Steve Reads

 . . . over the White House’s warrantless wiretapping.

Wherever you are, please take a moment to send Senator Feingold an email supporting this resolution. It may have no effect, but the Senate needs to know that Americans are paying attention.

Feingold has made it rather easy to get in touch with him: his email address is russell_feingold@feingold.senate.gov (according to his website).

Here’s what I just sent him:

Dear Senator Feingold,

I would just like to express my deepest appreciation that you will be introducing a resolution to censure President Bush over the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. The president is not above the law — neither this president nor any other president, nor for that matter any other American. It is high time Congress stopped rubber-stamping the president’s actions, and started reaffirming the rule of law in American life.

Bravo, Senator Feingold.

If you copy and paste that message, you can express your support in no more than 15 seconds. Let’s get started on the road to ending these illegal wiretaps.

They were doing so well, and then this series of words flew together:

“Students who come to the university need to be exposed to different opinions and ideas. When you have segregated pockets in our residence halls, we are allowing students to shut themselves off, and then they are missing out.”

This fall, there will be no floors set aside for minority students when an 860-bed cluster of residence halls opens. The university also plans to discourage students from grounding their housing choices in a desire to live with students of like race or ethnicity. Instead, students may choose to live with others who share their academic interests. For example, students pursuing African-American studies could choose to live together.

It evinces a poverty of thought to believe that the only integration which matters is racial integration. Racial integration is certainly important, and I regret that CMU was as segregated as it was along those lines. But CMU, at least, was also highly segregated by major: art kids almost never talked to engineering kids, and they were certainly never in the same classes — or even on the same side of campus, for that matter.

It’s possible that UMass avoids this kind of division already, so they feel as though they don’t need to devote any special attention to it. But in general, there seems to be a tendency in this society to equate diversity with racial diversity. To me, it seems at least as important to have a variety of opinions and thought patterns in one dorm as it is to have many races.

The Times writes of David Foster Wallace’s latest book, Consider The Lobster, that “Wallace’s dazzling powers of description often redeem his bloggerlike tendency to run on.”

Quite apart from the veracity of that claim about bloggers, I’d like to point out that it’s an entirely extraneous comment meant to draw some cheap laughs about a much-mocked medium. Wallace has been a self-obsessed, vain, and under-edited writer since at least Infinite Jest, which is a masterpiece. More to the point, it came out well before anyone had conceived of the word “blog.” It hardly seems necessary to invoke the latest bogeyman when talking about this man.

First of all, let me congratulate the Syracuse Orangemen for winning the Big East title with a victory on Saturday night over the Pittsburgh Panthers. I normally wouldn’t care about this, but my man Adam Gerard does, and I was on edge with him tonight.

The New York Times wrote about the victory, and said,

A roll call of [Gerry McNamara’s] exploits has become mandatory as each unlikely victory surpassed the next.

Note that if each victory surpasses the next, they are in fact getting less impressive.

Some variant on this phrase shows up a lot; the Times didn’t really misstate anything. The phrase “each girl more beautiful than the next” is fairly common, and implies that they are getting uglier.

P.S.: Adam informs me that that they are now the Syracuse Orange, not Orangemen. This has apparently been true since 2004.

I don’t know why it took me this long, but I just now understood what the hell the symmetric-difference operator was all about: it’s just the XOR operator extended to sets, just as the union operator is (inclusive) “OR” for sets, and the intersection is “AND” for sets.

Sometimes the simplest things take me forever.

Along with the Cheney Shooting A Dude thing, I think the Dubai Ports World thing is the least interesting story of the year. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the tempest over it — including the Republican “revolt” — were entirely a GOP plant, meant to distract attention from what actually matters: the fact that the United States is mired in Iraq for the foreseeable future, that our government is wiretapping us without warrants, and that the Republican Congress has decided to throw away the separation of powers in the name of party loyalty.

And the liberal blogs are all going along with this “story”. Remarkable. Or not, sadly.

