born live love die

When I started this blog, it arose after a couple of other failed blogging attempts.  I found that I sent emails to my friends and put links and clips in them.  I decided to turn this into a blog.  It seemed that my emails fell into six categories: art, science, technology, politics, literature and kids.  I made posts in those categories.  Over time, it seemed that I needed to add a few more.  As of late, I have encountered bits about language.  There are times when I think that language is a poor form of communication, but it is the best that we have.

There is a project underway to scan books at Google for the purposes of research.

Together with over 40 university libraries, the internet titan has thus far scanned over 15 million books, creating a massive electronic library that represents 12% of all the books ever published. All the while, a team from Harvard University, led by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden have been analysing the flood of data.  Their first report is available today. Although it barely scratches the surface, it’s already a tantalising glimpse into the power of the Google Books corpus. It’s a record of human culture, spanning six centuries and seven languages. It shows vocabularies expanding and grammar evolving. It contains stories about our adoption of technology, our quest for fame, and our battle for equality. And it hides the traces of tragedy, including traces of political suppression, records of past plagues, and a fading connection with our own history.

Read the whole thing.

Wired on snitches in terrorist organizations:

It may seem obvious, but well adjusted people don’t join terrorist groups. It’s the “anxious,” those with a “need for belonging/affiliation,” those with a “relatively low… level of assertiveness,” with low-self esteem who see themselves as “disorganized and undisciplined… incapable, lackadaisical, and unreliable.” They join terror groups to belong, and suspect they’re not doing the right thing — thereby opening up the door to betraying the organization.

Didn’t  know that.  I’m not much of a group joiner.  Maybe because I’m well adjusted?

Saw this and need to post it.

I don’t know if I am going to see this movie.

Nicole Kidman stars as a mother who loses a child.  She grieves.  The trailer brought tears to my eyes.  I was reminded of something I learned when I first divorced.  Kids don’t know how to grieve.  It takes time to learn that.  Grieving should be the last lesson you learn in life, not the first.  They are forced to grieve the loss of a family, the loss of a parent when they don’t know how to grieve.

This story seems one-sided.

Over the last decade, the federal government has been targeting doctors who treat pain patients with prescription drugs like Percocet and Oxycontin. Advocates like Reynolds argue that doctors who overprescribe painkillers should be disciplined by medical boards if they are sloppy or unscrupulous, not judges and prosecutors. Dumping them into the criminal justice system puts drug cops in the position of determining what is and isn’t acceptable medical treatment. One promising treatment of chronic pain known as high-dose opiate therapy, for example has all but disappeared because doctors are too terrified of running afoul of the law to try it.

And a woman became an advocate for the doctors.

Siobhan Reynolds entered this fray when her late ex-husband, Sean, began suffering the symptoms of a congenital connective tissue disorder that left him with debilitating pain in his joints. After trying a variety of treatments, he found relief in a high-dose drug therapy administered by Virginia pain specialist William Hurwitz. But Hurwitz was later charged and convicted on 16 counts of drug trafficking. The judge acknowledged that Hurwitz ran a legitimate practice and had likely saved and improved the lives of countless people. His crime was not recognizing that some of his patients were addicts and dealers. Meanwhile, Reynolds’ husband died in 2006 of a cerebral brain hemorrhage, which she believes was the result of years of abnormally high blood pressure brought on by his pain.

She ran afoul of a federal prosecutor.  Read the whole thing.

I’m not that familiar with the writings of David Foster Wallace.

For most of college, Wallace’s main philosophical interests were in the more technical branches of the subject, such as mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. One semester, he took a seminar on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early work grapples with the writings of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, two of the founders of modern logic. As Wallace recollected in 1992 in a letter to the novelist Lance Olsen, he was “deeply taken” in the seminar with Wittgenstein’s first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). Along with its controversial arguments about the nature and limits of language, the Tractatus introduced some indisputable formal innovations, including a method of analyzing the propositions of modern logic by way of “truth tables.” To some, the book might have seemed forbiddingly spare and exacting; Wallace remembered being moved by its “cold formal beauty.” When the seminar moved on to Wittgenstein’s so-called late philosophy, in which he repudiates the ideas and austere methodology of theTractatus in favor of new assumptions and a looser, less mathematical style, Wallace was not immediately impressed. He wrote to Olsen that at first he found Philosophical Investigations, the crowning statement of the late philosophy, to be “silly.”

I am not familiar with the essence of Wittgenstein’s writings.  But in giving it the Wiki once-over, it seems that there is a lot there that depends on the axioms one chooses for the argument.  I have considered the issue and it seems to me that there are two kinds of truth: things we define to be true, e.g., there are 12 inches in a foot, and things we determine to be true.  We can determine the truth by measurement or by inference.  Philosophy lives in the realm of truth by inference since there is precious little to measure.  In this realm, it is possible to grow a tree of logic, then unroot it and connect the roots to the leaves.  I don’t see the point.

