Murky Thoughts

Toward a hand-waving Theory of Everything

2011-03-03T20:18:00.000-08:00

Let's say Heisenberg Uncertainty, Pauli Exclusion and Entropy are three sides of the same coin and observe that to be present implies necessarily not only place but time. Obviously, minimal presence is defined by the zero-point energy equation and greater presences must be discrete or quantized. Matter that is stationary, which is to say without momentum, within a reference frame exhibits maximal place, whereas propagating electromagnetism exhibits always the same minimum. I leave the rest as an exercise to the reader.

Favor: One more for the vocabulary of prestige, authorship and influence

2011-03-03T15:26:00.000-08:00

It might be most basic to say we want favor and/or favors. Over the long run, we seek credit or attribution for actions done and things made. But credit accrues toward prestige; and arguably prestige exerts its influence as the basis for writing a kind of check on the bank in which we've accrued it. The checks underwrite favorable transactions with strangers. Alternatively, we can secure favor through the issue of private scrip, as when we invite a person to "Do me a favor," in the absence of sufficient prestige or holdings at a bank that person recognizes.

Things I ought to have learned from my dog, if not as a child

2008-12-10T08:11:00.000-08:00

Is it really so bad to have your tail yanked or to be given a bath? No. One growls and bites because it's scary; and what does this have to do with our relationship anyway? Well, if it's kin inflicting it, then it can't be lethal, and those treats are my favorite. We've got a deal.

Mysticism: The way brains sniff glue?

2008-11-11T10:01:00.000-08:00

Struck me that trance and mystic mental states in general are a kind of high one learns to enjoy from an ordinarily noxious cognitive dissonance--such as between "the everything" and "the one." That can't be healthy. On the other hand, it does seem like what William James had in mind when he called prayer the "sovereign cure for worry" (allegedly, I can't find the reference). Through prayer we can envision circumventing the ineluctable, see how good may come of bad and construe what things mean as what they don't.
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By the way, let me second my occasional phronesisaical colleague helmut's grave recommendation of this article on the political influence of a publicly little known group of extreme-conservative, mystically-minded Christians.

"The current administration has committed war crimes" U.S. General says.

2008-06-18T23:47:00.000-07:00

Now retired, the general who investigated Abu Ghraib quoted in McClatchy:

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

The best stories aren't true

2008-06-12T20:10:00.000-07:00

The best story tellers are journalists.

Witness to the Creation of the Net's First Node

2008-06-06T09:34:00.000-07:00

We didn’t even have a camera or a tape recorder or a written record of that event. I mean, who noticed? Nobody did. Nineteen sixty-nine was quite a year. Man on the moon. Woodstock. Mets won the World Series. Charles Manson starts killing these people here in Los Angeles. And the Internet was born. Well, the first four everybody knew about. Nobody knew about the Internet.

Leonard Kleinrock in How the Web Was Won, Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb's story in Vanity Fair.

Maliki Fronting for Bush against Sadr

2008-03-31T19:13:00.000-07:00

Makes no sense otherwise for Maliki to have gambled so foolishly against Sadr's militia. Maliki had nothing to lose, being without even a faded reputation of effective control over Iraq to redeem, and with nobody to replace him (notice nobody is replacing him, now that he's failed). The current U.S. administration had a chance to pull out of the air the appearance of having accomplished something with the surge and the propping of the Maliki government--all the more if a successful anti-Sadr campaign appeared to have been Maliki's independent doing. Seemingly every increment of ostensible progress the nominal government of Iraq has so far accomplished (besides clandestine killings) has been with the hands of the White House forcing forward their behinds. Suddenly they propose to make Sadr's militia stand down? Quite a change of character. Notice how when Maliki was forced to push back the deadline for his ultimatum, he pushed it no farther than the date Patreus is due to testify to Congress on the state of U.S. troops and strategy in the former Iraq? That's a date Bush & Co. would choose. Notice that Malaki was quick to push back his deadline and quick to withdraw his ultimatum? Doesn't seem like his heart was in it, does it? And could he have really been such a booby about his army's chances against Sadr's militia? The only administration with a record of intelligence that bad there is Bush's.

Neato (a.k.a. Mixwit)

2008-03-27T20:10:00.000-07:00

Darwin's "Origin" sesquicentennial.

