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http://jordantimes.com/fri/index.htm

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:38:15 -0700

In three days, I'll be leaving home for a true-life adventure in Jordan. I'm going to teach history at King's Academy, a school set up to spread tolerance and peace in the Middle East. What am I expecting and hoping for? First I'm hoping to learn as much from my students as they learn from me. I want to hear their life stories and try to understand what it means to grow up in the 21st-century Middle East. I am expecting to hear that some things there are more heartbreaking than a middle-class American could have imagined, but also that kids there experience love, joy, and fun, as kids have throughout history. I'm also hoping to form deep friendships with my colleagues. I know that together we'll be helping to address one of the biggest problems of our time, violence in the Middle East. In my free time (if any), I want to explore Amman, walking all over the city and stopping in cafes, markets, and shops to see (and perhaps take video of) what people are doing. I'll be posting pics here for those who are interested.

Notice Israel on one side and Iraq on the other. In a way, Jordan is at the fulcrum of history right now.

Technology Review: Technology and Happiness

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 23:36:44 -0700

Happiness may seem like a pretty nebulous concept, but psychologists like Martin Seligman have been doing their best to study it scientifically. This field is called Positive Psychology, and over the past few decades its practitioners have come up with some interesting results.

'It's better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you'd think

In short, your attitude has a much stronger effect on your happiness than any external event does. If you want to be happy, do something you're good at. And even the people who have the most to be happy about can find reasons to be unhappy.

Constable, John: Stour Valley and Dedham Church

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 21:45:19 -0700

If you were to ask an art historian about landscape painters, two names that would probably come up are Constable (above) and Ruisdael (below). John Constable was an English painter born in 1776, the year of the American Revolution. Jacob van Ruisdael was a Dutch painter who lived a century before him. They had some similar ideas about how to paint a landscape. For instance, they both considered the sky a matter of maximum importance; they thought of it as a dome of light that controlled the appearance of every other part of the painting. But in one important way, they were diametrically opposed. Ruisdael felt free to paint from his imagination and "improve" on reality. Constable felt that imagination could never surpass reality. For him, the highest goal of a landscape painter was to observe and understand nature.

Should art try to be better than life? Or is that merely self-delusion? Both sides have a point, but I'm a fan of better-than-life. Sure Constable is the purer artist, sticking to his principles... but his pictures don't make me long for another time and place, the way Ruisdael's do. What's wrong with a little outrageous invention if it produces pleasure? For me, enjoyment is everything; artistic principles are nothing.

Speaking of landscapes giving pleasure, my friend ShirlT made and sent me a beautiful painting for my birthday. Deepest thanks, Shirl! Her paintings can be viewed online here.

(The first painting is John Constable's Stour Valley and Dedham Church. The second is Jacob van Ruisdael's Bentheim Castle.)

Fox Searchlight - Day Watch - Official Site

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 20:30:31 -0700

I saw Day Watch last weekend with my sister and her husband. We talked about it afterwards, and I was surprised by how much they liked it. I mean, I didn't hate it, but it had such obvious flaws, I thought they would find it as empty as I did. My beef with it was that it didn't make enough sense. It's set in an alternate reality with some supernatural phenomena, but the phenomena seem to have been pulled out of a hat, without rhyme or reason. There's a magical piece of chalk, but it has nothing to do with the magic wad of aluminum foil. And the magic aluminum foil has nothing to do with the magical otherworld known as the Gloom. And of course the Gloom has nothing to do with the chalk. Somehow, this didn't bother my sister or her husband. They simply felt that a movie like this didn't have to have any overall structure or meaning. So what if the different elements were unconnected and inconsistent? That didn't dull the sweetness of the eye candy for them one bit.

Perhaps I wanted Day Watch to be something it wasn't trying to be. But wasn't it trying to tell a story? And isn't a story just better if it makes some kind of sense? It doesn't have be a traditional, realist kind of sense, but I enjoy a story more when all its parts work together. For example, compare Day Watch with another fantasy about a demimonde of the undead, Interview with the Vampire. Whatever you may feel about the absurdity of blood-sucking in general, you have to admit that Anne Rice's story is driven by a certain logic. The story and its phenomena seem to flow naturally from her basic premise about the nature of vampirism. It's possible that Timur Bekmambetov wasn't trying for that kind of narrative logic. It's possible he actually intended to make a movie in which the main premises are incoherent and arbitrary, in which the rules are just made up as it goes along. But if those are the terms on which the movie demands to be accepted, we may as well accept that Bekmambetov simply intended to make an empty, mediocre movie. And succeeded.

http://haikucircus.com/aug04.htm

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 16:45:38 -0700

Thumbs-up on this site.
But be warned: too much time here
Will make you talk weird.

William Tecumseh Sherman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:32:11 -0700

"I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting--its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers.... it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation." (General William T. Sherman, 1865)

When he was proposed as a candidate for President, Sherman replied, "If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve."

