In an email, Maria Spiropulu, a professor at the California Institute of Technology who works with the CMS team at CERN wrote about the Higgs, “I personally do not want it to be standard model anything — I don’t want it to be simple or symmetric or as predicted. I want us all to have been dealt a complex hand that will send me (and all of us) in a (good) loop for a long time. From the NYT story on the... Read more
There are times (and these times grow ever more frequent) that I begin to worry about how little I know about contemporary music. I don’t just mean the crappy teeny bopper nonsense that, like some viruses, die as soon as they’re exposed to the air (although I partly mean that, as ignorance of them removes for me a common subject of derision). I’m mainly talking about quality stuff made in the past handful of years. I’m not an old guy... Read more
Listen to music: If it’s somber or richly produced or instrumented (which is the only kind to which I’ll be inclined), it may only depress me further, or at least more deeply entrench me into the ill feeling. If it’s really good, it will further depress me by reminding me of all the music I’m not writing or recording or performing. Read: The solitary and silent nature of long-form reading is too fragile; it leaves too much space in my... Read more
Gary Wills, no knee-jerk liberal he, marks this year’s election as a crucial moment for the right. … this election year gives Republicans one of their last chances—perhaps the very last one—to put the seal on their plutocracy. They are in a race against time. A Democratic wave is rising fast, to wash away the plutocracy before it sets its features in concrete, with future help from the full (not just frequent) cooperation of the Supreme Court. I accept the... Read more
I was rather angered by how the tech press handled the Mike Daisey affair. They seemed to me to be dancing with glee at the prospect of having their consciences somehow cleared because the man delivering the message of the treatment of workers at Foxconn had turned out to be something of a fabulist. Daisey certainly erred when he implied that his theatrical story was documentary truth. But the tech press was way too happy that Daisey had been caught... Read more
George Scialabba, reviewing Morris Berman’s final installment of a trilogy of books diagnosing the ills of our grand experiment, provides of litany of horrifying facts about the dismal state of our country’s brains, morals, priorities, and environment, and writes: Contemplating these dreary statistics, one might well conclude that the United States is — to a distressing extent — a nation of violent, intolerant, ignorant, superstitious, passive, shallow, boorish, selfish, unhealthy, unhappy people, addicted to flickering screens, incurious about other societies... Read more
Long story short: Sam Harris said that we should specifically profile Muslims at airports, not grandmas in wheelchairs and 4-year-old girls, because if someone’s going to try to crash a plane in 2012, it’s almost certainly going to be a radicalized Muslim. Liberals went insane, calling Harris a racist and other terrible things, atheists disowned him, and I think somewhere Gandhi cried. Harris said, okay, then let me debate it with a security expert. He nabbed security bigwig Bruce Schneier,... Read more
I’m reading The Essays of Montaigne because, well, it’s there. In discussing friendship, ol’ Michel blockquotes Cicero: Those are only to be reputed friendships that are fortified and confirmed by judgment and length of time. Yeah, that’s totally not what happens now. If Facebook’s “friend” becomes the dominant definition of the word, we’re going to need a whole other term for what Cicero and Montaigne mean. Read more
ZachsMind just posted a very thoughtful response to a post of mine from a few weeks back that seemed to get a wee bit of attention from the Tumblrsphere. The meat of my post that has been a few times bequoted is thus: How many readers does it take to make a blog worthwhile? What constitutes a sufficient number of pageviews for a given post? The most obvious answer is that there is no line of demarcation; the act of... Read more
The following is a collection of thoughts about air travel that I typed into my iPad’s note program or twiddled into my iPhone’s Twitter client while making my way through the flying process this past weekend. They are in no particular order and have not been edited in any meaningful way from when they were first written, and that should probably be warning enough. * * * It may be the defining mark of a super-advanced civilization that we’ve managed... Read more
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