Getting around to the due dilligence

Three physicists have reexamined the math surrounding the creation of microscopic black holes in the Switzerland-based LHC, the world's largest particle collider, and determined that they won't simply evaporate in a millisecond as had previously been predicted.

Rather, Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and Sergio Fabi and Benjamin Harms of the University of Alabama say mini black holes could exist for much longer — perhaps even more than a second, a relative eternity in particle colliders, where most objects decay much faster.

Under such long-lived conditions, it becomes a race between how fast a black hole can decay — and how fast it can gobble up matter to grow bigger and prevent itself from decaying. |FOXNews|

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Unlike most, I don't think Obama's failed attempt to find House GOP votes for the stimulus package was evidence of political naivete. It was theater. Obama, by going the extra mile in an attempt to forge bipartisan consensus, came off as reasonable, professional, and focused on moving the country forward. The Republicans, on the other hand, showed themselves to be utterly uninterested in cooperation on any terms whatsoever, even when the good of the country is at stake. Seems like a win for Obama to me.

It's cheap to just post a link to the Onion

... but this 'graph in particular made me fall over laughing:

A holdover from the Bush administration, Gates told reporters he may have gotten off on the wrong foot with the new president, citing an occasion when Obama asked him what he knew about 1984's Secret Wars, a 12-issue limited Marvel release. Gates then handed a visibly confused Obama 1,400 classified pages on covert CIA operations in El Salvador.

Obama Disappointed Cabinet Failed To Understand His Reference To 'Savage Sword Of Conan' #24

thanks to Maray for the link.

And it smells like death

Outlander.

Not since Apollonius of Rhodes have we borne witness to so stirring an epic. We see the kinship of Iron Age sailors and a sailor of the airless, starry void. We see humanity struggle with their shared burden against insurmountable odds, a struggle against the closing darkness. We see the blossoming of impossible love.

Spaceships, Vikings, Dragons, Fair Maidens, Ron Perlman. Yes, all of that, to be sure. All of the archetypes are here. Every story is told through this story. Here is the Odyssey. Here is Beowulf.

Outlander.

Here is King Lear. Here is The Godfather. Here is Predator (the first one).

Outlander.

All of life is here. And all that makes life worth living. And as we learn about CGI carnage, we learn about ourselves.

Here is Outlander. It is not to be missed.

PRT

Item: I didn't fully realize this existed until right now, so I'm a-posting it.

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Item: Here's how you fucking do the song.

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Item: Full disclosure. I own and have listened to the Green Day album from which their cover of My Generation is taken.

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Item: These kids today, I tell you what.

For my part, I first heard the song in the form of a Green Day cover on their seminal album Kerplunk. It struck me, in eighth grade, as an incredibly awesome anthem of generational angst and change. It was only later that I learned the irony—it was appropriated from an earlier generation. |Yglesias|

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Item: Gotta add the real PRT.

Monday funnies

Today is Wondermark #483; In which it's time to move on. Topical! Don't forget the mouseover punchline.

Change I can believe in

For a few months after I moved to Illinois I was able to buy Shiner Bock, but then there came the recount and the next thing you know the distribution deal that pumped Shiner into the upper midwest went south. Now here we are, mere days into the Obama Administration, and there is Shiner in my fridge in Ann Arbor. This has never happened before. Relatedly, the global gag rule has been rescinded.

EFCA matters

Item: I've been seeing a lot of pro-EFCA advertisements on the tee vee lately, and they seem, to my jaundiced eye, to be pretty good.

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Item: And just to prove that me and the labor movement aren't the only folks who think putting workers out front is a good idea, here's a little something from the Union Facts bozos:

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Item: Last but not least, Labornerd is set to launch February 9 and is looking for contributors, occasional and otherwise. Unlike our own humble blog of record, Labornerd has a mission statement:

The project of this blog is to bring together the labor movement, new media, the arts and (free) culture. The project of this blog is to facilitate activism, to get the Employee Free Choice Act passed by June 23, 2009 (the 62nd anniversary of the passage of Taft-Hartley), and to report on the re-merger of AFL-CIO and CtW (as well as other developments in labor). The project of this blog is to tell workers' stories, to re-envision unions for the 21st Century, and to help shape President Obama's New New Deal. The project of this blog is what you want it to be, since it will be shaped by your participation.

To split or not to split, faithfully

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”

Any speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense that these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing. The myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a single word, like dicere, “to say.” But in English, infinitives like “to go” and future-tense forms like “will go” are two words, not one, and there is not the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between them.

Oaf of Office

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is a bad movie

There, I said it. 

UPDATE: Slumdog Millionaire is alright, I guess, but it's no great shakes. 

Discuss

Morgellons truth not yet revealed!

I received the following Morgellons news alert:

But when I followed the link...

Mars

At a NASA news conference this afternoon, a team of scientists led by Michael Mumma of the Goddard Space Flight Center announced the discovery of plumes of methane emanating from the surface of Mars during the planet’s late spring and early summer…

The only way to learn more about these plumes may be to go and physically investigate them, she said. Observing them from Earth—or even from Mars orbit—probably won’t reveal whether there are microbes beneath the surface. “We’re going to have to get down where they live,” she said. The Mars Science Laboratory, a new rover set to launch in 2011, carries instruments that could investigate below the planet’s surface—but most likely not deep enough. If microbes do exist on Mars, Mumma said, they could be buried more than a kilometer down. That would require a whole new plan, including technology that doesn’t yet exist.

