headline of the day
Eight million gallons of water drained from reservoir after man urinates in it
The Coping Cop-out of Machines of Loving Grace
Throughout the AWOBMLG trilogy, Adam Curtis effectively shows how certain memes inform economic, social & political change in the world & in the third monkey in the machine <> machine in the monkey episode he addresses the mother of all memes: the selfish gene, as put forward by Hamilton > Price > Dawkins. And in the process Curtis manages to artfully wrangle & weave in disparate & seemingly unrelated topics (like HIV, hippies, PS2, gorillas, London’s homeless, disco-dancing & conflict in the Congo), but doesn’t touch the one topic I would’ve liked to see addressed: interspecies altruism & how to explain it genetically. I’m not talking about the classic examples of reciprocal altruism (ox-pecker<>buffalo or remora<>shark) but for example dolphins saving humans from sharks or why this orangutan seemingly has an interest in reviving this little bird, or why we humans, unlike the honey badger, even give a shit.
At first these final lines of episode 3 were a let-down, a cop-out that left me hanging (for perhaps the same reason that Deron couldn’t get past the premise):
… But Hamilton’s ideas remain powerfully influential in our society. Above all, the idea that human beings are helpless chunks of hardware controlled by software programs written in their genetic code. The question is, have we embraced that idea because it is a comfort in a world where everything we do, either good or bad, seems to have terrible unforeseen consequences? We know that it was our actions that helped cause the horror still unfolding in the Congo. Yet we have not idea what to do about it. So instead we have embraced a fatalistic philosophy of us as helpless computing machines to both excuse and explain our political failure to change the world.
But now, waking up the next morning, I can’t stop thinking about it & I’m wondering if it bothered me because it’s true & I just don’t want to accept it?
Up in the redwoods
from the comments
There is, or was once, a 45-rpm record I had, or maybe Mom still has, or maybe it is lost, they recorded on red plastic, the label cream-colored. On one side, “‘Til the Last Leaf Shall Fall from the Tree.” On the flip side, “His Hand.” Written by the pianist pictured here. I remember her first name was Judith, I don’t remember her whole name. We had (I can’t believe Mom doesn’t still have the copy) a piece of sheet-music with her picture on the front. I could almost sing it here. I might not remember tonight, but it is in my head, in my heart.
tweet of the day
“It’s still a good day”
is what my friend Steve said.
He was looking for the first day of summer and for when the full moon was going to happen next week, and he discovered that today is a good day to castrate animals, according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac Astrological Timetable.
Ken Block promotes a video game I never heard of, but I don’t know much about video games, I just like awesome feats of driving and tilt-shift mind games
This is pretty awesome. Ken Block + stunt driving + tilt-shift.
bronze age brain surgery
At Ikiztepe, a small settlement near the Black Sea occupied from 3200 to 1700 B.C., archaeologist Önder Bilgi of Istanbul University has uncovered five skulls with clean, rectangular incisions that are evidence for trepanation, or basic cranial surgery. The procedure may have been performed to treat hemorrhages, brain cancer, head trauma, or mental illness. Last August Bilgi also unearthed a pair of razor-sharp volcanic glass blades that he believes were used to make the careful cuts.
The image at the link is interesting as well.
(via marginal revolution)
headline of the day
Three bystanders injured at Western shootout in South Dakota
Clarence Clemons, 1942 — 2011
Clarence Clemons died yesterday. The E Street Band was really important to me growing up. I was sorry to hear the news.
Mr. Clemons’s first encounter with Mr. Springsteen has become E Street Band lore. In most tellings, a lightning storm was rolling through Asbury Park one night in 1971 while Mr. Springsteen was playing a gig there. As Mr. Clemons entered the bar, the wind blew the door off its hinges, and Mr. Springsteen was startled by the towering shadow at the door. Then Mr. Clemons invited himself onstage to play along, and they clicked.
“I swear I will never forget that moment,” Mr. Clemons later recalled in an interview. “I felt like I was supposed to be there. It was a magical moment. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love. And that’s still there.”
from the comments
Hey, I’ve never been an honorary man. I have a guy card — big difference. It was revoked for a time, so I keep it up my ass now. With my grandfather’s watch.
Gospel Melody Boys
That’s Daddy, third guy from the left. Happy Father’s Day.
Rememberies of the Star Herald
’76 – ’79-ish.
1) Mrs. Carroll (Editor of the weekly she inherited it from relatives before her, sold it to the the publisher in Corning, a decade before I started working there)l: Rick, you’re fired!
Me: Again! Why this time?
She: You turned the air conditioner thermostat up to 78. (This in the middle of the gas crisis in the late 70′s when we were trying to conserve.) Read more
sub-headline of the day
Kind of like The Tree of Life, except it’s terrible.
