Quiz: What is the Connection with the Man Getting Punched to the Huffington Post?
September 13th, 2008 1 comment or link to (permalink)
The answer after the jump, here.
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Gunter Grass and Norman Mailer
September 13th, 2008 comment or link to (permalink)
The New York Public Library ran a particularly great selection of lectures last year. Here is the culmination: Gunter Grass followed by both Grass and Norman Mailer.
Zeitgeist and the Threat of Dangerous, Pandemic Internet Memes.
September 12th, 2008 16 comments or link to (permalink)
The comments thread under my rant against the execrable Zeitgeist has taken on a life of its own. Most people are clearly cranks, but a few are curious as to why I think such a seemly amateur and relatively unimportant film is worth talking about at all.
Rather than discussing the details of the film, which for me is like a chemist arguing with a priest as to whether you can turn water into wine by saying a prayer, I am more interested in the general pathology of conspiracy theories on the Internet (Perhaps this would be a good topic for some second-rate liberal arts degree).
The ability to travel to new continents created pandemic disease that wiped out many aboriginal Americans. The web has created a potential for diseases of the mind to spread more rapidly across continents than ever before. It is reasonable to take seriously the threat of idea pandemics caused by false ideas, spread via any new and powerful medium. The Rwandan genocide was triggered by the more traditional and less virulent medium of radio, as Hutus spread rumors that they would be attacked by Tutsi. I suspect that it is theoretically possible that an idea could spread via the Internet and translate into large scale violence, and that we should be on the look out for Internet memes that could mutate into malignant forms, just in case.
Current viral ideas on the Internet are largely benign, if bland or tasteless, from cuddly animals (LOLcats) to people drinking each other’s shit (2 girls one cup). Looking at the statistics from YouTube, conspiracy theory clips are extremely popular and increasingly so. Many of the ideas in these are only a few plot changes away from resembling those that have triggered violence, historically. Zeitgeist is a prime example.
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The Big Bang
September 11th, 2008 3 comments or link to (permalink)
Aired on Sept 4th on BBC to celebrate this weeks trial run of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a history of the Big Bang, a story far more wonderful and imaginative than Biblical creation.
(For those of you that have noticed that I keep bashing religion at the moment - I’ve had enough, I’ve cracked. I am normally relatively nonpartisan about politics because I don’t like or trust any politicians from McCain to Obama, but I can normally see people’s points of view from both sides of the fence. However, I really, really am depressed about a certain intellectually incurious, beehive hairdoed, 50s throwback, living adjacent to Siberia without a Passport. Someone probably quite nice as a person and harmless, if her opinions aren’t inflicted on everyone. Someone who thinks that fairy stories should be taught as an alternative to science and that rape victims should be forced to have babies without a welfare state to support them. Palin is living proof that consent can be manufactured, and in 15 minutes, as junk food rather than a healthy product.)
The Inability of Humans to Understand Growth
September 10th, 2008 18 comments or link to (permalink)
Albert Bartlett is a modern day Malthusian on a mission. Bartlett is physicist who claims that “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”. He points out what is undeniable: that at current growth rates the world population will have to decline within a period of historical rather than geological time (i.e. not that long), or we will not have enough room to stand up, let alone farm, and that this decline can only come about through a finite number of means: contraception, abortion, disease, war, famine.
With this knowledge, people who are against contraception, the item on this list which will cause the least suffering, are extremely dangerous.
If you believe that the exponential rise in population which coincides exactly with the use of fossil fuels has something to do with fossil fuels; if you believe that the geometric (i.e. non Malthusian) increase in the efficiency of farming through oil based products has something do with oil, then its even more imperative to start listening to people like Bartlett.
Unfortunately a large percentage of the population would rather believe that the cause of our prosperity is due to either the Dancing Wuli Masters, the ascendancy of Mars in Capricorn or the miracle of the image of Jesus Christ in a damp stain on a shit-house door in Ohio. Many of the same people think that we absolutely must breed like rabbits because a garbled, Greek translation of a late Bronze Age folk tale, called The Bible, modified through centuries of the game of Telephone, says so. Is it surprising that these people fail to understand the exponential function?
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