A mental image, without vision. Darkness, and that special feeling that theatres always have that if you stand up and step in the wrong direction, you'll tumble over a number of people, possibly eventually to drop to your demise. No sound, except for the clicking of snapped fingers, en masse. Strange. The vision visits me, and even stranger dreams await. Dreams dance around and through topics that disturb and confound me.

I recently have been thinking further about the topic I introduced in the last entry (I think) -- positions I'll call essentialist and emergentalist ways of looking at the world. I'll go further now, and speculate that the first is generally conservative, and the second is generally liberal. I suggest the tie because of a few reasons -- the first focuses on formal structures, which has ties to moral absolutism and fundamentalism, and the second focuses on grand messages and less on specifics, pushing for new interpretations. It would be tempting to make this into a caricature of personalities -- the scientist and the artist, but I don't think that's quite accurate -- the scientist might be claimed, depending what version of philosophy of science is used, by either side. One thing I got from taking a class on Philosophy of Science here at CMU was that there are a lot of different ways to look at science, philosophically, and that some of these have effects on how one might interpret some types of findings. Fortunately for science, most of these are edge cases, and it's quite possible to get along in science without understanding the philosophy that underlies it. Unfortunately, this means that a lot of scientists can be dogmatic about science without understanding the rich intellectual traditions that surround the tools they use, nor even thinking that there could be controversy beyond meeting basic scientific integrity in their experiments as to what they might mean. Anyhow, thinking back to the perspectives, the benefits of each perspective are at least partly plain -- essentialists preserve meaning by simplifying the world into categories and rules, and emergentalists prevent formalism from strangling the meaning of things. There's an interesting dynamic between the two ideas here. I imagine a lot of this may be set in early education -- perhaps the reason liberals and conservatives are distributed where they are in the United States (city vs noncity) is that cities have, in kindergarten through second grade, teachers who teach in different styles, emphasising one or the other ways of looking at the world. This leads to a possibly testable theory -- if we were to differentially raise children with stresses on the two ideas, would they be statistically affected in conservativism or liberalism? If so, education should be even more interesting, politically. It would, alas, be a tricky study to run. I wonder if this perspective/divide makes sense.

You may like this image. This looks very weird.

Apparently there's one fewer dangerous loon in Canada today. I bet the Germans are *thrilled* to have him back. In the news, another dangerous person is in trouble, and apparently BushJr has decided that he's an "enemy combatant" and so shouldn't get an open trial with the normal constitutional protections. A judge ruled against the president, and apparently he's upset that that ruling limits his ability to fight terrorism. Apparently, the Executive branch doesn't trust our court system. That's .. interesting. It also apparently likes NATO more than it likes the UN. No surprise.

Recently, two bits of news came out on BushJr -- firstly, he apparently tried pot at some point, and also thought about some other jobs before deciding to enter politics. None of these are great sins, but apparently some liberals are in the mode of jumping on anything potentially damning as a starving squirrel would leap on the last walnut on earth. That's sad. It makes opponents of BushJr look dumb, and sets stupid standards for politicians. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with pot usage unless it's too frequent, and don't think at all the less of people who smoke it. I even tried it in Amsterdam. I didn't particularly like it, but for the people that do, more power to them (provided it's used responsibly). As for the second, who doesn't think about a lot of careers before picking one? That's a good thing. It's not controversial. I fail to see how that's even news. Finally, the person who released tapes of him saying these things was apparently formerly a close friend of BushJr. It seems really rude to put out tapes of conversations you had with someone. If I were his friend, I'd be a bit nervous.

JWZ's latest rant is on-target. He takes on the problem of when a certain kind of groupthought leads to a certain kind of corporate thinking that leads to a sucky product. This leads to interesting thoughts about alternate ways to manage groups -- I've noted that programmers tend to have the ability to work without managers, in smallish groups (up to maybe 20) by becoming a kind of delegated collective. From conversations with others, other kinds of workers presently don't have this ability, and there are questions of scalability. I wonder if there are ways to deal with scalability and making this efficient.

Occasionally I come across ideas that seem on one hand to be interesting to think along, and on the other hand seem to be quite dangerous and easily used to justify a number of dangerous things. The work of Kevin MacDonald promises to be of that sort. It's going on my wishlist, for it looks interesting.

AMD has gone multicore!. W00t!

MJD's next book will be out soon. It promises to be interesting.

Bob Swanson has a very important political point. Apparently, the FCC's obscenity fines, which IMO should not be there in the first place, are 500k per violation, well above numerous other, obviously more harmful violations. What a free society America is! Apparently, the 1950s are calling, and they want to take our freedoms away.

Things are really interesting in the middle east right now. Syria and Lebanon are becoming less intertwined, and Abbas says he won't tolerate more Palestinian attacks on Israel. Hmm.

I haven't read it yet, but this looks interesting. I'm becoming interested in learning about China's government, because they seem to be doing a number of things radically different than the western world, but in ways that are not all obviously bad. I'm further considering (yes, it's now rising to the level of being a real interest that I'm not just tossing around anymore) living in Qatar (transferring to the CMU campus there), Tel Aviv, or Amsterdam for a few years. I want to experience more of the world than the United States. I'm not entirely certain of the opportunities available to me in each -- Qatar is a pretty easy move, and would be no doubt the most different. I'd need the help of friends, I think, to arrange a job for me in Tel Aviv or Amsterdam. I'm going to start talking to people so I can seriously consider this. The biggest problem I see is that I have pets. Almost everything else I have in my life can be pared back or brought with me - I live a very digital life, with more of an attachment to the data that's presently on my laptop than anything else. The next most prized possession is my books. Well, and I don't exactly see pets as possessions. Hmm. In some ways, it was very dumb to take the iguana and the cats back from Martha and Debb. If I move, I'll need to find good new places for them.