mcgees.org

I thought Pearl Jam would send an email update when West Coast shows were announced, as they have with the East Coast shows. I was wrong, and missed the window to buy tix for the LA Forum show. There is a possible second show being added, on contingent presale from 10am to 10pm PST on 31 March (tomorrow).

Pearl Jam’s new news feed is http://www.pearljam.com/flat/pj-rss2.xml.  Use it in your favorite reader, such as the Google Reader I discussed recently.

Got Time?: “Please program in more days.”  Or, if you like, “Please teach your programmer arithmetic division.”  It hurts the brain.

Google Reader, for syndicated site feeds.  In Beta.  Good, needs a lot of work and a blogroll export feature.

Many popular male first names commonly thought of as being Irish, such as Patrick, Mick and Sean, actually originated with the English and the French-Danish-Norwegian Normans, who invaded Ireland in the 12th century…. Freya Verstraten, a doctoral postgraduate student of history at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland

“A name like Seán is usually thought of as typically Irish; however, it is an Irish adaptation of the Biblical name John, and this version of the name was used in Ireland only after the invasion,” [said Verstraten]. “There are many other names people consider to be Irish, although they are in fact Irish versions of Anglo-Norman names. Séamus, for example, is the Irish form of James.”

At around the time of the invasion, popular Irish male first names included Diarmaid, Donnchadh, Cormac, Cathal, Niall, Brian, and Aodh…. — Discovery Channel News

Myths about the sanctity of life, or of consciousness, cut both ways. They may be useful in erecting barriers (against euthanasia, against capital punishment, against abortion, against eating meat) to impress the unimaginative, but at the price of offensive hypocrisy or ridiculous self-deception among the more enlightened.

Absolutist barriers, like the Maginot Line, seldom do the work they were designed for….  Surely it would be better to try to foster an appreciation for the nonabsolutist, nonintrinsic, nondichotomized grounds for moral concern that can co-exist with our increasing knowledge of the inner workings of that most amazing machine, the brain. The moral arguments on both sides of the issues of capital punishment, abortion, eating meat, and experimenting on nonhuman animals, for instance, are raised to a higher, more appropriate standard when we explicitly jettison the myths…. — Daniel Dennett.

Discuss, if you are so inclined.

The Wine Info Site.  Learn about your grape varietals.  They don’t have much info about Aghiorgitiko.

Forgetting what our local portal server at work was called, I typed in portal in Firefox’s address bar.  That was not the name of the server, so Firefox did its magic, running an “I’m Feeling Lucky” search at Google and giving me the first match: http://www.firstgov.gov/. It’s a massive, wonderful U.S. Government web portal. Auctions, taxes, science for kids, census data, blue pages, product recalls, forms — massive amounts of stuff. Well recommended.

Wow, I’m glad I kept reading The Blank Slate.  The last two chapters, “The Arts” and “The Voice of the Species” were really, really, really good.  Maybe borrow the book and just read those?

I have been reading the intricate shell game that is Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. Thought-provoking shell game, but shell game nonetheless, prone to rapid escalations from fish-in-barrel-shooting to global generalization in seven-league leaps of Randian proportion.  I’ve kept reading it for one reason: its occasional aha-generating moments are really fun (and normally in the form of citations from other thinkers.) In that sense the book is a footnote to its bibliography.

Allow me to cite, however, the first citation that has made me put the book down to write a blog post. He cites a writer called J.C. Wakefield as follows:

A good definition of a disease or disorder is that it consists of suffering experienced by an individual because of a malfunction of a mechanism in the individual’s body.

Now, hold on.  That is an immeasurably lousy definition of disease and disorder, on the scale of David Gelernter’s definition of vivid imagination.  By this definition, brain death is not a disorder.  Early-stage HIV infection is not a disease.  They’re not causing suffering, right?  At least not unless you expand suffering to something like “eventual diminution of lifespan”, or “elimination of the potential for experience of happiness”. But maybe his argument doesn’t rely on the suffering bit, or maybe it permits this sort of wide definition. He proceeds to explain why violence is not a disorder:

But as a writer for Science recently pointed out, “Unlike most diseases, it’s usually not the perpetrator who defines aggression as a problem; it’s the environment. Violent people may feel they are functioning normally, and some may even enjoy their occasional outbursts and resist treatment.  (Emphasis added)

I’m not making a claim about the pathology of violence. That’s not the point. The point is that if you are willing to start with assumptions this flawed, where do your arguments lead? Apparently, if this book is testament, the effect is arguments such as Neural models with distributed intelligence function better than top-down models. Leftism is top-down and utopian. Conservatism, with its free economic agents pursuing their own ends, is distributed. Therefore, the validity of Conservatism is supported by artificial intelligence research.  The only difference is that he takes ten pages to state this thesis.

I have discovered the interesting fact that all the regular male cast members on Firefly are older than all the female cast members on the program, that this span is 1,357 days, and that my birthdate lies in this gap. So, a game. Points to players who:

1. Find other shows where all the men are older than all the women (or vice versa) and the gap is smaller than 1,357 days.  IMDB and the date calculator will help.
2. Extra-super-crazy points if you find one of these gaps in which your birthdate lies.
3. Runner-up credit for finding a show where all the old cast members are older than all the young cast members.