Who Were the Sea Peoples?

If you like subtle psychological thrillers, I highly recommend the French film La Moustache . The story centers on a man who asks his wife if he should shave his moustache of 13 years, to which she replies she would not recognize him without it. After shaving and attempting to surprise her, she does not notice the change and insists that he has never had one. Learning that his father has been dead a year and his friends don't exist, he slowly spirals into an almost sensible madness that he can only escape from by clinging to the eyes of his wife. Some might find it to be unsatisfying as entertainment or smacking of French pretentiousness (not a redundancy, I remind the reader), but I think this is a very singular story, satisfying in its own odd way.

Reading this article , I found: "And then there is the related set of concerns: the emerging prospect that the world’s demand for oil will outstrip supply..." (Bashes head on keyboard fifteen times.) Supply and demand are curves my friend, curves and one of them cannot "outstrip" the other. Furthermore, the quantity demanded and the quantity supplied will always match at the equilibrium price. The quantity demanded will always "outstrip" the quantity supplied at a price below equilibrium, and vice versa at a price above equilibrium. The sentence above means nothing more than, "The price of oil is likely to keep rising."

New IBM machine can hold over 800,000 processors .

Or so my pappy used to say .

really looks like a ghoul from a horror movie , doesn't she?

I recall my friend Larry White talking about the bug zappers people put in their backyards: "So, I'm supposed to reduce the number of bugs in my yard by attracting them ?"

Looking at this book , which I am scheduled to review, I found: "Yet, keep in mind just how narrow life in rural India was for so long. In 1952, on the fifth anniversary of independence, the Indian government commissioned a survey to find out if the average Indian villager had heard yet that the British had gone. The study was quietly cancelled when early results showed that the average villager had never heard that the British had ever arrived!"

In this one I talk about why kickbacks aren't a problem in private business, plus I use a Friends reference.

Say Something. Signs to this effect are all over the NYC subway. The always give me the urge to run up to an MTA employee yelling "I saw something, I saw something." "What?" "God, I don't know... it was long, and noisy, and seemed to consist of many body segments, with portals that emit and swallow up people!"

I really don't understand anti-Christians who try to argue "Jesus never existed." Certainly, someone came up with the doctrines we call Christianity. So what if his name was Bill and not Jesus? What possible issue could turn on that question?

It's commonly aphorized that socialism is good in theory, but not in practice. Socialists consider this is a sad joke, because they have seen socialism work in practice, never mind the theory. We have public libraries, collectively owned roads, medicine, public schools, public welfare, etc. And though there are often attendant problems, there are some cities in the world in which these socialistic models thrive. More primordially, the family is evidence that spontaneous cooperation and collective pooling of resources independent of market mechanisms is not only viable, but optimal in diverse contexts. It works. Mises' classic argument about the impossibility of economic calculation in socialism is an overstatement. It is a difficulty inherent in socialistic planning, perhaps, but not an impossibility. The state of theoretical investigations seems irrelevant and distracting to tried and true paths developed by trial and error. There is a tendency in libertarian and conservative...

1) I've been re-reading old detective novels from a box I just unearthed. The characters are always "washing down" food with a pint or a glass of wine. What's this about? Have their digestive systems stopped working? My food goes down fine on its own, without any need for "washing." 2) One of the phrases of British English I least like is "tuck into," as in, "He tucked into his fish and chips." I tuck babies into their blankets; I never have tucked myself into my food. It makes me shiver every time I read it. 3) In Brooklyn, new Indian restaurants with absolutely standard fare still boast that they offer "exotic Indian foods." Dear owners: Thirty years ago, paratha, lamb korma, and chicken vindaloo may have been "exotic," but today they are about as exotic as spaghetti marinara. 4) Another tired blog cliche: "I'm just asking..." Having seen this for like the 7000th time, I'm pretty sick of it.

A: Absorbed in our discussion of immortality, we had let night fall without lighting the lamp, and we couldn't see each other's faces. With an offhandedness or gentleness more convincing than passion would have been, Macedonio Fernandez' voice said once more that the soul is immortal. He assured me that the death of the body is altogether insignificant, and that dying has to be the most unimportant thing that can happen to a man. I was playing with Macedonio's pocketknife, opening and closing it. A nearby accordion was infinitely dispatching La Comparsita , that dismaying trifle that so many people like because it's been misrepresented to them as being old. . . . I suggested to Macedonio that we kill ourselves, so we might have our discussion without all that racket. Z: (mockingly) But I suspect that at the last moment you reconsidered. A: (now deep in mysticism) Quite frankly, I don't remember whether we committed suicide that night or not. -Jorge Luis Borg...

