universal quantification. Still, at least one can conceive of experiments that might support this, e.g. separating out the marrow into some solution and then showing that erythropoiesis continues, etc. Blood cells at least can be delineated (at our level of resolution), counted/estimated, etc.
I would be surprised to hear a claim that one could successfully delineate thoughts and feelings; I understood one of the key points of Arthur C Danto's Analytical Philosophy of History to be that actions can only be interpreted within the frame work of meaning that the executors give them, but do not by themselves reveal beginning and end or similar sub-structures and demarcation.
To be honest, I would be hard-pressed to accept This action X originated in this entity Y. as a statement of fact. regardless of whether Y was the unconscious or the kidney.
PS: Not surprisingly, Ms Barnaby's sermon ends with an exhortation: Jung understood the implications of the unconscious psyche's pivotal role .... It is time that we all did. More likely it is time we all brush up on argumentation theory. Or Charles Sanders Pierce.
Oct. 5th, 2009 @ 11:33 pm
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| » my goodness |
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Has it really been four weeks already? Time flies when you dont have any.
I am now mostly on facebook these days, in sort of the same way a Green party person might vote for Barack Obama. The main thing is the friend coverage; less of the people that I know have LJ accounts than the other way around.
I still check by and read occasionally, but I dont get around to posting here as much anymore.
Sep. 28th, 2009 @ 08:53 pm
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| » no worries about the earth quake |
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For those of you aware of the fact that my family is currently vacationing in Japan, rest assured: we missed the stronger one completely, because we were in the northern part of the island, and this morning's was too weak to even wake up the kids. It reminded us of the gentle rocking motion of the cruise ship we went on in May; altogether, a not unpleasant experience.
Aug. 10th, 2009 @ 05:22 pm
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| » four more days to Japan |
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Jul. 26th, 2009 @ 09:43 pm
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| » cable modems cache MAC addresses |
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This was the simple cause behind our Internet connectivity problems. bbz was the first to suspect it, and it sure took me a long time to figure out what that implied. But now I know, and we can get online whenever we want and on whatever hardware we desire.
The pathetic tech support of the provider is getting an earful for this one, though.
Jul. 20th, 2009 @ 02:18 pm
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| » Iran and the Old Testament |
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Recently, my friend InferenceArchitect brought to my attention the analysis of STRATFOR that argues that none of the clerics in Iran are interested in getting to a democratic Iran, but that it is a power hustle where each side is willing (or not) to accept the democratic aspirations of the Iranian middle class as a token of support. Fundamentally, no side wants a democracy; they are merely jockeying for position in their inner sanctuary power play. The outcomes may not differ that much for the individuals now getting bloodied or tear-gassed on the streets--neither side's victory is going to help them.
There is an important lesson here: The tools that political in-fighters will draw upon need not have the meanings for the organizers that they have for the participants.
One particular case in point, and a key one for the Western world, is the Old Testament. To get this out of the way up front, I am indeed personally excited about every person who accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour. But please, do not conclude from this that the Old Testament was written for you! Treat it rather as one of these chips in the power struggle between elites, neither of whom had a real change of the status quo in mind but was merely jockeying for the advantage to saw off the (almost indistinguishable, to the outsider) opposition and thereby improve their own position.
Just like the Iranian clerics who attack Ahmadenijad are not really in support of a Democratic Iran, so the Old Testament is not trying to provide the foundation information for a personal savior, but is primarily concerned with dissing the economic elite that remained behind in the heartland of what we now call Israel, while supporting the view of the newly returned elite from Babylon, Esra and Nehemia. (Hence the heavy emphasis on marrying the right girl.) Surely not all the texts that Nehemia and his pals were redacting were authored with that view in mind, but you can bet your bottom dollar that no thing that obviously stood in contrast to their interests made it through the final redactive effort.
The sad truth, to the people of Iran is, that, these protests and demonstrations for democracy, are fundamentally not about those protesting--they are in their reception about the clerics who jockey for position. In the same vein, the Old Testament is not about the required background information for accepting anyone's personal savior. A harsh word in the 21st century, but: the OT is not about you either.
