I finally did the wordpress upgrade from 1.2 to 1.5.1.2. It took a little while, but I finally handed in all my final papers and I decided I would do it as a little break/reward. I should have watched a movie or something, I haven’t seen one in weeks. Instead I’m upgrading my blogging software. I am pitiful.

wasn’t that bad, just followed their upgrade instructions — backed up the mysql databases and other files, uploaded the thing, copied the customized files back and zampapowpadoodlebameedoo, wordpress 1.5.1.2.

nonetheless, I did it cuz they claim that it features improves comment management. and man the management features on the last one truly suck. while 1.2 had the ability to corral spam comments into a bin to “await moderation,” it still required regularly going through the thing and cleaning them out. There was no separate junk folder that you could just empty. Having just installed this thing, I don’t know what the new and improved comment management stuff is, but I might report back on that soon.

nothing much interesting else to say right now, as I don’t do the posting my life thing on there really. but to break with the trend I’m working on a demo for my advisor and working on a paper for WoSLAD. Any workshop about spatial language which titles itself with an acronym that sounds like “Woah salad!” can’t be that bad. Although I hear Delmenhorst is not the coolest place on earth. I’m moving to DC on Saturday or Sunday.

Last Friday, John Searle came to speak at Northwestern. Justine passed on an email to me inviting interested grad students to have lunch with him before his “dialogue” with Alan Wallace. I don’t have too much to say about the lunch, but, as you might expect, John Searle is a really down to earth, brilliant guy. He is awesome. The food at the Orrington Hotel’s globe cafe looked somewhat creative but tasted mediocre. The service was good, it was overpriced, but the Cog Sci center footed the bill.

I asked him about why he thought people sometimes called him a dualist and about the free speech movement at Berkeley in the 60’s. A lot of the time was spent listening to two of the other grad students debate some of the issues John has written about and that he was invited to speak on. It was fun though, and I’m glad I can say that I’ve hung out a guy I consider to be one the most important American philosophers. The debate was so-so. Searle was funny and animated as he was the last time I saw him speak. His points are strong and insightful, but as he will say himself, not hard to swallow or particularly earth shattering, but important to keep in mind when debating consciousness and the possibility of it’s existence in things besides brains. I paricularly like his view of biological naturalism, i.e. that consciousness is a ‘natural’, biological process, just like digestion or respiration. Robin has posted a summary of the ‘4′ main points he said he wanted to convey, along with her own ideas on the whole thing. Searle doesn’t really know what consciousness is, and as Colin McGinn, my old Rutgers prof who I’ve cited before says, maybe an understanding of consciousness is beyond the grasp of human intelligence altogether. Searle hasn’t gotten us too much closer to what consciousness really is, but his statements of fact about what it has to be are important to keep in mind.

Alan Wallace was also interesting to listen to, although his presentation was a lot of quotes from William James and John Searle, which made the idea of debating somewhat awkward for Searle at first (not for too long though, he is a philosopher after all). He also enunciates all his words and has funny forced looking facial expressions, much like Frasier. On the whole, I don’t think Wallace did a great job at supporting his thesis. He made a great case for introspection as an important tool in understanding consciousness, in addition to other methods (neuro, cognitive), although a lot of his argument was James’s quotes. His inferential leap came in the claim that through Buddhist meditation practices, science could acquire a tool analogous to the telescope in astronomy or the microscope in microbiology, allowing greater clarity and higher resolution in the study of qualitative, mental phenomena (a.k.a. qualia). Searle came to the same conclusion I did here, and said it, namely, that if this is true, what will the results of applying the method look like? Wallace replied that the practices did have clear results: healthy, peaceful lives for practitioners. But, the real point remained unanswered: why should somebody spend time in (or the bigger question in academia, spend money on) a lab that plans to train a bunch of people in Buddhist meditation methods, in order to attain clearer pictures of mental phenomena, when it’s not clear what such clearer pictures would get you in terms of understanding consciousness. A deep meditative state might allow someone to give you a more detailed description of what a pin prick feels like or the color red looks like when viewed, but I’m not sure that anyone’s actually looking for that. Not to mention the fact that experience from an altered mental state throws into question it’s comparibility to quotidian qualia. Wallace is a trained Tibetan monk — shouldn’t he have something to tell us that would say he’s on the road to offering so new info on the consciousness mystery, some results to show for applying the method before evangelizing it to the world? I haven’t read any of his many books, so if anyone out there has, let me know if there are any juicy findings.

