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History of Philosophy: a free weekly podcast

Peter Adamson, Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at King's College London, takes listeners through the history of philosophy, "without any gaps." Beginning with the earliest ancient thinkers, the series will look at the ideas and lives of the major philosophers (eventually covering in detail such giants as Plato, Aristotle, Avicenna, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant) as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition.

What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness: The decline and fall of American English, and stuff

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. "And he was like, you know, 'Helloooo, what are you looking at?' and stuff, and I'm like, you know, 'Can I, like, pick you up?,' and he goes, like, 'Brrrp brrrp brrrp,' and I'm like, you know, 'Whoa, that is so wow!'"
She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.
Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.

Economist research: Imbalance of opportunity for women

This presentation, prepared for one of our Ideas Economy events, examines the variation in economic opportunities for women around the world, using data compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Opportunity is defined as a combination of prevailing labour policies, access to finance, education and training, and legal and social status. One surprising finding: under communism women were encouraged (or expected) to work, and this attitude has persisted in many former communist countries, which continue to provide more opportunities for women.

It Takes a Church Like Scientology to Have Apostates These Days

To make a true apostate you need a religious community that has, among other things, obvious insiders and outsiders. In the United States, with our promiscuous spiritual questing, many of us are never exclusively in one religion enough to one day find ourselves out of it. To leave some religious groups is to apostatize, while to leave other groups - notably mainline Christian groups - is simply to float away. It is hard to imagine a Unitarian-Universalist apostate.

Mind vs. Machine: Computers can fly airplanes, but they can't make plausible small talk

In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test—an annual battle between the world's most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people. The objective? To find out whether a computer can act "more human" than a person. In his own quest to beat the machines, the author discovers that the march of technology isn't just changing how we live, it's raising new questions about what it means to be human.

A Dow Jones/S&P 500 Index for the Arts (It's a Bear Market)

The National Arts Index is intended to function much like stock indexes. By its measure, the recent, recession-strapped years have seen big declines not just in nonprofit arts but pop concerts and movies as well.

[...]

Billed as 'the largest data set ever assembled describing arts and culture in America,' the National Arts Index released Monday by the advocacy group Americans for the Arts aims to capture in a single number how the arts and entertainment sector has been doing - much as the Dow Jones and S&P indices do for stocks. The news is not good.

Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory

When Claude Lévi-Strauss died a little over a year ago at age 100, he left behind a curious and contested legacy. For the French, he was the intellectual equivalent of royalty. In 2008, editions of his works were published in the gilt-lettered Pléiade collection, an act of canonization rare for a living French author; in his last appearances on television, he was less a commentator than an object of veneration; shortly before the end, President Nicolas Sarkozy paid him court to wish him happy birthday. "All French anthropologists are the children of Lévi-Strauss," proclaimed Le Monde in its obituary—which was an understatement, as there is scarcely a field in the humanities and social sciences Lévi-Strauss left unaltered. His ideas about myth dramatically collapsed the distinction between European high culture and so-called primitive society, and weaned a generation of French thinkers off Marxist orthodoxy and Sartrean existentialism. Though he did not like to claim intellectual patrimony, the careers of Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault are impossible to imagine without him.

But for readers outside France, including many Anglo-American critics, the nature of his achievement is harder to define. No one doubts Lévi-Strauss was the author of important works and the purveyor of powerful insights, but the suspicion remains that behind his fantastically rigorous analyses of Amerindian culture there operated a deeply impressionistic and idiosyncratic mind at odds with any general theory. Some accused him of reducing the meaning of human existence to an arbitrary stock of contrasting flavors: the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the rotten, the wet and the dry. Others took his structuralist program to be a scientific alibi that concealed his fundamentally artistic enterprise. This was a man, after all, who once, while in the middle of the Amazon, wrote a tragedy about Augustus, and whose magnum opus, the four-volume Mythologiques (1964–71), was composed in a series of musical movements that promised a key to all mythologies. For such critics, the very scale of Lévi-Strauss's ambition belongs to a particularly heady moment in French thought.

Patrick Wilcken's new biography, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, is an ambitious attempt to navigate between these two extreme perspectives.

When will we run out of IPv4 Addresses? I hope 2012!