The key difference is that, at the very latest, with the advent of Alexander the Great, the petty Jerusalemite squabbles made no difference one way or the other. (Just as if Israel would blast the Iranian nuclear testing program out of existence.) This irrelevance with respect to real politics freed the texts up to be about something else, about problems other than the petty haggling between two groups of elite that were going to live off of the fellahs one way or the other and could not reach consensus on whom to call their overlord. Thus historically liberated, the texts were freed up to be about grander schemes and designs, initially nationalistic, but eventually world wide.
Which is the exciting thing about Iran. It could still become a struggle about democracy, if it became clear that it could no longer be about the Iranian revolutionary elites at all.
Jul. 12th, 2009 @ 01:40 am
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| » cable modem still not working |
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Someone suggested I should give the computers a static IP address, in case the DHCP is not working properly, but that did not help either. I am getting very frustrated with the setup, it is one of the biggest flies in the ointment of living here.
Jul. 6th, 2009 @ 10:00 pm
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| » ask Dr LJ: cable modem problems |
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The new place comes with cable modem and I am having setup issues.
Altogether, we have four laptops, two of which run WinXP, SP2/3; one runs Ubuntu Linux 8, the other Ubuntu Linux 9. When I plug the modem's ethernet cable into the Ubuntu 8, I get an IP address assigned, valid DNS numbers, and the world is hunky dory. (Which is how I am blogging right now.)
When I plug in the WinXPs or the Ubuntu 9, they wait forever to get an IP address assigned and eventually time out.
The provider is Grande Communications and comes with the "warm" part of this place, so switching is not the most interesting option. Their tech support helpfully pointed out that since the Ubuntu 8 was working fine, the problem had to be on our end, not theirs. (What is this word "support" that you keep using???)
I poked around in the connection settings and tried to provide the DNS information from the valid connection. I suppose I could try to hard-code the IP address that the Ubuntu 8 got in the other cases, but that seems like a retarded way to go about the matter.
Any and all suggestions are welcome.
Jul. 5th, 2009 @ 10:43 am
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| » room for thought |
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This editorial by Nicholas Kristoff on keeping IQ scores high through summer reading in the NY Times, when recommended on facebook, led to some more research into the connection between reading and IQ on the one side and soul-searching about the restrained format of facebook to lead scientifically underpinned discussions on the other side.
Though Kristoff does not say so in that particular column, his underlying research is by Richard Nisbett, as becomes clear from this blog entry. Interestingly, the fact that I re-recognized the research mention tricked me into thinking that I now had two independent verifications of its validity, when it was in fact the same root--namely Kristoff.
As the wisest of the Mystics in The Dark Crystal points out, the story runs deeper. Research cited in the comment to the blog quoted above points out that the genetic component to IQ is sufficiently strong that adopted children can exceed the IQ of their adoptive parents. In addition, a reading specialist blogs about the fact that while the summer break can cause children to fall behind on their reading skills, this does not co-vary with their IQ.
So it might well be that Nisbett and Kristoff have a point, but not a point that is best made arguing via IQ.
Which brings me to the second observation that the size of the entry boxes in Facebook are fundamentally unsuited for doing these kinds of discussions. In addition, the inability for the comments to split up into threads is problematic, because all of the above issues would deserve more consideration in and of themselves.
Annoyingly, this means that I now have to choose between two tools when wanting to discuss these classes of problems with my friends: Facebook for the initial noting (most of my friends are there), and LJ if the matter deserves more and deeper discussion and consideration.
As if my life was not complicated enough.
Jul. 5th, 2009 @ 10:26 am
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| » last night in the current abode |
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A year ago we moved into this town home, and tonight is the last night of sleeping here. This produces feelings of pensiveness.
Each of the family experienced this town home in a very different way. The children liked the proximity of the parental bedroom, the pool across the street and the bus stops on the other side of the apartment entrance. They liked the close-by school playground and how quickly we could get to the Mueller development, which most recently was our favorite place to go.
