Logrolling in our time

The sadly defunct Spy magazine used to have a feature called "Logrolling in Our Time," in which it pointed out examples of authors providing favorable cover blurbs to each other. Like this:

"Written with his customary verve and flair, The Mind of the Market is Michael Shermer at his best. Roving over the entire sweep of history, and drawing on the best of modern science, Shermer attempts a grand synthesis of research from psychology and the neurosciences to demonstrate that markets are moral and that free trade meshes well with human nature. Shermer entertains as well as informs, and in the process he deepens the argument for economic, political and social freedom." --Dinesh D’Souza, author of What’s So Great About America, on Michael Shermer's book, The Mind of the Market

"As an unbeliever I passionately disagree with Dinesh D'Souza on some of his positions. But he is a first-rate scholar whom I feel absolutely compelled to read. His thorough research and elegant prose have elevated him into the top ranks of those who champion liberty and individual responsibility. Now he adds Christianity to his formula for a good society, and although non-Christians and non-theists may disagree with some of his arguments, we ignore him at our peril. D'Souza's book takes the debate to a new level. Read it." --Michael Shermer, author of The Mind of the Market, on Dinesh D'Souza's book, What's So Great About Christianity

D'Souza is clearly not a "first-rate scholar." Neither, for that matter, is Shermer. Both are popularizers.

Company sued for potentially ending the world

An NPR story on a Hawaiian botanist's lawsuit against CERN to try to prevent the Large Hadron Collider from being turned on for fear that it will destroy the earth. This is worth listening to in order to hear Rudy Rucker read from one of his novels, Spaceland.

E.J. Graff on prostitution

The Eliott Spitzer prostitution scandal is bringing the moralizers out of the woodwork. At TPM Cafe, E.J. Graff writes:

I'm tired of hearing about Eliot Spitzer's "classical tragedy." I'm not interested in whether he was targeted by Republicans, especially since the TPMmuckrakers seem to have shown fairly clearly that his shady-looking wire transfers drew ordinary oversight attention. I'm a little sickened to read that paying thousands of dollars for sex is all about buying a "positional good"--if I understand Harold Meyerson correctly (and Harold is magnificent on other subjects, but very strange here), the point of paying $5500 for sex isn't that it gives you better-than-ordinary sex, but rather, that the cost itself makes it *higher status* than buying your way into a lower-cost vagina.
...
To know that your father is paying to use the body of someone just a couple of years older than your own--well, I picture eating disorders ahead for those girls. I picture that in part because Eliot Spitzer cannot be going to a prostitute for the sex. He's a powerful, good-looking, wealthy man, and could seduce a woman if nonmarital sex were all he wanted. No: he wanted to order some woman around, wanted to treat her not like a person but like a collection of body parts put together for his pleasure. To use women this way -- just for the thrill of power -- is appalling. If that's how your dad treats women, that cannot make you feel good as a future woman yourself.
...
We're not talking about a victimless crime. We're talking about a way of degrading and traumatizing women who have already been degraded and traumatized (and sometimes trafficked). Some of my friends who are recovering drug addicts (and, yes, violently abused as children) were once prostitutes, and what they've told me is fully in keeping with the studies: it's alienating, traumatizing, violent, and not what anyone dreams of doing when they grow up.
So here's an idea: let's decriminalize *being* a prostitute ... but criminalize *patronizing* a prostitute.

Leaving aside Graff's attribution of intentions and views to Spitzer on the basis of no evidence of any kind and her last comment advocating the Swedish model that's also advocated by Melissa Farley, contrast her moralizing with H.L. Mencken's views on prostitution in his "The Lady of Joy":