Various studies and articles have been published in recent years with estimates concerning the exhaustion of IPv4. While no one can predict the exhaustion date of IPv4 with certainty, we all know it is inevitable. It is no longer a question of "if", but rather of "when". Various mathematical calculations, along with discussions on how different variables affect the exhaustion date are used to approach this complex challenge.

While the existing studies published on IPv4 have merits, they also have some mathematical shortcomings and they do not examine the existing and forthcoming IANA allocation procedures in detail. As a result, they tend to underestimate the projected exhaustion date.

The result of this new method is that the IANA pool will be exhausted by 2011-01-22. The first RIR exhaustion date would occur around 2011-10-09 and the last RIR would be depleted by 2012-07-28.

1906: Crafty farmers get around data charges with telegraph ciphers

Walter A Wood was a large scale manufacturer of Agricultural Equipment located in Hoosick Falls, NY – a small town between Albany and the Vermont border. Although his business began local, it was eventually an international operation. The NYSHA library has a large and comprehensive collection of catalogs, broadsides, parts lists and circulars for Wood’s company. The Farmers' Museum also has several pieces of Wood equipment in the collection.

In scanning one of the parts catalogs I discovered that each part had its own telegraph cipher. Perhaps I have been reading too many murder mystery novels, but my first thought about this cipher systems was related to German spies. I thought "Did the US government not want Germany to know where all of our grain was grown, so they directied these manufacturers to encode their ordering system?"

There are a number of problems with this conspiracy-theory, not the least of which are that the codes are printed in a readily available catalog and 1906 is too early to be worrying about German spies.

My next thought was "DATA PLAN"! This may seem like a non-sequitur.  however, if you have a cell phone, or have tried to upgrade your cell phone recently, you will notice that just about every phone is internet-ready and that you will have to pay for the cost of sending internet data over the cellular network to which you subscribe. It dawned on me that these telegraph cipher codes were a data cost-cutting measure for ordering your replacement parts via telegraph.

102-Key Piano Developed in Australia

Most pianos have 88 keys. And most great piano music comes from the middle of the keyboard — only rarely do the player’s fingers venture onto the tinkly keys at the top of the keyboard, or the booming bass notes at the bottom. But a craftsman in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, thinks the instrument has room to grow; and he wants to nudge the piano out of complacent middle age. He has designed a grand with an unprecedented 102 keys.

The Stuart and Sons grand piano has 14 more keys than most, which means its lowest and highest notes live very much on the edge. Its designer, Wayne Stuart, says a few other grands can play as low as this 102-key model, but none can play as high.

"I'd hate to go back to the 88-key piano," he says. "I couldn't stand it. It's too limited."

The extra notes might lend themselves to great feats of acrobatics, but they're not exactly musical. So why have them?

For color, Stuart says, and resonance. "There's a tremendous amount of energy in the low-octave notes, and you can hear the power."

Researchers Say They Can Cure Tinnitus By 'Retuning' The Brain

American scientists claim to have developed a cure for tinnitus, a condition that causes incessant ringing in the ears. Researchers have found that by stimulating the part of the brain that causes the disorder they were able to make the ringing go away - at least for, er, rats.

Poor Reason: Culture still doesn't explain poverty

"'Culture of Poverty' Makes a Comeback." So read the headline of Patricia Cohen’s front-page article in the October 17, 2010 edition of The New York Times. The article was prompted by a recent issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science under the title, "Reconsidering Culture and Poverty." In their introductory essay, the editors, Mario Luis Small, David J. Harding, and Michèle Lamont, strike a triumphant note:

Culture is back on the poverty research agenda. Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists have begun asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of poverty and even explicitly explaining the behavior of the low-income population in reference to cultural factors.

Cohen begins with a similar refrain:

For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named. The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a ‘culture of poverty’ to the public in his 1965 report on 'The Negro Family.'

Cohen uncritically accepts two myths woven by William Julius Wilson, the prominent Harvard sociologist, and repeated by his acolytes: first, Moynihan was clobbered for bringing to light compromising facts about black families, and second, that this torrent of criticism constrained a generation of social scientists from investigating the relation between culture and poverty, for fear that it would be pilloried for "blaming the victim." Thus, a third, patently self-serving myth: thanks to some intrepid scholars who reject political correctness, it is now permissible to consider the role that culture plays in the production and reproduction of racial inequalities.

