Oops!

No one is immune from making mistakes. We may carefully lay down our plans in great and painstaking detail, but the principle of unanticipated consequences is always lurking in the background, ready to mess with our designs. Of course, more often than not, the law of unanticipated consequences can just sit back and relax while our own stupidity takes over.

The following segment of RadioLab explores a series of hilarious linguistic mistakes that arise out of pure ideological laziness (what a concept!)... the kind of thing you should expect from trying to automate human communication.

But there's more: there's the story of a Harvard psychologist who devised a method to help safeguard American troops from being brainwashed by the enemy, only to later realize that the results might have backfired, in a big way...

And then there's the story of a scientist who chopped up a tree to figure out how old it was, and then discovered the tree he had just killed was the oldest living organism on the planet... well, not anymore...

Check out more fascinating entries from RadioLab.
.

God and the Void

In the beginning there was nothingness, and out of that nothingness emerged God (also known, evidently, as El?-oh...him).

God, or Mr. Deity if you like (he goes by different names), apparently looked like a 70's porn star (with the creepy thin beard and dark goatee, though no sideburns), and even sported the quintessential pedophile silk robe. He had a serious case of personal insecurity and an insatiable need for social validation, but that's probably because his parents were Null and Void, and they weren't full of love... or anything else for that matter :)

Interestingly enough, this creature of emptiness had something of a philosophical disposition (though he still considered existence to be a predicate...), and in his infinite wisdom contemplated the conceptual problems behind the fact of his own omniscience. Never mind the fact that you could never throw a surprise party for God, or that he could never revel in wonder and curiosity, or enjoy the satisfaction of solving a difficult problem or making a new discovery, or experience the thrill of suspense and anticipation...

Could God know that he is all-knowing? Or might he suffer from a case of divine anosognosia, and not know about what he couldn't know?

Though not exactly on point, Elohim's soliloquy reminded me of Meno's paradox (also known as the paradox of inquiry), which is a question Meno poses to Socrates after the latter completely befuddles Meno's attempts to define virtue. Socrates summarizes the problem thus:

A man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know... He cannot search for what he knows—since he knows it, there is no need to search— nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for.

Here is a nice Philosophy Bites discussion of the apparent paradox:

And there is a related New York Times excellent five-part series on anosognosia (a condition in which a person who suffers from a mental/physical disability is unaware of said disability). It happens a lot more than you'd think...
.

Kim - Hapers Bazaar Magazine June 2010

Kim - Elle Magazine June 2010

Elias for Open Lab Magazine

Photography: Delwin Kamara (Editor-in-Chief)
Style: Mitsu Tsuchiya, fashion editor at Elle

William Butler Yeats - Leda and the Swan

The other day I accidentally stumbled upon this risqué and evocative piece by sculptor Igor Zeinalov, and was instantly reminded of the story of Leda and the swan. Good thing, too, because that also happens to be the name of the sculpture.

This mythical story has inspired many artists through the ages, from Leonardo to Michelangelo and Cezanne, but no one, in my opinion, manages to convey the mixed feeling of awe and prophetic terror better than William Butler Yeats. This, I think, can be explained by the fact that, apart from Yeat's obvious poetic genius, the written word manages to conceal more than the visual arts while simultaneously inviting the imagination to take an active role. This is probably why I shudder every time I read the third stanza...

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

And if you don't get why this is such a big deal, here is a short introduction to the genius of this amazing work.
.

Anthony Quinton on Wittgenstein

I just found out that philosopher Anthony Quinton recently passed away (you've seen him before talk about Spinoza and Leibniz), so I thought today would be an appropriate occasion to show a little appreciation for his intellectual and pedagogical contributions.

In the following conversation with Bryan Magee, Professor Quinton attempts the very difficult task of explaining the importance of that all-too-elusive German thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein, the man who Bertrand Russell once referred to as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating."

Wittgenstein's life was tragic, and to a large extent, it is difficult to understand precisely how it affected his intellectual development, so we'll skip that for now (but feel free to follow the links to The Philosopher's Zone to get an idea).

You'd think that coming up with a brand new system of philosophy that would consign you to intellectual posterity would be enough. Not so for Wittgenstein. After revolutionizing the world of philosophy of language with his Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus, and consequently giving up on philosophy for a number of years, he became dissatisfied with his early work and decided to do it again with his highly aphoristic publication Philosophical Investigations. The result is a work that simultaneously seems self-evident and bizarrely counter-intuitive.