2008-02-13T16:38:00.000-08:00

Drat! Missed it by a day! But if you're relying on this site for timely info it's time to adapt. Anyway, the U.K.'s Guardian has a rich site up for the 150th year of On the Origin of Species. While celebrating the publication of the most revolutionary insight of all time, don't forget to whom we owe the date: Alfred Russel Wallace.

Dynastic Tea-leaf reading

2008-02-11T16:01:00.000-08:00

Just as Mitt Romney aborts his campaign to be president, it comes to my attention that he has a first-born son named Tagg. Besides noting and reluctantly admiring what appears to be a relatively subtle and appealing family naming tradition, I had a thought that the fate of Romney might have been sealed with the naming of Tagg's own first-born. I'm inclined to doubt this is right, but you might watch for a possible pending announcement of Cupp.*

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* "Essen" might explain it too, I suppose.

Forgive me Stevie, Sly, Mr. Brown, Gap Band members....

2007-12-01T17:04:00.000-08:00

Don't ask me to explain it, but my thing now is eight minutes, 37 years ago in New York.

Water-boarding demo

2007-11-07T11:42:00.000-08:00

Look at the face and listen to the testimonial of somebody who has just been subjected to water-boarding by friends at his own instruction: Begins at the 5:00 minute mark of the November 6 broadcast of Democracy Now!

The Jena Six and Gladwell on punishment

2007-09-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

If the Jena Six affair is about anything national, it seems like it's at least about harsh sentencing. This column of a year ago by Malcom Gladwell feels relevant. Procedures can and will be racist, but egalitarian principles can be unjust too.

The War on Error

2007-08-30T08:20:00.000-07:00

On NPR again today the issue of effective use of suspected-terrorist "watch lists" came up. Lest we strike the wrong balance between over- and under-identifying list members among the very large numbers of people constantly coming under our consideration--and something terrible should happen as a result--let's be totally clear about who we're dealing with: Suspected suspected suspectedly certain-to-succeed individuals dead-set on committing mass murder and destruction for no reasonable grounds or cause. We know they're out there. Whatever the critics say. I want to add we also know we'll find them.

More on rewardism

2007-07-30T12:28:00.000-07:00

Before I could even make it to the shower today, my mind returned to this casual hypothesis of awhile back about how the extraordinary smarts of humans might have evolved from a simple dopamine reward system. I was reading this review of a book by Read Montague, which as paraphrased by reviewer Andy Clark seemed to be suggesting something similar in Why Choose this Book?

Coincidentally, Oliver Sacks' musicophilia story in the New Yorker suggested to me something these reward proposals might help to make sense of: Patients turn to music when their brains cease to reward kinds of contemplation that have ceased to signal "the reward center," which might be expected from a circuit-scrambling seizure or electric shock. But the former connections were highly personal and presumably the product of a whole life history. They're liable likewise to be elaborate, having had a whole life to adapt and to optimize. So an adult brain suddenly starved of reward might not reestablish these same links, but might wire up something new, and perhaps like a child craving sweets or like an addict, it might be expected to pick the quick fix. For coherence in contemplative sense making, music strikes me as the sweetest stuff there is.

Privatizing military dictatorship

2007-07-15T23:18:00.000-07:00

I hear the military occupation of former Iraq is now a majority-held enterprise of Blackwater and other privately owned, commercial security providers, and that these providers--offering premium wages, thanks to lucrative U.S. federal contracts and the confidence of forward-looking investors--recruit and employ large numbers of former Iraqis. Is it any wonder a proficient new Iraqi army doesn't seem to be coming together? In the chaotic hell-zone that once hosted the economy of Iraq, smart former Iraqis with advanced training in soldiering and other things useful to regional governance will work for Blackwater, not for the hypothetical new democratic state of the Baghdad Green Zone. We're witnessing a buy-out of the control of former Iraq. The purchasers are private entrepreneurs, who appear free to pursue any practices they choose while not disclosing anything to anybody.

Which debases impeachment more? Doing it to Clinton or not doing it to Bush?

2007-06-26T08:42:00.000-07:00

The latter.

Bush Takes Emergency Powers

2007-06-23T16:47:00.000-07:00

This seems insane. Can we call him "Hitler" now? You can't get a passport to flee to Canada, and you can expect free-wheeling, over-armed, NSA-assisted Blackwater mercenaries to be maintaining order while the guardsmen are overseas.

Feeling lucky? Well do you, punk?

"Gnommon is an island"

2007-06-20T15:44:00.000-07:00

The Sundial Bridge of Turtle Bay Exploration Park in Redding, California, striding due north across the Sacramento River.

