It now appears that there was never any reason for the US Justice Department to pick any fight with Apple over the encryption of its iPhones. Things happen so quickly now that events from as far back as 2015 are chiefly forgotten, but I'm going to resurrect this one. On December 2 of that year, a married couple targeted a Christmas Party being held by the San Bernardino Health Department to commit a terrorist attack. They killed 14 people and seriously injured another 22. Authorities covered one of the conspirators' work phones (they successfully destroyed their personal phone.) It was an Apple. In the aftermath of that attack, the US Justice Department received several court orders requiring Apple to cooperate with it is unlocking that phone. Apple objected to and challenged all such orders. As it happens, it was not necessary, for national security or for law enforcement or for any other urgent purpose, that Apple put itself in the business of ratting out its cust...
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The idea of inertia is not new. It was not invented by Newton, or even by Galileo. Galileo did make a fascinating elaboration on it, though. Let's look at the famous thought experiment in which he talked about dropping balls of different sizes from the Tower of Pisa. The point of the experiment is that, although there are in principle two ways of measuring mass, they come out to be the same. One can measure mass by inertia, or one can measure it in terms of gravity. If mass (gravity) is the important variable in our thought experiment, then one would expect the heavier ball -- say a cannon ball -- to fall to the ground more quickly than the small one, say, the pebble. On the other hand, if mass (inertia) in the important variable than one would expect the cannonball to move more slowly than the pebble. Inertial mass holds it back from the free fall the pebble enjoys. The only way that the cannonball and the pebble fall at the same ...
The Wind of Change was a power ballad by The Scorpions, released in 1990. The Scorpions, pictured here, are better remembered for Rock You Like a Hurricane, but TWoC was also a good-sized hit for them. The Berlin Wall had come down and the Soviet Union itself was on its last legs -- it would be dissolved formally the following year. The lyrics to TWoC make explicit reference to this situation. There is at least a little bit of evidence now that the lyrics were written within the bureaucratic bowels of the CIA, perhaps in the headquarters building in Langley, Virginia. It isn't by any means dispositive. But it is a possibility. Should lovers of the classic power ballads be ticked off or disillusioned by this? Should they knock that off their list of favorites? Nah. After all, it did no harm: and of how much of the output of that building can one say that? I do think government should stop subsidizing the arts, though. ;-) More: https://slate.com/culture/2020/05/win...
Intuition tells us that the right way to bet is to go with the way things have been going, so as not to miss out. Dotcom stocks are going up. Well then, buy some! Get yourself a piece of that action. This FOMO intuition is also known by the more dignified term, "momentum trading." Instinct also tells us that the right way to bet is to go against the way things have been going. After all, if red keeps coming up then black must be due to come up soon. This is sometimes known as "contrarianism." I can think of nothing that so illustrates the bankruptcy of appeals to "common sense." Both contrarianism and momentum trading wrap themselves in the garb of common sense. They do so quite naturally. Yet one of them must be wrong. And, at least if adhered to with any consistency, each of them is wrong.
A week ago I wrote here about cephalopods -- the octopus and similar creatures. I was then, and am now, motivated by some comments in Peter Godfrey-Smith's book about them, OTHER MINDS. I want to add to those thoughts today. The reason Godfrey-Smith (a professor of philosophy at CUNY) is so interested in them is that they are arguably a case where mind, consciousness, and the use of language have emerged with an evolutionary path very different from our own. Most writing on other, non-human, minds focuses on creatures with whom we share a lot of adaptive history: the other primates, for example, or even the marine mammals. But on the tree of life, the branching off that separates octopuses, squids, etc. from humans and other mammals of land or sea took place a long, long time ago. This, Godfrey-Smith says, presents is with a situation similar to that which would occur were we to encounter a form of life that had evolved on another planet. So: what do we learn by way of com...
A few days back, after Trump removed an Inspector General for the State Department, it became public knowledge that (1) the Secretary of State had been giving a 23 year old aide personal tasks -- i.e. had him walking his dog and arranging dinner reservations (2) the inspector general had been looking at this, and (3) that august official, Mike Pompeo, told the President that he should fire the IG. It is of course temping to connect these dots....President Trump has not even bothered to discourage the connection. He has said that he would rather have the S of S working to resolve outstanding issues between the two Koreas rather than walking his dog. In how many ways is that wrong? I'll try to keep this short. First, I have no confidence that anybody involved in this administration has been or is likely to do any good with regard to Korea. I think it more likely that any time the S of S devotes to that purpose does harm than good. So, yes, I'd rather have him walking his...
