thinkness - December 2003 Archives

December 2003

Color - President Cool - 'Man, though less than some male mammals, exhibits the "Coolidge effect": a new female refreshes his libido. The effect is named after the famous story about President Calvin Coolidge and his wife beig shown around a farm. Learning that a... Posted in color , language | 9 Trackbacks | 248 Comments
Color - capitalist kingpin - 'Humphrey began an essay on the topic with the story of how Henry Ford once asked his representatives to find out which parts of the Model-T never went wrong. They came back with the answer that the kingpin had never... Posted in color , language | 0 Trackbacks | 94 Comments
Red Queen clean-up - Quick hits on Red Queen: - I think an interesting point about human neoteny is that it seems that humans' extremely early birth [humans are born way before we 'should' be -- we're helpless for years] is that this coincides... Posted in evolution | 9 Trackbacks | 149 Comments

Trumping The Red Queen - So The Red Queen ends up basically as one long essay, with Ridley advancing his hypothesis that human intelligence -- the primary factor that makes us us -- is mostly a result of sexual selection: Humans are smart today because... Posted in evolution | 2 Trackbacks | 121 Comments

Color -- proof negative - Ridley uses three different metaphors to convey the idea of observation that falls short of proof. None of them are individually good enough to earn their way to thinkness' esteemed Chronic section, but in toto they squeak by: 'A man... Posted in color , language | 8 Trackbacks | 97 Comments
Ridley's response - I earlier criticized the section of The Red Queen in which Ridley seemed to claim that every major thing people do, even contemporary humans' choices not to maximize their numerical reproductive success -- 'the emancipation from evolution' -- was actually... Posted in evolution | 8 Trackbacks | 224 Comments

[Middle]sex specific - Okay, it didn't take long before I got the missing section of Middlesex beamed to me by a lovely friend in lovely Wisconsin. [Hopefully I'll get some cheese curds beamed next.] The punctuation may be a little off, but the... Posted in monkey vs robot | 3 Trackbacks | 163 Comments
But the words got in the way - My brother recently read me a great passage from Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, which relates to this whole question of abstractness. In this section he talks about how he [I don't know if this is a character or a narrating voice... Posted in monkey vs robot | 13 Trackbacks | 199 Comments
Appreciation of the analog - David Brooks wrote an interesting, completely misguided op-ed about how Iraq is actually going well, because it's muddling through the complicated process of making a democracy. [Talkingpointsmemo, as one would expect, has the lucid take-down: 'The failure to do proper... Posted in monkey vs robot | 9 Trackbacks | 156 Comments

Dean's success is imminent -- sort of... - There is a growing brouhaha emerging between Dean and the more moderate wing of the Democratic party, such as the Democratic Leadership Council. First Dean steals all their thunder by bashing Bush and jumping out in front of the pack.... Posted in political currents | 2 Trackbacks | 367 Comments

Color - Flying abhors a vacuum - I really like this line from Kant, as quoted in a book by Robert Fogelin, as quoted in a story by Edward Rothstein: '[A dove] cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its... Posted in color , language | 12 Trackbacks | 172 Comments
Scientist prematurely writes off philosophy - As you may have noticed, I am currently in the throes of trying to figure out exactly how to steer this blog. [This question tightly parallels an investigation of what I will study next year in school, and, perhaps consequently,... Posted in psychology & consciousness | 13 Trackbacks | 184 Comments

Literal hits the big-time - Earlier I showed how 'literal' frequently means exactly the opposite. This new use [some might call it a misuse] hit the biggest story of the week: 'The former Iraqi strongman was "literally a rat trapped in a hole," said NBC's... Posted in the lethal literal | 9 Trackbacks | 243 Comments

Internet killed the political party? - This is a quite-interesting take on how Internet organizing is, Everett Ehrlich says, going to do away with political parties. He says Ronald Coase hypothesized in 1937 that the cost of gathering information determines the size of an organization, and... Posted in political currents | 13 Trackbacks | 201 Comments

Evolution did not kill evolution - I just started reading The Red Queen, by Matt Ridley, a book about how sex is the dominant force in human evolution and human nature. It's a pretty interesting book, and Ridley's a pretty smart theorist/writer -- although I've not... Posted in evolution | 1 Trackbacks | 1889 Comments
The Muslim Martin Luther - The Globe Ideas section suggests it may have found a leader of a Muslim reformation: Tariq Ramadan, a moderate Muslim leader in France. My brother's been talking for a while about how what Islam needs is a reformation, and I... Posted in | 1 Trackbacks | 211 Comments

Literally not literally - Okay, I've been gone for long. But I'm back. I was sick and travelling. It seems that blogging, for me, is kind of like exercising: easy to do when you're doing it, tough when you lost the momentum. My brother... Posted in language , the lethal literal | 0 Trackbacks | 266 Comments