Counterfactuals and time traveling cold-blooded murderers!  Why is it we always want to see what happens when we kill ourselves (or others) when time traveling?  Does time travel make one murderous?  Anyway, besides  the weird questions that occur to me, the discussion over at Kadri Vihvelin’s philosophy blog does try to tackle Counterfactuals, Indicatives and What Time Travelers Can’t Do.

If that isn’t your cup-o-tea, maybe you like smoking pipes.  But apparently not the pipe if you are from Utah.

And if you don’t like smoking pipes, nor counterfactual time travelers, then perhaps you like the movies.  Over at Pirates and Revolutionaries we have durationless movies that involve no time flow.    Lot’s of YouTube clips — which I did actually watch (most of them at least) and you should too. Because what good is anything without pictures or conversation?

Well, if you don’t like the movies, pipes or homicidal time travelers, try the news.  But not if you read the New York Times’ Stone, apparently, because over at The Consternation of Philosophy, Matt says they got the foundation of human rights wrong.  He writes that the reasons that are given not only do not show a foundation for secular human rights, they actually lead to dogmatism.

But maybe you like dogmatism.  I bet there are secretly lots of philosophers out there who, while publicly decrying dogmatism, are secretly delighted with their own.  I’m probably one of these people.  Then, perhaps we should be epistemological anarchists, as is suggested over at the Kindly Ones.  Paul writes on Feyerabend’s reductio directed at rationalist conceptions of scientific method, which concludes with: Anything Goes.  You should read this- it’s something I dogmatically recommend.

Fine, be that way.  Don’t do what I recommend.  Instead sit around and listen to the radio for all I care.  Actually, we’ve got some high quality internet radio going down at the Partially Examined Life: Pat Churchland on the Neurobiology of Morality (Plus Hume’s Ethics).  I surprised myself and listened to the whole thing.  Good talk.  Also, a book for sale.

If none of this armchair stuff has impressed you, I guess you might be one of those “go out and do stuff types.” [yeah right]  If that is the case, go check out some Experimental Philosophy.  Justin writes, ask not “what the history of philosophy can do for us, but rather what we can do for the history of philosophy.“  That’s the attitude!  (The post is actually on the place of x-phi in a historical and cultural setting.  Good stuff just the same.)

Or maybe you are just at The Ends of Thought, so frustrated with the difficulties that you’re left wondering where a lot of us went wrong (and I’m not saying who has gone wrong; you’ll have to read the post to see who Roman says did).

Lastly, zombies, because philosophers like zombies.

[via information aesthetics]

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Animal of the Month: Immortal Jellyfish

‘Immortal’ jellyfish swarming across the world – Telegraph

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In second place is: Giant meat-eating plants prefer to eat tree shrew poo - BBC – Earth News

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A Softer World: 395

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[via Don't Panic > Magazine > Desire > THE BLACK HEART GANG]

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Beautiful and depraved: “Absolutely amazing.  Welcome back Massive Attack. And Mazzy Star. Two of the most iconic performers I’ve ever experienced.  And then this woman.  Wow.” Not safe for work. [if that link isn't working, the video is here too.]

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[via Whitezine]

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“Perhaps nothing has been more influential in determining the popular perception of the Italian game than furbizia, the art of guile… The word ‘furbizia’ itself means guile, cunning or astuteness. It refers to a method which is often (and admittedly) rather sly, a not particularly by-the-book approach to the performative, tactical and psychological part of the game. Core to furbizia is that it is executed by means of stratagems which are available to all players on the pitch, not only to one team. What are these stratagems? Here are a few: tactical fouls, taking free kicks before the goalkeeper has finished positioning himself, time-wasting, physical or verbal provocation and all related psychological games, arguably even diving… Anyone can provoke an adversary, but it takes real guile (real furbizia) to find the weakest links in the other team’s psychology, then wear them out and bite them until something or someone gives in – all without ever breaking a single rule in the book of football.

…

Ultimately, these differences come from two irreconcilable visions of the game. The Spanish style understands football as something like a fencing match, a rapid and meticulous art of noble origins where honour is the brand of valour. To the Italians, football is more like an ancient battle, a primal and inclement bronze-age scenario where survival rules over honour.

But this just begs the question: why are the visions of the game so different in nations that are geographically and culturally so close?

Rajiv Sethi: Gamesmanship and Collective Reputation [via]

[via Core77]

via BackRe(Action)

So this is what I came up with.

