Solipsism Gradient

David Weinberger thinks this explains it all:

According to a Harris Poll:

…half of all adults believe in ghosts, almost a third believe in astrology, and more than a quarter believe in reincarnation – that they were themselves reincarnated from other people. Majorities of about two-thirds of all adults believe in hell and the devil, but hardly anybody expects that they will go to hell themselves.

One very strange (at least to me) result of the Harris poll is that significantly more democrats than republicans believe in astrology, but more republicans than democrats believe in hell and the devil.

At the same time, Tom Coates expresses his amazement about American Fundamentalism:

…the idea that challenges to theories like “evolution” can circumvent the entire academic peer-review and testing process by way of the courts – inspired by people who want to find ways to equate the world with their religious beliefs… Well, it’s scandalous! Totally, utterly scandalous!

The Guardian is running an article in its new Life section today on exactly this subject: The Battle for American Science. It’s this article that part-inspired me to write about this subject today…

I could list dozens of other links about the “creationism” thing, which seems to be a uniquely American delusion. I’m looking forward to reading the comments to all these posts…

…as for me, I believe that being superstitious brings bad luck…

blogalization [colin] wrote:

By the way, come by Blogalization and see if you would be interested in participating or passing along the word.

Thanks, Colin; I just registered, and look forward to puzzling out something to contribute. (Comment for other readers: Colin’s Hairy Eyeball is very good reading…)

Posted by blogalization [colin]:
It was another Berkeley metaphorist, folklorist Alan Dundes, who noted that American football is rife with metaphors of sadistic sodomy, such as “penetrating the end zone” of the opponent. I think that analysis was slightly tongue-in-cheek. In the present case, I have to agree that Lakoff’s rhetoric in the first part of the essay was a bit too recondite to influence anyone — as he recognizes. But starting with the sentence, “Awareness matters,” he starts making a lot of sense to me.

By the way, come by Blogalization and see if you would be interested in participating or passing along the word.

Rageboy says that OTHER PEOPLE’S PERSONAL SHORTCOMINGS MAKE IT HARD FOR THEM TO GIVE ME THE COMPLIMENTS AND ATTENTION THAT ARE DUE ME.

You MUST read the entire thing to properly dislocate your diaphragm, but here’s a meta-quote from Interpersonal Diagnosis and Treatment of Personality Disorders, 2nd edition:

A great way to come down with a case of ‘medical student’s disease’ is to read a survey of personality disorders. For example, a reader of Milton’s (1982) impressive summary of each of the categories for personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, third edition (DSM-III; All-American Psychiatric Association, 1980) can believe that he or she has nearly every personality disorder there is. Probably any remaining disorders cab be assigned to one’s spouse.

…Who does not suffer from official ‘symptoms’ of personality disorders, including idealization, devaluation, vanity, temper outbursts, boredom, seductiveness, rapidly shifting emotions, devastation in face of criticism, needs to be special or unique, failures in empathy, cruelty, infidelity, working too hard, working too little, hypervigilance, ideas of reference [see Little House on the Prairie], odd mannerisms, wanting to be too intimate, wanting to be too distant, needing advice about little things, being too autonomous, having trouble getting started, feeling devastated when a relationship ends, being perfectionistic, being irresponsible, being too bossy, being too deferential, being withdrawn, hating being alone, wanting acceptance but fearing rejection, resenting others’ control, or being critical of authorities?

Many thanks to Doc Searls for the link! This made my day…

Joey deVilla, the AccordionGuy, last week waxed enthusiastic about “Ten Cool Things About The New Girl”:

– She went to high school at the hoity-toity Trafalgar College in Montreal

– She graduated from University of British Columbia with a degree in computer engineering

– She worked as a webmaster at Alliance Atlantis…

…she cooks, programs, dances, is cute, and so forth. Complete with photo. Hmm.

So, Joey’s a nice guy (anybody who puts me on his blogroll must be a nice guy, right?), so I thought this was worth thinking about… and I pondered about this sudden enthusiasm… while deciding whether to send e-mail, join the congratulants commenting on his post, or to post here… and trying to hit the appropriate balance between cautious optimism and sounds-too-good-to-be-true… then, while my comments still hovered on the fuzzy side of the Heisenberg barrier… he yanks his post.

Uh-oh, I thought.

So today he tells, in great detail, what happened; it was a sham. More’s the pity.

The interesting part is that a reader of his weblog recognized the “New Girl” from the photo he posted, and decided to blow the whistle on her. Just after I saw the news on his RSS feed, Boing Boing also had a note, and many other webloggers commented. Joey has quite a lot of free beer coming to him, it seems… I may buy him one myself next time I go to Toronto. 😀

Joey, I wish you better luck next time. Meanwhile, how about reposting the original entry (with names changed and so forth)? I think this might be helpful to other people.

Posted by Joho the Blog:
Joho the Blog linked to this post

George Lakoff Is Like a …

Let me begin with the standard-issue praise, which is no less sincere for being completely predictable: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By helped shape my thinking. Their book Philosophy in the Flesh is a truly fresh and mind-pivoting look at philosophy. I thank them for all that I’ve learned from them. (And now comes the “But…”) But Dr. Lakoff’s most recent op-ed comes close to self-parody. Lakoff has a superb eye for pointing out how what we take as straightforward, factual descriptions are in fact highly metaphorical — everything from talking about “high” notes to “straightforward” descriptions.

Simon Brunning of Small Values of Cool points at the Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time. Read this before believing anything else today.

My personal favorites:

– The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest

– The Island of San Seriffe

– The Internet Spring Cleaning (#40, at the bottom – I’ve spread that one myself a few times)

– Asterix Village Found (#89)

Update(s): The first items for 2003 are coming in… here are some nice ones. I’ll keep updating this throughout the day.

RFC3514: The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header. This one’s for techies only – if you don’t know what a RFC is, never mind:

Firewalls, packet filters, intrusion detection systems, and the like often have difficulty distinguishing between packets that have malicious intent and those that are merely unusual. We define a security flag in the IPv4 header as a means of distinguishing the two cases.

… Currently-assigned values are defined as follows:

0x0  If the bit is set to 0, the packet has no evil intent. Hosts, network elements, etc., SHOULD assume that the packet is harmless, and SHOULD NOT take any defensive measures. (We note that this part of the spec is already implemented by many common desktop operating systems.)

0x1  If the bit is set to 1, the packet has evil intent. Secure systems SHOULD try to defend themselves against such packets. Insecure systems MAY chose to crash, be penetrated, etc.

TidBITS#674:

…In a move that will no doubt cause even more consternation, Apple today announced that it has again rescheduled the upcoming Worldwide Developer Conference, this time to coincide with the new Create conference that replaced Macworld Expo from 14-Jul-03 through 18-Jul-03.

…The $25 Asbesteze gloves use a combination of Lycra and heat-resistant fibers to keep palms and wrists from becoming too hot (which can exacerbate inflammation) when resting on the aluminum PowerBooks.

…the company announced the Segway Kids Interactive Transporter (KIT), more commonly referred to as the “Segwee.”…

…I’ve been busy helping some old friends at Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) with an upcoming release of Microsoft Word 5.1 for OS X, a carbonized version of Word 5.1a that preserves most of the features and all the look and feel of the highly popular Word 5.1…

Apple admits Mac OS X transition a failure; announces Mac OS 9.5, Jobs steps down:

“I blew it. It’s as simple as that,” said a visibly upset Steve Jobs as he announced he would step down as head of Apple, the company he co-founded on this day over 25 years ago.

CFO Fred Anderson quickly announced the company would end its two-year-long transition to the UNIX-based Mac OS X and would release Mac OS 9.5 within the month…

Bare Bones Software Announces New Pricing Option:

…Now available is the option to purchase a single user license of BBEdit with hand delivery by a Bare Bones Software employee and one full year of personal service (including unlimited feature additions, ripping the cellophane off the CD, reading the manual aloud, and more). This opportunity is only available for a limited time, at the special price of US$250,000…

Safari developer Dave Hyatt says that Safari will drop table support:

The next release of Safari will be fully embracing Web standards by dropping all support for tables. From now on, any pages that use tables will cause Safari to play a very loud raspberry sound and refuse to display the page.

…For all sites that attempt to nest tables more than four levels deep, Safari will play a loud flushing sound, and it will remove itself from the dock and erase itself from your system in order to protect itself from your bad taste.

Joi Ito shows Mena Trott of Movable Type fame doing his trick with two corks. Very cool… took me some time to figure out.