He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. -Friedrich Nietzsche

Posted by Norm at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've always been uncomfortable with the idea of corporations buying the naming rights for a sports arena. Call me old fashioned, but I like the fields that are named after individuals that make contributions to the sport, or a name that reflects the geographical area the team plays in or just the town's name, well you get the idea. A financial contribution just doesn't cut it for me, so I had to smile when I saw this story . Of course, in our greedy society they are already looking for a new corporate sponsor. How sad.

Posted by Norm at 10:14 PM | Permalink

Chris Pirillo took Ben to task for the flames he sent Chris's way via email. Chris writes, "Okay, I didn't plan on doing this at first, but I just can't take it anymore. I just received another flame from some jerkwad going by the name "Ben Friedman." The exchange started on Thursday, February 21, 2002 at 10:43AM. Sadly, he's not the first person to do something like this. Go to hell, Ben, and please do your best to hit every thorn on the way down." which he follows with copies of his email correspondence with Ben.

I posted a comment questioning the appropriateness of posting the emails, since as far as I know, Ben unlike Chris has not chosen to make himself a public figure. I was definitely in the minority among Chris's fans.

Today I was reading Mike Sanders blog and found the following related comment.

Justin questioned the inclusion of Doonesbury as a blogroll. When I asked him if I could publish his email, he responded: Yeah, please do, I figure any e-mail sent to a blogger is considerable for publication --just like if you were writing to a newspaper or something.

An interesting thought, but I still think that emails to bloggers should only be published with permission, or if the blogger has explicitly stated that all emails are considered for publication.

I think Mike is correct we should only publish with permission. I don't believe that if Ben had sent his letter via the USPS Chris wouldn have published his letters on the show, and I still don't believe he should have published them online.

Posted by Norm at 7:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's been an extraordinarily good week at JOHO the Blog Dave has provided excellent coverage of TED the Technology Entertainment and Design Conference in Monterey. Damn, I'm jealous, why wasn't I invited. Well at least David was there and has been sharing with us. I found the sections on Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins particularly interesting since they cover some of the same ground. I too would like to hear the rest of the story from Dennet's address. I don't find the "ideas are viruses" meme as troubling as David does however. It would seem one could take the view that there are good and bad ideas, good and bad viruses and that by their works ye shall know them. As I read about Western memes being harmful to Native Americans I was reminded of an analogous example, the bacteria in water supplies around the world and how the local residents become accustomed to their own variety and have no trouble, but if you come from another area it becomes a significant problem. Fascinating stuff. On to Dawkins, who David says pissed him off mightily. I think the problem in comparing religion and science is a little bit of apples and oranges. Science is amoral, there are both moral and immoral scientists, but that says nothing of science as a discipline. On the other hand religion is necessarily faith based. I think that is what Dawkins is attacking, that making decisions based on faith is not a particularly effective way to live. Of course its never quite that simple. People of faith also use science which further confuses the issue. Dawkins writes extensively on the subject of viruses and concludes that religion is a virus and that science is not. If anyone knows of any further links that expand on Dennet's idea I would certainly appreciate an E-mail, and thanks again David.

Posted by Norm at 7:51 PM | Permalink

I suppose the genesis was in the spring of 1945. General Eisenhower and his paramour a cute little number named Kay Sommersby out for a Sunday drive. The story is that the General and the Chick were cruising the autobahn, the Black Forest zipping by. It was an afternoon that Ike would remember years later when he proposed a National Highway, the Interstate Highway System. Eisenhower saw this as a way of linking one coast to the other. A way of being able to transport troops and equipment across the country quickly. My interest in the system concerns a small section of one of the North South arteries I-15. Interstate 15 between St. George Utah and Las Vegas Nevada traverses the famous Virgin River Gorge, a spectacular red rock canyon carved over centuries by what is now known as the Virgin River. This road was finished in November of 1963 only days before John Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Every time I make this trip, I tell my fellow travelers the story of its creation.
There are many unique aspects of the construction, including the cost, but I’ll save that for later. Mind you explosives played a key role in the construction holes we’re drilled in the canyon wall. Sticks of dynamite were placed in the holes and detonated. If you look closely you can still see the holes where the charges were placed. If you listen carefully you can still here the echoes of those mighty blasts. Millions of cubic yards of material were removed from the canyon walls creating room for the eventual highway. It has been said that if you trucked all the material to China you could create a second Great Wall equal in length to the first and a striking red color. I think the Chinese would like that The Great Red Wall of China. Sometimes I picture Ike and Kay cruising through the Virgin River Gorge. I wonder if they would be visualizing tanks on the road like those they saw on the autobahn some 20 years earlier, and would one of them point out as I always do that this section of road cost over a million dollars a mile to build. Can you believe that a million dollars a mile.