EVEN PROSTITUTION, in the long run, may become more or less respectable profession, as it was in the great days of the Greeks. That quality will surely attach to it if ever it grows quite unnecessary; whatever is unnecessary is always respectable, for example, religion, fashionable clothing, and a knowledge of Latin grammar. The prostitute is disesteemed today, not because her trade involves anything intrinsically degrading or even disagreeable, but because she is currently assumed to have been driven into it by dire necessity, against her dignity and inclination. That this assumption is usually unsound is no objection to it; nearly all the thinking of the world, particularly in the field of morals, is based upon unsound assumption, e.g., that God observes the fall of a sparrow and is shocked by the fall of a Sunday-school superintendent. The truth is that prostitution is one of the most attractive of the occupations practically open to the sort of women who engage in it, and that the prostitute commonly likes her work, and would not exchange places with a shop-girl or a waitress for anything in the world. The notion to the contrary is propagated by unsuccessful prostitutes who fall into the hands of professional reformers, and who assent to the imbecile theories of the latter in order to cultivate their good will, just as convicts in prison, questioned by teetotalers, always ascribe their rascality to alcohol. No prostitute of anything resembling normal intelligence is under the slightest duress; she is perfectly free to abandon her trade and go into a shop or factory or into domestic service whenever the impulse strikes her; all the prevailing gabble about white slave jails and kidnappers comes from pious rogues who make a living by feeding such nonsense to the credulous. So long as the average prostitute is able to make a good living, she is quite content with her lot, and disposed to contrast it egotistically with the slavery of her virtuous sisters. If she complains of it, then you may be sure that her success is below her expectations. A starving lawyer always sees injustice in the courts. A bad physician is a bitter critic of Ehrlich and Pasteur. And when a suburban clergyman is forced out of his cure by a vestry-room revolution he almost invariably concludes that the sinfulness of man is incurable, and sometimes he even begins to doubt some of the typographical errors in Holy Writ.
...
Even the most lowly prostitute is better off, in all worldly ways, than the virtuous woman of her own station in life. She has less work to do, it is less monotonous and dispiriting, she meets a far greater variety of men, and they are of classes distinctly beyond her own. Nor is her occupation hazardous and her ultimate fate tragic. A dozen or more years ago I observed a somewhat amusing proof of this last. At that time certain sentimental busybodies of the American city in which I lived undertook an elaborate inquiry into prostitution therein, and some of them came to me in advance, as a practical journalist, for advice as to how to proceed. I found that all of them shared the common superstition that the professional life of the average prostitute is only five years long, and that she invariably ends in the gutter. They were enormously amazed when they unearthed the truth. This truth was to the effect that the average prostitute of that town ended her career, not in the morgue but at the altar of God, and that those who remained unmarried often continued in practice for ten, fifteen and even twenty years, and then retired on competences. It was established, indeed, that fully eighty per cent married, and that they almost always got husbands who would have been far beyond their reach had they remained virtuous. For one who married a cabman or petty pugilist there were a dozen who married respectable mechanics, policemen, small shopkeepers and minor officials, and at least two or three who married well-to-do tradesmen and professional men. Among the thousands whose careers were studied there was actually one who ended as the wife of the town's richest banker--that is, one who bagged the best catch in the whole community. This woman had begun as a domestic servant, and abandoned that harsh and dreary life to enter a brothel. Her experiences there polished and civilized her, and in her old age she was a grande dame of great dignity. Much of the sympathy wasted upon women of the ancient profession is grounded upon an error as to their own attitude toward it. An educated woman, hearing that a frail sister in a public stew is expected to be amiable to all sorts of bounders, thinks of how she would shrink from such contacts, and so concludes that the actual prostitute suffers acutely. What she overlooks is that these men, however gross and repulsive they may appear to her, are measurably superior to men of the prostitute's own class--say her father and brothers--and that communion with them, far from being disgusting, is often rather romantic.

Certainly there are prostitutes that meet Graff's description, but I suspect that those working for the Emperor's Club, including Ashley Alexandra Dupre, are more accurately described by Mencken.

Better than listening to either Graff or Mencken is to read what sex workers write about their own experiences (and not just those who have found new careers condemning their previous one), as in Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander's Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry.

BTW, the comments on Graff are far, far better than her article, and are well worth reading. Commenter Common Dreamer in particular points to some actual empirical research on prostitution (including a newspaper article summarizing prostitution researchers' responses to some bad research by a particular individual with an axe to grind). (Compare the comments on that newspaper article to the comments on Graff's article--at least Graff has attracted a much higher quality commenter than the Las Vegas Sun gets.) Common Dreamer points to some references on the ProstitutionProCon website, which looks like a good source for arguments and evidence regarding the question of whether prostitution should be legal.

Books Read in 2007

As another year comes to a close, I've again put together a list of the books I've managed to read this year. Once again, there are many that I've not finished, some of which were started but left uncompleted in 2005 or 2006, but I'm not going to bother listing those this year. While in previous years I've reviewed almost every book I read on Amazon.com, this year I've hardly done so at all, and my Amazon.com reviewer rank has dropped accordingly--I had hopes at one time of cracking the top 2000 (and got up to 2,171), but that won't happen if I don't write some more reviews. I'm disappointed with how few books I've read this year--this is the first time I can recall purchasing more new books than I've finished reading, so I plan to use my vacation days (the rest of the year) to see if I can finish a few more.

• Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography
• Barton Biggs, Hedge Hogging
• Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement
• Giles Foden, Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
• Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection
• Barry M. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative
• Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (nowhere near as good as I remembered, and the other two I read were so bad I didn't buy the fourth)
• Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door
• Madeleine L'Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet
• Mark R. Levin, Rescuing Sprite: A Dog Lover's Story of Joy and Anguish
• Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management
• Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Goedel's Proof
• Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World
• Ronald Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (revised edition)
• Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush
• William Poundstone, Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
• Rudy Rucker, Frek and the Elixir
• Jim Steinmeyer, The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo, the "Marvelous Chinese Conjurer"
• Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
• Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State
• Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea

(Previously: 2006, 2005.)

John Allen Paulos comes out with an atheism book

John Allen Paulos, the mathematician and author of such excellent books as Innumeracy, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (all three of which I recommend), has a new book coming out on January 3, 2008 titled Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up. Here's the review from Publishers Weekly:

Few of the recent books on atheism have been worth reading just for wit and style, but this is one of them: Paulos is truly funny. Despite the title, the Temple University math professor doesn't actually discuss mathematics much, which will be a relief to any numerically challenged readers who felt intimidated by his previous book Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. In this short primer ("just the gist with an occasional jest") Paulos tackles 12 of the most common arguments for God, including the argument from design, the idea that a "moral universality" points to a creator God, the notion of first causes and the argument from coincidence, among others. Along the way, he intersperses irreverent and entertaining little chapterlets that contain his musings on various subjects, including a hilarious imagined IM exchange with God that slyly parodies Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God. "Why does solemnity tend to infect almost all discussions of religion?" Paulos asks, clearly bemoaning the dearth of humor. This little book goes a long way toward correcting the problem, and provides both atheists and religious apologists some digestible food for thought along the way. (Jan. 3)

I hope the IM exchange described is as witty and funny as Raymond Smullyan's dialogue with God, "Is God a Taoist?" (also found in his excellent book The Tao is Silent and in Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter's anthology, The Mind's I).

UPDATE (January 14, 2008): Jim Holt reviews Paulos' book for the New York Times.

Antony Flew's new book

Today's New York Times has the story about how Roy Varghese wrote Antony Flew's new book for him, titled There Is A God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

Jon Ronson on Sylvia Browne

Jon Ronson, the author of the excellent books Them and The Men Who Stare At Goats, went on a cruise with Sylvia Browne. He tells the story at the Guardian Online, and it's a good read.

An excerpt:

Famous anti-psychics, such as Richard Dawkins, are often criticised for using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Dawkins' last television series, The Enemies Of Reason, was roundly condemned for making silly, harmless psychics seem too villainous. This criticism might be true were it not for the fact that, when the likes of Sylvia Browne make pronouncements, the police and desperate parents sometimes spend serious time and money investigating their claims.

In 2002, for instance, the parents of missing Holly Krewson turned their lives upside down in response to one of Sylvia's visions. Holly vanished in April 1995. Seven years later her mother, Gwen, went on Montel, where Sylvia told her Holly was alive and well and working as a stripper in a lap-dancing club on Hollywood and Vine. Gwen immediately flew to Los Angeles and frantically scoured the strip clubs, interviewing dancers and club owners and punters, and handing out flyers, and all the while Holly was lying dead and unidentified in San Diego.

Ronson also links to Robert Lancaster's stopsylviabrowne.com.

(Hat tip to Jeremy Goodenough on the SKEPTIC list.)

Discovery Institute Fellow: Dumbledore is NOT gay

Young-earth creationist and Discovery Institute Fellow John Mark Reynolds has written a pair of articles arguing that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's outing of her character Dumbledore as gay doesn't make him so, since the text is silent on the issue. I actually think he makes a reasonable argument, except that he heads in a personally dangerous direction when he writes:

What if Rowling writes a guide to her characters in which she gives new “back story” to the characters?

That too will not matter . . . anymore than I care much about the “Lost Books” (really his notes) that the Tolkien family keeps publishing from the author of Lord of the Rings insofar as it could possibly change the meaning of Tolkien’s main work. The text is fixed and it is as it is. The fact that Tolkien had other ideas about Frodo, Merry, or any other characters is important to discuss how the story came to be, but does not change the meaning of the text, if there is no explicit (or even hint) of the “new” matter.

This seems to be at extreme odds with how most Christians view the Old Testament in light of the New (and, as an aside, how Mormons view the Old and New Testaments in light of the Book of Mormon). It's pretty clear that Christians do hold that the words of the Old Testament have different meanings than Jews attribute to them.

(Via The Panda's Thumb.)

Josh McDowell's conversion to Christianity

Chris Hallquist takes a look at the different versions of Josh McDowell's testimony about being a former atheist who set out to disprove Christianity only to become a Christian, a finds some reasons to doubt its accuracy, as well as the quality of McDowell's research.

UPDATE (January 2, 2009): Vinny at You Call This Culture? notes that McDowell doesn't appear to have actually been converted to Christianity on the basis of evidence:

Commenting on the Hallquist post, self-identified Christian apologist Kevin H said that he had spoken with McDowell about the matter:

He's the kind of guy who is amused at all that is said about him. I noticed
he was quick to correct falsehoods. For example, he told me that the evidence
for Christianity was a "foot in the door" that kept him from immediately closing
it. But it was the love of God that drew him. It seems he knows, whether his
fault or the fault of the swirling influence of his books and speaking tours,
that people have the conception that he was forced into faith by irresistable
arguments.

His reading made him realize he could not initially write off Christianity from an intellectual standpoint. But it was a verse in Jeremiah that got to him: "I have loved you with an everlasting love". (Jer. 31:3).

So why would McDowell post statements like he does on his website? There is a big difference between "finding so much evidence you can only come to one conclusion" and "realizing you can't initially write off Christianity from an intellectual standpoint." My answer would be that McDowell knows what sells. McDowell knows that the story of an atheist overwhelmed by the evidence sells books and books speaking engagements, and probably most importantly to McDowell, it persuades unbelievers to accept Christ. The story of an atheist who merely gets his foot in the door is not nearly as dramatic. Story tellers tell their stories in the way that produces the desired effect.

Ed Babinski notes in comments on Vinny's blog post that Josh McDowell Ministries has, in response to queries, suggested that McDowell was not an atheist:

RESPONSE TO SHARON (WHO ASKED A SIMILAR QUESTION) FROM JOSH MCDOWELL MINISTRIES

Dear Sharon, Josh says in his tract, "Skeptic's Quest," that he was looking for meaning and purpose in life. He had tried religion when he was young but could not find the answers he was searching for. What he did not know until he was in college was that it is a relationship with Jesus Christ, rather than religion, which gives meaning and purpose to life.

He does not use the word atheist in the tract, but set out to prove Christianity false. Instead of being able to do that, he came to the following three conclusions: Jesus Christ was who He said He was, there is historic evidence for the reliability of Scripture, and the Resurrection of Christ took place.

In His service,
Penny Woods
Josh McDowell Ministry

Early U.S. income tax

I'm in the process of reading Akhil Reed Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography, and just came to the portion about the 16th Amendment, which instituted a federal income tax. I had already known that the tax was a very low percentage, but I hadn't realized that only the top 1% of income earners paid any income tax. It would be a nice model to go back to, but not possible without dramatically reducing federal spending--the wealthiest Americans wouldn't tolerate an extortionate percentage of taxation that would be required on the current level of spending, and given the huge amounts of money that are now a part of political campaigning, nobody gets elected without the support of at least some of the wealthiest Americans. (And those levels of spending are tied together--there's huge money riding on political campaigns because there's huge money and power in the hands of the federal government. The only way to reduce the former is to reduce the latter.)

Here are the two paragraphs where Amar describes pre-Civil War and post-16th Amendment income taxes in the United States:

Prior to the Civil War, at least seven states had adopted income taxes. High exemptions and graduated rates--the basic features of a progressive tax structure--were commonplace in these states. Congress followed this pattern when introducing a federal income tax in the 1860s. For instance, the 1865 federal tax code exempted all persons who made less than $600, taxed income between $600 and $5,000 at 5 percent, and subjected all income above $5,000 to a steeper 10 percent rate. Later federal laws tweaked the specifics but preserved the basic structure, under which more than three-quarters of federal revenue came from the seven wealthiest states: New York (which itself generated more than 30 percent of the total national intake), Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Under the law struck down in Pollock, incomes over $4,000 were taxed at 2 percent, all others were exempt. According to Treasury Department estimates, less than 1 percent of the population had been subject to this levy.
...
In the first income-tax statute enacted after the new amendment was in place, Congress once again opted for a progressive tax structure that exempted a large swath of low- and middle-income persons and taxed the rest at a sloping rate, beginning at 1 percent for an individual making $3,000 and topping out at 7 percent for income over $500,000. The $3,000 minimum threshold effectively limited the tax to the top 1 percent of the economic order. In 1916 the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the new tax law, expressly rejecting the notion that the "progressive feature" of the tax somehow rendered it unconstitutional. The American People had spoken and--this time, at least--the Court listened.

Critical reviews of Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution

Blake Stacey is maintaining a list, at Science after Sunclipse.

Which SF classics have you read?

The meme is to bold the ones you've read....

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks (like P.Z. Myers, I started this one and found it unreadable)
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Some missing: John Brunner The Shockwave Rider, Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books, Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad or Solaris, Rudy Rucker's work, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus!, D.F. Jones' Colossus, Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, Zelazny's Jack of Shadows, Cory Doctorow's work, Fritz Leiber's work, LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, John Varley's work, etc. For younger readers, notably missing are Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Eleanor Cameron's The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, Alexander Key's The Forgotten Door, and a book which I have only a vague memory of involving encoded messages in seashells, chess, and unicorns (sorry, no author, title, or further details come to mind).

(Via Pharyngula, Respectful Insolence, Evolving Thoughts, A Blog Around the Clock, etc.)

UPDATE: And Stranger Fruit, Good Math, Bad Math, and Afarensis...

Looks like Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math has gone to the most trouble of annotating his list, as well as having read more of these books than anyone else.

Daniel Dennett on religion

This YouTube video is of a talk by Daniel Dennett at the TED conference in 2006, following (and commenting on) Pastor Rick Warren.

Books for infidels at top of NYT bestseller lists

Mark Vuletic points out that the March 11 New York Times hardcover bestseller list includes five books of interest to infidels in the top 25:

7. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel
12. Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion
13. Chris Hedges' American Fascists
21. Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis
24. Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation

Tidbits from the Economist

During my long plane flights this week, I used some of my time to catch up on reading back issues of The Economist. Here were a few of the stories I found particularly interesting in the January 6-12, 2007 issue:

"Medicine at the Top of the World" (p. 65):

LYING in an intensive-care ward is a world away from climbing Everest, but a connection will be drawn this spring when 45 scientists and 208 volunteers tackle the mountain to bring back information about oxygen deprivation. The reason they are going is that hypoxia (a lack of oxygen in cells, which can lead to death) is the one thing that links practically all patients in intensive-care wards—and there is no better place to study it than in the thin air of the world's highest mountain.

The story describes the Xtreme Everest expedition, which will take 250 people up Mount Everest, setting up mobile labs at various elevations to study hypoxia. The volunteers will climb up to 5,300 meters, and 16 climber-scientists will ascend to the summit to become the first to have blood drawn at the top of the world's tallest mountain.

The research will be used to try to identify the genetic basis of people's ability to handle hypoxia, which couldn't be easily be conducted on patients in intensive care due to not having enough of them in one place at the right time.

