On this July Fourth, let us not forget Lisa Rein‘s archive of clips from Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.

And there was laughter in the land, and the Founders were pleased.

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Joshua Micah Marshall is running the first half of an awesome interview with Joseph Biden.

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RageBoy is getting messages from PayPal saying that what he’s sellling violates their standards of decency. If PayPal doesn’t want to be used for the sale of pornographic items, I guess that’s their choice, but in this case, RB isn’t trying to sell a thing. He has a “donate” button on his site. Apparently that requires him to clean up the content of his site to meet PayPal’s sense of decency. Feels a tad intrusive, doesn’t it?

BTW, if you’ve got some spare cash, you might want to consider pressing that big ol’ donate button while it still works.

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Where I’m staying, the kids have had the Discovery Channel all morning. It’s shark show after shark show. The underwater scientists wrestle them, tag them, measure them, and check their teeth for unsightly plaque.

Fine, but I plan on swimming in the ocean this summer, so could we please stop annoying the sharks for a while? Thank you.

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20q.net is an online game of 20 questions that apparently starts off with no knowledge base. It learns from the interactions of the players. And it is pretty damn impressive.

I’d like to know more about how it works, but I’m having trouble finding any explanations, and mail to the address given on the site is going unanswered. Anyone know of a place that discusses how it works? In particular, how does it come up with the questions? E.g., where does “Does it come in packs?” come from?

TIA (no, not Total Information Awareness.)

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Now this is odd.

1st Lt. Mark V. Shaney, of the US Marine Corps, posted a report from Baghdad today as a comment to a blog entry of mine from March 2003. That struck me as odd, as did his almost-coherent sentences and his giving as his URL a conservative site called The National Center for Public Policy Research. It occurred to me that perhaps the National Center was sending Shaney out to various blogs to post the same upbeat posting.

I didn’t find any similar posts, but Googling “Mark V Shaney” turns up the surprising news that he’s a computer program that generates plausible sentences on the basis of Markoff Chains (hence his name) derived from bodies of text. Mark was written by Bruce Ellis and was a well-known poster to Usenet back in the day…one of his most famous posts was in 1984.

Here’s a page that lets you download a DOS version of the program:

Mark V Shaney does two things. using a text input (usually a short story, essay or concatenated email – you choose), it builds probabilistic tables which describe how likely it is that certain words or phrases follow other words or phrases.
then, using these tables, mark will generate a new version of the input text. this process can be iterated, resulting in the amusing, strange or plain eerie. John J Mackin was a great fan of mark’s. john felt that mr. shaney often demonstrated his sentience, especially when it generated “I was born out of a user manual.”

I created a small text base consisting of a blog entry of mine about the authenticity of voice and the first part of a transcript of a recent speech by W. From this Mark generated the following (excerpt):

It means that in speaking with you, I am aware of how I think this is one of those questions that exposes a contradiction in our cultural cognitive disconnect the concept of authenticity exposes is, I believe, that we have inner and outer selves, and that the inner self is our real self. I personally find those ideas more misleading than helpful.) Semantic Behavior Index Jon Udell speculates on what our OS would do if Google wrote it instead of Microsoft: On the Google PC, you wouldn’t need third-party add-ons to index and search your local files, e-mail, and instant messages. It would also embolden the terrorists, leading to more bombings, more beheadings and more brutal. There are five steps in our very being, whatever that means. (But it seems to mean something.) While we need the term “authenticity” so we can talk about phonies, and simultaneously shouldn’t trust its implication that only “unfiltered” voice is “real.” But, then what marks an inauthentic voice from an authentic one? (The cultural cognitive disconnect the concept of authenticity exposes is, I believe, that we have inner and outer selves, and that the sequence of my small-motor movements may not think the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic. Yet our coalition and Iraqis will govern their own affairs. America’s ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, will present

Meanwhile, I still don’t know who posted the Shaneyized text into my comments…

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The initial photos of the rings ofSaturn — too cool! — are in black and white, with color ones to arrive soon. Why b&w first? Does it take longer to develop the color ones? Do we get double prints if we go with the b&w?

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I’ve started re-reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics (although if “re-reading” implies any serious memory of the first time, then we should remove the “re-“) with an eye towards the role of categories and tree-like organizational structures. So far, that’s turning out to be an oddly useful (= consistently distorting) lens.

In Book Beta, Aristotle is still examining how others have approached the problem of what things are. Previous philosophers have made the mistake, he argues, of thinking that principles and classes have to be independent things; in fact, they believe principles are the most real and the most eternal. But then you end up with the “greatest absurdity” [997b.5, p. 46], he says, for you’ve divided beings into an individual and the principle that makes the individual into what it is, and you have no way of getting them back together.

Worse, it’s the individuals that are most real (despite Plato), but if all we have are individuals, there’s no possibility of knowledge:

If there is nothing apart from concrete individuals, and if these are infinite, how is a science of infinite individuals possible? For whatever things we come to know, we come to know in so far as they are one or the same, and in so far as some general attributes belongs to them all. [998a, 23, p. 51]

But it isn’t possible that the condition for knowing is incompatible with the nature of being. Can we get to something general enough to count as knowledge without denying that to be is to be an individual?

Aristotle says predecessors failed at this. Those that say principles are real beings are needlessly multiplying entities and can’t explain what it means for an individual to “participate” in a principle, And, he argues, it doesn’t help to point to the constituent elements of things because if that’s all you have, you can’t understand what makes a bed into a bed; for that you have to see how the parts are put together and understand that a bed is for sleeping…a purpose not contained in the sum of constituent elements.

But, even if we agree that knowledge of a thing is knowledge of what kind of thing it is, how general should the kind be? Do you look at its most immediate genus, or do you look at the root of the tree to see the primary genus? [998b.15, p. 49]

…what many beings have in common cannot itself be a this-somnething, but is a “what”; whereas a primary being is a “this.” If we were permitted to supposed that what is predicated in common is itself a this-something, then Socrates would be many animals: himself and “man” and “animals”…These are the consequences of supposing principles to be general. But if they are not general, but individuals, they are not knowable; for knowledge of anything is general. Hence, if there is to be knowledge of such principles, there must be other principles prior to them, namely, what is general to them. [1003a.8, p. 60]

These are the problems that arise from assuming that being and knowability are one (an assumption we moderns don’t make; we assume that things are apart from how we know them), and not yet seeing how categories can be different in kind from the things they categorize. We don’t have a problem saying that Socrates is a human and an animal because we see that — looking upward — categories can be nested and inherit properties from their containers, and — looking downward — how categories can emerge from what the contain, just as beds emerge from constituent elements. Through the odd lens I’m using, reading this chapter feels like watching the birth of the level of abstraction required to make nested categories work.

I’m reading the Richard Hope translation from Ann Arbor Paperbacks.

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…Or Fahrenheit 9 out of 11, as I prefer to think of it. I just posted it over at BlogCritics.

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I just got an offer to subscribe to a new CMP magazine, Managing Offshore, “the essential resource for global sourcing managers.” For $495/year you can receive coverage of topics such as:

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