« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Great Google-y Moogly

Posted July 10, 2006 By Dave Thomer

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary has added “to google” as a verb in its latest edition, joining the Oxford English Dictionary’s online edition as recognizing that the name of the search engine has become a word in its own right. The article says that the first use of the verb was in a newspaper article five years ago, which is pretty young for a new word to be making it into the dictionary.

Unsurprisingly, the article also explores the dilemma that occurs when a brand name becomes so ubiquitous that it becomes an ordinary word: the company can lose trademark protection. The Merriam-Webster mentions that the term is derived from a trademark, and defines the word to specifically refer to used of the Google engine as opposed to a generic search. Given that Yahoo turned its own engine brand into a verb with the “Do You Yahoo!?” campaign, I think it’s hard to argue with the dictionary folks on this one.

Filed in Life in Practice
        

An Economic GOOOOOOAL?

Posted July 9, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Back when the Wor;d Cup started, the Inquirer’s economic columnist Andrew Cassell argued that many economists were rooting for Italy to win. Apparently, it’s been reasonably well documented that the country that wins the World Cup experiences a jump in economic growth in the following year. Cassell argued that Europe was most in need of a jump start, and that Italy’s economy was big enough to make a difference in the overall health of the economy and sluggish enough that the World Cup bump would make a noticeable difference in pushing it onto a growth track.

Well, thanks to penalty kicks, we’re going to find out if Cassell’s theory is right. I caught the last few minutes, just in time to see a French player get kicked out of the game for head-butting an Italian, and then to see the penalty kicks. I gotta say I feel bad for those goalkeepers. The French keeper didn’t stop anything, and really, neither did the Italian – the French missed when one player hit the crossbar after the Italian keeper had dived. That’s gonna lead to a few years of could’a-should’a, I’ll bet.

Filed in Special Order Speeches
        

Political Podcasting, Poverty and Pollution

Posted July 8, 2006 By Dave Thomer

I decided to take a break from my CD listening project to check out the growing arena of political podcasting. It’s an interesting medium, although I’m not sure it really clicks with me. I’m not great at getting information purely from speech – I need the visual engagement that comes from seeing and exchanging gestures, expressions, and so on. And when it’s something heavy like a policy issue, it’s that much harder to keep the focus going. That said, if you’re more of a sound person than I am, these podcasts can be a good chance to see what ideas are percolating behind the major news coverage. Today I listened to:

  • John Edwards at his One America Committee site, discussing his proposal that America set a Project-Apollo-like goal to eradicate poverty within America in the next 30 years. I like that Edwards is talking about the importance of the big idea, I like his hammering on the economic obstacles that help exacerbate so many of our other problems, and I like that he really seems to have committed himself to this theme over the last two or three years. You can see a brief video message that Edwards recorded for members of his online community, you can hear the speech he gave to the National Press Club, and you can read the prepared version of the speech. One thing I found remarkable is that in the video message, Edwards seemed almost unprepared – a lot of pauses and “um”s. Then, if you listen to the speech and follow along with the prepared text, you can see how he keeps to the structure but occasionally reshuffles lines on the fly or makes the text more conversational, and barely misses a beat when doing so.
  • Wesley Clark at his Securing America site discussing global warming in the first of a series of podcasts on the topic. I found it interesting the way that Clark brought global warming out of its normal environmental context and urged that we think of it as a national security issue. It’s not really surprising, since Clark is trying to establish himself as one of the Democratic leaders on national security, but I do find it encouraging that he’s not thinking of “national security” in the narrow way it’s often portrayed. And Clark has a good point – if global warming does have the kind of environmental impact that a lot of scientists think it could, then there’s going to be a lot of upheaval that’s going to pose challenges for any country trying to be a world leader.

It’s probably no coincidence that both Edwards and Clark are at least thinking of making a run for the 2008 presidential nomination. And y’know, if the way that they want to do so is by carving out solid niches on vital issues and mobilizing voters to take action on them, more power to ’em. Once the midterm elections are over, 2007 is going to be an interesting year in national politics.

