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 ...