"I have spent my entire life studying randomness, practicing randomness, hating randomness. The more that time passes, the worse things seem to me, the more scared I get, the more disgusted I am with Mother Nature. The more I think about my subject, the more I see evidence that the world we have in our minds is different from the one playing outside. Every morning the world appears to me more random than it did the day before, and humans seem to be even more fooled by it than they were the previous day. It is becoming unbearable. I find writing these lines painful; I find the world revolting." Nassim Taleb , still fooled by randomness.

One of my favorite history of science stories was told to me by John Milton -- no, not that John Milton, this one , who taught me history of science at King's College -- about Kepler. One of the reasons Kepler was happy to find his elliptical orbits for the planets was that in the system of both Copernicus and Ptolemy, the planets, to match observations, actually had to circle not the sun, but an empty point in space somewhat near the sun. When Kepler was able to put the sun at one of the focal points of a planet's elliptical orbit, he was quite pleased, for how, he asked, were the angelic intelligences steering the planets through space supposed to orient themselves around an empty point ?

One-quarter of the mammal species in the world are a type of bat .

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the Harry Potter books and movies. But I was watching one with my daughter last night, and I was struck once again by the fact that J.K. Rowling just didn't seem to bother working out any sort of logic to the magic in the books. Yes, we have to suspend disbelief and grant that magic and witchcraft exist in the fictional world, but having granted that, we should then find a logical consistency in how they operate there. However, in Harry Potter, what the heck is up with this "magic training"? The kids go to a class, and the teacher tells them to say "gaudiamus igitur," "vini, vidi, vici," or some such phrase, and... well, that's it! There seems to be nothing else to these spells at all. And yet there must be, because Ron Weasely's spells always go wrong. But with the single exception of the "Patronus," I've never seen any hint as to what the other thing could be, nor seen any student getting instruc...

I say no .

Yet another post in my series on song lyrics... I have nothing too profound this time, except to ask: Have you ever listened carefully to this Don Henley song ?!?

Great article by Bob "Too Lazy to Blog It Himself" Murphy.

Here's what I mean: A game theorist can set up a game and say "If a real situation exactly duplicates this game, and a fully rational actor in the situation is concerned solely with monetary [for instance] payoffs, then he will employ this strategy." The theory itself cannot say how closely any real world situation does match its structure, nor that an actor in the situation should be concerned only with what the game describes as the payoffs. For example, we sometimes hear something like, "While fully rational actors would bet this way at Game X, real humans are less than fully rational and, through their [love of risk / fear of loss /etc.] bet differently. But why is it "irrational" not to seek solely the reward that the game theorist has stipulated, and instead seek, say, the thrill of risk taking? Other than the theorist having mistaken his model for reality, there is no reason at all.

My daughter was telling our dog "Stay!" as she walked past me tonight. I jokingly said, "I'm staying, I swear I'm staying." It occurred to me that my joke hints at the gulf between animals and people: Our dog is perfectly capable of getting the idea of "Stay!" but I have never heard of any animal that could grasp the concept of "promising to stay."

At DiMattina Playground in Brooklyn, there are rules posted for the baseball field, including: "3) Only players on the field. 4) Only coaches on the field."

Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau writes : "In a continuing effort to highlight the way that even the most fundamental assumptions are subject to experimental testing in science..." This, of course, logically cannot be the case. How, for instance, could the fundamental assumption that experimental testing is a good way to get at the truth be tested experimentally without logical circularity? Or the idea that their is some sort of quantitatively stable relationship between a sequence of measurements? (You have to simply assume this, or all of your measurements are merely random pokes in the dark that prove nothing.)

When professional vocalists do this, do they sound much better than normal? (BTW a voice coach told me that you really do sing better in the shower. He said the acoustics allow you to get excellent feedback and adjust.)

I went to visit my friend Tommy at Cody's up on Court St. I told him I'd be running a tab, because I planned to skip out on the bill when I was done. He said, "You know how fast I can run, don't you?" (He did track in college, so I'd guess pretty fast.) I replied, "I'm just going to wait for you to go to the bathroom." Tommy pointed to the black guy next to me at the bar: "My friend Jeff here will watch you while I'm gone." The black guy looked at me and said, "Yeah, and I can run faster than you with a widescreen plasma TV and a stereo on my back."