Filed in Public Policy
        

San Diego, Here They Come

Posted July 7, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Comic-Con International is almost upon us. I have to admit, at this point, I feel almost no pangs of regret that Pattie and I aren’t going this year. We’ve done it three times, and it is truly exhausting. There’s a little bit of a diminishing returns factor, in that we’ve seen a lot of the people we want to see. And numerous Web sites are going to be posting updates about any major news that comes out of the con. I’ll miss seeing Team red Star’s triumphant return, and I’d kinda like to go see Bryan Singer’s presentation to hear what he might have up his sleeve for more Superman movies, but that’s really not worth a cross-country flight.

This year’s Baltimore Comic-Con, on the other hand, I’ll be there with bells on. It’s only a few hours away, and I’m hoping the smaller size means I’ll be able to grab some more sketches this time around.

Filed in Comics
        

Blogging Dewey: Dewey and Religion

Posted July 6, 2006 By Dave Thomer

A couple of bloggers mention Dewey in the context of the role of religion in today’s world. Thoughts from Kansas discusses a Washington Post article where physics is called a “secular ideology” along with capitalism and communism. Josh Rosenau brings up Barack Obama’s recent speech on religion (which I really need to discuss in its own right as soon as I get the energy to do so) and says:

Persuade people about a common reality, eh? What field of human endeavor seeks to understand our common reality? Ask John Dewey about that, and he’d have known that we’re talking about scientific pragmatism. Communism and capitalism adhere to unverifiable personal (unshared) assumptions about the nature of people, history, and morality. As such, they are unable to reach any synthesis but death or peaceful coexistence. Science, because it is the study of our shared reality is capable of synthesis. I can convince you that physics works because I can show it to you. We share that experience, and so long as we both value a commitment to reality, physics is the same for everyone.

I think this is a pretty good capsule of Dewey’s approach to empiricism. I do think that Dewey, at least, would be inclined to bring both communism and capitalism under empiricism’s scrutiny as well. Those “assumptions about the nature of people, history and morality” lead people to make predictions about how the future will unfold. We should be able to see whether or not these predictions pan out. Indeed, I’d argue that one of the reasons so many people either reject or want to modify capitalism and communism is that the predictions haven’t come to pass.

Todd at Todd’s Hammer – a really good blog that I’m going to add to the links sections here as soon as I hit post – briefly mentions Dewey in the context of the religion-vs.-science conflict. I’d like to quote a fair chunk of his opening paragraph along with the Dewey mention that comes later on:

Religion is a “meaning-maker� that for thousands of years has been mis-apprehended as a “truth-spring�, a source of empirical truth. The problem with religion and science over the past 500 years is that our human understanding of knowledgecraft, that is, how we know, has progressed to what we commonly call the “scientific method,� leaving religious truth-claims in the dust. Truth-seeking guided by the assumptions of scientific method produces a radically different kind of knowledge than that produced by religion (or philosophy or music or art or literature), one anchored in embodied experience, observation, deductive reasoning and generalizing inference from experimental data. Religion produces meaning through tradition, story, theorizing from foreknown assumptions, and affective experience or feelings. The conflict arises when religion is mistaken as the truth-spring, the source of our knowledge of the natural world, rather than a meaning-maker.
. . .
John Dewey’s particular version of Naturalism sees human meaning production, that is, the humanities, as a biological function. Our brains are set up to produce meaning. And George Herbert Mead argued that, psychologically, despite our formal knowledge systems in modern societies, at its root, meaning arises in interaction with the world. That is, our brains produce meaning through interaction and experience. We know what something means but, crassly put, using it. Thus, meaning production is embodied and social, by nature.

