So: what is so philosophically interesting about this movie? This: the brilliant but brittle scientist is turned mad by the realization that the human race is alone in the cosmos. Or at least in this galaxy. One key premise is that the base was established on Neptune in the first place because only there could data about the rest of the galaxy be gathered free of solar interference or something. Usual sci-fi gobbledegok but... the point is that the base was established on the fringe of our solar system with the confidence that if there is other intelligent life to be detected, it could be detected from there. Lots of data was gathered, no sign of alien life appeared. The negative result drove Tommy Lee Jones' character over the deep end and sets up the situation with which, as I said in Part I of this discussion, the plot of the movie begins. Science fiction is full of aliens. It nearly never gives serious consideration to the possibility that there aren't any. That we ...
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What was the single most important event of the 20th century, from the standpoint of creating the 21st? It is, you might say, an arrogant question. How do we measure the importance of, say, the development of antibiotics, beginning with penicillin , against the importance of Hiroshima? How do we measure either of those against the creation of the United Nations, the end of the gold standard for money within and among most nation states, or a thousand other things? How even decide what counts as a "single event"? But if you were to want an answer despite all objections, I could do worse that to say ... Probably the rise of the internet. One key moment in this development came on January 1, 1983, when ARPA initiated the TCP/IP protocol suite. To decode that a bit: ARPA was the Advanced Research Projects Agency, of the US Defense Department. When ARPA started linking computers together, the people working on this naturally called it the ARPANET. TCP/IP stands for...
Ad Astra is a recent science fiction movie starring Brad Pitt. I will describe the plot today and, in a later post, I will say what it is about the movie that strikes me as philosophically intriguing. In "high concept" form, the movie is: Heart of Darkness as a space opera. In "the near future," space travel within at least the inner half of the solar system is routine. A madman (played when he does eventually appear, late in the movie, by Tommy Lee Jones) working from a base on Neptune, is apparently causing mysterious electromagnetic power surges directed toward the inner planets. The madman was once a hero but somehow went rogue in deepest space. Somebody must be sent to confront him, find out the truth, and stop him. That burden falls on Brad Pitt. Pitt undertakes the arduous journey from earth to Neptune, talks to the rogue genius, and tries to bring him home and by implication, to his senses But Jones denies that the earth is his home. I won...
Wow. I recently encountered on twitter an idiot who was trying to argue that Hitler had created the Berlin Wall. Actually, this was part of a broader discussion. Our idiot (OI for short) was trying to defend Trump's wall building. Somebody else had apparently mentioned the Berlin Wall as an example of the evils of building walls. OI apparently thought it important to make the point that Hitler had built a wall through the middle of his own capital, whereas Trump was dong things the right way, putting the wall on a border. Then some other genius popped up and explained (???) that Stalin had actually built the Berlin Wall. This was too much. Yours truly intervened and informed them that the Wall was constructed at the insistence of Nikita Khrushchev, isolating West Berlin from the eastern part of the city and the country of East Germany, when the latter was being run by a Khrushchev puppet, Walter Ulbricht. I'm such a spoilsport. But hey: if the Trumpets want to compa...
Spoiler Alert. Turn back if you want to see this movie without any ides of what will happen in it. Still here? Too late. The Oscar-winning movie 1917 follows the simplest and perhaps the oldest of plats. The protagonist and a companion have to cross forbidding terrain to get an indispensable job done. The companion dies during the course of the trip, and the protagonist is heartbroken, but he has to find it in himself to carry on. The job is done. The companion's death has not been in vain. Not plot novelties. But of course show business has never thrived on plot novelties. It thrives on the expenditure of its energies and talents on filling out and giving new twists to precisely the old familiar plots. One great thing about this movie is a brief scene where the two central characters are being chased by a low-flying airplane. Its a period-accurate biplane, of course but the scene still looks like a hommage to an analogous scene in a Hitchcock film.