As the plane moves forward, a small vacuum is created above the wing. The vacuum is a low pressure zone which pulls the wing up and the air down to fill itself in (because Nature HATES a vacuum).  This upward pull that the low pressure zone creates we call lift.

I thought, “Hooray.  This isn’t so complicated!  Planes stay up because they create small vacuums above their wings as they move forward, creating an upward force.”

Then I thought, “And this is why planes can’t fly in outer space, because there is no air to displace and create a vacuum.”

Then I thought, “But if there is an aether theory, why not?”

So as a wing moves through a vacuum, generally we don’t think there is anything to cause lift or drag.  But if we have an aether theory of a vacuum, i.e. there is some substance below what we can observe that our matter exists within, then why can’t we create a vacuum in that substance?

My line of thought was: Air is to Vacuum as Vacuum is to Black Hole.

Can’t we just spin a propeller fast enough in outer space to create lift?  As the prop turns small vacuums in the aether will be created, and, insofar as Nature hates vacuums, a force will be created to fill in this vacuum, pulling the propeller in that direction.

(Someone please tell me how this is nonsense so I won’t go around thinking I’ve come up with a new model of space flight.)

Amsterdam:

Heineken tastes MUCH better in Amsterdam.  Now I won’t be able to drink it States-side, which kind of sucks. Hopefully the memory will fade soon and I will be able to go back to my ignorant bliss.

[On the flip side I had some Sam Adams while in Israel and near spit it out.]

Israel:

1) In the 3 days I was in Jerusalem I wanted to figure out why everyone finds it to be the place for religion.  Here’s what I came up with:

These images were taken within the same minute at on Ben Yehuda Street, Jerusalem .  However, my camera was set to New York time, so it is really 1:34 am (NY +7).  I’ve put up two images because I want to give the best view of the street that I can to make my point: the top image was with flash, which only reaches so far, but does not make blurry images; the second image was long exposure and gives a more accurate view, but, try as I might, I can only hold myself so still.  Hopefully you will be able to imagine how it looks between the two. (see this image from Wikipedia too)

The second picture – this is the more accurate to life shot – shows the street to be very bright and, in fact, unusually bright.  Times Square-bright even but, as you can see, this street has normal stores and streetlights; no neon, no giant billboards.  So how is this feat of lighting achieved?

Nearly everything in Jerusalem is made of the off-white Jerusalem stone.  Ben Yehuda street is an old, pedestrian only street with no asphalt and hence is white on 3 sides.  This makes it reflect light incredibly well, as I hope you can divine from my shoddy photography.

Imagine the extra hours of usable time that people would have because they needed less fuel for their lamps, and multiply this by thousands of years.   I figure that a place with nice weather and well above average lighting conditions, such as Jerusalem, would be conducive to people sitting around reading and arguing about stuff, and hence religious studies.

2) Gaza:

Israel on the whole seemed rather safe and so completely normal while I was there that it was hard to reconcile it with the place the media covers.  Granted I didn’t go anywhere near where the fighting was, but I was in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and observed how people were living, and I thought it could have been San Diego.  I’ve never been to San Diego, but I think it must be pretty with a friendly population that mostly speaks English and has nice weather, which was my experience in Israel.  So what is going on?

Again, 2 pictures:

The first map is of Israel alone and it is what we see when we are looking at the fighting going on.  The second is of the Middle East.  When an Israeli thinks about Israel, it is the second map and the distance scale of the first map that come to mind.  From this perspective, it looks as if Israel is a teeny bastion of non-Muslims trying to eek out an existence in a world of Islam.  If you look at the top map, Gaza doesn’t appear all that big, but since Israel is so small, that little bit of usable land is important.

Of course that bit of land isn’t so important to start killing people over.

However, what I was told, was that Gaza was part of long term strategy to take down Israel from within: Since there are many more Muslims in the region and world, if more can gain residency in Israel through Gaza, then in only a few years they will be able to out vote the Jews.  So every settlement matters because each represents an increased voting bloc and tips the balance of power away from the current establishment.

This presents a dilemma because either the Jewish state must change its democratic principles if it wants continued existence, or else die slowly to the ever increasing Muslim population.  So the crude, stop-gap  solution was to just eradicate the Palestinian settlements.  This at least explains some of the reasoning; whether the actions taken were justified is a different question.