You can only learn so much by observation and remote drones.

We need to get there A.S.A.P and have our minds blown and axioms shattered.

I’ll never shut up about this. | grinding |

Amen.

Cool, daddy, cool

via

LOLSea-kittens

Apologies to everyone, but after reading DR's post, I just had to:

Caption 'em if you got 'em.

Wyeth

Image from here, with every possible right reserved

|CNN| -- Andrew Wyeth, the well-known American painter famed for his painting of a young girl in a field called "Christina's World," has died, according to a Brandywine River Museum official.

Wyeth, 91, died in his sleep Thursday night, according to Lora Englehart, public relations coordinator for the Brandywine River Museum in Pennsylvania.

The argument leaves a lot to be desired

Fish, as we know from their name, are slimy, cold, and suspicious. This, and most emphatically not deliciousness, explains our willingness to eat them. Thus, it is imperative that fish be renamed 'sea-kittens.' Or so reasons PETA. If you agree, you can sign the petition here.

Let's see how well it works:

Many people have never stopped to think about it, but sea kittens are smart, interesting animals with their own unique personalities—just like the dogs and cats that we share our homes with. Did you know that sea kittens can learn to avoid nets by watching other sea kittens in their group and that they can recognize individual "shoal mates"? Some sea kittens gather information by eavesdropping on others, and some—such as a type of South African sea kittens that lays eggs on leaves so that they can be carried to a safe place—even use tools. |PETA: Fishing Hurts|

Speaking only for myself, I didn't find that the change of name helped. But then, I don't much like kittens. Or it could be that in this paragraph anthropomorphic equivocations do all of the work.

Just to take one example, "Some sea kittens gather information by eavesdropping on others." Sea kittens eavesdrop? How quirky they must be! Of course, they don't really eavesdrop, not as we understand the term. To eavesdrop implies, for us, a cultural conception of privacy, a capacity for sneakiness, a language, and so on. Sea Kitten eavesdropping, in contrast, implies none of this. It just requires something that looks, from the outside, a little bit similar. Something like a sea kitten responding to a signal even though that signal was not directed at it. That kind of behavior is remarkable, but it isn't eavesdropping and it doesn't provide any evidence that a species (species!) of sea kitten that does it has a 'unique personality.'

In short

1. We act.
2. To act is to have reasons.
3. To have reasons is to be committed to concepts with moral content.

Adding: I really didn't mean this post as some kind of dig at Neal. On the contrary, the moral skepticism discussion in the Gaza thread below got me thinking about some of the meta-ethical problems that I work on, and those three statements occurred to me. Together, they seemed to me to be a succinct elaboration of a view that I've pretty consistently espoused for awhile now, and which I think is general enough to garner wide agreement. I thought that was neat, and worth writing down.

But just as Neal reacted more harshly that was warranted, so should I have toned down my response. Believe it or not, hours before Neal's broadside I abandoned a long comment about Mackie and error theory because diving into the literature seemed pedantic. Suffice it to say that I recognize that the three statements above don't constitute a proof for the existence of moral concepts. One could say, in something like the way Mackie does, that our commitments are in error. The weird thing about this line of thinking is that it assumes that the existence of moral concepts requires that they meet some standard beyond what is necessary for the truth of claims like 1, 2, and 3. Why do they need to meet such a standard? To me it seems more plausible to suppose that the standards for what a reason is, and what counts as a reason, are internal to the project of moral reasoning.

Which brings me to sociobiology. Again, "stupid" is too harsh. Let me first be clear what I'm not denying. Facts about human nature and biology certainly can inform our moral decisions. So, for example, we now know that lead poisoning is correlated with loss of impulse control and, subsequently, criminality. We also know that a leading cause of lead poisoning in the United States had historically been the ingestion of chips of lead-based paint by young children. These facts have some clear moral implications, and those implications have led to a variety of policies designed to reduce the incidence of lead poisoning.

Sociobiology is different. Supposing that a successful sociobiology were possible, what it would give us is an explanation of moral concepts which justifies them through a reduction to adaptive fitness. In reducing-complex-realities-to-syllogisms words, a successful sociobiology might give you statements like the following:

S1: People will act altruistically in situation S because doing so expresses a trait which has proven to be adaptive.

At most S1 will tell you whether people will act altruistically in S. But the moral question is, how ought people to act in S. The answer to the moral question, in turn, has to do with what reasons people in S have. But sociobiology doesn't address its explanations to those whose actions it describes -- the only reason it could give is, 'have reasons to act altruistically because having such reasons encourages the expression of genetic endowments quite similar to your own.' That wouldn't motivate most people. Which is to say that even if sociobiology is maximally successful in explaining altruism on its own terms, people in S would find themselves in search of reasons to act altruistically and sociobiology would offer no guidance. In other words, sociobiology neither answers moral questions nor removes the need to answer them.