Today Marc sent me this awesome visualization of the election results. It goes perfectly with my rant below about the electoral college and the illusion of the red and blue divide in the US.

It’s also interested that, if you compare the top map to the bottom map showing the light emitting by the US, giving a very good idea about population density, it becomes abundantly clear, that not only is the divide an illusion, but that in the areas where poeple actually live, the states are way darker purple and bluish. The only really red states are the ones were very few people live! The cities are bluer (even in the south and midwest) and they get more purple as you get into the burbs. I’m curious about how much weight the electoral college gives to these red areas of the country just because they are states. What would happen if that whole red, sparsely populated area of the country, which seems to have relatively similar concerns, were made into one state? Would it balance things? Would it really be that unfair, if indeed they have the same concerns and views there, as opposed to the rest of the country, where it’s all purpley? I don’t think that’s an answer, but sort of a thought experiment. I clearly think they should scrap the whole thing in favor of something that um… makes sense. But I don’t know how that could ever happen. Oh and yes, I know he won the popular vote.

You should follow the link to see the full images and information, but here’s some thumbnails.

Bask in the red and blue make violet glow of Java-generated mathematical visualization.

I’m not sure whether it’s the loss, my ongoing confusion about the direction of my life, or the lack of sleep that’s plunging me into the worst state of mind I’ve experienced in years, but that’s that. I can’t sleep. I can’t work. I can barely think. Apparently I can still surf and write. I looked to my bookmarks for something, Z Mag offers the usual leftist anger and polemic, the news has nothing to say, but repeats the empty words of these empty politicians.

I don’t know what I’m looking for. Maybe someone to say what’s really on our minds. That the majority of the power in this country, the executive and legislative, soon the judicial, is in the hands of people who’s values who are fundamentally opposed to mine, and to about half the people in every part of the country. They’ve declared that less this clear split is actually a “mandate” for the so-called conservative agenda. Which amounts to homophobia, misogyny, bigotry, warmongering, fearmongering, lack of concern for the environment, lack of care for the opinions of the rest of the planet. Ignorance.

I’m not sure how much it matter why he won. The question is, what the fuck do we do now? Give up on this country and expatriate, taking our vision elsewhere? Follow as Gandhi and Martin Luther King and start a campaign of civil-disobience? Civil war & revolution claiming that the system has failed, like they did in 1776? I hope some really smart, really great leaders step up soon to fill this vacuum. And maybe for the moment, that’s all there is left to do. Hope.

But maybe we don’t need brains or guts or military prowess next time. Bush doesn’t have any of those things. This piece on Slate seems to be saying that we just need our own simple, god-fearing kinda guy to run for president. Play the stupid game. (Then give him a cabinet of leftists to pull his strings just like they did).

It’s being reported by several sources that a few of the mains reasons why I so utterly despise this administration, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft and Paul Wolfowitz, won’t continue on for another four years. That is, they’ll resign or be fired. Fred Kaplan of Slate sites a few reasons why, which are being echoed elsewhere. Bush has always seemed like an ignorant simpleton to me, but I never thought of him as evil or scary in the way that I do these guys in his cabinet of doom. Somehow this doesn’t make me feel that much better, but it’s a start. Hope.

The Unbearable Darkness of Being by Lakshmi Chaudhry, senior editor of AlterNet, is all I’ve found so far that comes close to saying something relevant to me.

