Don’t let the sorry state of our political discourse get you down. Head over to Luboš’s blog for a fair and balanced review of an important piece of world literature (my GR book).
I don’t know if Luboš can keep up the pace of posting, but he deserves an entry on the blogroll. (Who says I can’t be bought?) Other worthy new additions: 3quarksdaily, Trish Wilson, and BlogBites.
Escape from the negativity Read More »
Why blog about Godzilla when the country (and by extension the world) is being destroyed by a cabal of faith-based nutjobs? Because I feel myself in weird sympathy with the Bushies — reality is just too depressing. For comments from folks with stronger constitutions, see Majikthise, Matthew Yglesias, Matt McIrvin, Michael Bérubé, Chris C Mooney, or best of all Cosma Shalizi.
Reality-Based Communitarians Read More »
And here I thought it was just me who thought about the scientific issues raised by Godzilla. No, there are a bunch of people interested in this and all other sorts of Godzilla issues; they’re getting together this week to exchange ideas.
The University of Kansas plans to pay homage to the giant lizard later this month, organizing a three-day scholarly conference for the 50th anniversary of his first film.
It’s not just about celebrating campy creature features. Planners want to provoke discussion of globalization, Japanese pop culture and Japanese-American relations after World War II.
[…]
The movie – in which H-bomb testing disturbs Godzilla’s undersea habitat and transforms him into a behemoth with fiery, radioactive breath – reflects anxiety and a feeling of helplessness in the face of a nuclear threat, Igarashi said.
The franchise was widely known for its campy special effects. Godzilla films featured men in dinosaur suits stomping around miniature urban landscapes and some monster battles that, Tsutsui acknowledged in his book, seem more like professional wrestling matches.
When an American version of the first film was released in 1956 – re-edited to include new scenes featuring Raymond Burr of “Perry Mason” fame – the New York Times dismissed it as “cheap cinematic horror-stuff.”
“It is true there were some bad, bad films produced, particularly in the late ’60s and early ’70s,” said Igarashi, who plans to lecture at the conference on the 1964 movie “Godzilla vs. the Thing,” in which Godzilla battles the giant moth, Mothra, and its offspring.
I don’t know why I wasn’t invited to the conference. Maybe the organizers thought I was already traveling too much.
Ahead of the curve Read More »
Wikipedia is a free web-based encyclopedia, constructed entirely out of contributions from folks out there on the internets. A nice idea, but obviously you need some mechanisms for quality control, not to mention resolving disputes over how to present certain material. Consequently, there is a long list of entries that are currently in “NPOV Dispute,” for “Neutral Point of View.” Leaving aside the issue of whether such a thing is philosophically possible, it is extremely illuminating to have a look at the topics currently under dispute — it’s a reflection of what issues are currently regarded as controversial in the world.
This is a partial list, but you get the idea. Mostly the standard stuff — religion, sex, Wal-Mart, the Middle East, wars just about anywhere. But there are a few surprises — Henry James? Catherine Zeta-Jones? Loop quantum gravity? Okay, that last one makes sense. (Especially for readers of Luboš Motl‘s new blog.)
Sorry for the big picture file, but it’s worth it.
Globular clusters are bound systems of very old stars, orbiting around (and often passing through) the main disk of our galaxy. The variable stars in the above image are RR Lyrae variables, single stars that pulsate with periods of about half a day. This is a highly sped-up view, compressing images taken over the course of a single night into a few seconds. Fun to look at, but also a sign of the times: astronomers are increasingly using modern technology to extend wide-field imaging from static images into the time domain.
If you like the twinkling stars, check out movies of motions in the center of our galaxy, showing stars moving rapidly around a heavy, invisible mass — in fact, a million-solar-mass black hole.
I’ve often thought, looking around my neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side, that there must be some obscure city ordinance that force people to move out once they either hit the age of 40 or have kids. I found a way to quantify just how tightly bunched the local demographics of my neighborhood really are: City-Data.com gives you the raw data about the composition of anywhere in the U.S., and some fascinating graphical representations of who lives there.
So I studied my personal history as told through the demographics of the zip codes in which I lived (somewhat streamlined for dramatic purposes). You can’t really choose where you are born, and I grew up in the depths of the Philadelphia suburbs, in 19067. Here is a graph of the number of people in the zip code as a function of their age; black for males, magenta for females (hey, I don’t pick the color schemes).
Next it was on to college at Villanova, in the scenic zip of 19085.
Then to grad school at Harvard and the celebrated destination of 02138, where they used to sell T-shirts proudly proclaiming it as “The Most Opinionated Zip Code in America.”
After graduating, I took the easy way out and stayed in Cambridge for my first postdoc at MIT. But with my spiffy new postdoctoral salary I could move across the river to the South End in Boston, landing in 02116.
But alas, the academic wheel of fortune turns in mysterious ways, and my next stop was at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. As I hoped to be spirited away by an attractive faculty offer at any moment, I chose not to bother to find a place in SB proper but rather live in Isla Vista, 93117.