Posted by Norm at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A French student was pleased when his teacher provided an opportunity to earn extra credit. The teacher told him that if he read Orson Scott Card's Enders Game he would receive 500 funny money francs exchangeable at the end of the quarter for points toward improving his grade. He further stated that Card's book Speaker for the Dead would earn an additional 500 francs. Being above average in intelligence and after making a quick calculation the student concluded he could make an A with no further work. He would simply use the thousand francs he would earn by reading. So read he did, and let his daily class work slide. Nothing to worry about he thought. At the end of the quarter he presented the thousand francs to the teacher with a wry smile. The teacher, who by now had realized his mistake, and wasn't about to let a student get an unearned A. So he took the thousand francs keeping the 500 francs for Enders Game and returning 500 francs, informed the student that he had earned a C- , no discussion. The student was very angry and appeared at the teachers' home that same evening. The teacher arriving at the door and seeing the student with a gun said, "Please, don't shoot, where did you get the gun?" The student paused, smiled, and said, "What did you expect me to do with my extra 500 francs, and put a bullet in his head. Is the story true, were the bullets real, I can't say, you see, I'm no Speaker for the Dead.

Posted by Norm at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I found a nice collection of quotations here.

A few examples:

"Any idiot can face a crisis - it's the day to day living that wears you out." - Anton Chekhov

"When I sit down in front of a Windows machine, I can't write; when I sit down in front of my Mac, I can write. So I only use Macs." -Michael Crichton

The secret of survival is: Always expect the unexpected. Dr. Who

Posted by Norm at 12:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Now I don't want to complain but if I hear "everything has changed" just one more time I'm going to crack. I hate to tell you this but nothing has changed. Before 9-11 we had terrorists and after 9-11 there are still terrorists. Did everyone just somehow forget about the World Trade Center in 1993 or the Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 and what about the USS Cole in October of 2000 an explosion tore a 40 x 40 hole in the side of the that destroyer. We were damn lucky it didn't sink. Dick Cheney was hiding before 9-11, usually in a hospital, and after 9-11 he is still hiding. He says on Jay Leno's show that he and president shouldn't be in the same place at the same time because everything has changed. Before 9-11 we worried about some crazy with a gun now we have to worry about bombs and other bad stuff. Does the guy think all the guns before 9-11 were single shot.
Sometimes terrorists are successful sometimes they're not, but nothing has changed. I know what you're thinking, doesn't this guy remember we lost 3000 people at one time on 9-11. I'll grant that, but it was not for a lack of trying that it didn't happen sooner. A few feet or inches and the World Trade Center could have collapsed in 1993, the Cole may have sunk and even more innocent victims could have died in Africa. And since I'm off on a rant the other phrase I'm tired of hearing is "nothing will ever be the same". The only thing that won't be the same is that we'll have less freedom, we'll never be late to the airport and still make our flight. We'll never have the same level of privacy that we had before. We won't have the same standard of living because we'll be spending all our money on security. Will we be any safer, perhaps, but the risk will always be there just like it was before. There will be future terrorist attacks there's no damn way to stop them. An open society will always be vulnerable. That's the price we pay. I think Nader put it well when he said, "this kind of terrorism is tolerated and bred by poverty, injustice, dictatorships, destitution and human suffering." That's the place to start. Otherwise the terrorist's win. It will never be perfect, but hell that's the way it's always been, nothing has changed everything is still the same.