King's Academy | Home

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:26:12 -0700

King's Academy is a rigorous and progressive boarding school modeled on Deerfield Academy (of which HM King Abdullah II is an alumnus). If you want to spread tolerance and humanism in the Middle East, you do it with schools, not bombs! (President Bush, please take notes, or at least try.)

This is the school, outside Amman, Jordan, where I will be teaching 9th-grade World History and 10th-grade Middle Eastern History, beginning this fall. I will also be living in the dorms as a faculty advisor. On this map, the dorms are on the far side of campus (around building 22).

rocket balloon missile ballons balloons at missileballoon.com

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 21:56:55 -0700

They invent this amazingly stupid, funny thing--and they use it to sell ads?!?

St. Pete for Peace

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 18:10:33 -0700

As this graph shows, "terrorism" is a much smaller threat than some people would like us to believe. Even if America suffered a 9/11-style attack every week, the damage (in terms of lives, money, and productivity lost) would be far less than what we routinely suffer from tobacco and its purveyors. But damage, in the sense of destroying one's enemy, isn't the purpose of these attacks. Educated "terrorists" such as Osama bin Laden know that even the most spectacular acts of destruction have no chance of defeating a powerful, prosperous nation-state--let alone the most powerful, prosperous nation-state in the history of the world. His purpose, as he has stated many times in his writings and messages, is to cause the U.S. government to overreact and make costly, self-destructive mistakes (such as the invason of Iraq), setting us on the path of long-term decline. It's like an ant stinging an elephant and infuriating it to such a degree that it falls off a cliff. In this light, 9/11 was a trap, and our president fell right into it.

(Thanks to Marcus-Lycus for this picture.)

Damn Interesting & The Daedalus Starship

Mon, 28 May 2007 13:28:12 -0700

Most discussions of extraterrestrial colonization focus on technology, i.e. will we ever have the ability to colonize other planets? To me, the answer seems obvious: The United States (let alone the entire world) has most of the required technology already, and the rest is easily within reach, at least for the colonization of a nearby planet.

The real question is: Will humans ever have a reason to colonize other planets? People who once imagined that there would be mining colonies on the Moon or Mars have by now come to the realization that their assumptions were faulty. Even if the Moon were made of solid gold, the cost of transporting materials to and from this orbiting gold mine would far exceed any profit to be derived from such an enterprise. (Keep in mind that the Law of Supply and Demand would drive the price of gold down--the more gold there was up there, the less it would be worth! Also, an influx of precious commodities without an increase in productive capacity would lead to runaway inflation. This is how New World gold ended up destroying the economies of Spain and Portugal.)

So why would humans ever go to the enormous expense of colonizing other planets? The idea that we would "run out of room" on Planet Earth is as half-baked as the idea that we could profitably mine the Moon. Population scientists predict that the Earth's human population will level off sometime this century between 10 and 11 billion. The reasons for this leveling-off are complex but basically have to do with industrialization and the more secure life expectancies that accompany it. So the situation imagined in Star Trek (original season 3, episode 72: "The Mark of Gideon"), in which an entire planet is covered with living human bodies, is nonsense. (In that episode, the people of Planet Gideon were packed shoulder-to-shoulder at all times. To achieve a similar density on Earth, say 1 person per square meter of dry land, the population would have to reach 149,000,000,000,000, or about 25,000 times more than it is today.)

Another commonly cited rationale for extraterrestrial colonization is the notion that "human beings have always expanded into uninhabited areas." Even if this were true (large areas of our own planet have no permanent human settlements), it doesn't necessarily mean we will expand off-world. Uninhabited areas on Earth are fundamentally different from uninhabited areas on other planets. Besides the obvious physical differences, there is also the fact that our evolution adapted us to conditions that are specific to this particular planet, so patterns of human colonization on Earth imply nothing about human colonization elsewhere.

At first glance, global climate change seems to provide a more reasonable justification for colonizing other planets. But even if humans do nothing to limit their impact on the environment (i.e. we keep spewing carbon to our heart's content), we would at worst end up turning Earth into an "Earth-like" planet, with plenty of water (in the form of vapor), surface temperatures well within our tolerance, and exactly 1.0g gravity. If we were looking for a planet to colonize and found one meeting these criteria, its discoverers would celebrate wildly. So why travel millions of miles and spend trillions of dollars to find Earth-like conditions when we have them right here? To put it bluntly, even if we devastate our planet, it will still be a better place for humans to live than almost any other conceivable place.

Since there seems to be no rational motivation to colonize other planets, how about irrational motivations, such as religious belief? There is obviously no gainsaying faith, so this scenario can't be ruled out. Optimistic atheists may hope that, in a highly scientific/technological society, religion would go the way of the dodo bird, but psychologists have shown that superstition is an irreducible feature of human cognition. Since religious thought is here to stay, this rationale for extraterrestrial colonization at least seems less unlikely than the others.