Pain. Nausea. Sorrow. It really is that bad.

I was looking something up on dictionary.com and saw this ad. it worked i guess, b/c I was curious enough to click on it. It brought be to this web page for this book & it’s author: retro vs. metro. Not terribly enlightening, but a great little title, and the Rants & Raves section is pretty funny/scary.

I here people talking a lot about these clashes of civilizations though (and by people I mean editorials and random Ds and Rs calling in to NPR). The Islamic world “versus” the Judeo-Christian West. . . the conservative, religious south & midwest (retro) vs. the scattered, progressive, urban areas (metro). My brain keeps going back to Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes. I haven’t looked at the original works in about 7 years… since I was 17… and I can only remember the gists of these great works. Man is good, man is bad, conflict is a result of the state, fighting is innate. But as usually my mind is stuck on philosophy and what the Truth is about human nature and society (note the capital “T”).

On a side note, I think it’s interesting that Rousseau, the guy who thought people are innately good and noble, is portrayed in the paintings as a smiling, happy dude with a nice wig and fancy French duds, whereas Hobbes, the dude who says people are animals and the state is necessary to keep us in line, is portrayed as a crotchedy old man with a Puritanical fashion sense.

God I have work to do! All I was trying to is remember the exact, formal definition of what makes up an “algebra” and - ZAP! - 30 minutes of my life gone. Damn you internet! (or lack of personal willpower (!)).

I probably shoulda went to FOLDOC anyway. More precise (nerdy) and no ads. Had I gone there, I would be certain to follow links allowing me to learn (waste time learning) about things like magmas and abelian monoids. Clearly more useful procrastinative efforts than thinking about the fundamental nature of humanity.

robin posted this yesterday. I’m reposting it, because it deserves to be memetically reproduced.

sweet jesus, i hate bill o’reilly

see also

sweet jesus, i hate fox news

man, for a jew, there sure is a lot of jesus on my site right now.

I also found this cool site that offers website summariation services, Fyuze. It’s similar to something like Columbia NLP’s machine generated news summary service, Newsblaster, but this one offers customizable output.

Speaking of sites that attempt to summarize some of the media out there on the web, I often peruse Arts & Letters Daily, a huge, regularly updated respository of links to news, articles, opinions, books, etc. Today I found this gem by Gerald Edelman, Nobel prize winner for physiology and medicine in 1972. The articles about consicousness, how it arose as an outcome of some specific ways that the has brain evolved to work (in theory of course). Apparently he is a major expert on consciousness & neurophysiology, so it should have come as no surprise to me that in the advanced philosophy seminar I took in college on consciousness, his name never came up (nor did Penrose’s for that matter). It was taught by super-suave philosopher Colin McGinn, also a renowned expert on the topic. The class was wicked cool, but, as I’m obsessed with the kinds of patterns and structures our brain seems so intrinsically set up to recognize and process, I think I like Edelman’s perspective more than anything the philosophers have come up with, although it’s all worth reading. As David Chalmers makes pretty clear (possibly inadvertently), the philosophy and science of consciousness are still pretty distinct.

Lastly, I replaced the temporary header banner with this new graphic I made. I think it looks pretty dope-ass illmatic, and fully realizes the awesome magnitude of what it means to have been born in the year 1980. I didn’t really come of age in the 80s, but I should have. I mean the 90s were cool and all but not that cool… Cross Colors, MC Hammer, the Roger Rabbit dance, Boys 2 Men motownphilly, BBD’s Poison, ABC’s Ayeesha, etc. etc. All frickin awesome, but nothing compared to the dawn of hip hop and the awesomeness of the graphic design and color schemes I am paying homage to with the new visual motif of this site. Also — note the interplay of the two sides of the beatbox, another homage, this time to the great Jedi Knights who fought so that we could enjoy freedom in this great nation.. Dark and Light, like yin and yang, also present a manifestation of the constant search for happiness through a balanced life.