The Stuff Of Thought is an excellent book, and while it may not be as groundbreaking and controversial as some of his earlier works, it is easily his most accessible and fun book to read, as it is so suffused in pop culturata. Yet, on a scientific level, the book does something quite amazing: it bridges the chasm that many Academics have over language itself. Postmodernists believe language is a circular self-referential trap, while pragmatists believe it lends insight into what reality is. Pinker’s book seems to posit that that is a false dichotomy, not because both claims are false, but because both are fundamentally true.

The Stuff Of Thought, by Steven Pinker

I was surprised to find out during a campus visits with my son that the '80s are now a big nostalgia craze for college students. To those of us who lived it, it's as weird as nostalgia for polio.

I'm no professor of pop culture, but I have a theory.

Historian Jacques Barzun, in "Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life," wrote: "The point at which good intentions exceeded the power to fulfill them marked for the culture the onset of decadence."

That's "Miami Vice" - a decadent world of stark white rooms in sunny paradise, shadowed by dark evil. Drugs and guns, guns and drugs - the plots are as interchangeable as sides of a Rubik's Cube, nearly always involving smugglers from Jamaica, Haiti, Africa, Cuba, Asia, Costa Rica, Mexico. It's a pink and aqua preview of our 21st century angst over the illegal immigration invasion.

While we're on the subject of Barzun, let's take a dip into the archives:

Bookshelf already full, you say? Pick up your broom, clear away the dust, and consider making that "Harry" disappear.

This is a staggering tribute to uber-critic Jacques Barzun's legendary intelligence and cantankerousness.

What truly impresses here is Barzun's breadth of knowledge; in an age of academic specialization, he is a rare, confident master-of-all-trades.

Read the Koran. Read it as Jacques Barzun suggests: with pencil in hand; underline and circle; with marginalia of surprise, sympathy, outrage, confusion. Annotate - make it your Koran - absorb and comprehend.

We can say that attempts to base a foreign policy on the idea of exporting democracy—as sought by both the Reagan and Clinton administrations — will forever be doomed to failure.

A book of enormous riches, it's sprinkled with provocations.

Who misses 'Miami Vice' '80s? College kids, of all people

What our results suggest is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market "wants" at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history: there is no sense in which it simply "reveals" what people wanted all along. In such a world, in fact, the question "Why did X succeed?" may not have any better answer than the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss's surprise best seller, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," who, when asked to explain its success, replied that "it sold well because lots of people bought it."

People are like sheep -- or just like sharing

As violent Islamic extremists take their message to the Internet with remarkable skill, military academics are mulling new ways to challenge them in cyberspace.

DOD seeks ways to fight online propaganda war

Humans are highly social, but we don't get pally with just anybody. Before forming relationships with other people, we normally size them up to see how trustworthy they are. A new study suggests that this behavior stems from an evolutionary reorganization in a part of the brain responsible for detecting other people's emotions.

A Mind for Sociability

Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, an iconoclastic filmmaker widely regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, died Monday, local media reported. He was 89 years old.

He was "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera," Woody Allen said in a 70th birthday tribute in 1988.

In a press interview for her film "Away From Her", director Sarah Polley laments:

"It's sad to think there was a time when people lined up around the block to see Bergman movies ... and how unimaginable that is now."

How about a theatrical re-release of "Wild Strawberries" and The Seventh Seal"?

Film Director Ingmar Bergman Dies

Sodom, BC:

Then the LORD said: "The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave, that I must go down and see whether or not their actions fully correspond to the cry against them that comes to me. I mean to find out."

While the two men walked on farther toward Sodom, the LORD remained standing before Abraham. Then Abraham drew nearer to him and said:

"Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty? Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city; would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it for the sake of the fifty innocent people within it?"

"Far be it from you to do such a thing, to make the innocent die with the guilty, so that the innocent and the guilty would be treated alike! Should not the judge of all the world act with justice?"

The LORD replied, "If I find fifty innocent people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake."

Hebron, 2007:

The settlers are calling their compound "House of Peace," but are also considering "Martyrs’ Peak."

