Boethius – the most important philosopher you’ve probably never heard of

The first I remember hearing of Boethius was this In Our Time programme on The Consolation of Philosophy…

In the 6th century AD, a successful and intelligent Roman politician called Boethius found himself unjustly accused of treason. Trapped in his prison cell, awaiting a brutal execution, he found solace in philosophical ideas - about the true nature of reality, about injustice and evil and the meaning of living a moral life. His thoughts did not save him from death, but his ideas lived on because he wrote them into a book. He called it The Consolation of Philosophy…

Boethius, I learned, was a Christian influenced neo-Platonist scholar and man of the world who lived in the waning years of the Roman empire. Wikipedia has more …

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius^[1] (ca. 480–524 or 525) … was born in Rome to an ancient and important family which included emperors Petronius Maximus and Olybrius and many consuls. His father, Flavius Manlius Boethius, was consul in 487 after Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman Emperor. Boethius himself was consul in 510 in the kingdom of the Ostrogoths. In 522 he saw his two sons become consuls. Boethius was executed by King Theodoric the Great…

It is unknown where Boethius received his formidable education in Greek. Historical documents are ambiguous on the subject, but Boethius may have studied in Athens, and perhaps Alexandria…

As a result of his education and experience, Boethius entered the service of Theodoric the Great, who in 506 had written him a graceful and complimentary letter about his studies…

…By 520, at the age of about forty, Boethius had risen to the position of magister officiorum, the head of all the government and court services…

… Boethius's best known work is the Consolation of Philosophy, which he wrote most likely while in exile under house arrest or in prison while awaiting his execution, but his lifelong project was a deliberate attempt to preserve ancient classical knowledge, particularly philosophy. He intended to translate all the works of Aristotle and Plato from the original Greek into Latin…

…it is his final work, the Consolation of Philosophy, that assured his legacy… the work was translated into Old English by King Alfred, and into later English byChaucer and Queen Elizabeth; many manuscripts survive and it was extensively edited, translated and printed throughout Europe from the 14th century onwards.^[5] Many commentaries on it were compiled and it has been one of the most influential books in European culture…

From our perspective it’s not clear how Christian Boethius was by the time he died, but he’s a Catholic saint anyway, and supposedly a favorite of Benedict. He was immensely influential in many ways, but I suspect most of us have never come across his name.

I do like In Our Time, it’s so sad that the BBC doesn’t sell past programmes on iTunes. (You can subscribe easily to the podcasts, but you can’t turn the available streaming archives into mp3/aac unless you’re a serious geek.)

See also:

• Danger- Addictive temptations from the BBC
• Gordon's Notes- In Our Time
• Gordon's Notes- In Our Time threatens to go mainstream

Update 11/5/09: When I listen to the best of IOT I take it in sips. A bit of listening, a bit of contemplation. The very best I'll do twice. Since I first wrote this I'm about three quarters done with the Consolation of Philosophy, and it is among the best. Great guests, and for once Melvyn didn't run out of time. They fit Boethius into the chain from the Stoics through Schopenhauer to Camus and Nietzsche (but not Hume and they didn't trace back to the Greek religious tradition of the futile but heroic response to inevitable tragedy).

I'm going to have to go back to past discussions of the Stoics, and I'm looking forward to the new episode on Schopenhauer.

An abundance of earth-class planets

We're filling in a key variable in the Drake equation. Smaller rocky planets are now believed to be common ...

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Scientists announce planet bounty

... The 32 "exoplanets" ranged in size from five times the mass of Earth to 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter, the researchers said.

They were found using a very sensitive instrument on a 3.6m telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility in Chile.

The discovery is exciting because it suggests that low-mass planets could be numerous in our galaxy.

"From [our] results, we know now that at least 40% of solar-type stars have low-mass planets. This is really important because it means that low-mass planets are everywhere, basically," explained Stephane Udry from Geneva University, Switzerland.

"What's very interesting is that models are predicting them, and we are finding them; and furthermore the models are predicting even more lower-mass planets like the Earth."...

This is consistent with the fun calculation I ran 8 months ago, the one predicting several hundred technological civilizations operating in the galaxy at this "moment".

The data continues to point to a "go no more a wanderin" solution to the Fermi paradox.

Snowe has defenders in Maine

I don't know how strong Snowe's home base is, but this physician executive editorial seems encouraging ...

