- Leg bouncers – Tend to bounce at a rhythm of around ten times per second, achieved by pressing and releasing the forward part of the metatarsals on the floor while the calcaneus remains consistently raised.
- Foot bouncers – Legs are crossed, and the tallus of the raised foot is held still, while the phalanges move side to side at about ten cycles per second.
- Thigh massagers – Feet are ususally flat on the floor, and knees move closer together and further apart at a rate of about three times per second. Each knee moves horizontally about three to five inches each half cycle with the average distance between the knees somewhere between one and a little over two feet, depending on the particular man who can't sit still's style of thigh massage.
- Foot rotators – Langorous, veering into laconicity, phalanges make a slow circle at about once per second.
- Gum chewers – Styles may vary.
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I know a few regular readers of this blog have views about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I want to ask a question about what is supposed to be the response to a basic worry about a whole family of approaches. (David Wallace's recent book would be an obvious case, but so would Sean Carrol's recent contributions.)
The many worlds interpretation basically says that whenever you make a "meausurement" in QM, (say you have a particle that is spin up in the y direction and you measure spin in the x direction,) the world contintues to evolve according to the Schroedinger equation, and the only thing that makes it look like the measurement has a determinate outcome is that the world splits into two emergent worlds, with an emergent observer in each one. The trick of all this, of course, is to somehow explain why there is probability when all of the outcomes are occuring. One problem I have with all of these attempts to get probability out of is that they all go like this.
1. Assume decoherence gets you branches in some preferred basis.
2. Give an argument that the Born rule applied to the amplitudes of these branches yields something worthy of the name ‘probability.’The problem is that these steps happen in the reverse order that one would like them to happen.
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Do you know the pain of women you sometimes see flying
on carts with bottles of vitriol in fingers that burn?Do you know the sorrow of strong wild madmen,
when hoses of water stream on their bare necks?Do you know the hatred to life of people dying
with a rope on their neck and a bullet in their skull?Do you know the grief of children from beds of sin,
who are found strangled in toilets?Do you know the pain of waxen fading lips
of the dying who no longer have strength to sob?Can you fathom the pain of pregnant mothers
who in their bellies carry dead children? -
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God. -
Twenty five years ago today, the last great example of an artform destroyed by the Disney copywrite regime.The band members are still being sued for the sampling.
I was going to post one of the videos from the album, but MCA would have preferred the video at right.
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I’m teaching a course on privacy and surveillance this fall, and one of the things I’ve been doing is reading up on aspects of privacy theory that I didn’t know much about, such as the feminist critique of privacy. The basic feminist argument is that “family privacy” has been historically used as a cover to shield domestic abuse from legal scrutiny (and not only against women – see this disturbing Supreme Court case about a stepfather who beat a four year old into serious and permanent cognitive disability; the Rhenquist Court argues that state social services had no enforceable obligation to intervene because of family privacy). It is in this context that I ran across Reva Siegel’s (Law, Yale) fantastic article on the way that claims of domestic privacy emerged out of the collapse of a husband’s legal right to “chastise” (beat) his wife. Siegel’s larger purpose is to study the ways that legal reforms can serve to “modernize” status regimes, a process in which old hierarchies are given new justifications and (perhaps) weakened, but not eliminated. It’s not that the legal reforms don’t achieve anything – it’s that it’s very, very difficult to dismantle regimes of social privilege, and that (as Foucault noted), power always entails resistance.
Here, I want to focus briefly on the move from chastisement to privacy, because I think it suggests something important for our understanding of biopolitics. As Siegel outlines it, the basic story is that, over the course of the nineteenth century, a couple of groups made substantial inroads into the old common law right of chastisement: temperance groups used stories of horrific abuse of women by drunk husbands to advocate banning alcohol, and feminist groups use the same stories to advocate for the banning of wife-beating. The feminists eventually won, and a pair of state supreme court cases around 1870 (one in Alabama and one in North Carolina) emphatically – perhaps a little too emphatically – pronounced wife beating to be the unwelcome vestige of a primitive, bygone era.
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Shocking report here on how bad the California ground water situation is to go along with the terrible drought conditions. Groundwater is the only thing keeping California afloat, so to speak, through the last 3 consecutive years of drought.
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A couple of times I've co-written with people who don't use the Oxford comma. It can end up being a big headache when the usage isn't consistent, and then it's also weird to realize just how many times you conjoin three or more words in a phrase.
Putnam's book came out in Cambridge University Press, so I guess it's O.K. that he didn't use it.
The wikipedia article is quite nice, though the anti-Oxford comma section isn't sourced and the supposed ambiguity introduced by the Oxford comma is unconvincing, because the same phrase is also ambiguous without it. The pro-Oxford comma section gives examples that are ambiguous without it and not ambiguous with it, e.g. a book dedication that reads "to my parents, Any Rand and God" versus "to my parents, Ayn Rand, and God."
Vampire Weekend's eponymous song is pretty, though it's possibly NSFW because of f-bombs. I don't know what it's about, but the odd specificity of the lyrics ("Why would you lie about how much coal you own?") work very well. When I first heard the song I though it was pro-Oxford comma, and was pretty disappointing when I read the lyrics.
After the kerfuffle over Weird Al's song, pro-Oxford Comma partisans are probably just going to have to continue to wait for our anthem.
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Might there be excellent reasons to embrace radical skepticism, of which we are entirely unaware?
You know brain-in-a-vat skepticism — the view that maybe last night while I was sleeping, alien superscientists removed my brain, envatted it, and are now stimulating it to create the false impression that I’m still living a normal life. I see no reason to regard that scenario as at all likely. Somewhat more likely, I argue — not very likely, but I think reasonably drawing a wee smidgen of doubt — are dream skepticism (might I now be asleep and dreaming?), simulation skepticism (might I be an artificial intelligence living in a small, simulated world?), and cosmological skepticism (might the cosmos in general, or my position in it, be radically different than I think, e.g., might I be a Boltzmann brain?).
“1% skepticism“, as I define it, is the view that it’s reasonable for me to assign about a 1% credence to the possibility that I am actually now enduring some radically skeptical scenario of this sort (and thus about a 99% credence in non-skeptical realism, the view that the world is more or less how I think it is).
Now, how do I arrive at this “about 1%” skeptical credence? Although the only skeptical possibilities to which I am inclined to assign non-trivial credence are the three just mentioned (dream, simulation, and cosmological), it also seems reasonable for me to reserve a bit of my credence space, a bit of room for doubt, for the possibility that there is some skeptical scenario that I haven’t yet considered, or that I’ve considered but dismissed and should take more seriously than I do. I’ll call this wildcard skepticism. It’s a kind of meta-level doubt. It’s a recognition of the possibility that I might be underappreciating the skeptical possibilities. This recognition, this wildcard skepticism, should slightly increase my credence that I am currently in a radically skeptical scenario.
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Eric Kaplan, who overlapped with me in grad school at Berkeley but who is now much more famous as a comedy writer for Big Bang Theory, Futurama, and several other shows, has been cooking up weird philosophical-comical blog posts since March at his WordPress blog here.
Check it out!
New APPS 