Hama, 1982:

In February 1982 the secular Syrian government of President Hafez al-Assad faced a mortal threat from Islamic extremists, who sought to topple the Assad regime. How did it respond? President Assad identified the rebellion as emanating from Syria's fourth-largest city — Hama — and he literally leveled it, pounding the fundamentalist neighborhoods with artillery for days. Once the guns fell silent, he plowed up the rubble and bulldozed it flat, into vast parking lots. Amnesty International estimated that 10,000 to 25,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, were killed in the merciless crackdown. Syria has not had a Muslim extremist problem since.

This was "Hama Rules" — the real rules of Middle East politics — and Hama Rules are no rules at all.

Baghdad, 2007:

"Mom, we killed women on the street today. We killed kids on bikes. We had no choice."

"They brought him in one day and brought his head in another."

“I have a question,” he said, pointing to the left side of his head. “... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

From NYT:

Computer scientists from California universities have hacked into three electronic voting systems used in California and elsewhere in the nation and found several ways in which vote totals could potentially be altered, according to reports released yesterday by the state.

The California reports said the scientists, acting at the state’s request, had hacked into systems from three of the four largest companies in the business: Diebold Election Systems, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia Voting Systems. [Makers of Los Angeles County's InkaVote system did not submit its equipment in time, so it wasn't included.]

Thousands of their machines in varying setups are in use.

Matt Bishop said his group was surprised by how easy it was not only to pick the physical locks on the machines, but also to break through the software defenses meant to block intruders.

All the machines had problems, and one of the biggest was that the manufacturers appeared to have added the security measures after the basic systems had been designed.

By contrast, he said, the best way to create strong defenses is "to build security in from the design, in Phase 1."

From the LA Times:

"Right now, I don't see any smoking gun, honestly," said Stephen L. Weir, Contra Costa County's clerk-recorder and registrar of voters, and president of the California Assn. of Clerks and Election Officials.

Diebold also condemned the review, questioning why no election officials were included in the testing.

The review:

Secretary of State Debra Bowen began her top-to-bottom review of the voting machines certified for use in California on May 31, 2007. The review is designed to restore the public's confidence in the integrity of the electoral process and is designed to ensure that California voters are being asked to cast their ballots on machines that are secure, accurate, reliable, and accessible.

The review includes David Wagner, Matt Blaze, Eric Rescorla, and many others:

When exactly did House of Blues cross over the line between tribute and parody?

Hey kids, let's commit a felony!

We suggest that the technology exists to render format string vulnerabilities extinct in the near future.

Scientists Hack Into Electronic Voting Machines in California and Elsewhere

Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate, writes:

One pleasure of art comes from how accurately it can convey ambivalence. In a poem, form can have things both ways at once, emotionally: understated and bold, dark and bright, somber and funny, painful and cool, angry and sympathetic.

He cites "Oil & Steel", from Henri Cole's new book, Blackbird and Wolf, which earns a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Here's the poem:

My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum,
watching a portable black-and-white television,
reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
which he preferred to Modern Fiction.

One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease,
except the one that guarded his corpse
found holding a tumbler of Bushmills.
"Dead is dead," he would say, an anti-preacher.

I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet
and some motor oil -- my inheritance.

Once, I saw him weep in a courtroom --
neglected, needing nursing -- this man who never showed
me much affection but gave me a knack
for solitude, which has been mostly useful.

Poet's Choice | Robert Pinsky

It's as if they had to humanize her before they did things to her that would be taboo, criminal even, without the saving grace of medical training.

"The skin of the chest pulls back easily after we have made the incisions, and the body opens like a book."

"The body is staggeringly complex, and to understand it with any degree of completeness demands dealing with the thing itself -- picking up and holding the heart, tracing the path of an artery by threading a pipe cleaner through its lumen."

"[We] removed her heart and lungs from her body, tying them in a brown-black garbage bag. ... Her rib cage falls to the table as we turn her, and one of her removed breasts lies out to the side of her, facing the ceiling as she lies facedown."

This book earns a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab