I find it amusing that a site such a Salon, which has no qualms about passing judgment on complex issues of science, economics, diplomacy, ethics, morality, and so on, really doesn't know diddly.

Here they are confusing Heidegger and Heidegger. As part of annotating the Python's Philosopher's Song for the handful of folks on the net that know less about philosophy than Salon's content providers, they retell this amusing anecdote:

Such was Heidegger's remarkable ugliness that he once bet Lord Chesterfield that he would be unable to produce anyone uglier.
Thus encouraged, the earl eventually produced an old woman who was said to be marginally more hideous. The quick-witted Heidegger, however, snatched his rival's bonnet, set it upon his head, and was promptly awarded the desired victory.

The only problem is that the Heidegger in the anecdote precedes the Heidegger in Eric Idle's song by a few centuries. At the end of the annotations we discover that Salon merely copied the content from another web site. Wouldn't a link have been sufficient? I guess by appearing under the Salon brand, we know the content has been fact checked by Salon...  ¶ 9:05 AM

  In this op-ed piece on the American Left in The New York Observer, Ron Rosenbaum compares the Left's denial of the Leninist holocaust (Ukraine famine, Gulag, Mao, Pol Pot) to Heidegger's denial of his involvement with the Nazis.

Mr. Rosenbaum talked to Berel Lang about the issue and says:

After everything came out, after it was no longer possible to deny at least post facto knowledge of the Holocaust, nothing changed for Heidegger. He felt no need to incorporate what happened into his philosophy. "His silence," Mr. Lang said, "it wasn’t even denial. For him, it wasn’t important! It wasn’t important …. Now if you ask which of them is worse … the Revisionists [Holocaust deniers] deny it occurred, but their official position, at least, is that if it occurred, it would have been wrong. But Heidegger knows it occurred, but it’s just not important—it’s not something to distort history to deny. For Heidegger, this is not history to concern oneself with."

I think that misstates Heidegger's position after the war. Heidegger acknowledged that his involvement in university politics and the Nazis was a mistake to some people, but that he didn't want to talk about it publicly. He wanted to talk about ontology, and any discussion about his politics or the holocaust was a distraction from ontology. Heidegger had attempted to incorporate Nazism into his philosophy while toadying up to the Nazis, but that was a dismal failure. Given that failure, he wasn't about to try to incorporate politics into his philosophy once again. He was just going to say what he had to say ontology, and not mess with politics again. Heidegger was a philosopher, not a historian. He was not saying the holocaust was or was not important--he didn't want to talk about the holocaust. He wanted to spend his time talking about what changed in philosophy 25 centuries ago.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with Heidegger's position. I'm just disagreeing with Mr. Rosenbaum. He and Mr. Lang misinterpret Heidegger. Should German mathematicians have to discuss the holocaust in their writings?  ¶ 3:25 PM 0 comments

  An article in the NYTimes about Republican punks. I remember that when punk started circa 1977 it was as a reaction against the hippie/prog-rock establishment that dominated popular music. At that time the hippies and the punks were both rebelling against the "establishment" controlled by the previous generation. But now decades on, the 60s generation are the establishment, so it's to be expected that punks will rebel against its oppressive tendencies.

I put it down to the realignment of political attitudes following 9/11. The hippie/"liberal" elite are essentially defined by their hatred of Bush, and their willingness to align themselves with anyone also anti-Bush: Baath parties, Kommie Korea, terrorists, anti-semites, Aristide, Castro, Chavez. For rational reasons, many punks cannot see aligning themselves with the Islamic fascists who are also anti-music.

{ I put "liberal" in quotes because although I am sympathetic to classical liberal principals, today in the USA the essence of "liberalism" is being against everything Bush is for. }  ¶ 2:58 PM 0 comments

  Not enough is being done to remember Erostratus, IMHO. Symptomatic of the neglect of this indispensable personage is the fact he has no home page on the web.

I note that there's a butterfly, papilio erostratus. Looks appropriately named. And Fernando Pessoa wrote a short story, or something, that has not been translated.

I came across Erostratus as a teenager via Sartre's short story of the same name. This essay does a good job of summarizing things Erostratus. Both the original who razed the temple Croesus raised, and Sartre's modern fable.

Sartre's story and Conrad's Secret Agent do a better job of explaining, or at least giving insight into, the terrorist mind than most rubbish floating around.  ¶ 9:37 AM

  Tim Robbins, one of the Hollywood glitterati, has written a play, Embedded, that exposes the cabal in Washington that follows the teachings of Leo Strauss and controls USA foreign policy. Great conspiracy theory, but...