That’s the thing about Fry and Laurie.  You can’t stop with just one.

I like some good snark.  This cracked me up when I read it.

Virginia, fresh off the thrilling conservative victory of getting a Republican judge to rule part of Obamacare unconstitutional, is now looking to ban gays from the National Guard in its state,because playing around with secessionary tactics is the second greatest passion in the South. (#1 passion: the South.)

Yes, people in the South talk about the South, how great it is and how it is disrespected.  I haven’t gotten a lot of that from other places I’ve lived in this country.  As I told JMan the other day, “If you want to be respected, be respectable.”  But the last bit of that snark reminded me of this:

Pardon the advert; it is also available on Netflix.

Kinsley’s review of the Bush tell-nothing introduced a new word: lachrymose.

George W. Bush’s presidency was not one of America’s greatest, but judging from Bush’s own retelling, it surely was the most lachrymose.

I’m an engineer, so that isn’t a word I would use very much.  But it is a word I would use to describe the way I react when I think about the way Bush treated the country.

I didn’t trust Bush, but I wanted him to go sit in the Oval office on 9/11 and lead by example.  He didn’t.

Speaking of blood, on 9/11: “My blood was boiling. We were going to find out who did this, and kick their ass.” He was in Florida at the time, you will recall, and wanted to return to Washington. The Secret Service wanted him to go to an Air Force base in Louisiana. “I told them I was not going to let terrorists scare me away. ‘I’m the president,’ I said firmly. ‘And we’re going to Washington.’ ” So Air Force One went to Louisiana. There, Bush insisted once again that “the American people needed to see their president in Washington.” So they went to Nebraska. There, “I put my foot down.” And they went to Washington.

Bush has a selective memory, as do we all.

Whatever that description means, exactly, Bush applies it to himself until the day after a 40th-birthday celebration, when he stopped drinking with the help of God, who spoke to him while he was out jogging. (I make light, but this part of his story is actually fascinating, gutsy and very well told.) Thirteen years later, after he had made a quick fortune buying and selling a baseball team and then had been elected governor of Texas, God told him to run for president. “I felt a calling to run,” Bush writes. “I was concerned about the future of the country, and I had a clear vision of where to lead it. I wanted to cut taxes, raise standards in public schools, reform Social Security.” Bush never indicates where this laundry list of views came from. He had no political views he deems worthy of mention before the age of 40, but a few years later he has a complete set. You do have to wonder how deep they run.

Not very deep.  Bush wanted to become President more than he wanted to be President.

I sat through this movie when it came out, all 9 hours of it.  It played on consecutive nights at a theater in Cupertino now known as the Bluelight Cinemas.  Jack Tramiel, formerly of Commodore Computers and then of Atari, was interviewed in the lobby.  Tramiel was a survivor of Auschwitz.  It is said that he would try to intimidate competitors by showing them the number the Nazis had tattooed on his arm.

The movie by Claude Lanzmann got a lot of attention, but it was at the end of a long chain of attention making media events.  There was a mini-series in the 1970s called “Holocaust.”  There were cases in the 60s, 70s and 80s where Nazis were unearthed and returned to Europe to stand trial for atrocities they committed during World War II.

This statement in The New York Review of Books is somewhat astounding.

A quarter century ago, the Holocaust was not as widely recognized as it is today as an unprecedented evil.

A quarter century ago, I don’t think anyone questioned the evil that was the Holocaust.  Except in fringe circles, the horror of the Holocaust has not been questioned.  The next topic sentence:

Lanzmann thereby helped to rescue the central event of the twentieth century from neglect.

No, what Lanzmann did was provide some of the first documentation about the complicity of the other Nazi government organs in the murder of millions.  He dug out records that showed train cars that were not designed to transport passengers being assembled into a train and that train carrying passengers to Trebinka, and then returning empty.  Fares were charged as a for the travel one way only.  Some government agency paid the fares for the people going to the death camp.

Until that point, there was a level of distance that ordinary Germans would put between themselves and the atrocities of the Nazi regime.  But Lanzmann showed that there were many people complicit in it, not just Nazis.  In the last six months, documents have come to light that describe the role of the German Foreign Ministry in the Holocaust.

The Nazis were a effectively a parallel government to the German government.  They had paramilitary forces, the SS, police, intelligence, etc.  But they didn’t have a rail system or any of the other functions of a civil government.  They depended on the German government for that.  The information about what was happening in the East was available, but people were too afraid to speak out.  I don’t know that I would have the guts to speak out if the price would be my death or the death of my family.