"The logic of privacy" (pp. 65-66):

A group of computer scientists at Stanford University, led by John Mitchell, has started to address the problem in a novel way. Instead of relying on rigid (and easily programmable) codes of what is and is not acceptable, Dr Mitchell and his colleagues Adam Barth and Anupam Datta have turned to a philosophical theory called contextual integrity. This theory acknowledges that people do not require complete privacy. They will happily share information with others as long as certain social norms are met. Only when these norms are contravened—for example, when your psychiatrist tells the personnel department all about your consultation—has your privacy been invaded. The team think contextual integrity can be used to express the conventions and laws surrounding privacy in the formal vernacular of a computer language.

Contextual integrity, which was developed by Helen Nissenbaum of New York University, relies on four classes of variable. These are the context of a flow of information, the capacities in which the individuals sending and receiving the information are acting, the types of information involved, and what she calls the “principle of transmission”.

I'm always interested in the intersection of philosophy and information security, since the former was my field of undergraduate and graduate study, while the latter is my profession. The article briefly describes how Adam Barth is attempting to apply linear temporal logic to codify conditions of information transmission into rules that can be used by computers.

"In praise of mess" (p. 69):

This is a book review of Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman's book, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. The Economist reviewer admits to the bias of having "easily the most untidy" office at the magazine, and I have a similar bias. The book argues for the benefits of disorder and procrastination, and the reviewer notes that the authors "are witheringly contemptuous of the bogus equation of tidiness and morality--for example in corporate 'clean desk' policies." Yet the reviewer notes that the book overstates its case ("the case for tidiness in some environments--surgery, a dinner table or income tax returns--is really overwhelming") and suffers from repetition and disorganization that reduce the pleasure of reading the book. The reviewer concludes: "Even readers who love mess in their own lives don't necessarily like it in others."

Interview with Jon Winokur

Guy Kawasaki interviews Jon Winokur, whose books of curmudgeonly quotations are prized possessions of mine. It was Winokur's The Portable Curmudgeon which inspired me to track down and read the very entertaining autobiography of Oscar Levant.

Here's a short excerpt, chosen because it makes a point that is part of Paul Krassner's standup act:

Question: What are you working on now?

Answer: The Big Curmudgeon, an omnibus edition of previous curmudgeon books plus new material, and The Big Book of Irony, a small-format hardcover in which I try to share my delight in the many facets of irony and clear up some misconceptions, because irony is widely misunderstood.
It drives me crazy when people say “ironic” when they mean “coincidental.” The classic example is Morissettian Irony, which I define in the book as “irony based on a misapprehension of irony, i.e., no irony at all.” It’s named for the pop singer Alanis Morissette, whose hit single, “Ironic” mislabels coincidence and inconvenience as irony.
In the song, situations purporting to be ironic are merely sad, random, or annoying (“It's a traffic jam when you're already late/It's a no-smoking sign on your cigarette break”). In other words, “Ironic” is an un-ironic song about irony. Which, of course, is ironic in itself. But wait, there’s more, a “bonus irony” if you will: “Ironic” has been cited as an example of how Americans don’t get irony, despite the fact that Alanis Morissette is Canadian!

By the way, here's a rewrite of lines from Morissette's song to actually make them ironic.

Books Read in 2006

I read the following books in 2006. These are the ones I've finished--looks like I didn't do nearly as well as last year. The links are to Amazon.com, where I've reviewed most of these.

• James Bovard, The Bush Betrayal
• Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness
• John Grogan, Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog
• Jim Harper, Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood
• John Hodgman, The Areas of My Expertise
• Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History
• Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
• Paul Krassner, One Hand Jerking: Reports from an investigative satirist
• Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
• Cesar Millan with Melissa Jo Peltier, Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding & Correcting Common Dog Problems
• John Allen Paulos, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper
• John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
• Gerald Posner, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11
• V.S. Ramachandran, M.D., Ph.D., and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
• Mary Roach, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
• Rudy Rucker, Saucer Wisdom
• Thomas J. Stanley, The Millionaire Mind
• Neil Strauss, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists
• Martha Stout, Ph.D., The Sociopath Next Door
• Nick Webb, Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams

And these are the ones I haven't finished yet--some (Amar, Numbers, Zimmer) I just started, others have been hanging around for a while and I should probably give up on (some of these were started but uncompleted this time last year). The Girard and Lambot book is a beautiful, interesting, and quite expensive book that can be read one short biography at a time.

• Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography
• Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection
• Greg Girard and Ian Lambot, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City
• Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
• Olivia Judson, Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation
• Ronald Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design
• Kevin Mandia, Chris Prosise, and Matt Pepe, Incident Response and Computer Forensics, Second Edition
• Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush
• Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy
• Spammer-X, Inside the Spam Cartel: Trade Secrets from the Dark Side
• Robert H. Tillman and Michael L. Indergaard, Pump & Dump: The Rancid Rules of the New Economy
• John Viega and Gary McGraw, Building Secure Software: How to Avoid Security Problems the Right Way
• Vernor Vinge, The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
• Andrew Vladimirov, Konstantin V. Gavrilenko, Andrei A. Mikhailovsky, WI-FOO: The Secrets of Wireless Hacking
• Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea

(Previously: 2005.)

Robert Anton Wilson nears the end of his life

Robert Anton Wilson, co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy (which was the inspiration for my domain name and computer naming scheme on my home network), is now bedridden and under 24-hour care. Some fans on the Internet have helped him raise funds for his continuing care, and you can buy a Robert Anton Wilson T-shirt to help out.

UPDATE (January 11, 2007): Robert Anton Wilson died this morning at 4:50 a.m., PST.

Jesse Walker reports on his final blog post, and Brian Doherty offers some interesting reflections.

Though my only published writing about Robert Anton Wilson was rather critical, I greatly enjoyed and own most of his published work.

UPDATE (January 12, 2007): And there's more from Nick Gillespie here.

John Horgan criticizes Adler's Newsweek piece on "The New Naysayers"

Science writer John Horgan (author of the excellent book Rational Mysticism) weighs in on Jerry Adler's "The New Naysayers" in Newsweek, an article about Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris:

As I expected—can it be otherwise for a mass-market essayist?–he panders to his audience, which is after all predominantly religious. (Adler notes that a recent Newsweek poll found that 92 percent of Americans believe in God and only 37 would vote for an atheist for President.) He does a fair job of summarizing the “highly inflammatory” arguments of Dennett/Dawkins/Harris, namely, that religions make false and contradictory claims and spur people to commit destructive acts. But Adler not-so-subtly distances himself from the skeptics’ viewpoints.
...
And what is Adler really saying here? Just this: we must give a pass to delusional beliefs that are held sincerely by millions of people, especially if they are Newsweek subscribers. I have my differences with Dawkins et al, but I admire their courage, especially compared to the cowardice that afflicts pop-culture intellectuals like Adler when they write about religion.

P.Z. Myers has are more detailed critique of the Newsweek piece here.

Soap writer Kola Boof joins the bogus sex slave claim party

There's a market for books by women who claim to have been the sex slaves of the famous. In Cathy O'Brien's book, Trance Formation of America, she claims to have been raised to be a mind-controlled sex slave for presidents and celebrities on behalf of the CIA. The book is filled with completely absurd claims and unbelievable scenarios, and written in such a way as to be simultaneously titillating gossip about famous people and condemnation of such immoral acts. In short, it's pornography for gullible prudes, much like the Meese Commission Report on Pornography that was sold by Focus on the Family (with the nastiest parts edited out). "Brice Taylor" (Susan Ford) was another mind control sex slave claimant, whose book Thanks for the Memories is similar in content to O'Brien's--she tells of being the sex slave to both Henry Kissinger and Bob Hope.

Kola Boof, a Sudanese-American raised in Washington, D.C. who has written for the soap opera "Days of Our Lives," claims that she was Osama bin Laden's mistress in Morocco in 1996. (A time when Bin Laden was in Sudan.) In addition to claiming that Osama bin Laden was interested in Whitney Houston and liked to listen to the B-52's, she says she was forced to have sex with other al Qaeda members, including two terrorists who were long dead at the time she describes.

The publisher of Boof's book has been contacting bloggers who refer to Boof as a "sex slave," stating that she was bin Laden's mistress. Wonkette has an appropriate response.

Boof may not be as crazy as Ford and O'Brien, but it sounds like her book may fall into the same genre.