It appears that the Leo Strauss that Tim Robbins quotes in his play is not the Leo Strauss that escaped from the Nazi Holocaust and went on to teach political philosophy in the USA. Instead, as this fact checking theater critic discovered, Tim Robbins gets his conspiracy theories from Lyndon LaRouche. Way to go Tim!

I don't know much about Leo Strauss, but from what little I've read by him, he appears to be a thoughtful commentator on Plato and other philosophers that have thought about politics. Obviously a minefield, but someone's got to step through it.  ¶ 9:35 AM 0 comments

  Here a link to Philip Pullman's web page; to help it move up in search engine rankings.

{ What's wrong with search engines? When a search for an author brings up dozens of links selling the latest book in random locales, instead of the author's home page? }

On his site he has stuff he has written on education. His grouse is that reading is just taught functionally: how to extract the information from the text. And not how to enjoy a good book. I would guess that is educational minimalism. "At least teach them to understand a job application." I expect educational maximalism then is: "We must teach them to think."  ¶ 6:42 AM 0 comments

    ¶ 10:11 AM 0 comments

  Found this interview with Alan Moore about his recently published novel. He's one of the few reasons I read comic books. I stopped at puberty (apart from Freak Brothers, the popular comic at my high-school) and restarted fifteen years ago because of the buzz around Alan Moore--and I also started to appreciate R. Crumb. He says that an early character he worked on has been in litigation for years. I checked at Amazon and sure enough, the Miracleman graphic novels go for $100 used. I'll have to post mine at Amazon marketplace when I get home and get my c-note.  ¶ 5:02 PM 0 comments

  I've been reading about software security issues and came across this editorial in a security magazine: Toward a Security Ontology. Therein it says:

What the field needs is an ontology—a set of descriptions of the most important concepts and the relationships among them.

That may be what the field needs, a standard way of specifying security entities, but ontology is more.

Security bugs are like other quality issues.

At a basic level quality defects can be qualified, quantified, and triaged. If there's a security hole in a piece of software, the hole can be closed or mitigated.

Above that, the defects have to become known, they have to appear. A piece of software has zero bugs--is of high quality--until bugs are found. Then the defects can be addressed at the basic level.

At the top level we have the possibility of bugs appearing at all. This is the insight in Murphy's Law. If things that can go wrong will go wrong, then software should be designed in such a way that things cannot go wrong. For example, if buffer overflows lead to security holes, then implementing software with a language or technology that doesn't permit buffer overflows eliminates those problems. More than just knowing that no buffer overflows have been found in a particular software component, a component written in say C# will never have buffer overruns because they can't exist in that language.  ¶ 10:26 AM

  Here's the definition for ontology at an Information Technology website. The problem with the general description of the term--no fault of the website, as that is the commonly understood definition-- is that it puts ontology in the box that defined it. If ontology is the study of entities, how can it be just another entity, a branch of metaphysics, yet another entity? Concern is an excellent term what is involved, and required. For entities to exist there must be a way, or place, or possibility, for entities to appear.

Metaphysically, a branch in a hierarchy can be compared to another, and statements of value made: "1+1=2 is true" or "You need ENG 101 READING before ENG 102 WRITING". But in order to make such metaphysical statements first the entities 1, 2, CALCULUS and "true" and have to exist.

Parsing the term in Greek implies that ontology is about being--discourse about being. But what is this term being. How important can it be if non-indo-European languages manage quite well without such a word? Do people who don't have a word for being not have ontology?

I like ontology as "first principles". Everyone likes to be at the front of the line. Move back epistemology! If ontology is the study of the essence of things, then we approach a tautology, because an essence is a required property of an entity. And a property is itself a metaphysical entity.

We have this Greek term ontology because Aristotle wrote this all down, about entities and their properties. He classified entities hence and systematized knowledge. Henceforth science was about classifying all the different entites that appear in nature, and math was about the correct statements that could be made about numbers of entities.

The info-tech definition of ontology in the following paragraph refers to defining systems of entities that interact--things, events, and relations. And again ontology is stuck down in the trenches with the entities and loses its ability to think outside that box. Ontology asks: "Why do these entities interact?"  ¶ 7:24 AM

  Whilst googling about looking for uses of the term enowning I came across this web site on post-onto-theology that has the word God with a strike-through: God. All it takes is enclosing the word in <s> tags. Deconstruction was never easier!
  ¶ 7:58 AM 0 comments