Istanbul:

Everyone is interested in Obama.  These ads were ubiquitous (notice the second ad right behind the first on the left hand side.):

Garanti is a bank.

This is what Google Translate tells me the text says:

support loan interest rates

using the most comprehensive credit insurance for Turkey is out of 3 women in markets bonus

warranty package to revive the economy of the world will envy

Much of the world still operates with the dollar.  I bought some ridiculously nice leather shoes from a dingy shop for US $30 – they didn’t even accept Turkish Lira.  I handed the guy 2 20s and the man immediately became concerned: this confused me until he pulled a stack of Benjamins (US 100s) out of his pocket an inch thick and started going through it looking for a 10.  He had to go across the street to get me change.

My thought was that the  current US president is, for all intensive purposes, on the $100 bill.  Money has value because people believe that it guarantees something of worth, goods and services.  This guarantee of worth is made by large, trusted institutions likes banks and governments, and as the head of the biggest institution, Obama is where the buck stops.

So the unsurprising conclusion is that the entire world is counting on Obama to fix the financial crisis.  I don’t know anything about Garanti Bank, but 1.19% loans do sound good.

What I would like to see is a lifelike 3-D world that has a main character that has special abilities, or levels, taken from modern art.  This means, for example, that a character with Cubist special abilities (or in the cubist level) can flatten parts of the world that they are looking at into a 2-D space, but in this space they have the ability to see around corners, rearrange objects and do all the other funky things that happen in cubist art.

On the flip-side, when using the Cubist skills, the character would lose depth perception, motion would be funky, and other sorts of strange phenomena would go on.

Moreover the character could get skills associated with other artists or artistic movements.  Say there was a Dali  gun: it could stretch the legs of elephants (or any other animal) such that they become unstable.  Or a Duchamp Readymade skill which combines random objects in the world into other objects depending upon the angle at which you are looking at them.  Frankly I think that there are too many different and good ways to go; it would take some effort to really take a few ideas and make them work well.

This would be a great way to combine the ‘new’ media form of interactive video gaming and more ‘traditional’ modern art.  It might even be considered educational.  But if executed well, it would definitely be fun, interesting and visually impressive.

Fedor fights MMA, for those of you who don’t know, stands for Mixed Martial Arts.  MMA is well named: the fighting ranges from boxing to grappling, and just about everything in between.  This means that not only do you have be an excellent boxer, but skilled in kickboxing, Judo, Ju Jitsu, and a variety of other fighting styles if you want to be successful.  It sometimes gets a bad reputation because of the no-holds-barred attitude, but all the top fighters are incredibly skilled at martial arts.

Fedor is the best in the entire world.  Bar none. There isn’t anyone in the entire world who would likely win in a fight against this man; there is no strategy, there is no size differential, there isn’t anything short of having a gun or a posse than would give you an advantage if he were standing in your way.  His nickname is The Last Emperor.

The NY Times just (Jan 20) had a whole piece on him as a lead up to his most recent fight (last night).  And the LA Times has the follow up to last night’s fight (spoiler alert, if you can’t guess who won already by my beaming praise).

But the best thing to do is to just watch videos of him in action.  If you know something about martial arts and fighting, he is something to behold; if you don’t, then there is none more exciting or better to learn from.

I don’t normally post anything that I’ve seen on Digg or Reddit, but this turns jaw dropping at around 1:28  [3:45]: moogaloop.swf

Industrial design:

Orbita Mouse Is One Big Scroll Wheel | Technomix | Fast Company

“Over its forty year life the mouse has seen some interesting re-inventions, and the new Orbita mouse is one that’s eye-catching. Its designers have taken the idea of a scroll wheel and inverted it, making the entire top surface of the mouse into a scroll dial.”

FORA.tv – MythBusters Co-Host Adam Savage on Obsession[16:54]

MythBusters co-host Adam Savage presents a glimpse into the mind of the obsessed and the motivation that drives their obsessions.

Industrial version of the Angel of Death shreds much more than paper – Core77 [multiple videos]

What “Will it Blend?” wants to be when it grows up.

Art:

YouTube – larytta – souvenir de chine – video directed by koerner union[3:13]

Really cool, like a kaleidoscope of animals.

