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August 4, 2007
Critt Jarvis has left an audio comment that’s a limerick version of the Dylan Thomas poem.
FWIW, I plan on going into that good night whining.
And while I’m at it, here’s Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene as a limerick:
Girl, hush! It’s death if we are seen.
You’re so hot. Omigod, like I mean
if Juliet’s an alias
You’re still one fair lass
And you don’t look a day over thirteen.
[Tags: critt_jarvis dylan_thomas romeo_juliet limericks humor]
July 19, 2007
The Crow
The crow is a well-shaped bird.
To the east, a fan splays out.
Crescents point west and south.
Beak down, tail up, it inquires
forward, but then flaps north
where it is not pointing.
The crow is a well-shaped bird.
And then it opens its goddamn mouth.
January 5, 2007
Oxfam America’s “Unwrapped” program lets you buy gifts online for those who really really need your help. As is Oxfam’s wont, the gifts help a poor family sustain itself: For $20, you can irrigate a farmer’s land for two months, for $30 you can plant 50 trees, and for $120 you can start a village savings group. [Tags: oxfam charity]
August 21, 2006
Meredith Sue Willils, the writer and my sister-in-law, has a poem admiring weeds even as she’s uprooting them. (Sue’s blog has no visible permalinks, so you may have to search for “Admiration for Weeds.”)
June 30, 2006
Found at Pink Dome thanks to Andy Oram:
Omigod. [Tags: george_bush mashup bloodysunday youtube video broadcast_flag]
You can add your name and good wishes to the virtual birthday card the Republican National Committee is sending to our President on July 6. You’ll have to make a campaign contribution first, though. Great idea! That’s how I’m going to manage my next birthday!
February 11, 2006
Last night, at the end of her lecture, Miriam Udel Lambert read a sonnet by Robert Frost that I found moving and beautiful:
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent
So that in guys it gently sways at ease
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everyone on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.
Jeez, that guy can write! [Tags: miriam_udel_lambert robert_frost poetry]
August 25, 2005
A rainbow planted one foot on land
and another on top of the ocean.
I know how they work:
Water particles split light into its tendencies.
But I don’t know why the colors band,
why they twice touch the bottom of the sky,
or why they paint a half circle
so perfect that it confounds Plato. So I lost my explanation for a moment.
The rainbow became a gift
so orderly that it must be a sign. I was watching as someone else.
Believe me, I know
there is no giver of the gift
and no sense in the sign, just the modern embarrassment
of looking at a rainbow.
(Please remember Blogging Rule #3: We must forgive one another’s poetry.) [Technorati tags: poetry]
July 28, 2005
Bob comments on George Gilder’s promotion of the “intelligent design” idea in an interesting interview with Gilder in the Boston Globe yesterday. (My take on the article was simply that Gilder has made an admirable career out of being wrong in public.) Bob says that bell curves look like they were intelligently designed, too, but as the famous exhibit at the 1964 Worlds Fair shows every time it’s run — I was there and I remember it — when you drop balls down a set of pegs, you get a bell curve every time.
Bob’s right, IMO, but his example isn’t going to cut the mustard with someone like Gilder who comes to the intelligent design conclusion not on the basis of faith. (Those who get there by faith can only be moved from it by another faith.) Gilder et al. point to far more complex examples than balls forming bell curves. In fact, the entire argument rests on finding examples so complex that they seem impossible without an intelligent designer. So, Bob’s tactic of finding something simple to understand that looks intentional but isn’t can’t work on ID believers, for they will always be able to find an example of something complex for which we don’t yet have an explanation.
Here’s my point of view on the intelligent design argument. I’m not claiming that it’s a sophisticated point of view. It’s just what I think.
I don’t know if there’s an intelligent designer. It seems unlikely to me for a few reasons: As SJ Gould pointed out, much of life is rather haphazardly and ad hoc-ly formed (e.g., the panda’s thumb), not as elegant as you’d expect from an ID and not like the elegant examples ID believers point to. Also, if there is an ID, I can’t imagine that the two words we use to describe it — “intelligent” and “design” — actually are anywhere near to describing it; it’s got to so far transcend our understanding that those terms don’t really make sense. Also, a belief that nature was intelligently designed raises the problem of evil — why do bad things happen to good people? — that argues against ID. I mean, if it turns out that it took an ID to design an eyeball, then why the hell didn’t it build in a tsunami warning system so the eyeballs of millions of children wouldn’t be dimmed? ID solves an engineering problem but raises an insoluble moral problem.
So, I don’t know if there’s an ID. As I say, if I had to guess, I’d say no, but if I don’t trust my judgment about whether my subscription to PC Gamer counts as a tax deduction, how can I trust my judgment about the origin of the universe? So, maybe there is an ID. But if there is, we sure can’t look to our ignorance as proof, because historically we know not only that we solve problems that once looked impossible, but our understanding of the domain within the which the problems exist changes radically. For most of recorded history we thought nature only had a few thousand years in which to operate. We were stuck with real-time apparatus for calculating. We were stuck running experiments about physical events by using physical events. We lacked the tools for understanding complexity. Human ignorance evolves, so it is unwise to base any argument on its nature.
Personally, I find absolutely nothing objectionable about people who believe G-d is the architect of nature. (Why pussyfoot around this? ID=G-d.) For the believers I know personally, this is a way of contacting the ineffable beauty, orderliness and complexity of our world. It is a way of acknowledging our dark-inked ignorance, our fallibility, our humanity, just as the best of our knowing always has. But taking ignorance as an excuse for remaining ignorant or, worse, for using it as an argument against science? The believers I know don’t do that. It would feel like a betrayal.
Bob also has a terrific essay on the damage DRM will do to the marketplace and innovation…and to the long tail. [Technorati tags: GeorgeGilder BobFrankston IntelligentDesign LongTail science]
June 20, 2005
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