The Libertarian Alliance posts my history of political thought talk, which I posted here a while back -- but their version has nice graphics!

This article got me thinking about game theory a bit. In particular, when the author writes, "Game theory predicts that the Nash equilibrium will occur when the Traveler's Dilemma is played rationally," he is guilty of a common mistake. I know many game theorists think game theory should model human behaviour, but they are mistaken. Game theory is a formal system, an abstraction from real decisions in which many factors other than those specified in the game come into play. It is interesting, and can offer some insight into real decisions, but to take it to predict anything about them, or, even worse, that it can stand as a normative judge of a decision's "rationality" or "irrationality, are severe mistakes. Saying "a Nash equilibrium is the rational result in game X" says no more than "If you play this game according to the rules I stipulate, then you will play it according to those rules." There is no reason whatsoever that it is...

I recently corresponded with a physicist who had posted, on his web site, what he saw as two invalid reasons for accepting a scientific theory (I paraphrase): 1) My theory is more beautiful than the accepted one. His response? "Take it to an art dealer." 2) My theory is more philosophically sound. Then you should "Take it to church." I pointed out to him that these two reasons were, until the work of Kepler, the only two reasons for accepting Copernican astronomy. (See, for instance, The Copernican Revolution by Kuhn (who was a trained physicist) or Against Method by Feyerabend, also trained in physics.) Copernican astronomy was simply no better than Ptolemaic astronomy at making predictions, and significantly worse in terms of agreeing with the main body of contemporary physics. He finally responded to me that, in evaluating why Copernican astronomy was accepted by early adopters, such as Rheticus, Maestlin, Kepler, and Galileo, I should "look to the physi...

"Materialism as the heir of Reiassance pantheism continued to live and thrive not only in the seventeenth century but throughout the eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries, until it was finally destroyed by the new theory of matter which grew up in the late nineteenth century. To the very end it retained the impress of its pantheistic origin. This appears in the outspoken religious character of its attitude towards matter which it postulates as the only reality. It denies God, but only because it transferred the attributes of God to matter, and being the offspring of a monotheistic tradition thinks one God quite enough. The phenomenon is so uniform that in a general way we can recognize a materialist author by his habit of using the traditional forms of Christian piety in speaking about the material world. On occasion he will even pray to it.... "Scientifically speaking, on the other hand, materialism was from first to last an aspiration rather than an achievement. Its ...

"Kettle ponds are sites where blocks of ice broke off from the ice sheet and were buried as meltwater carrying debris built up plains of outwash material around and over them." -- National Audobon Society Field Guide to the Mid-Atlantic Right around the word "debris" I get totally lost.

My stance on abortion wavers just about every day. I seriously don't think the government should get involved, but I also get the creeps when I think about growing fetuses getting sucked out of a womb. I have some sympathy for all sides, basically. Then there are the people who don't get a drop of my sympathy. The people who bomb abortion clinics, for instance. The officials in China who force women to take pregnancy tests and then have abortions. Those are the obvious people to hate in this debate. There's a group with more insidious methods, however. These people will take any opportunity to make abortion a political issue, no matter what the circumstances, and they twist language to make their point. Here's the story that outraged me today. A woman had a miscarriage 15-20 weeks into her pregnancy, and she preserved the fetus in her freezer. She's been charged with concealing the death of a child and abuse of a corpse (the latter charge was dropped). ...

by exposure to total horseshit studies . "However, she admitted the research team had no specific data on which chemicals the meat contained, and conceded other possible causes, such as exposure to pesticides, or lifestyle factors could not be ruled out." In other words, they controlled for absolutely nothing, and yet expect us to take their study seriously.

Apparently, it was a crime in ancient Rome to "use magic to move crops." (And there were prosecutions for this crime.) So if you had a spell that could make your wheat walk to the next field, best not to use it. Also, the wife of a patrician consul was prosecuted because she had said, "I wish the plebs were all dead." I don't think she had thought things through: first of all, who would she be patrician in relation to if the plebs all died? And, secondly, who would do her manual labor?

Walking down Rt. 6 near my house, I saw a sign reading "Passing Bidden." I looked closer, and realized the sign had originally read "Trespassing Forbidden," but the first few letters of each word had been folded up. Unintended consequences!