This probably cuts right to the core of why Dewey and pragmatists are so fiercely criticized by strong supporters of religion. When pragmatists says that meaning comes from use, on the one hand there’s a very basic and “practical” way to take it. If I say “The sun is bright outside,” I can describe a lot of different phenomena that I might be trying to point out in terms of light and color. But in order for me to understand what the sun being outside means, the sentence has to call to mind different ways that the sun being bright shapes the world around me. I need sunglasses, I should think about sunblock, and so on and so forth. We know more about what it means for the sun to be bright now than we did years ago when we didn’t understand UV radiation so well. Well, you can take this concept and scale it up to the big ideas, which is what Dewey is famous for doing with things like democracy and education. We grasp the meaning of democracy to the extent that we take actions that increase human potential to understand and act and unlocks that potential in everyone. This is a big idea, on the scale of many religious ideas, and Dewey tries to explain how meaningful it is to him in his book A Common Faith. But it is based entirely on the natural world that we experience, and so it isn’t a satisfactory source of meaning for many people.

Filed in Philosophy
        

Redefining Bad Luck

Posted July 5, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Pattie and I had really good seats for tonight’s Phillies game, with a fireworks show afterwards. She wound up having to cover for a vacationing coworker, so we sold the tickets – to said vacationing coworker.

I’m really not sure who got the better deal out of that one.

Filed in Life in Practice
        

Lieberman and the Meaning of Party

Posted July 3, 2006 By Dave Thomer

So, confirming speculation that’s been buzzing for a while, Senator Joe Lieberman announced that he will begin circulating petitions to run for re-election as an independent. Lieberman is still running in the Democratic primary this August, but he’s facing a challenge from businessman Ned Lamont. So he’s decided to hedge his bets – if he loses the primary, he can still run in the general election and hope that independent, Republicans, and Democrats who didn’t turn out for the primary can put him over the top. Many of the progressive blogs that have been beating the drum against Lieberman for the last few years are unsurprisingly upset by this move, urging readers to call various Democratic politicians and campaign organizations and demand that they support the Democratic nominee.

Now, I’m not a big fan of Joe Lieberman. I think I would be happier if Lamont wins this Senate seat. But if I may indulge in a bit of navel-gazing, this line of discussion has had me thinking about the definition of a political party. What’s it mean to be a member of a party? What are the responsibilities that go with it?

Being a member of a political party as a voter carries few responsibilities and in some cases it doesn’t even bring any particular privileges. In some states, voters can vote in any primary they want, regardless of their registration. In Louisiana there is no separate primary at all. In states like Connecticut, party affiliation does matter. But Lieberman says he is going to remain a registered Democrat. So the requirements are clearly different for an elected official, and that makes sense.

As an elected official it seems to me like the clearest and most significant issue when it comes to party affiliation is how you caucus – which side will you vote for when it comes time to organize the chamber? This can’t be the be-all and end-all, because there are two members of Congress right now who are independents who caucus with Democrats. And the Democrats have endorsed one of those independents, Bernie Sanders, in his race to replace the other one, Jim Jeffords, as Senator from Vermont. But if you’re going to be a registered Democrat and caucus with Democrats, which Lieberman’s said he will do, is it right to say that you’re not a Democrat?

The key argument might be that the Democratic voters of Connecticut wanted a particular candidate, and if you’re running against that candidate you’re going againt the will of the state’s Democrats, and thus by definition you’re working against the party and can’t be a member. The scenario I’ve always considered that would work against this standard is based on the idea that primaries tend to draw fewer voters than the general election. What if Lieberman ran i nthe fall as an independent and won, getting more Democratic voters than Lamont? Couldn’t you make an argument that Lieberman, as a registered Democrat caucusing with Democrats and receiving the support of the most Democratic voters, is still a Democrat even if the letter “I” appears after his name instead of a “D”?

After a lot of mental back and forth, I would finally say no. As an elected official within a party, you have certain leadership responsibilities. One of those is helping other candidates from your party. A fall campaign where Lieberman is running against the Democratic candidate is not going to be good for other Democrats running in Connecticut, from a media attention or fundraising perspective. And refusing to accept the verdict of the primary voters is absolutely a rejection of the party and its structure. Perhaps there are a lot of Democrats in the state who like Lieberman but can’t be bothered to vote in the primary. That’s their fault for not voting and Lieberman’s for not mobilizing them.

