Happy Gaudete Sunday! Gaudete Sunday is the third Sunday in Advent, and although Advent is a season of preparation and penitence, this Sunday is a foretaste of the joy of Christmas, and the liturgical colors for Mass change from violet to rose. In celebration, I’d like to share a few poems that I got to enjoy this past week at the Catholic Information Center’s Christmas Poetry party. A nun recited Richard Crashaw’s “A Hymn of the Nativity,” and I particularly... Read more
Last night, I kept seeing a news story pop up in my social media feeds: “Federal Court Strikes Down Criminalization of Polygamy In Utah.” The family that brought the suit is the Brown family, of the reality tv show Sister Wives. Kody Brown, his four wives, and their seventeen children had moved away from Utah after they went public, to avoid prosecution. I assumed, naturally enough, that this might mean that plural marriage was now legal in Utah (or at least... Read more
— 1 — The first time I ran into Google Hangout’s facial recognition feature, I had a lot of fun trying to find the limits of what it would recognize as a face. I grabbed photos, drawings, etc and held them up while ducking below my webcam’s sightline and then trying to compete with the faux-face to try to suss out how the algorithm decided. But Neil Yager has coded up a prototype that wouldn’t be fooled. He built a... Read more
Every summer, when I run the Ideological Turing Test, I end up making very grumpy faces at Google Forms. If I want to free people from the obligation to answer every single entry, I can’t link up responses across entries to see how people scored on the whole. But when I make a separate form for each essay, I have to re-ask the demographic question each time, which is tedious for you and limits how many I can ask. And... Read more
A few weeks ago, there was an interesting post on LessWrong about the unspoken assumptions of the Effective Altruism movement: However, ‘Effective Altruist’ has a major problem: it refers to altruism, not ethics. Altruism may be a part of ethics (though the etymology of the term gives some concern), but it is not all there is to ethics. Value is complex. Helping people is good, but so is truth, and justice, and freedom, and beauty, and loyalty, and fairness, and honor, and fraternity, and tradition,... Read more
In her memoir The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, Laura Miller talks about why she strongly preferred the Narnia books to the Elsie Dinsmore series an aunt pressed on her: The morality of Elsie Dinsmore was the morality of childhood, where the choice was between obedience and naughtiness. The morality of Narnia was grown-up, a matter of good and evil. A childhood friend echoed her feelings, contrasting Narnia to Oz: There was a certain weightiness to Narnia which really... Read more
This week, police in Iceland shot a suspect who was shooting at them. This is the first time in Iceland’s history that its law enforcement has killed a civilian in the line of duty, and the incident made national news. The Icelandic police department said officers involved will go through grief counseling. And the police department has already apologized to the family of the man who died — though not necessarily because they did anything wrong. “I think it’s respectful,”... Read more
I never get tired of Twelfth Night. Last night, I got to see a boisterous production in NYC that my brother’s been working on. (Runs through this weekend, details and tickets here). The show began with Sir Toby and Sir Andrew Aguecheek teaching the audience the lyrics for some of their drinking songs, so we can join in during the show proper. (“Go ahead and take a wife / you still will drink away your life / So drink... Read more
As the year winds to a close, and you may be starting to wonder what gifts which books to give friends and family for the holiday, I would, of course, like to remind you of the existence of Arcadia, Gödel Escher Bach, Reflections on the Psalms, and the corpus of Sondheim, for this week’s quick takes, I’m sharing my seven favorite books I read for the first time this year. They are in the order I read them chronologically over the last eleven months.... Read more
In Laura Miller’s quasi-memoir The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, she talks about her intellectual development in the context of the books she read as a child, with a particular emphasis on Narnia. But my attention was caught by a later passage, after she’s read Orwell’s Animal Farm. I don’t mean to suggest that Animal Farm isn’t moving. Even as an adult, I found the novel terribly sad. I pitied poor Boxer the draft horse, who dies serving a... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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