A woman's greatest handicap is her upbringing: Interview with Beatrix Patzak (Federal Pathologic-Anatomical Museum, Vienna)

For the series on “Women leaders in art and science” wieninternational.at spoke this week with Beatrix Patzak, director of the Federal Pathologic-Anatomical Museum in Vienna. The woman who reigns over about 50,000 anatomical and pathological specimens reported from her workplace in the so-called Narrenturm (Madhouse Tower) about her first activities at the museum, her everyday experience with overwhelmed visitors and the special features of the building.

Since the beginning of her era Beatrix Patzak has succeeded in turning the Pathologic-Anatomical Museum into an open, accessible building. Yet even so the 'Madhouse Tower' appears deserted on this morning of the 2nd of November. The doors of what was once the world’s first psychiatric ward are closed, and only after ringing the bell does the door to today’s museum world of pathology and anatomy open. Silence reigns on the path leading past the public exhibition on the ground floor through the courtyard up to the first floor to the study collection. There we finally came face to face with Beatrix Patzak who in 1993 became the youngest director of an Austrian state museum and the first woman to hold such a high position. Two skulls are quickly removed from her desk before our interview begins.

What prompted the Beatles to end their lengthy dispute with the other Apple over downloads?

Part of the hesitation on the Beatles' part may have been that the band have always been heavily protective of their music, keen never to devalue the brand by giving away their songs too cheaply: when the disruptive effects of the internet were first felt within the music industry, one common response was to start selling CDs at heavily marked-down prices, but McCartney and co never succumbed to this pressure.

Nor is it likely to be coincidence that the iTunes deal was only concluded a full year after all the Beatles' albums were remastered and reissued on CD, rather than at the same time: this way, the band get yet another turn in the spotlight. For now, iTunes is the only digital carrier of the Beatles catalogue, but an EMI spokesman has said this special treatment will only last "into 2011", holding out the promise that Baby, You're Rich Man will soon be available on a multitude of digital platforms, including services such as Spotify (although possibly, in that instance, as part of the offering to premium subscribers).

What Does It Mean To Be Cool? Linking Stoicism and Hip Hop

In principle, to be cool means to remain calm even under stress. But this doesn't explain why there is now a global culture of cool. What is cool, and why is it so cool to be cool?

The aesthetics of cool developed mainly as a behavioral attitude practiced by black men in the United States at the time of slavery. Slavery made necessary the cultivation of special defense mechanisms which employed emotional detachment and irony. A cool attitude helped slaves and former slaves to cope with exploitation or simply made it possible to walk the streets at night. During slavery, and long afterwards, overt aggression by blacks was punishable by death. Provocation had to remain relatively inoffensive, and any level of serious intent had to be disguised or suppressed. So cool represents a paradoxical fusion of submission and subversion. It's a classic case of resistance to authority through creativity and innovation.

Today the aesthetics of cool represents the most important phenomenon in youth culture. The aesthetic is spread by Hip Hop culture for example, which has become "the center of a mega music and fashion industry around the world" (montevideo.usembassy.gov). Black aesthetics, whose stylistic, cognitive, and behavioural tropes are largely based on cool-mindedness, has arguably become "the only distinctive American artistic creation" (White & Cones, Black Man Emerging: Facing the Past and Seizing the Future, 1999, p.60). The African American philosopher Cornel West sees the "black-based Hip Hop culture of youth around the world" as a grand example of the "shattering of male, WASP cultural homogeneity" (Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America, 1993, p.15). While several recent studies have shown that American brand names have dramatically slipped in their cool quotients worldwide, symbols of black coolness such as Hip Hop remain exportable.

However, ‘cool' does not only refer to a respected aspect of masculine display, it's also a symptom of anomie, confusion, anxiety, self-gratification and escapism, since being cool can push individuals towards passivity more than towards an active fulfillment of life's potential. Often "it is more important to be ‘cool and down' with the peer group than to demonstrate academic achievement," write White & Cones (p.87). On the one hand, the message produced by a cool pose fascinates the world because of its inherent mysteriousness. The stylized way of offering resistance that insists more on appearance than on substance can turn cool people into untouchable objects of desire. On the other hand, to be cool can be seen as a decadent attitude leading to individual passivity and social decay. The ambiguity residing in this constellation lends the cool scheme its dynamics, but it also makes its evaluation very difficult.

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