Meet the Flockers: Casey Cichowicz
Hello, everyone! I’m very pleased to be here. Long time lurker, then Walken impersonator. A few things about me:
I live in the DC area (Alexandria, actually), and grew up in south central Pennsylvania (I always get funny looks when I say that, but it just means not Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, and you probably wouldn’t know it anyway). When I was in gradeschool we lived in Heidelberg Germany for four years. At this point I only speak a little German, but I still remember how to eat a schnitzel!
I’m a web developer/project manager type, but was a music major and failed rock star. I still try now and then. Trying to get something going again. I’m also trying a little painting — well, it’s really just layering and then sanding down acrylic paint. So I’m not sure it’s art. Actually, I’m very interested in the question of “what is art”, even though from time to time I think it’s a pretty silly question.
I’m a fairly avid mountain biker, but of the weekend warrior variety. I enjoy backpacking. I don’t do nearly enough of either, but I have been on some pretty great trips (Whistler last fall, Patagonia two years ago).
I’m a music fan — I go to a lot of shows and have a large MP3 collection. After reluctantly switching to iTunes, I am still trying to figure out the best way to listen to my music. And by this, I mean, I want to listen to full albums in more-or-less random order, but according to least recently played album and without hearing the same artist within 1 month. If you’ve figured out a good way to manage that, please let me know. These are the kinds of problems I have, or at least, the kinds that I am willing to reveal at the moment.
Anyway, hello and thanks!
Palin can write
McWhorter on the Palin emails:
To get a sense, it helps to see a few of these emails. Because email is written speech, it’s easy to miss artfulness in them. Yet, take this Palin passage: “Even CP has admitted locking up tax rates as Glenn suggests is unacceptable to the legislature, the Alaskan public, this administration, and the Constitution.”
The spelling is flawless—and unlikely to be completely a product of spell-check, which misses errors and often creates others. More to the point, she has an embedded clause (“locking up tax rates”) nested into a main one, with another clause “as Glenn suggests” nested within the embedded one. That’s good old-fashioned grammar school “syntax.” I have known plenty of people with B.A.s who could barely pull it off properly at gunpoint, and several others who would only bother to at gunpoint.
He then goes on to explain why she is facile with the written word and how it speaks to the current, failing models for educational writing.
headline of the day
Deer dropped by eagle knocks out power in Montana
Animals Being Dicks
A new site collects animated gifs of animals being dicks for our edification. The Condescending Llama. The Penguin Taking a Shortcut. The Retaliatory Horse. The Show-Off Horse. The Terrier Assassin. And The Testicle Biting Turtle are just a few examples.
(thanks, Patrick)
neuroscientist David Eagleman on the competing nature of self
From an interview with neuroscientist David Eagleman on his new book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.
Wired.com: So if we’re not consciously directing our own decision-making, how do our brains handle the process?
Eagleman: I make this argument about the brain being like a team of rivals. I synthesize a lot of data to show that you are not one thing, but instead your brain is made up of these competing networks that are all battling it out to control this single output channel of your behavior. And so your brain’s like a neural parliament, and you’ve got these different parties in there like the Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians, all of whom love their country and feel that they know the best way to steer the ship of state. But they have differing opinions on how to do it, and they have to fight it out.
This is why we can cuss at ourselves and cajole ourselves and get angry at ourselves, and this is why you can do behavior and look back and think, “Wow, how did I do that?” It’s because you are not one person, you are not one thing. As Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
I think Incognito is next on my list after The Information.
artist’s rendition out of context
spam name
Dick Figueroa.
anyone think of a good title?
Paragraph 10. “At the time of the collision, Defendant was going 85 miles per hour.”
Paragraph 12. “At the time of the collision, Defendant was having sex with a female.”
Paragraph13. “At the time of the collision, Defendant was driving admittedly drunk.”
Paragraph 14. “At the time of the accident, Defendant was partially or totally in the backseat of the car.”
(via TPM)
It’s worth waiting for
human pedigree
Ta-Nehisi Coates has been reading through The Federalist Papers, which, as way leads to way, led him to this thought:
When you are a young intellectual black kid, you often find yourself in this desperate search for some sort of anti-Western tradition. That Saul Bellow quote–”Who is the Tolstoy of the Zululs”–really captures a lot of the dilemma for those of us looking for a “native” tradition. That search ends all kinds of ways for different people. But for us, I think it ended in the rejection of the premise, in the great Ralph Wiley riposte that “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.”
That line was sorcery for me. It found me a black pathologist, and set me free by revealing that my own search for something “native” was an implicit acceptance of the very racism that I sought to counter. The way out was not to find my own, but to reject the notion of anyone’s “own.” If you reject the very premise of racism–the idea skin color directly contributes to genius or sloth–then all of humanity becomes “native” to you. And so empowered, I could–out of my own individual identity–create my own intellectual and artistic pedigree, and I was free to have it extend from Biggie to to Wharton to Melville to Hayden.
(Thanks, Noah.)