Check out more of these fascinating conversations with Bryan Magee.
.

Summer Treats

Miss Rocketpop!, originally uploaded by cutesypoo (Buy these on Etsy!)

I'm churning out ice cream faster than I can eat it, which is saying a lot. My newest flavors are a super-thick peanut butter brownie concoction and cherry vanilla, which is made with a reduction of real cherries. Just this morning I made a batch of mint ice cream mixed with "cool mint" Oreos.

Summer's bounty has started trickling from our garden too. We found some wild black raspberry bushes in the rocks behind it and Natalie couldn't get enough of those. She was also the lucky eater of the year's first peas. In fact, with such a measly little garden, I wonder if there's going to be much left for anyone else after she gets the first dibs on all her favorite foods.

This week, Salt & Fat wrote about pancakes and the post inspired me to immediately make my own from scratch. I've never done it before but Jim was right, it was easy, and they were the most delicious pancakes I have ever made! Natalie was slamming them down like there was no tomorrow. I threw some fresh blueberries into mine... YUM.

Lee Ye Seul for Sure Magazine June 2010 - I AM GOLD

Lee Ye Seul Sure Magazine June 2010

Kim Mi Jung Marie Claire June 2010

Park Ji Hye and Jeon Soo Min Woman Sense Magazine

Kubrick vs. Scorsese

I probably don't have to tell you, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese are two of the most influential movie directors of all time, and they've been directing their masterpieces since the 1950's and 1970's respectively.

The following is a very nicely designed montage paying tribute to these giants of film.

And if nothing else, a little kick-ass Irish music is always a great way to start the weekend. Cheers!

I doubt anyone can understand how awesome it is to watch DiCaprio get shot in the head :)
.

How The West Was Saved

In the century after Muhammad's reported divine inspiration on the Arabian peninsula, Islam conquered much of the Middle East and northern Africa through commercial trade and war. By the early part of the 8th century, Islam was on the march in Europe. After taking the Iberian peninsula (Spain), a large Islamic army stood poised to take Gaul (modern day France) and the rest of Europe.
.
If successful, Islam would have likely prevailed on the Continent and altered the entire course of Western and world history. One man, however, prevented Muslim forces from not only conquering the West but preserving Christianity itself.
.
As the grandfather of Charlemagne (742-814), Charles Martel (688-741) possessed uncanny skills in the art of warfare along with a passionate desire to unite the Franks into one kingdom. In the span of only a few years, Charles, who earned the moniker 'Martel' or 'The Hammer' due to his military prowess, was able to defeat the rulers of Austrasia (northeastern France) and realize his political ambition.
.
Soon thereafter, however, the armies of Islam, led by the Emir of Cordoba, crossed the Pyrenees and threatened his Frankish kingdom. At the Battle of Tours (732), Charles outmaneuvered and ultimately defeated the invading Islamic forces due to superior organization and tactics on the battlefield. From the victory, the legacies of ancient Greece, ancient Rome and Christianity were preserved and allowed to be rediscovered seven centuries later during the Renaissance.
.
In the absence of Charles Martel, how would world history have developed? Although impossible to answer, the consequences of an Islamic Europe from 732 to the present day would have changed every period of history from the Crusades to the Cold War. History - it must be remembered - evolves on a series of contingencies, and few if any outcomes are predetermined.
.
(Picture: Charles Martel)
.
J Roquen

Giant Spider Crab Performs Strip-Tease

You've heard the totally hilarious lobster song before in one of Robert Krulwich's entries, so you know how important the molting process is for crustaceans, as well as how important it is to avoid the bisque :) If you haven't heard that excellent song, go do it now; I'll wait.

The following time-lapse video shows either the crustacean version of Alien, or how a giant spider crab molts. You'll probably end up both disturbed and fascinated.

And if you're curious about the molting process, there's a nice explanation over at the Pharyngula blog.
.

Danilo - Cosmopolitan Greece

Velociraptor is the Tonya Harding of Dinosaurs

What do you get when you mix a geek wearing an 8-bit ThinkGeek tie with an audience with various opinions on what constitutes the best dinosaur ever?

Give up? A hilarious (and surprisingly educational) paleontology comedy routine...

I'd warn you that this might be NSFW, but if that's the case, you should just quit your job right now.

