DENIS DUTTON

I've
encountered stiff academic resistance to the notion that Darwinian
theory might greatly improve the understanding of our aesthetic
and imaginative lives.  There's no reason to worry.  The
most complete, evolutionarily-based explanation of a great
work of art, classic or recent, will address its form, its
narrative content, its ideology, how it is taken in by the
eye or mind, and indeed, how it can produce a deep, even life-transforming
pleasure.  But nothing in a valid aesthetic psychology
will rob art of its appeal, any more than knowing how we evolved
to enjoy fat and sweet makes a piece of cheesecake any less
delicious. Nor will a Darwinian aesthetics reduce the complexity
of art to simple formulae.  It will only give us a better
understanding of the greatest human achievements and their
effects on us.

One is reminded of Feynman as well :

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars— mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination— stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern— of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent.

(from Wikiquote - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman)

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 4

MIHALYI CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

So the dangerous idea on which our culture is based is that the
political economy has a silver bullet — the free market — that
must take precedence over any other value, and thereby lead to
peace and prosperity. It is dangerous because like all silver
bullets it is an intellectual and political scam that might benefit
some, but ultimately requires the majority to pay for the destruction
it causes.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 3

HAIM HARARI

Democracy
may be on its way out. Future historians
may determine that Democracy will have
been a one-century episode. It will disappear. This is a sad, truly dangerous, but very
realistic idea (or, rather, prediction).
Falling
boundaries between countries, cross border
commerce, merging economies, instant global
flow of information and numerous other
features of our modern society, all lead
to multinational structures. If you extrapolate
this irreversible trend, you get the entire
planet becoming one political unit. But
in this unit, anti-democracy forces are
now a clear majority. This majority increases
by the day, due to demographic patterns. All democratic nations have slow, vanishing
or negative population growth, while all
anti-democratic and uneducated societies
multiply fast. Within democratic countries,
most well-educated families remain small
while the least educated families are growing
fast. This means that, both at the individual
level and at the national level, the more
people you represent, the less economic
power you have. In a knowledge based economy,
in which the number of working hands is
less important, this situation is much
more non-democratic than in the industrial
age. As long as upward mobility of individuals
and nations could neutralize this phenomenon,
democracy was tenable. But when we apply
this analysis to the entire planet, as
it evolves now, we see that democracy may
be doomed.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 2

The
history of science is replete with discoveries
that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally
dangerous in their time; the Copernican and
Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious.
What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think
about (not necessarily one you originated)
that is dangerous not because it is assumed
to be false, but because it might be true?

The smart folks over at Edge.org weigh in on "dangerous" -- which i interpret to mean potentially massively transformative -- ideas.

As usual, there's some fascinating stuff here.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006

The networks will all be creating exciting, innovative new spin-offs of today's shows. Approximately 67 percent of all television will be CSI-based, including CSI: Des Moines, CSI: New York but a Different Part than Gary Sinise Is In and NCSI: SVU WKRP, which covers every possible gruesome crime with a groovin' '70s beat. (Jerry Bruckheimer will also have conquered Broadway with the CSI musical "FOLLICLE!" starring Nathan Lane as a frenetic but lovable blood spatter and Matthew Broderick as lint.)
Lost has that one-of-a-kind alchemy that really can't be copied. Therefore, look for the original series Misplaced, as well as Unfound, Not So Much with the Whereabouts and Just Pull Over and Ask!
In a stunningly cost-effective move, CBS will air How I Met Your Biological Mother, That Bitch, which is just old episodes of How I Met Your Mother with snarkier narration. HBO's Westminster will continue the trend pioneered by Deadwood and Rome by making 19th-century England really dirty and weird, like Jane Austen with Tourette's. (Actually, I can't wait for that one.) Also, the constant slew of cable mergers will result in the creation of CinePax, a channel that's just very confused about its morals.

"Not So Much with the Whereabouts." classic.

Joss Whedon on the future of TV

Some of these are absolutely incredible.

Worth1000.com | Photoshop Contests | Are you Worthy™ | contest

In hundreds of bars and cafes nationwide — from Fresno to Ames, Iowa, to Raleigh, N.C. — Americans are inhaling fruit-flavored tobacco through water pipes as Arab and Indian men have done for centuries.

This tradition is posing a new challenge to the anti-tobacco movement in the USA, which has helped pass more than 2,000 smoke-free laws.

I caught this in my morning CDC missive and it struck me because a number of my friends have started rocking the hookah recently.

My attitude towards smoking, and anti-smoking laws, is that you should be able to do it anywhere that doesn't force the second hand smoke on anyone who hasn't chosen to inhale it.

That does mean no smoking in public bars, but in no way excludes establishments designed primarily around smoking.

Ultimately, I think there's a big difference between cigarettes and hookahs. For one, cigarettes are portable and small, so people frequently smoke them *a lot*. It's a little tougher to deal with the whole hookah apparatus and i do think that mitigates it's risk. The other issue is use... the article does mention a Saudi man who smokes a hookah every day, but most people i know do it only occasionally, maybe a couple times a month at most. Even if each time counts as 36 cigarettes, if you do it monthly you're on about a 1 cigarette a day, equivalent. That's not so bad, really.

USATODAY.com - Hookah trend is puffing along

In an unusually candid admission, the federal chief of AIDS research says he believes drug companies don't have an incentive to create a vaccine for the
HIV and are likely to wait to profit from it after the government develops one.

And that means the government has had to spend more time focusing on the processes that drug companies ordinarily follow in developing new medicines and bringing them to market.

Stop acting so surprised... Chris Rock said the exact thing more than 5 years ago. I guess when you laugh at the truth, it's less true.

He was right. Drug companies have a lot more to gain from treatments than from cures. That's not to say that the people working for them aren't well meaning, good people, but even they can't change the nature of capitalism.

Another straightforward example of why we need government, and why free markets can't solve all the worlds problems.

Federal Chief Of AIDS Research: Drug Companies Have No Incentive To Create HIV Vaccine… | The Huffington Post

Yes, dammit. Yes. For many reasons.

1. This is probably the funniest thing SNL's done since Col. Angus.

2. I've been looking for a non-streaming version so i could have it for ever and ever.

3. Because I think it's a *really* positive sign that NBC rapidly recognized all the attention this was getting on the intarweb and rather than freaking out about piracy and sending C & D's to everyone, just released it for free through it's brand new download channel (iTMS).

Say what you will about Apple, FairPlay or whatever, but i feel like we're finally getting somewhere... slowly, bit at least it's happening.

-k

p.s. one caveat : looks like you have to have an Apple ID which means either a) have ever bought something from their web store, b) have .mac, c) have purchaased thru iTMS before. Some people will probly bitch about this, but i'm just happy that i have the video now so's i can play it for all my friends who're behind the curve ;)

'Lazy Sunday' available free on iTunes...

Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the
way, any time you hear the United States government talking about
wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has
changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists,
we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's
important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot
Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what
is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the
Constitution.

bold mine.

That's Bush from April 20, 2004, lying. Not equivocating or waffling or vacillating. There's no word for it but outright lying.

Certainly there are times when national security requires a lie. When the topic is a citizen's right to due process I reject that defense out of hand. Sorry, sir. NOT justifiable.

President Bush: Information Sharing, Patriot Act Vital to Homeland Security