How bout that future?

Between 1981 and 2003, there were 315 suicide bombings in the entire world, but the past 4 years have seen 400 in Iraq alone. (Found on Gene Healy's blog).

Department of over-eager reductions

Other people's opinions about the reasons that there are thus constitute potential challenges to my own opinions. I have something to learn about myself and my own reasons by finding out about others and their reasons. This is why books and movie films are so engaging. All of this is flat out inconsistent with the claim that our concept of a reason for action is quite generally relative to the individual;

--Michael Smith

Them's fightin words

"What you can imagine depends on what you know. Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives."

--Damn, Dennett, you really got a set on you!

For the record, I won't be calling anyone a janitor.

I am feeling of low mind

I can't quite understand how the Large Number Championship would work. A few key parameters aren't specified by the description I have, such as what sorts of notations are allowed, and if the contestants are allowed to define new notations, what standards govern their introduction, but that's not what's confusing me, as far as I can tell.

My first thought was something using Knuth's up arrow notation, and I felt pretty happy about that. It felt good, albeit not professional caliber, until I realized it was actually just someone else's idea.

So, the problem is that the contestants know the ins and outs of not only Knuth's notation but Conway's much more powerful chained arrow notation and any other demoniacal inventions out there (non-computable functions!!!!). It's quite plausible that they'll have prepared something entirely new for the contest. If so, they'll have to have a good method of determining which of the numbers is larger on the spot, which I find a mind-blowing task.

My first semester is over

This is how I feel. But I'm unsure whether I'm Roast Beef or Ray. Usually I'm Beef, but maybe today I'm Ray?

Sort of about music

I've been away from the blog for so long that firefox deleted its URL
from my history. In order to ease back slowly, here's something content-free.

When I was in middle school my dad decided to make things easy on
himself, and at a pre-appointed hour, would enter my room, turn on my stereo, and leave. At that point in my life, I was embarrassed by making my preferences publicly known and only listened to music using headphones and a portable player. So it was three months of Greenday's Insomniac. This was a very bad time. Nevertheless, my dad had the right idea. Waking up is the most unpleasant part of my day, and to compound that by involving an alarm clock would be too dreadful to contemplate. In contrast, my computer is very considerate about the entire process, gradually increasing the volume over the course of five minutes (alarm clock plug). So here are a few songs I've used in the past.

• Radiohead - Everything in Its Right Place
• Xploding Plastix - Treat Me Mean I Need the Respect
• Ratatat - Seventeen Years
• Nirvana - ??

I listened to these four in sequence.

• Radiohead - Everything in Its Right Place
• Gorillaz - Last Living Souls
• Mogwai - Golden Porsche
• The Orb - Earth Orbit One - Little Fluffy Clouds
• Tortoise - TNT

Of these, I recommend any of the standalone songs, though don't try Gorillaz for the first time when you have anything important to do--I always slept
through it. After being woken up by a song for long enough, it
will tend to wear on you: to some extent, that's what happened to me
with the Radiohead and Mogwai, so the Orb and Tortoise are new
additions: hopefully I can find a few more to put into a rotation. Any
suggestions?

Incidentally, you're going to want to get the Xploding Plastix album and listen to it constantly.

The Best Dumplings Ever

In learning to play go, one of the most elusive concepts has been good shape. Bad shape, on the other hand..well, just look at this game I played today. If the groups with the triangle and the square make you feel uneasy or even nauseated, you understand bad shape.

Incidentally, I'm white, and it's my turn.

Why does the world refuse to arrange itself to my wishes in every detail?

My continually growing affection for the Pittsburgh department notwithstanding, I graduated college a year too early.

Kenan Seminar: Empirical Moral Psychology (Phil 805) (305) - Joshua Knobe & Jesse Prinz

Recent philosophical work on moral psychology has taken an interdisciplinary turn. Philosophers have been calling on empirical findings to assess traditional theories, and psychologists have been exploring questions that emerged within philosophy. What role do emotions play in moral judgment? Is morality an evolved capacity? Could there be a faculty of moral intuition? What is the empirical viability of Aristotelian virtue ethics? How do notions of freedom and responsibility hold up in light of recent research on mind and brain? In this seminar, we will read articles addressing such questions, and, through the generous support of the Kenan foundation, we will also have the opportunity to engage in intensive discussion with some of the leading authors in the field. Visitors will include (at least) philosophers John Doris, Shaun Nichols, and Walter Sinnott- Armstrong, as well as psychologists Daniel Gilbert, Liane Young and Fiery Cushman.

This course will meet on Wednesday from 4:00-6:30. (Chapel Hill graduate seminars)

I should also note that I don't have class on Wednesdays this coming semester...

No one told me I was moving to a cold place!

I've already resolved not to go out of my apartment tomorrow.

Update: Well shit! This policy only made sense when the forecast said Friday would be warmer than Monday.

Ratio of Lifehacker Visits to Ideas Implemented ~30 : 1

So, I finally broke down and installed Invisibility Cloak which blocks time-wasting websites. More precisely, you list the worst offenders and it prevents them from loading prior to a certain time of day. I had previously resisted the software based on the important principle that I really enjoy wasting time.

The script exhibited a sad lack of professionalism: it has a built in variable specifying the time of day after which the cloaking stops taking effect, but no opposite variable. Perhaps they assumed that anyone who is awake after midnight is just too degenerate to embrace this sort of productivity enhancing tool. As a result, I was forced to alter the code so that I won't be stripped of my diversions after midnight. Since I've never even previously looked at javascript, the chances of this failing are approximately 100%.