Snowe’s chutzpa needed to reform U.S. health care - Bangor Daily News

... when the hounds come looking for Sen. Snowe’s hide, they should find us circled around her, protecting the black mane of Maine’s senior senator. We should tell them we are doing so not because we always agree with her, or because we think the Senate’s health reform bill is everything we want, but because last Tuesday she stood up for us and to us and did the tough thing, the right thing, and we are now doing the same for her.

The triumph of the Yes Men – Chamber of Commerce endorses climate change legislation

The YES MEN have triumphed …

The Chamber of Commerce hoax was perpetrated by the Yes Men, in tandem with a group of activists known as the Avaaz Action Factory.

Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum showed up at the 11am press conference that had earlier been announced by a "Chamber of Commerce" press release, and, impersonating a Chamber executive, declared:

We at the Chamber have tried to keep climate science from interfering with business. But without a stable climate, there will be no business.

At some point, reports Mother Jones, an actual Chamber spokesman showed up and yelled: "This is fraudulent!"…

Reuters fell for it, and the NY Times picked it up …

Reuters is now admitting that their epic screw-up today — it fell for a hoax press release and ran a story about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce supposedly changing its opposition to climate change legislation — could actually have moved financial markets…

… The Reuters story was picked up by the New York Times and the Washington Post and rocketed around the political world today.

In case you missed it, Reuters ran a story today claiming the Chamber’s shift, basing it on a fradulent press release claiming the Chamber “is throwing its weight behind strong climate legislation.”…

We’re all hoping the Chamber of Commerce will try to sue the YES MEN. If they do, the YES MEN’s coffers will swell …

See also … The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs- Dear U.S. Chamber of Commerce- You are totally full of shit, now please sit down and shut the **** up.

Update 10/27/09: Salon on the Yes Men win.

Update 11/18/09: The Chamber is a GOP front.

Why I dropped the Freakonomics blog

I didn’t drop the Freakonomics blog (Levitt and Dubner) just because of their anti-rational climate change ploy.

I admit, the thorough evisceration by (via DeLong) Last Post on Superfreakonomics, SuperFreakonomics- Global Cooling, Superfreakonomics on climate, RealClimate- Why Levitt and Dubner like geo-engineering, Does -Superfreakonomics- Need A Do-Over and so many others did take a toll.

In the end though, it took a lethal blow from CT to do them in. There’s a world of difference between original thought and faux contrarianism. As fun as Levitt and Dubner have sometimes been, they’ve hit the media bottle too many times. They can no longer distinguish between skeptical thinking and the intellectual vice of fashionable thought.

Velikovsky was a contrarian. I doubt Levitt and Dubner aspired to his company, but that’s where they’ve ended up.

Not to worry though, I’m sure their book earnings will ease the pain of my departure.

Obama and the Laser – stop the stupidity.

Alan Blinder likes Obama’s economic accomplishments, but he concludes they’d be better if (emphases mine) …

… Mr. Obama’s accomplishments in just nine months are palpable and were very much needed. If he seems to have achieved little, it’s partly because he set out to do too much. Too bad he didn’t just “focus like a laser beam on the economy.”

I read the same thing from pundits wishing Obama had been a “laser beam” on Health Care, or Climate Change, or American honor, or Afghanistan (I’m sure there are other recommended targets, but you get the idea).

I know Americans have a memory of about 3 weeks, but this is the so-called punditocracy we’re talking about. Pundits are supposed to have a memory of at least 3 months.

Ok, I see the problem.

Well, for the sake of ventilation, if for no other benefit, let me put this plainly.

Bush, Cheney, Greenspan and the GOP just about trashed America and pushed the world to the edge. They were blunderers at a moment in American history where blundering was particularly dangerous.

Obama inherited a nation in critical care. We’re still there. It’s going to take 10 years to crawl out into a changed world. We aren’t going back to the 1990s, because that path is gone.

Obama can’t “focus like a laser beam”. He’s got to deploy his team on a wide front – holding in some places (economy), strategically retreating in others (climate), pressing the advantage in a few (health care). Obama is not Putin – he has to respond to the chaotic fluctuations of the political environment.

Stuff the laser beams.

The NYT does not like the Taliban

The NYT has recently published at least 3 articles that deliver pretty much the same message …

• Pakistan Attacks Show Tighter Militant Links
• Remembering Afghanistan’s Golden Age (1964 to 1974)*
• Held by the Taliban - A Times Reporter’s Account. A Five-Part Series by David Rohde

The message is that the modern Taliban have become inextricably linked to al Qaeda and Pakistan. There’s a less clear attempt to argue that Afghanistan is not a hopeless case.