Posted by Norm at 7:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I recently finished reading Maugham's The Razor's Edge which I commented on a few days ago , well that reminded me that Maugham wrote a book many years ago where he listed his ten favorite novel's. I no longer have the book but I do have the list. I've read all of them with the exception of Tom Jones and War And Peace which are on my list of things to read. The only problem is that the list is getting longer than the list of what I've already read. I used to say that I had of stack of books I intended to read, but there is simply no way one could stack books that high. Funny isn't it the more one reads the longer the list of what you want to read becomes. I think de Balzac's Old Man Goriot was my favorite on this list in fact I consider it one of the top ten I've ever read. If you haven't read it yet I recommend putting it on the top of your stack (or list). Okay so here's the list.

W. Somerset Maugham's Ten Greatest Novels*

1. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding;
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen;
3. The Red and the Black, Stendhal;
4. Old Man Goriot, Honoré de Balzac;
5. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens;
6. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
7. Madam Bovary, Gustave Flaubert;
8. Moby Dick, Herman Melville;
9. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoi;
10. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Posted by Norm at 9:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of my favorite philosophers. I recently discovered this page with one hundred seventy-six of his aphorisms.

Here are three examples:

Forbidden generosity.-There is not sufficient love and goodness in the world to permit us to give some of it away to imaginary beings.

Sense of truth.-I think well of all skepticism to which I may reply "Let us try it." But I no longer want to hear anything of all those things and questions which do not permit experiments. This is the limit of my "sense of truth" for there courage has lost its rights

Free nature.- We are so fond of being out among Nature, because it has no opinions about us.

Posted by Norm at 1:48 PM | Permalink

I received an E-mail from my son Chris who is studying Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Utah and the Mormon's are currently a hot topic all over the world as a result of the Olympics being held here. Here is what he wrote.

"I ran into Christopher Hookway, a professor that happens to live quite close to me and is a well-known scholar of pragmatism, walking on the street. We chatted about this and that. He asked if I was sad that I was missing the Olympics, I said that I wasn't. He asked if I was raised in the Salt Lake area, and I said I was, but not as a Mormon. I told him some rumors about Utah are true and some are not. I told him that I felt like a minority there and related the story about people burning a cross on our lawn! He then made an interesting comment. He said there is no religious right in England and that I would find that agreeable. I said I did. He then said that some of this could be attributed, ironically, to having an official state religion. This is because the state religion has to be so watered down so as not to offend anybody. I thought this was an interesting remark."

Interesting indeed.

Posted by Norm at 4:43 PM | Permalink

Here is a link to the latest Dennis Miller rant. This one is on trust don't miss it.

Posted by Norm at 10:07 PM | Permalink

An interesting paper on why a contrastive explanation works well for those pesky "Why X?" questions.

Motivations for Contrastive Explanation

Posted by Norm at 3:46 PM | Permalink

Making sound judgments is difficult enough without having to deal with faulty and misleading research. There is a great link at metafilter that discusses one aspect of that difficulty. The article it links to is well worth reading. It reminded me of a book I read many years ago that had all kinds of great advice on the subject. I don't know if the book is still available, but I would recommend it highly to anyone that wants to make better judgments. I believe the title is: Human Inference: Strategies & Shortcomings of Social Judgment by Nesbitt & Ross. One bit of advice that has influenced me ever since reading this was when making a judgment about a person; disposition or unchanging characteristic to remember that behavior may be caused by situational constraints. How often we forget that advice and how often it causes us problems. I suppose that is why I'm so fond of the Oliver Wendell Holmes quotation I posted previously. "Truth is just a name for what is impossible for a person to doubt." If you can identify the situational constraints a person is subject to it certainly helps in understanding why they believe or behave the way they do.