John Tamny has written about the Theranos "Bad Blood" case for the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) and seems to have gotten it utterly wrong. He thinks one ought to stand up for Elizabeth Holmes out of some admiration for heroic entrepreneurship. Sorry, but Holmes is the kind of crook who gives the ideal of heroic entrepreneurship a bad name. Every securities fraudster, when caught blames the losses of his victims on the fact that he got caught. It is a very old and very tired line. I might tell you, dear reader, that I have an algorithm that allows me to take advantage of inefficiencies on the onion futures exchanges. I might take your money, transfer it to my Swiss back account, and then with every appearance of broken heartedness, tell you that my well-intentioned scheme went awry. We lost your money. Those darned unreliable onion futures exchanges. If I'm caught, though (perhaps by authorities who are aware that there are no onion futures ex...
Brotherhood is a Showtime series about life in Providence, Rhode Island. It turns out to be somewhere between The Sopranos and The Wire, with perhaps a little bit of Breaking Bad thrown in. If you enjoyed any or all of those three series, you might also like this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotherhood_(American_TV_series) By the way, for those of you who make have notices that I didn't have a blog post on the Super Bowl this year: you're right. I decided there is no way I can add value to any casual TV viewer's existing understanding of the event this year. Glad you got by without me.
AT least in an early phase of his own academic career, Allen W. Wood had a high opinion of Kant's book, RELIGION WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE. In contrast to much of the voluminous literature on that somewhat idiosyncratic item in the Kant canon, Wood thought the book consistent with Kant's three great Critiques as well as consistent with the historical monotheistic faiths. Wood wrote, "It would be a great mistake to see in the God of Kant's moral faith no more than an abstract, metaphysical idea. For Kant, moral faith in God ... is the moral man's trust in God." Wood, KANT'S MORAL RELIGION (1970). Wood seemed later to change his view, in two seminal articles in the early 1990s. Who is Allen Wood, you ask? A philosopher born in Seattle in 1942 who has taught at Cornell, Yale, and Stanford.
Throwback Thursday. Let's look today at the way in which underestimating the nature and extent of a loss can be disastrous, even if one is right about the binary question of an asset’s direction. As Nassim Taleb has put it, “In 2007 the Wall Street firm Morgan Stanley decided to ‘hedge’ against a real estate ‘collapse’, before the market in real estate started declining. The problem is that they didn’t realize that ‘collapse’ could take many values.” It didn’t work out well for them. Morgan Stanley’s hedges would have worked in the face of a modest decline, but in the event MS lost $10 billion in the face of the one they got. Taleb also offers some good news for risk managers: machine learning is on the right track. There are “various machine learning functions that produce exhaustive non-linearities,” that is, that do control for the fat tails. They do this through “cross-entropy.” Cross-entropy is a concept taken from the field of information t...
Michael Bloomberg has never asked me for help. Nor should he, because I might play the part of a saboteur. But if he were to ask me for advice, and if I actually wanted to help him, this is how it might go. Bloomberg: I've repented of my former support of a racist stop-and-frisk policy. I'm running for the Dem nomination for POTUS. Now this inconvenient tape has shown up, of the way I was unreservedly devoted to that policy, fairly recently, and it has thrown the reality of my repentance into question for voters whose sympathetic attention I need. What can I do? Faille: Okay. The Dem base still loves the fact that you're anti-gun, right? Bloomberg: Have you been paying attention at all? I'm asking about stop and frisk. Faille: The two are not unrelated. A vigorous urban gun control policy can't be pursued if every coat pocket is considered sacrosanct. Bloomberg. Hmmmm. You've got a point there. But ... racism. The numbers. Faille: Yes, and ...
Far be it from me to offer moral support to someone best known to the world as Oprah Winfrey's friend (and the editor of Winfrey's magazine, O). King knows where to get moral support -- and a new car, too -- if she wants it. Still I have to cheer her on in the silly controversy over an interview she did with a WNBA star. King was known to me, by the way, before she went national. She was a news anchor at WFSB in Hartford, CT for many years, during some of which I was living in nearby Enfield, and regularly watching that station's local news. But, to the controversy: after the death of Kobe Bryant, and a lot of all-too-typical 'he was the greatest thing in the universe and we'll all miss him": coverage, King did an interview with a woman basketball player, Lisa Leslie, who was a friend of Kobe's. King went where most of the postmortem coverage wouldn't, bringing up the fact that Bryant had settled sexual assault allegations against him in 2003....
A: I just ended a sixteen year relationship. B. Oh my God! Are you okay? A: I'm fine. It wasn't MY relationship. B: [Spits out coffee.]