5.24.2005

In blog news...

TK is having its first Super Excellent TK Giveaway Extravaganza, which needs eight more entrants for me to win my damn gift card.

Also, though he has so rudely refused to notify me directly, Matt has launched Mutually Assured Destruction. I plug him less than enthusiastically, until he says sorry.

5.22.2005

Putting two and two together

Saturday: President Hamid Karzai condemns U.S. prisoner abuse and demands Afghanistan take custody of Afghan prisoners.

Sunday: Bush administration publicizes internal memo criticizing Karzai for failing to crackdown on opium production.

Placing the audacity of the administration's strenuous efforts to defend and conceal torture aside, the broader point is clear. If we're actually going to support independent, democratically-elected leaders in the Muslim world, we might have to let them (gasp) criticize us.

5.18.2005

Whose Monument?

I wish Trump wasn't Trump and this idea had a more credible big name behind it, because it makes perfect sense.

If the purpose of rebuilding is to show deference to the victims, defiance to the perpetrators, and show that life moves on, why not essentially rebuild the original towers along with a memorial?

Building any of the jagged, post-modern monstrosities that have been proposed, especially Daniel Libeskind's, is not a monument to the victims and the resilient spirit of New York. Instead, it is a monument to its morbid, egomaniacal designer.

5.14.2005

What if I want to write in the margins?

The NYT today draws attention to library collections' transition from paper to digital. The article mostly focuses on internet scholarship's potential to free up floor space, especially since many undergraduate libraries are duplicate collections of superior graduate facilities, unlike here at NYU where the behemoth Bobst serves all.

While the piece doesn't seem to be intended as a full feature on the topic, it should have at least raised some of the potential pitfalls that internet scholarship, in its present state, poses to scholarship in general. (There is a very interesting piece on this by David Bell in the May 2 New Republic.)

Of course, internet scholarship has tremendous potential to democratize learning, eliminating the cost of printing, shipping, and storing books and making the finest collections on the planet available to anyone with an internet connection. However, at the present, this seems to be confined to the university realm. Publishers, uncomfortable with a new medium as entrenched interests often are, are wary of publishing e-books, and the result is a very low selection of titles available online outside of the Academy.

Also, there is the actual physical process of reading from a computer. This isn't a concern based in the romantic notion of cracking open a dusty calf-bound volume, but from a simple fear that internet scholarship will make us all bad readers.

Most obviously, there is the potential for eyestrain, which would serve as a physical deterrent to prolonged reading. Some companies are experimenting with "electronic ink," screens that display text with microcapsules manipulated by an electronic field, rather than with the projection of an internal light source. Still, electronic reading devices released to date have been clumsy, expensive, and just not realistic enough.

Finally and most importantly, internet scholarship has the potential to reduce the overall quality of study, because it's just too easy to cheat. Instead of reading an entire book or chapter to get a feel for the author's style and the context of the book, eager researchers can simply search the text for the information they need based on certain words or phrases.

I'm not against the expansion of internet scholarship, but we shouldn't put the cart in front of the horse. Until hardware technology has caught up with internet technology and until we can be assured that e-books will be treated like any other, we should proceed with caution, with an ethos of quality over quantity.

5.13.2005

What an ass.

I mean, seriously.

5.11.2005

Unintelligent Design

There are two pieces on the "cover" of Slate today on the battle over earth and life science curriculum in Kansas, and how that conflict is showing how Intelligent Design (ID) is taking creationism's place as the primary opposition to evolution.

As William Saletan outlines, ID is the lastest installment along the ironic "evolution" of creationism. First, creationism was the status quo that sought to stave off evolution. Then, creationists sought plurality: creationism alongside evolution in textbooks. Now, there is ID: a theory stating that the complexity of the earth and its life is the work of a vaguely defined "master designer," which could be a deity, a natural process, or organisms themselves.

ID proponents base their argument on gaps in the evolutionist record of earth and life history, but break from the literalist interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 and some also support a few of evolutionists' broader claims, such as the age of the earth and even microevolution: the formation of new species through genetic mutation and natural selection.

ID, as a foe of evolution, is preferable to creationism in that it is actually based on scientific inquisition, and also avoids creationists' wilder claims, such as the earth is 6,000-some years old, fossils do not take a long time to form, the Grand Canyon was formed in hours or days, and dinosaurs co-existed with man. ID seeks to fill in what is left by evolution, and evolution, technically and perpetually a theory, is not sacrosanct, as other well-founded scientific theories have turned out to be entirely wrong (though evolution is unlikely to find this fate).

However, while there is nothing wrong with ID in form, there are serious flaws in its reasoning that for some reason go entirely unquestioned in its press coverage, even in opinion pages. The flaw lies in its central assumption that the complexity of life and the earth is evidence for some form of design: that life and earth forms and processes are far too elaborate and well-functioning to be arrived at by chance.

But aren't the complexities and detailed systems of life and the earth evidence for the opposite? What designer would have thought to put the little hairs in my nose to warm the air and catch debris? What designer would have thought of the shapes and colors of the Valley of Fire? It seems, to me at least, that the complexities of nature are evidence not of a designer, but of billions of years and countless incremental changes and trial-and-error.

UPDATE: Mikey briefly posts pro-ID. I hope he doesn't take my "Unintelligent Design" epigram personally.

5.07.2005

Just give up

John Tierney continues to flail in defense of privatization today, backpedaling somewhat on his Chilean pension piece, but continuing to propagate Social Security misconceptions and silly anti-government rhetoric across the opinion page of the paper of record.

Today's fallacy is the notion is something he's hinted at before, but is now saying outright: that payroll tax cannot be trusted in the hands of Congress. Tierney claims that private savings accounts are preferable because retirees can see the account balance with their own two eyes, as opposed to sending it to the Treasury.

He envisions Congress being unable to make the tax increases or budget cuts necessary to save Social Security as is because of the political risk involved, so it's either go to private accounts or Social Security perishes. First of all, this view is entirely ahistorical. At several points in the past, Congress has done exactly what Tierney is saying it would never do. Furthermore, Tierney's attitude is right in keeping with privatization advocates' denial or ignorance of the wild popularity of Social Security. No matter the political risk of making slightly painful adjustments to the Social Security system, this pales in comparison to the political hara-kiri of allowing Social Security to go underfunded and expire, or even be cut at all. I'm trying to write the last undergrad paper of my life so I'll make it short: not gonna happen, and Tierney needs to stick to the fluff that he writes best.