Most significantly for me is a point I’ve seen several blog commenters make. If you’re like me and you believe that, given the structure of American politics, we’re stuck with a two-party system and that the way to promote change is to work to change the party from within rather than run against the party as an outsider, then you simply can’t turn around and say it’s OK for the establishment to run against the party as an outsider when those who want change succeed within the system. You just can’t change the rules in the middle of the game like that. And if you’re a party leader, as Lieberman is, you just can’t send that message that the party’s procedures aren’t valid and still call yourself a member of the party in good standing.

Filed in So Now What?
        

Superman Returns Review

Posted July 3, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Pattie and I caught Superman Returns over the weekend. I really enjoyed it; it may be #3 on my superhero movie list behind Spider-Man 2 and The Incredibles. (It’s really amazing to me that we’ve gotten so many good additions to the genre over the last couple of years.) My full review is over at the LogBook.

Before the movie, Pattie and I were joking about whether or not Bryan Singer would have an eight-minute credit sequence a la Richard Donner’s 1978 version. He didn’t, but both of us broke out laughing when we saw that he did emulate the style of those credits, complete with zooming names. Gotta admit I got a goofy grin on my face when I saw that one.

Filed in Culture and Media
        

Learning from an Extra Life

Posted July 2, 2006 By Dave Thomer

One of the books Earl loaned me to read this summer is David Bennahum’s Extra Life, his account of how computers influenced his education and childhood. It’s a very good book, and I’ll point you to Earl’s fuller review of it for the details. But there’s a point Bennahum makes a few times, when he’s discussing his early school years when he wasn’t really striving to excel academically but was putting a lot of attention into games and computer programming, and I wanted to highlight some passages.

On Big Trak, a toy truck that could be programmed to move along a predetermined path:

Here was a form of responsibility, of active participation, thinking, and analysis that crept into my time with Big Trak. The process was instinctively modular, a breaking apart of goals into subgoals, building back up to the whole from the smallest unit of problem solving. The act of laying out graph paper, modeling a room, and associating each square with a unit of distance meant I had to measure the room first and then think about what scale to use. Each square served as the smallest unit of measurement and gained meaning by pulling back, much as dots in a newspaper photograph or television screen fuse together when looked at from a suitable distance. I used a lot of math to make Big Trak work. At school I consistently received Cs in math, yet at home I eagerly applied principles of arithemetic and geometry. What made these laborious tasks worthwhile was the experience of making a finished product that happened to be thrilling to a ten-year-old. (32-33)

And a few pages later, on his summer spent playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends:

The games we played began to alter my abilities. Up to then my analytic activities were limited to theoretical exercises in math or science class, like seeing what happened to plants when we stuck them in a closet with no light (they turned white and drooped, or pointed to the seam of the door if any light came through). Now, of our own free will, we were taking on problems – math, probability, mapping, the mechanics of which were rarely called upon for most ten-year-olds. More subtly still, we were doing a special kind of problem solving, what some might call systems analysis. (37)

Bennahum eventually graduated from Harvard, but his academic turnaround can be traced to the fact that there were things he wanted to accomplish in his non-school life, and he had to develop certain skills in order to accomplish them. This is not to say that formal education is unimportant, but I think it does say something about the need to get students engaged in that process. “Why do we have to know this?” is still one of the deadliest questions a teacher can bump into. People like Bennahum show how teachers can find answers to it. (Indeed, I really recommend the chapters where he talks about his high school computer teacher, and the teacher-led but cooperative culture he created.)

Filed in Special Order Speeches
        

Playing Gods

Posted June 28, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Those interested in the ethics of genetic screening of embryos should head over to hyper-textual ontology or Technoprogressive, where Robn’s started an interesting thread. I’ve already started commenting in the h-t o thread, so I’ll just point you over there and encourage you to join in.

Filed in Philosophy
        
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »