All posts by Chris

on natural philosophers

Science

New Scientist has a beautiful “interview with Benoit Mandelbrot”:http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp, who discovered the Mandelbrot set and brought fractals to the masses. It’s refreshing to see someone with such history and brilliance at the same time. Mandelbrot is 80 years old, yet he’s still pursuing revolutionary branches of mathematics.

bq. [I am] A mathematical scientist. It’s the official name of my chair at Yale and it was chosen with care. It is deliberately ambiguous. In a different era, I would have called myself a natural philosopher. All my life, I have enjoyed the reputation of being someone who disrupted prevailing ideas. Now that I’m in my 80th year, I can play on my age and provoke people even more.

I have a personal fondness for Mandelbrot because the idea behind fractals — complex forms emerging from a simple function recursively applied and geometrically expressed — provides a compelling reason why it’s possible for us to understand the workings of a complex Universe at all. It doesn’t have to be just randomness out there. We can discern patterns that may turn out to be simple and elegant, even when they are capable of infinite variety.

reason and “balance”

Science

The Columbia Journalism Review has a thought-provoking “article on media coverage of science”:http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/6/mooney-science.asp, specifically the role of “balance” in determining the journalistic merit of a science article. This has been on my mind lately, since public perception of scientific topics like climate change, medicine, and evolution is so crucial to making sound decisions.

mumble red state mumble

Politics

Hey kids, I’m not sure I’m up to this idea of embracing the red states. I’m usually all for that kind of thing, but it gets difficult when they don’t want to be friendly. (Josh Marshall “explains my reluctance more eloquently”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_11_07.php#003956A than I could.) A case in point is this recent “explosion of fascist vitriol”:http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=5652 masquerading as a “modest proposal” for mainstream America:

bq. As a class, liberals no longer are merely the vigorous opponents of the Right; they are spiteful enemies of civilization’s core decency and traditions…

bq. When they tire of showering conservative victims with ideological mud, liberals promote the only other subjects with which they feel conversationally comfortable: Obscenity and sexual perversion. It’s as if the genes of liberals have rendered them immune to all forms of filth.

bq. As a final insult, liberal lawyers and judges have become locusts of the Left, conspiring to destroy democracy itself by excreting statutes and courtroom tactics that fertilize electoral fraud and sprout fields of vandals who will cast undeserved and copious ballots on Election Day.

(Yes, you heard that right. Our crimes include talking about sex and encouraging everyone to vote.)

_Ugh._ That commentary would have sickened me if I hadn’t been bolstered by the simple beauty of “Sorry Everybody”:http://sorryeverybody.com/, a collection of heart-felt apologies to the rest of the world (i.e. victims of our foreign policy) and sweet replies from the world community.

our ancient robot masters

Technology

It seems that Leonardo Da Vinci hasn’t ceased to astound. This month’s Wired has an article about a three-wheeled cart designed by Leonardo that may actually be a “physically programmable robot”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/davinci.html. As Keanu would say, “_Whoa._”

adrift in the red sea

Politics

OK, OK, I’ll write something about the election. I was just giving it a chance to… cool off or something.

The bad news: four more years of Bush. No link for that, because everyone knows it already. The good news: four more years of “Fafblog”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2004_10_31_fafblog_archive.html#109977682378623607, and that almost makes it worthwhile. OK, it doesn’t, but we can still laugh. Her. her. heh.

Oh, and in case you suddenly feel surrounded by hordes of brain-eating Jesus-talkin’ red-state zombies, please review the “map that puts the election results in perspective”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/. Scroll down to that last map and behold our “shredded country”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/cartcolorslarge.png, at the very least. It doesn’t change the basic fact that 51% of voters actually seemed to vote for Bush, but it tones down that feeling of “religious uprising” that we keep hearing about.