I’ve had a spectacularly good record of emailing professors to ask for academic papers that interest me. In fact I think my batting average — the percentage of those I asked who ended up supplying me with PDFs or papers — is 1.000. Professors love doing this, I’ve discovered. If you express an interest in their field, they will do all they can do help you out in that interest. I emailed Professor Chomsky a while back to ask for one of his early linguistics papers (one of the ones laying out the Chomsky Hierarchy), and heard back from him that (as expected) there are no PDFs for papers that old. But he had his assistant send along a copy of the physical paper.

Just the other day I emailed Professor Elliott Sober about his paper “The Evolution of Rationality”, which I believe I encountered when Dennett cited it in Elbow Room. “TEoR” was written in 1981, so I had little hope of a PDF. Within less than an hour, I had an email back from Professor Sober asking for my postal address so that he could mail me a copy.

People love being asked to talk about what they do. I’m constantly surprised at how receptive they are to my requests, but I really shouldn’t be. I would be equally receptive if someone asked me to talk about statistics or Linux.

Please someone can you please write an article about Canada without mentioning the word “eh”, please? Thanks.

Is anyone interested in trying to fly without an ID?

I think I may be brave enough to try this, next time. Though I expect to be submitted to security audits so thorough that I’ll need to present individual nail clippings back to 1986.

Once again Bruce Schneier proves why he is America’s go-to guy for security. He brings a bracing kick of reality to the terrorism debate that we’re not having.

 . . . and that makes me sad. He wrote beautiful music.

I emailed Dan Dennett a short time ago to see if he would be publishing a rebuttal to Leon Wieselter’s review of his [Dennett’s] latest book. Dennett wrote back and said that he would indeed be doing so; his reply was published yesterday. While searching for it, I found William J. Broad’s passing mention of Dennett in a discussion of how scientists should leave well enough alone.

Sometimes the Times is just really dumb. There is a way to confront materialism (the claim that everything, from biology up to ethics and religion, can be reduced to “atoms and the void”) intelligently, and there is a way to do it badly. The bad way is to assert with no argument that materialism’s premise is false, then do some spiritual handwaving about how certain truths have endured for thousands of years. This is essentially dodging the question. Or as Dennett put it in response to Wieselter:

When you can’t stand the implications of some scientific discipline X, but can’t think of any solid objections, you brand them instances of the sin of Xism and then you don’t have to take them seriously! What next? A review that warns about the pernicious “meteorologism” that keeps scolding us about global warming, or the “economism” that has the effrontery to inform us that the gap between rich and poor is growing? Wieseltier helps himself to several other instances of the trick in his review: he trots out the old chestnut reductionism, from which all serious meaning evaporated years ago, and sneers at my rationalism (a handy retort to any reasonable person when you can’t think of anything better to say — “Stop being so, so, so  . . . rationalistic!”)

Dennett’s program is quite straightforward; he telegraphed it in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. The idea is simply this: if you’re going to accept the premise that those traits which confer reproductive fitness will tend to occur more often in subsequent generations, then you have to apply that premise all the way “up the stack”: apply it to ethics, apply it to religion, apply it to love, and so forth.

So now, if you’re going to attack Dennett’s argument head-on, you’ve got a few approaches. One is to attack the claim. Another is to attack the quality of the evidence that evolutionary psychologists gather. The trouble with the latter approach is that it doesn’t really weaken your opponent’s argument: “fine,” they could say, “we’ll go gather better evidence, but in the meantime we’re merely extending a successful biological argument into realms where it’s reasonable to expect it to work.” The biologists win there, because their argument has such a strong track record and such intuitive appeal.

What’s left, as far as I can tell, is to attack biologists as people, or prey on people’s fears of creeping science. That’s what Wieselter does, and what Broad’s argument reduces to. Neither of them engages in any actual arguing worth the term.

I just got root on the shared server that my friends have been running for years, which I’ve been helping (in a very small capacity) to run. It’s a very good feeling, getting root on a production machine. I’m a made man.