Posted by Norm at 11:28 PM | Permalink

Being a resident of Utah and for the record one who would have been thrilled if some other city had been blessed with the Winter Olympics. I'll say that I found the opening ceremonies quite delightful, and very tastefully done. It is what I would expect our country to provide. Of course our president was, at his best?. I thought it was a nice touch that he sat with the athletes. Of course the scowl on his face when members of the "axis of evil" were introduced was, I thought, in very poor taste. If you're going to have guests you should treat them civilly and a scowl is not civil. I also thought it in poor taste for an athlete to stick a cell phone in the president’s ear. I think cell phones and camera’s at the opening ceremonies detract from the experience. I think it would be difficult to be both a participant and a photographer. When I mentioned this to a fellow employee who had attended the women's snowboarding halfpipe competition. She told me how exciting it was to be there in person, she simply didn't have words for the experience. The weather was perfect, the commentators snowboarders who learned the sport before helmets were standard, were apparently quite fun, and it was a bonus that an American won the gold medal. She said that when the American Kelly Clark was making her final run that she wanted to get a picture of her doing one of her great tricks, so at the beginning of the run she started looking through the viewfinder of her camera in order to get a good shot. Unfortunately a camera's viewfinder is not the perfect way to view the halfpipe, and she found that she missed much of the action. Afraid of missing the "perfect shot" so not looking up she heard the crowd going crazy over something she couldn't clearly see. What a price to pay for a simple picture. Of course with today’s technology one could have the best of both worlds; the memory through a picture captured on your TV and transferred to your computer and the unfettered experience of seeing the scene through both eyes. I asked her about security and she said they got there early enough that it wasn’t much of a problem, but a little uneven some gates moved right a long while others were very slow. I suppose that’s the human element a measure of how paranoid the security personnel was. I'm not worried about the terrorist threat since I'll do my watching on TV although given the amount of money spent on security I think it extremely unlikely there will be any problems. I understand a number of our residents are not so confident and have left the area for the duration. It seems to me that spending 392 million on security at the Olympics not to mention the other freedoms we have lost are evidence that the terrorists have indeed won. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to examine some other approaches to the problems.

Posted by Norm at 5:04 PM | Permalink

I just finished reading W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor’s Edge. Many years ago I read Of Human Bondage which is on my top ten list. So thirty years pass and with the exception of Summing Up an autobiographical account of his career I've read nothing else by him. My choice of reading material seems so random; I'm just as likely to pick up a mystery as something more substantive. I suppose that is why I enjoy reading so much it fills so many needs. I thoroughly enjoyed The Razor's Edge written in 1943 at the height of his career, it takes place mostly in France, and has a delightful cast of characters. Elliot the snob, but also a kind generous soul Gray, who speaks in cliché’s. His wife Isabel, gracious, interesting, but a little bit too preoccupied with money and status. Suzanne the opportunist with a lust for life and Sophie who demonstrates how unpredictable life really is. Finally Larry the idealist in all of us a searcher for truth. This is a book about life; I particularly enjoyed the contrast Maugham creates between material wealth and happiness. He is one of the best writers of the 20th Century, and this is a wonderful example of his talent. Read it!!

Posted by Norm at 12:41 AM | Permalink

"But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads." - Camus

Posted by Norm at 8:52 PM | Permalink

Distributed computing is all the rage these days we're searching for extraterrestrials, working on cures for cancer and anthrax. Now you can spend some of those extra CPU cylces on artificial intelligence. What they are doing is basically "Creating Chess Playing Artificial Neural Networks with Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms" this is different from the brute force approaches taken by most chess playing programs, and has more to do with how humans approach the game. "The approach taken here can perhaps be described best as 'playing chess by pattern recognition'. Interesting stuff check it out.

Posted by Norm at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again. And now it has died of these arid words and shakes and flaps in them - and I hardly know any more when I look at it how I could ever have felt so happy when I caught this bird." Friedrich Nietzche from The Gay Science section 298

Posted by Norm at 12:55 AM | Permalink

I often get distracted playing chess, spending many hours that I should probably be doing something else, but hell I enjoy playing chess and it looks like the Afghans do as well.

"The Taliban watched their every move, but chess-loving Afghans survived to play again"

Posted by Norm at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was wathcing TheScreenSavers last night, when Leo Laporte mentioned that he had set up a blog for Paul the producer of the show. I didn't get around to checking it out until this morning, well needless to say I was pleasantly suprised to find that it was a MOVABLETYPE powered blog. I remember Leo saying that he used GreyMatter for his own Blog so it is interesting that he would choose Movable for Pauls. Just occured to me to recheck Leo's Blog he is also using MOVABLETYPE quite a recommendation.

Posted by Norm at 12:52 PM | Permalink