“philosophy”

There was recently (November 2006) an article in Nature about the famous Antikythera Mechanism^WP, a strange Greek contraption from the second century B.C.E. that with its gears and dials is considered by some the first (astrological) computer. Nothing like it is known in human history until a thousand years later (which prompted Professor Mike Edmunds, one of the article’s authors, to regard it as “more valuable than the Mona Lisa.”). Using new advanced imaging techniques the researchers were able to discover much previously hidden complexity in the device and established it was used to model the position of the moon and probably that of other planets. The article was all over the news (in 2002, another famous analysis was released and it was also broadly covered).

Then there’s Richard Feynman and his letters, gathered by her daughter and published in an also fairly recent (April 5, 2005) book titled Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track^AM. And there’s one from Athens that mentions Feynman’s encounter with a funny little Greek mechanism. It’s a gem of a letter, full of wisdom about science, history, and modernity.

Ayn Rand’s^{WP, ELZR} Atlas Shrugged^AM is on the wishlist. I’ve read a sketch of the plot and as soon as I get my hands on it, it’ll be the first book I read. It was a tortuous decision though. I tend to anguish over negative criticism and she’s a woman with her fair share of it. People talk jadedly about “growing out of Rand’s idealism.” They compare her with Herman Hesse, good for rebel-without-a-cause teenagers but pity the adult that still believes them. And so on.

The thing is her radical capitalism and love for America are exactly where I am at.

It was a very simple idea—a girl and a boy, in the subway—and yet actually drawing it was a nightmare. There are any number of things I would do different for my next webcomic. I guess that means the effort was worth it: much was learned.

So, again, the idea is a girl and a boy in the subway (I used this Flickr photo to “remember” the subway). None of them can muster the courage to speak to each other, none of them can come up with a clever excuse for starting the conversation. Until the girl realizes there’s no bad excuse for meeting someone. And that is her excuse. That’s it.

Reminds me a lot of an elevator sign I scrawled years ago.

He just can. Many have said it before and I too had glimpsed at it from time to time at his Dilbert blog, but I just read (via 2centsworth) The Little Robot That Could post—a thought experiment against the idea of freewill—and have to say it again: he’s funny, he gets the message across, he’s unassumingly challenging, he’s imaginative, he risks, he’s enticingly (yet humbly) pretentious, he delivers, he’s faithful^ELZR, he conveys, he makes you think—he can write.

If there was one fragment from Richard Dawkins’s Why There Almost Certainly Is No God that startled me, and that has continued to do so for over a week, is this counterfactual.

Here’s the beginning and end of Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, a 1996 talk by Richard Dawkins^WP on the wonders of science, transcribed and made available online on Edge (which I’m reading a lot these days). What can I say—breathtaking.

Hace unos dias ya que Ben me aviso que, justo despues de un roce con la muerte, Daniel Dennett^WP acababa de escribir una carta, Thank Goodness!, en la que respondia a sus amigos que le preguntaban si en algo se habia afectado su largamente publico ateismo.

La carta me impresiono muchisimo inmediatamente, porque atendia varias preguntas que me estaba haciendo en ese momento (recuerdo que ese mismo dia le decia a mi hermana Chepe en el cafe, medio en broma y medio no, que si realmente no queriamos morir por que no nos volviamos doctores (como Chemito!) y nos poniamos a investigar?) y porque me emociono tremendamente el estilo conciliador pero firme, tan brillantemente elegante, de Dennett. En cierta forma la carta es una buena y sosegada continuacion a la carta elegiaca^ELZR de Eliezer Yudkowsky a su fallecido hermano Yehuda—aquella carta que tanto me marco en su momento, que tanto ame por su cruda rabia y su descarnado optimismo, y que traduje al Español casi por reflejo (reflejo que fue muy gratamente reforzado cuando mi primo Paco me dijo que le llevo la traduccion a sus alumnos de prepa).

He traducido, tambien casi por reflejo, esta carta de Daniel Dennett y se encuentra disponible aqui, como una hoja aparte: Gracias al bien!. Fue una traduccion mucho mas dificil por aquellas oraciones increibles y barrocas de Dennett asi que por favor dejen un mensaje si se les ocurre cualquier forma de mejorar la traduccion. (Gracias, por cierto, a Chemito por asesoria medica en la traduccion.)

Ojala lo lean, ojala los haga pensar y ojala nos veamos en los proximos dias con sus opiniones. (Para ser escritas, las mias tendran que esperar todavia unos dias a que aterrice el desorden de ideas que traigo—esta carta de Dennet me condujo al movimiento de los brights^WP, a las ultimas ediciones de Wired, Time, y Newsweek, a los escritos de Dawkins, a Edge, a leer ciencia, a discusiones, coming-outs, y a muchos, muchos pequeños repensamientos propios).

Why read David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom^AM:

I’m sure I’ve seen the stats before, several times, but still I was disconcerted when I read this paragraph:

Four billion quarters seemed a wild guess, but four billion people? In 1981? Surely there was something wrong with the reference. But there wasn’t. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, that was the approximate number of people only 25 years ago.

More alarming still, my dad was born in 1957. World population was around 3 billion then. We’re 6.5 billion now and counting. That is, my parents’ lifetime has seen the world population double—3.5 billion new souls.

I had surely seen a similar graph several times before but somehow it never got through my thick skull. I was overjoyed to realize just to what extent the world had changed in less than 50 years. Frankly, I believe I’ve found the proof I’d been looking for that the world is getting better. Isn’t it unambiguously a good thing that 3.5 billion people have been able to be born? Yes, many will live in what are to us abysmal conditions. But there is no worst quality of life than not being able to live in the first place. Death is always an option, life is not. Most of this growth comes from the poorest classes of the poorest countries but that’s also heartening in a way. There was never before reason to counteract the “ignorance” that made them try to have as many children as they physically could—it wasn’t ignorance at the time, it was bet-splitting. Most of them died anyway.

Never have so many children had the luxury of extreme poverty, to put it bluntly.

The other number shock today was from a talk by Google’s Marissa Mayer, platonic love and Google’s VP of search products and user experience:

Again, I’ve played with such numbers before. It’s just they had never hit me so hard.