I remember a similar NYT consensus in the build up to the invasion of Iraq, when the NYT jumped on the WMB and especially bioweapon bandwagon. In retrospect the Times was being played by their sources.

That’s not to say this consensus is wrong, but we’d be foolish to forget how this game is played.

I’m very glad Obama is doing his strategic review.

--

* My recollection is that in the early 80s Afghanistan was a poster child for impending ecological collapse. It’s a very fragile ecosystem, and the rapid development of the 1970s combined with severe oppression of women had led to extreme population growth and environmental degradation. Climate variation may have also played a role. By the late 1980s and early 1990s Afghanistan was in economic and ecological collapse.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any references that agree with my memory!

This is important. If the Afghan agricultural infrastructure is gone, then it has a very long road ahead.

See also Gordon's Notes- Lester Brown, Julian Simon, the UNFPA, Malthus, and, again, the Food.

Simultaneous infections with multiple viruses - why are there so few studies?

For the past several years I’ve wondered about the clinical presentation of patients with multiple simultaneous infections.

The H1N1 outbreaks has brought this to mind again. We assume bad outcomes are the result of some odd combination of immune system and viral mutation, but what about the impacts of co-infection?

I’ve asked academic physicians about this question. I usually get a started look, then a statement that “common wisdom” is that the enhanced immune response to one infection makes a co-infection less likely*.

Turns out, though, that this question was researched 21 years ago ...

Am J Dis Child -- Abstract: Simultaneous Infection With Respiratory Syncytial Virus and Other Respiratory Pathogens, August 1988, Tristram et al. 142 (8): 834

… The presentation and subsequent course of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) bronchiolitis may be atypical and unusually severe when simultaneous infection due to other pathogenic agents is present. During the past two years, nine of the 189 pediatric patients hospitalized with documented RSV infection were found to have the following simultaneous isolates from initial respiratory tract specimens: four adenovirus, four pneumococcus, one cytomegalovirus, and one Pneumocystis carinii. Noted complications attributable to the second pathogen included thrombocytopenia and anemia (cytomegalovirus), hepatitis and disseminated intravascular coagulation (adenovirus), and sepsis and osteomyelitis (pneumococcus). Three of the four patients with RSV and adenovirus died of severe respiratory failure despite mechanical ventilation; two of these patients received ribavirin therapy…

So 21 years ago it was shown that children with co-occurrent viral infections, such as adenovirus and RSV, could have more severe disease progression.

You’d think this study would have been widely cited, but you’d be wrong. A pubmed search on “simultaneous infection virus” returned no strong hits.

I’d love for someone who knows this area to explain why this hasn’t been studied further.

See also: Defining a disease: how often are atypical presentations due to multiple agents? (Feb 2006)

* When smart people say this they immediately get a worried look. In medicine “conventional wisdom” is often shorthand for “something that got into textbooks in the 1960s but, really, on inspection, has never been studied”.

Update 11/1/09: If one viral infection really prevented another, one could manage dangerous epidemics by giving everyone a cold.

The paradoxical power of the Snowe effect

In an ideal world, smart, rational Republicans would balance the worst instincts of my team.

These mythical Republicans would know that government has its own flaws, that my team’s backers can be misled by self-interest and constituency politics. They’d remind us that markets can solve optimization problems better than any planner.

Unfortunately, in this world, the GOP is the Party of Torture, Cheney, Palin, Beck and Limbaugh.

Except … for two senators from Maine – Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe.

Chance, and the complete abdication of the Party of Beck, has made Olympia Snowe immensely powerful in this particular debate. She has the same impact as would, in better times, 20 sane GOP senators …

Why One Vote Matters in the Senate - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com

… The country, frankly, is fortunate that the one holding the most cards is Olympia Snowe. Few public officials are as honest, principled, independent and smart as she is. The bargains she is striking to enable a bill to pass are almost all aimed at improving the quality of the health reform bill and helping more people to get health insurance coverage and health care. It may be unfortunate that one person, representing a tiny sliver of Americans, has so much power. We could do a lot worse…

Snowe is best known, to my team, as the enemy of the public option that’s favored by two of our top leaders – Reich and Krugman. 

Maybe that’s not all bad. I could believe that while the public option might be a very good theoretical idea, it might also be politically disastrous. Maybe we need to find a 2nd best option, knowing that we’re going to have to revisit health care reform many times in the decades to come.