Finally I was spirited away to the Windy City, where I live in the Lakeview section of Chicago, 60613.
Worldline demographics Read More »
Jacques Derrida, French philosopher and originator of deconstruction, passed away this Friday. Obituaries at the Guardian and the New York Times; blog posts by Michael Bérubé and Jack Balkin and Brian Leiter; comments at Crooked Timber; a nice encyclopedia article. A quick perusal is enough to give an impression of how controversial Derrida was!
Derrida is one of those intellectual figures who is arguably more important as a symbol than for his actual work. In Derrida’s case, in the minds of many people he has come to represent a perspective that is deeply anti-intellectual, or at least anti-Enlightenment and anti-rationality. This is a completely misguided impression, but a persistent one nonetheless. Derrida enjoyed the project of undermining conventional Western metaphysics, emphasizing gaps and contradictions in the writings of major players of the philosophical tradition. More significantly (for the critics), he also enjoyed playful and elliptical language, especially in his own writings, although he could be quite straightforward in speech.
I am by no means an expert on Derrida’s work, although I have read a couple of things and can vouch that he was not nearly as impenetrable as his reputation suggests. I couldn’t tell you whether deconstruction will end up being counted as a productive moment in the history of philosophy, but the simple caricatures of his enemies tend to make me sympathetic to Derrida’s side of the controversies. I take Derrida to be interested in highlighting the weak points and inconsistencies in grand meta-narrative systems. The question would be, do we do no more than delight in the failings of the system-builders, or do we try to nurture what remains valid, reconstructing after deconstructing? Derrida’s critics would argue that he is nothing but a nihilist, while he prefers to place himself squarely in the Enlightenment tradition of questioning authority and dispelling mysteries. Consistent with this stance, his later writings and activities had become increasingly political; a recent book describes interviews with Derrida and Jurgen Habermas over the significance of the September 11th attacks.
You might think that scientists, who take a noisy pride in the self-critical techniques of their own disciplines, would be sympathetic to the search for weak points in philosophical theories, even if those theories were implicitly subscribed to by the scientists themselves. Okay, maybe you wouldn’t; scientists have never been excessively fond of criticism from non-scientists. Derrida rarely addressed science directly (although his brother Bernard is a well-known condensed matter physicist), but his status as a symbol of anti-reason drew substantial attention from defenders of objective truth. A famous example was of course the Sokal affair, in which physicist Alan Sokal parodied postmodern jargon in an article he managed to get published in the journal Social Text. Just like it’s more fun to attack the wingnuts at Little Green Footballs than it is to attack more respectable conservative thinkers, the critics would gleefully (and correctly) highlight the most ridiculous statements of self-described postmodernists, without bothering to engage carefully with the better thinkers on their own terms.
Time will tell what Derrida’s legacy ultimately becomes. Deconstruction was a technique rather than a system, but not everyone needs to build a system. My guess is that, two hundred years from now, some of Derrida’s writings will be ignored as misguided or silly, while some basic insights of deconstruction will be acknowledged as useful tools for probing the limitations of ideas. And everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about.
Update: Have to include a small joke that Ed Cohn noticed in the BBC obituary:
He was so influential that last year a film was made about his life – a biographical documentary.
At one point, wandering through Derrida’s library, one of the filmmakers asks him: “Have you read all the books in here?”
“No,” he replies impishly, “only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully”.
By Joseph Brodsky. Translated from Russian by the author.
I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages,
carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters,
lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis,
dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles.
From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly
width. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.
Quit the country the bore and nursed me.
Those who forgot me would make a city.
I have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles,
worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter,
planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables,
guzzled everything save dry water.
I’ve admitted the sentries’ third eye into my wet and foul
dreams. Munched the bread of exile; it’s stale and warty.
Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl;
switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.
What should I say about my life? That it’s long and abhors transparence.
Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit.
Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx,
only gratitude will be gushing from it.
I can’t even resist the ordinary greasy Philly cheesesteaks, going so far as to search out good ones here in Chicago. (Clark Street Dog does an acceptable job.) Now they’ve gone upscale.
Served with a small bottle of champagne, Barclay Prime’s cheesesteak is made of sliced Kobe beef, melted Taleggio cheese, shaved truffles, sauteed foie gras, caramelized onions and heirloom shaved tomatoes on a homemade brioche roll brushed with truffle butter and squirted with homemade mustard.
Perfectly calibrated, in other words, to appeal all at once to both the shameless hedonist side and the scruffy Philadelphian within me. (Although they should skip the mustard and go with gourmet ketchup instead.) Hmm, I’m visiting Penn next week to give a colloquium; think they’ll spring for dinner?
I would totally pay for that Read More »
… as a role model for British youth. But Hawking didn’t take first prize; he lost out to rugby hero Johnny Wilkinson. What all this means, I have no idea.
Hawking bests Beckham Read More »