And in case you're wondering, here is what ankylosaurus probably looked like:


Check out Lewis Black with some thoughts about creationists and dinosaurs :)
.

All-Natural Food Preservative Causes All-Natural Cancer

Religiosity seems to be a human instinct. Even secularists and hard-core atheists are prone to engage in practices and beliefs that are fundamentally religious. One of these instances has to do with the belief, whose strongest philosophical articulation was provided by St. Thomas Aquinas, that whatever is natural is better, and, consequently, that whatever is unnatural must therefore be evil.

This is why social conservatives and the catholic church rage against homosexuality and birth control, but this is also why bleeding-heart liberals and hippie-type progressives are all about 'organic' and 'all-natural' food.

Leave it to The Onion to refute the faulty logic upon which these beliefs are premised...

Naturally :)
.

St. Benedict's 6th Form

This is a 6th form foyer that we completed this week, the brief was hand rendered type with 'welcome' words in different languages.

Happy birthday, Alan Turing

The modern world runs on computers, and the idea of modern computers owes its birth particularly to Alan Turing, a British polymath (philosopher, mathematician, computer science visionary, mathematical biologist, marathon runner, etc.) whose ideas would revolutionize virtually every discipline he thought about.

During World War II, for instance, the Nazi's were basically kicking some major British butt, until that is, Alan Turing decided to get involved and crack the code of the Nazi Enigma cipher machine and even the score. It wouldn't be long until the tide would turn and the krauts found themselves on the receiving end...

Turing's ability to crack the German code was related to his work on computational theory. Instead of creating a domain-specific computer to perform a very limited set of functions, part of Turing's genius consisted in realizing (and proving) that a universal machine (now known as a Turing machine) could compute any string of operations that could be expressed in symbolic form, no matter how complex. This eventually gave rise to the idea of artificial intelligence, whose daddy, as you might already be able to guess, is Alan Turing. Here is a very short introduction to this man's genius.

To learn about his incredibly interesting work on mathematical biology (specifically his ideas related to the chemistry basis of morphogenesis), check out Jim Al-Khalili's documentary The Secret Life of Chaos.
.

MIX 2010 Montage Video

Penn & Teller - Circumcision Is Bullshit!

I don't know whether the practice of circumcision arose from sincere concern for the health of babies being born and raised in conditions less than optimal in terms of hygiene, or whether it arose from the dogmatic, arbitrary and superstitious religious beliefs of illiterate goat herders in the desert.

What I do know is that this practice has become the norm in Western cultures. Never mind the ironic self-esteem problems it produces for those whose loving parents have spared them this brutal procedure, the practice of child circumcision raises some very interesting ethical questions:

If there is no clear medical benefit to circumcision (and there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that, at least in developed countries, it is completely useless), is it okay for parents to impose, simply for the sake of some backward sense of social acceptance, what can only be described as a barbaric procedure on their obviously non-consenting boys? If circumcision desensitizes sexual pleasure, can it be compared (in kind, not degree) to the clearly objectionable practice of female genital mutilation?

Penn & Teller have a few choice words to share about the issue.

And if you feel self-conscious because you haven't been butchered, there are people who might find you sexy :)


Check out more of Penn & Teller's magic and irreverence.
.

The Genius of Britain - Episode 1

The scientific revolution represents one of the most exciting developments of our species' history, replacing the traditions of dogma, authority, superstition and fear with the promise of true understanding, reason, knowledge and freedom. The Greeks had attempted this once before, but their amazing intellectual progress was obfuscated by the Roman conquest and the subsequent dominion of Christianity that would bring in the Dark Ages.

While the scientific revolution took place in various countries, it should come as no surprise that the BBC would want to pay particular recognition to the British men and women whose minds and discoveries helped shape the modern world, and to get this tribute started, they have brought in some of Britain's current big guns: Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, David Attenborough, Robert Winston, Jim Al-Khalili and others.

This first episode tells the incredible and astonishing story of a small group of friends, colleagues and enemies (Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton) who, with the aid of their unquenchable curiosity, inexhaustible industry, rigorous thinking and astonishing ingenuity, would produce discoveries and develop theories that defied virtually everything that was known about the world at that time. These events are told in the context of the appearance of a strange object moving across the sky in the winter of 1,664...

To learn more about the birth, history and influence of The Royal Society, you might want to listen to this fascinating four-part series of In Our Time, with Melvin Bragg.
.

From GREECE with Love