_mwife_ who found the place, was initially very excited but quickly tired of the place, regretting our leaving the larger duplex we had been renting since before having the children. She hated the little kitchen, she hated the lack of room for putting out all the stuff, and she was upset when the rental office reversed themselves and had us remove our bicycles (which we had kept chained to the fence).
I can go either way on this issue. I thought the place was reasonably nice, and though I did not have enough access to my books, there was enough other infrastructure to keep me happy and occupied for the little spare time that I had. I would have preferred a less noisy environs, and sleeping right next to the gate has its own problems, esp. on weekends and holidays. But I still like the division of the space, and the wooden floors, and the high ceiling in the living room, with the large windows. And I am especially happy that no one fell down the staircase.
Jun. 25th, 2009 @ 10:04 pm
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| » the compelling analogy |
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My favorite quote from this article is:In their minds and souls, as in their blogs and chat rooms, they [i.e. the Iranian young people, RCK] were wired to the globalized world, and yet in their growing bodies and narrowing social restrictions trapped inside an Islamic version of Calvinist Geneva.
Jun. 23rd, 2009 @ 10:51 pm
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| » representational caching and underspecification |
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For most of the stuff that I work with in my historiographical research, a Davidsonian style of knowledge representation is really most appropriate. The backbone of historiography is after all the chronology, so an event centric representation makes all sorts of sense.
However, there is in historiography also the continuous problem of lack of information. For example, for most of the farmers that are covered by the polyptique of St Germain de Prés, we have no idea when they started or stopped being sattled with the taxes and dues that are enumerated there. All we know is that they had dues to fulfil. Thus, it makes sense to turn specific configurations of relations on the events into relations between the end points and represent these. An example would be a binary relationship that relates a farmer to the abbey to which he has feudal obligations in terms of dues and services.
Except, sometimes we do not even know all of the arguments of such a binary representation. And then we opt for turning it into a unary property of the entity about which we have the information--the surviving argument position, so to speak--itself. Thus, we might declare the abbey to be a feudal institution, which means that the abbey had allods that others farmed and for which dues and taxes were levied--even if we may know nothing about the individuals who complied with these requirements. Or conversely, we might only know that a specific farmer paid taxes to someone, though we do not know to whom.
In terms of uniformity of the rules we want to write to target such vocabulary, it would be nice if there was an efficient way for the more detailed representations, the Davidsonian event forms, to project into the (interesting) relational forms, which in turn project into unary predicates. Then the inference could be executed at whichever representation the particular historical datum clocked in at.
So far so good. Two tricks remain to be accomplished.- The first would be to get the inference engine to understand this hierarchy of specificity, where the unary level is almost like a precondition for the low n-ary relational level; while that level in turn is like a summary of the rich event level description. Because then the inference engine could use the most impoverished level of description to quickly prune those parts of the search space for which the rich representations will not exist either. How to communicate that heuristic to the inference engine is not obvious to me at this point in time.
The second part is to make sure that, once the inference has run to completion at whatever level of the representation, the results are projected back down to the richest representation possible.
Jun. 23rd, 2009 @ 09:51 pm
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| » sold on ubuntu |
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My old laptop's hard drive developed an error right in the middle of some cluster of the registry hive. So I went down to the discount electronics place and they swapped me in a new 2.5" drive and gave me a UBS cover to get the old data off.
Because the new hard drive is 2.5 times as large, I decided to go with dual boot and installed ubuntu on it from a live CD that our sys admin gave me (thanks again!). Everything installed flawlessly, except for the Broadcom 43x driver, which comes only as Win32 but contains proprietary firmware that the card must have. Not a problem; the Linux wireless folks have written a "firmware cutter", a piece of software that goes into the Win32 driver, sucks out the necessary bits, then turns them into a Linux usable piece of code.
Rock on, I was up and running fine in under an hour. I still need to install Win32, but I am going to stall on that for right now until I really need it. The VNC viewer for one is just as fine as the WinXP version of TightVNC was.
Jun. 22nd, 2009 @ 10:10 pm
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