A more insightful post than this would have noted how this hack is really just another instance of applying a high-powered technical solution to avoid applying any concept of personal responsibility, but I'm too lazy for that.

This is relevant to 11% of my visitors

There has been some chatter about a security flaw in Safari, though as of yet there's no malware in the wild. You can fix the most serious issue by going to preferences and stop having Safari automatically open “safe” files. Even to my uninformed eyes, this looks like an atrociously bad feature, but it's the default setting. Given that Gruber was writing about this feature back in 2004, and again in 2006 it seems time to start entertaining the thesis that all the (extra) protection Apple has going for it is security through obscurity.

Update: it may be that the dmg problem doesn't actually pose a threat beyond forcing you to restart. That's reassuring, but doesn't change the badness of Safari's presets.

My apologies to Chekhov

If there is a database of driver's license data in the first act, it will be hacked in the second.

Please to not exercise your creativity

I went to a go tournament in D.C. this weekend, but I'll reserve comment until later, as it only sets the stage. While driving back to Pittsburgh on I-76, I was behind a pickup with a bumper sticker reading Gun Control Is Racist. Several hours later, I still don't get it.

Ding, dong, the witch is dead

Vernon Robinson is no more. Brad Miller beat him 96,842–55,308 or 64 to 36 percent. Both Vernon's political hopes and half of my traffic have now gone the way of the dodo.

Related News:
GOP FEARS ELECTION “NOT CLOSE ENOUGH TO THROW”

A schedule

It's almost exactly a year since I last posted a harrowing schedule of my activities for the upcoming several weeks, so for tradition's sake, I might as well let you know what's happening.

• November 6th: Presentation of Projectivism about laws of nature
• November 8th: Presentation on Michael Dummett's article “Realism”
• November 9th: Philosophy of Science paper on something somehow connected to causation or reduction
• November 13th: Paper for metaphysics, which will probably be on projectivism
• November 16th: Presentation on Kuhn's “Revolutions as Changes of World View” and probable paper on lack of theoretical unity in science (how did this happen?!)
• November 23nd: Probable paper on the topic of scientific change
• December 11th: Final short paper in metaphysics
• December 13th: Short paper for M&E core
• December 13th: 4000–7000 word paper for Philosophy of Cognitive Science

The two saving graces are that the philosophy of science papers are usually just 1000 words, and I have a topic for cognitive science that is quite exciting. I'm writing on Stich's argument that the simulation theory blocks arguments for eliminativism. For that paper, I'm looking at his books From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science and Mindreading (with Sean Nichols), the latter of which is an all-time favorite. Nevertheless, this hurts.

My Internets Fame

I give in. I really want to know why are people doing google searches for poll data on Vernon Robinson all of a sudden? And would any of them mind telling me how things stand in that race? I'm still left choosing between the principles "the American people would never elect someone so obviously insane" and "the American people would elect only someone that insane."

From Daily Kos, I get that Vernon Robinson is inching up against Miller, implying that he is behind. I also find out that his ads random substituted a picture of a Palestinian man for a Mexican man. Another advertisement (SFW) reads “Brad Miller even spent your tax dollars to pay teenage girls to watch pornographic movies with probes connected to their genitalia,” but I think we're all better off if I don't joke about that.

It's news because we're talking about it

If you are the BBC and someone produces a report for the Bravo television channel claiming that the human race will split in two, much as in H.G. Wells' The Time Traveler, you should:

• Ignore the matter
• Post it in your sadly nonexistent satire section because it is quite droll
• Post it with the title Human species may ‘split in two’

Cynicism bleg

Everytime I find myself getting optimistic about the elections, I have to remind myself that while voters seem ready to elect Democrats, the factor which goes unmentioned is that the other side is going to be cheating. A lot. If things go well enough, it won't matter, because elections in this country are still more or less democratic—you don't win them without a hell of a lot of people voting for you. Once that requirement is met, however, we have very little to do with the matter.

Combatting Plagiarism

One university professor writes that he suspects as many as 25–30% of the graduating seniors at his university were guilty of some form of cheating. I'm a bit put off by his emphasis on Wikipedia as a source of cheating—though I don't doubt that it's often the source of plagiarized material, that's just because of its prominence as a source of information. The tone just strikes me as typical “blame Wikipedia!” style hysteria. The comments are also excellent in an entirely different fashion: somehow the cheating problem is the professor's fault, because they are either failing to engage the students, assigning too much work, or the assignments fail to require student creativity, facilitating plagiarism. Also, fantasy-land is an excellent place which you should visit! The only serious complaint is that many students get in trouble because no one has done a good job explaining citations to them, meaning that they are merely dense instead of scum.

In any case, he raises the point that sites such as Student of Fortune, which offer answers to questions on an as needed basis, and provide all original content thereby make it much harder for professors to catch cheaters.* I'm tempted by the idea of a legal mandate to give universities access to these sorts of sites, so that the written content would be searchable just like what's on wikipedia. Obviously, there is both a demarcation problem in terms of identifying the sites which would be subject to the law, and a matter of the political impossibility of passing such legislation, but I suspect this is a decent idea in principle.

(*)(I think it's irrelevant that one has to question Student of Fortune's impact, given that its top earner has made $43.50 so far. There are other sites that offer original content and do greater business.)

More than 4 million possible configurations!

Apple has begun stealing marketing strategies from my favorite late night food which can be purchased from a restaurant chain. If you are one of Tim, Ed or Dan, you should instantly know what I'm referring to.