Yesterday we discussed how HOMELAND ended. Today I want to comment on the philosophical implications of it. I hereby repeat my SPOILER ALERT. Although the spoilers will be less blatant in this discussion than they were in yesterday's, I'M NOT GOING TO TRY TO DANCE AROUND THE ENDING. The writers characteristically make the stakes very high, so that we can be routing for Carrie even as we recoil at the awfulness of some of the things she has to do. For a moment, we may even suspect that she has killed Saul. (She hasn't, but she lies both to his sister and in effect to us about this.) The Evil of Two Lessers The implicit ethical point is that if one is trying to prevent something as awful as a nuclear exchange, anything less awful than that is permitted. But of course this raises the issue of whether such consequentialist thinking is what got the world into such a state. Carrie and Saul had a good deal to do, in the world of the series, with shaping the relations ...
HOMELAND is a television series that ran on SHOWTIME from 2011 until this year. The series is centered by the character of Carrie Mathison, (played by Claire Danes), a CIA agent engaged in various covert activities while struggling with the bureaucracy around her and the bipolar disorder within her. Sometimes the bipolar disorder became a critical plot point. She apparently found that going off her meds allowed her to figure things out -- to think more clearly and get a jump on whatever external threats she faced -- so long as she didn't stay off her meds for too long. That was not an element in the way in which the series came to its end, though. The writers apparently found no use for it in their final twists and turns. SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FINAL EPISODE, AND YOU PLAN TO, READ NO FURTHER. As this final episode begins, the US and Pakistan are on the verge of a nuclear exchange. The US President -- who got that office because he was vice president w...
The cephalopods are: the squid, the cuttlefish, and the Octopus. Do they have intelligence? We normally think of our companions in intelligence as other mammals. This is a very different branch of the tree of life. Still, as a start, we might ask ourselves: do they have a language? Nothing so auditory as the human voice, or the wonderful whale songs either. The best candidate for a cephalopod language is the constant change of the color of their skin. As Peter Godfrey-Smith writes, these colors change "second by second," Blues and greens, for example, can seep back and forth, unveiling "gray and silver veins." There are at least three evolutionary purposes for the display of colors. They are used for camouflage. If camouflage fails and it is necessary to flee a predator, the colors can also be used for "deimatic displays," i.e. for patterns that may surprise or confuse the predator giving chase. A predator that pauses or loses its own bearings can...
One observer of matters libertarian remarked recently that there are only twelve true anarcho-caps in the world. The rest of the claimants are poseurs, trolls, or bots. I'm happy to be part of such a narrow elite! I wonder what we twelve should call each other? The Dirty ... uh, it's been done. The Ditzy Dozen ... closer to the mark, but gives up too much. Twelve Angry Men ... been skipping out on those diversity classes? Hoppe's Last Hopes! There ya go. For the uninitiated, that's a photo of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who might reasonable be considered the leader of the twelve, above.
My post today, like yesterday's, will update you, dear reader, on one of the state level campaigns that will have their collective denouement in November. John E. James is going for the Senate, not the House. James is a rising star within the Republican Party. We know this because President Donald Trump briefly considered him as a possible nominee for the US Ambassador to the United Nations after Nikki Haley left that post. James, pictured, is a veteran, a West Point graduate who was with the US Army in Iraq. After discharge, he went to work in a company his father had founded, James Group International. (Hmmm, one can see his appeal to Trump -- although Trump surely feels superior in that, in HIS family, one gets bone spurs rather than going to war.) Last June, almost a year ago, there were reports that different groups of Republican were trying to recruit James for two distinct career opportunities. One group wanted him to challenge incumbent Democrat Haley Stevens for ...
Eric Holcomb is the Governor of Indiana. This makes him the successor to Vice President Michael Pence. It would be a great victory if the Democratic Party could pick up this Governorship in the November election. The Governor will play a role in whatever reapportionment follows the 2020 census, so it would be a victory with some consequences for the partisan balance going forward both in that state and in the US House of Representatives. But perhaps as important, it would be symbolic -- a rejection of Holcomb would look a lot like a repudiation of Pence, even should Trump and Pence receive a new term on the same day. The Democratic Party's best hope to pull off this result, its most plausible gubernatorial candidate, is Woody Myers, a former New Yorker. Myers, pictured above, was health commissioner of NYC under Mayor Dinkins. The fact that Myers ever worked in NYC may work against him in Indiana at present. The fact that he has a public health background may work f...
May 10, 1940, was the day Winston Churchill formally replaced Neville Chamberlain at 10 Downing Street. The illustration here is of Chamberlain. It was not the end of a war. It was not even the beginning of the end. But it was the end of the beginning. https://www.onthisday.com/day/may/10