As a young Vermonter who went to school in another state, didn’t return after graduation, and intends not to return for a long time, today’s New York Times article about the exodus of young people from Vermont is 99% spot on. The only point I would argue with is the claim that strict housing laws are keeping people away. Vermont has to realize what its strengths are, and it seems to me that beautiful land with limited sprawl (except in the area around Burlington) is one of the big ones. Without tourism and beautiful country, what would Vermont have left to offer? It could build other infrastructure — and it had such infrastructure when IBM was still a huge employer — but its current strengths obviously rest on its beauty. Weakening housing laws, it seems to me, is precisely what the state doesn’t need.

But the article gets everything else right. I grew up in Vermont and went to school in Pittsburgh, two places that do a bad job retaining young people. I’m curious whether the big draws for post-college kids are any different now than when our parents were growing up. Me, I want to live in cities, because

1. I don’t need to own a car.
2. I can walk to most everything I need.
3. The environmental devastation is concentrated in one dense area.
4. There tend to be more jobs in high-tech.
5. Semi-circularly, there tend to be more young people. (I do think there’s a self-accelerating cycle in many of these items: more young people, for instance, come to the towns, so other young people move there to be with those who look like they do.)
6. There are more cultural things to do.
7. There’s a more diverse collection of people, along any number of axes.
8. Cities can exploit density: they can build large research libraries, build restaurants devoted to obscure types of cuisine, etc.

Pittsburgh’s decline, from my rather simplistic understanding, is rather easy to explain: the steel industry left during the general decline of American heavy industry from the 60’s through the 90’s, and Pittsburgh didn’t have enough other stuff going on to keep kids there. CMU professor Richard Florida famously asserted that one good measure of how well a city will thrive in today’s economy is how large its gay population is. I’ve not read his book, but it seems that he’s quite a bit more interesting than that: he develops a measure of the size of a city’s “creative class” (which is defined too broadly for me, but whatever), and uses it to guess which cities will do well in the post-industrial era. Boston looks pretty good by this measure; Pittsburgh does not. I would imagine that Vermont doesn’t, either.

Every time I go home to Vermont (just outside of Burlington), I’m ecstatic to see my friends, but a little horrified to see how development has worked there. It occurred to me with some clarity a few months ago that Burlington and its environs can’t avoid sprawl the way they’re going: when everyone believes that it is his god-given right to live in a two-story house on an acre of land, and that his house ought to be larger than his parents’, you are very likely to have sprawl. In short: the way to avoid sprawl is to build dense housing, like cities have; but Vermont doesn’t want dense cities. Hence it seems to me that if their population grows, they’re going to get suburbanizaton. The experiments in mass transit around Burlington have been abortive — particularly a train running from Charlotte, I believe, into Burlington — because the population wasn’t really dense enough to support it. As long as the suburbs are concentrated around Burlington (and I don’t necessarily mean “suburb” in the sense of “smaller city orbiting around a larger one, with most of the former’s residents working in the latter” — I mean more the effects of suburbs, including the requirement that everyone drive a car), the sprawl’s effects will be minor, and Vermont’s traditional rural beauty will remain. But density is really what the state ought to plan for, and it doesn’t seem to want that.

Large portions of Burlington now look like any other city: Williston Road and Shelburne Road are the several-mile stretches of single-story stores and office buildings that you’d see anywhere in the U.S.; Spear Street is covered with McMansions; and downtown is now mostly filled with chain stores. Of course Burlington still has an incredible charm that I love visiting: the lake is beautiful, Muddy Waters is possibly the greatest coffee shop on earth, and the decision to block cars from most of Church Street was brilliant. I love to visit. But I wouldn’t live there.

It occurred to me with icy clarity a little while ago that there is some very bad irony happening with my brain: I can remember the lyrics to probably 10,000 songs, including some very terrible ones, but I often have a hard time remembering people’s names, or the details of historical events, or any number of other details, space for which is probably being occupied by “Who Got The Hooch.”

So herewith, my proposed musical graveyard. Every time I start humming along to “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life” (“and I owe it all to you-uuuuu [thank you baby]”) or some such musical disaster, I will include it in here. Others are welcome to contribute their own suggestions.

• Genesis, “Invisible Touch”