Varini’s Trompe L’oeil | Trend.Land

“I am totally fascinated by Swiss Trompe L’oeil artist Felice Varini whom I just discovered.Dont be fooled by your first percetion of this work. These are not photo rendered images, it is master craft! He has worked on many interior spaces and exterior spaces which are even harder to believe. Varini’s work is comes together in full in only one exact point where the entire geometric calculation is percieved. From anywhere else it looks like some graphic design made of lines, concentric circles, and triangles of color. Here a gallery of some of his works.”

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Graphical Art:

Weeping Willow: Mood-Driven Data Sculptures – information aesthetics

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swissmiss: Typographic study of a-holes

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Dark Roasted Blend: What Kids Wish For

… A hat that would make everyone fall in love with you

Fun:

Human Wrecking Balls [via Core77]

“The stupidest show on TV.”

Welcome to 3EyedBear

I love these things: You print them, cut the piece of paper and glue, and you have a brand new toy in less that 10 minutes! I think this is one of the great successes of modern technology.

Best for last: I watched this thing over and over.[1m] via

I’m not sure if it is the gorgeous priest (this is the first time I’ve had that thought), the overall beauty of it, or the love on their faces. check out this live performance of the song and realize how amazing a singer she is.

Then, one of my teachers told me, “Make a suicide pact with ceramics.” So I took that advice to heart and made a “suicide pact with ceramics.”

That’s hardcore.

Election maps

Really cool visualization break down of the elections.

swissmiss: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

One of my favorite books from childhood.

Toyota IQ x SOMARTA II on Vimeo

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Amazing geared paper heart kinetic sculpture – Core77

Cool video [1:35]

whatever martha – Google Search

I saw watching a TV show called “Whatever, Martha!“  Old ‘Martha Stewart Living’ shows are watched and commented upon Mystery Science Theater 3000 style by Martha Stewart’s daughter Alexis and her friend Jennifer.  It is freaking hilarious.

PingMag – Advanced Beauty: Processed Volatile Moments

Advanced Beauty is a wondrous new DVD compilation comprised of 18 visuals by 20 artists, or rather sound sculptures, as curator Matt Pyke of UK-based Universal Everything would say. These transient pieces made by processing are for us to see how far you can really push the aesthetics of software generated visualisations and play around [...]

BibliOdyssey: Original Winnie The Pooh Drawings

Damn Straight.

….damn straight………………………….

(3:12) [via digg]

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Runner-Up: Pseudo-animals – The Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill

See videos of not-quite animals!

USA

(2:55) via cursivebuildings MUST WATCH

The National Anthem, 1983. Unbelievably good rendition.

YouTube – The Manchurian Candidate (1:26)

Modern presidential politics.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Candidate Comedy

“For those who haven’t seen the footage, McCain and Obama  appeared last night at a charity dinner in New York to roast themselves and each other. Some of it was very, very funny. McCain was really, really funny….  (candidates’ speeches, McCain, Obama – 14:53, 13:39 respectively)

Art and Logic (somehow)

somefield

Awesome vision of Alice in Wonderland (written by a logician, for those who did not know what Lewis Carrol’s day job was.)  [scroll down a little to see the Alice pictures.  And I would be forever in someone's debt if they bought me a print.]

Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes — FIRST PICTURES

Please let this movie not suck (take 2).

PingMag – Levi Van Veluw: What’s That Tree In Your Hair?

“Either you’ll be intrigued by the fascinating way Dutchman Levi van Veluw applies materials on his face, neck and head — or you’ll be kind of appalled by this weird appearance.[...]”

— All I want to know what this man does for Halloween.

Alcohol

Video review for real Duff Beer from The Simpsons | iFoods.tv (1:55)

This is well worth your 2 minutes.

MxMo XXXII Guilty Pleasures – Kalimotxo

I have yet to try this, but judging by the review and the accompanying video (21s), it looks near perfect.

Interactive Fun

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Rachael Ray Corn Porn (1:39)

“Okay, this is one of the funniest videos I’ve ever seen. It’s that evil little succubus Rachael Ray getting all naughty with an ear of corn – and being far more excited about it than any human being should be….

RRRR : Don’t Shoot the Puppy (game)

I haven’t gotten past level 12…

The Associated Press: Video games feature ads for Obama’s campaign

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swissmiss: The Unfinished Swan (1:55)

The Unfinished Swan – Really cool video of the tech demo.  This looks like serious fun!

i’m dead

Paid Notice: Deaths GREENSTEIN, NOAH – New York Times

not really me, but it is an odd site to see your name in the obits.