To everybody on Earth, Murky Thoughts wishes you a nice long day.

i.e. around 18:06 GMT, 21 June, 2007
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Title quote: Robert Nestor Marley.

Consciousness and kinematics

2007-06-14T12:53:00.000-07:00

Consciousness looks like it might be an adaption to multi-sensory life on the move, in that the blur of vision, the swirl of smell, the cacophony of sound and the sum of gravity and the various propulsive forces we're exerting with our limbs are a lot to be dealing with directly, if you've got a gazelle to catch (see Merker, B. Consciousness and Cognition 14: 115–118). In other words, there seems to be some speed and efficiency to be gained from walling that off and handing control to a front end that deals with just a simplified synthesis of these inputs, the content of which is the outside world and its happenings, and the disentangled subtracted ingredients of which include, for example, the "merely apparent" motion that our eyes would otherwise causes us every time we glance sideways. A world view sort of like the "image stabilized" view many digital cameras provide.

A nice illustration of a speed improvement that an animal might derive from a "guidance system" that works with a self-subtracted representation of the world might be how a dog fetches or chases: My dog, at least, pursues his line of sight, so that if a person ahead and to his left is tossing a ball to another to his right, he will trace an arc in the grass in his sprint after the hurling orb. When a throw is so weak that the ball would fall short, any human child with a little experience in sports, having had a moment to track the ball, could trace a straight-line course to where the arcing ball is bound to land and so might beat the dog. That which confers advantage in NBA draft selection could also confer advantage in natural selection.

But would it be fair to conclude that the child pursues the ball consciously while the dog does it only unconsciously? Or are dogs and people alike conscious, whereas my dog is just dumb? (Snoopy succeeded as a shortstop, after all.) Or are canines, as carnivorous hunters, just predisposed by evolution to see any moving target as animate and liable to flee adaptively to his or her pursuit? (reorienting always to maximize headway and so sure to extend its lead if a predator were ever to deviate from a dead-reckoned bee-line)

I imagine raptors and other high-nesting bird lineages might have evolved efficiency at intercepting a passively falling body (such as junior or his egg), but to the extent that everything falls at the same speed (shout out to Galileo), that may not have required anything so fancy as consciousness. Do many animals besides ourselves seem to distinguish passive motion and to know the laws that apply?

A terror law we do need

2007-06-07T22:11:00.000-07:00

I couldn't be happier that the FBI is entrapping people intending to murder, maim and interfere with daily business. Just don't treat them as if they didn't need entrapping. There ought to be a suitable category of offense with which to classify and charge such actors. Call it "Criminal lack of scruple" and have a "third degree" or "Type T (for Terror)," for example. As some have more dubiously advocated for torture, require a judge-authorized warrant for which enforcers must appeal in order to entrap and draw up standards and showings enforcers must satisfy to undertake or carry through any plan to entrap. We allow planes to spray pesticides over suburbs with the approval of a public health commissioner, though the thought of wanton spraying is disturbing, and I see no reason not to consider the same principle appropriate to entrapment. If overzealous enforcement looks to be a peril, let the sentences be light--perhaps as light as probation, in exchange for which the probationer agrees to obey special rules affecting his or her liberty and privacy, including in cases of intention to commit terrorism, for example, such surveillance as the White House now seems to be applying wantonly. If easy access to technology amenable to mass murder make our legal traditions appear to be unsafe and unsustainable, then in principle revisions are apt, and to me in practice the laws relating to entrapment seem like a perfectly reasonable place to go to work.

New Credo ( or: If I Had a Bumper )

2007-06-07T17:53:00.000-07:00

HYPOTHESIZE AUTHORITY

There is no Iraq

2007-06-06T20:42:00.000-07:00

Isn't it time we start referring to that place over there as "former Iraq," "American occupied Arabia" or as anything else that actually makes sense?

First they came for the fact checkers...

2007-04-20T17:14:00.000-07:00

...and then it was the spell checkers.

He said that, for years, most of the education budget has been squandered in administration—“We are excessively administered in this country”—and that too many politicians have fostered unrealistic expectations and offered up fake solutions to those expectations, most notably Lionel Jospin, one of his predecessors at the education ministry and the man who decreed that eighty per cent of France’s students would be eligible to go to college, when what the country needed was four thousand more butchers and at least as many new plumbers.

i.e. "decried" certainement