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free is good September 28, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : open access , add a comment

Via EconLog, I found Freeload Press, Inc. which apparently offers college textbooks free. I’ve yet to download or look at any of the books; EconLog’s Arnold Kling noted that the registration process was painless.

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weekly photo #50: Mathildenhöhe September 28, 2007

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Mathildenhöhe
This week’s photo is from Darmstadt, Germany. It’s called “Mathildenhöhe” because it’s a photo of… wait for it… Mathildenhöhe, which is a former artists’ colony that is now a park and museum area on the edge of the city. I always went there when passing through Germany on my travels.The building in the center background is an art museum, the Museum Künstlerkolonie Darmstadt, and the tower is, I believe, a bell tower. The building on the right is a Russian Orthodox chapel, whose presence is due to the fact that Empress Alexandra (yes, of Nicholas and Alexandra fame) was born in Darmstadt.

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weekly quote #1: M. Mitchell Waldrop September 27, 2007

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I’m adding another (hopefully) weekly feature, for two reasons. First, the goal of putting up a quote once per week will force me to pay even more attention to what I’m reading, as I intend for the quotes to come from what I’m reading that week, and will use random quotes from stuff I’m not currently reading only as a fallback. Second, putting them up will focus them more in my memory and provide me with at least an archive, if not a well-organized one. I never did get that quote database up and running, after all….

So, here’s the first quote, from M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity*, speaking about John H. Holland:

“What captivated him wasn’t that science allowed you to reduce everything in the universe to a few simple laws. It was just the opposite: that science showed you how a few simple laws could produce the enormously rich behavior of the world.”

*chapter 5, page 153 of my edition.

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monstrosity September 27, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : society , add a comment

Via the BBC, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has recently put up online an exhibit of a photo album taken at Auschwitz. The photos are of the SS personnel who worked at the camp — and the monstrosity of it all is revealed in how utterly ordinary they all seem.

Just as I mentioned recently while talking about Das Leben der Anderen, good and evil are not so cut and dry. Rather than, as Rebecca Erbelding says, a bunch of “red-eyed monsters” or easily-dismissed Col. Klinks, the pictures show regular men and women engaged in normal activities. There is no ‘evil’ inherent in the photos, and none of the portraits show someone with a shadow in their eyes. They’re just people. And that, in the end, is the real horror.

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hero September 26, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : society , 2comments

There aren’t a whole lot of people I would label as ‘heroes’. However, both Assymetrical Information and Overcoming Bias today have posts up about one person who I feel deserves the title:

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Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov

If you’ve never heard of him, you’re certainly not alone. I myself first heard of him earlier this year in a class at MIIS on proliferation. The professor provided us with an excerpt from a book… I can’t locate my copies right now, I think they might be at the office.

At any rate, the fact that this man is so little known is, to me, nothing less than a travesty. According to the wiki article, Mr Petrov, who now lives in relative poverty, says he “did nothing.” Indeed — and we, in all probability, owe him our lives for it.

Addendum: If, by some small chance, someone knows of any kind of fund set up for Mr Petrov, please let me know.

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have oil wealth, will island September 25, 2007

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Via FP Passport, it seems Russia is planning to build an artificial island off the coast of Sochi* for the upcoming Winter Olympic games. The kicker? It’s going to be shaped like Russia (not sure why FP calls it “the Russian continent”). It seems constructing artificial islands is all the rage among countries with lots of income from natural resources — but as FP notes, they’ve got to spend the money somehow.

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happy birthday September 24, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : food & drink , add a comment

Today is the birthday of Mr Guinness, so have a pint. Why Guinness? ‘Cause they care!

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clarity via muddying September 24, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : language , add a comment

A few weeks back, Overcoming Bias had a post up about clarity of thought and language, referring for support to Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”.

Today, Language Log, in a post about the President’s nominee for Attorney General, pointed out an earlier post decrying the same essay.

Agree to disagree? I’d prefer not to, since I’d probably wind up trying to agree to disagree with myself. I’m a fan of clarity — my loyal readers might notice that my posts tend to be short and to the point. On top of that, I’ve written again recently that it’s what is said, not how it’s said, that matters.

My clear, short take? Orwell had good initiative but poor judgment. Muddy writing may be used in an attempt to obscure sloppy or perhaps even morally despicable thought, but anyone taken in by such a simple ploy as messy language is not so much being played for a fool as playing the role themselves.

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bluer September 21, 2007

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The Scientific Indian has alerted me to the presence of an essay (free registration required) by Daniel Dennet on AI. Dennet uses the example provided by computer chess-playing programs, Deep Blue among them, to briefly discuss how our brains work — and more importantly, to question our fear of being biological machines:

“Many people still cling, white-­knuckled, to a brittle vision of our minds as mysterious immaterial souls, or–just as romantic–as the products of brains composed of ­wonder tissue engaged in irreducible non-computational (perhaps alchemical?) processes.”

Worth the few moments to register.

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