It’s a sad day for America that the GOP is shattered, but, at least for the moment, we have a reasonable proxy to the mythical GOP we never had. Maine, you rate.

When it's as good as it gets

A lot of the comments on this post of Judith Warner's post imply she's melodramatic...

I Feel It Coming Together - Judith Warner Blog - NYTimes.com

... This is the cruelty of middle age, I find: just when things have gotten good — really, really, consistently good — I have become aware that they will end...

... I now see the passage of time more as a kind of bell curve. Years of ascension, soaring anticipation, followed by a plateau — which is not so bad, really — and then, no way to sugar coat this: a rather precipitous decline.

You are not supposed to think this, much less say it. A decline? Never!

Fifty is the new 30, after all; and 70 is the new 15, and 40 — well, the forties are just so fabulous that they can’t even be considered middle age. Even if they do happen to fall right smack in the middle of what, despite our best efforts, is still a limited human lifespan.

Susan Jacoby, the author of “The Age of American Unreason,” among other books, found herself, a year or so ago, attending a panel at the World Science Festival in New York City called “Ninety is the new Fifty,” and is now writing a book on the “delusion” she says we all have “that age is something that can be defied.”...

Ok, maybe a bit melodramatic - but not entirely. I'm six years older than Ms Warner, and I'm sympathetic.

Yes, there are those who might remember that I felt the pressure of mortality at 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, and so on.

Well, in retrospect, I was damned right every time. Sure, there have been 80 year olds exploring Kashmir -- but there are more 80 year olds that Nature's tortured with a rigor that Dick Cheney might envy. Not to mention the quieter cohort.

My life is good, in many ways the best it's been. Even so, we all have a right to complain. Mortality sucks, 92* years is not nearly enough.

I'm with you Judith! I'll take my mortal life, but I reserve the right to bitch.

* My current projection - but it's not a promise and if we don't get an Alzheimer's breakthrough soon I'd discount the last 10.

The Jackson movie - not my problem

Our family movie (Cloudy with a chance of meatballs ... not bad) was preceded by a preview of a movie featuring a great cultural icon -- Michael Jackson.

Right.

I grew up in the disco era. I've always felt bad about that, though, and I realize this is hard to imagine, I did enjoy the dancing.

Jackson the superstar was after me. My generation is not responsible. It's a Gen X thing.

That makes me feel better.

The NY Times has about 70 blogs

My rough guesstimate is that the NYTimes has about 70 blogs.

This at a time that the classic feed reader is supposed to be defunct.

I already subscribe to about half a dozen (Krugman, Blow, Kristoff, Economix, Freakonomics* and more). I've now added Floyd Norris, Idea of the Day, Judith Warner, Olivia Judson, Stanley Fish and "The Lede".

I used to pay for the NY Times online. I wouldn't mind paying again. I just don't want newspaper.

PS. As long as I'm media topics, I should mention that a formerly great news journal has resurrected their paywall. They offered a $12 subscription of some kind to registered online readers. Alas, I don't want the paper. Oddly enough the feeds appear to still be free, so I continue to follow the remaining good bits of The Economist - Science, Technology, Africa, and, above all, the Obit.

The fears of the GOP base - last defenders of America

A Dem consulting group has tried to capture the worldview of the GOP base by focusing on samples of Georgia GOP voters. They're not that far from my own thoughts on the rise of Klan 2.0, but the consultants take their subjects relative lack of explicit racism at face value. Amateurs! These guys need to do some Anthro 101 course work.

Even so, I think it's a useful portrait. We're looking at tens of millions of euro-Americans who are both terrified and completely disconnected from reality. These are the Palin people Peggy Noonan dog whistles to. Obama needs to manage their fears, to walk them back from the edge. They'll never vote for a rationalist, but we don't want them panicking.

Welcome to the Beckians ...

Democracy Corps: Republican Base Voters Living In Another World | TPMDC

... "They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a 'secret agenda' to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism," the analysis said." While these voters are disdainful of a Republican Party they view to have failed in its mission, they overwhelmingly view a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of this country's founding principles and are committed to seeing the president fail."

The analysis argues that Obama's unpopularity among conservative Republicans is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from liberal Democratic ire against George W. Bush -- that the GOP is more heavily conservative than the Democrats are heavily liberal, and that the hatred of Obama is more intense than Dem hatred of Bush was...

... The voters in these focus groups saw Obama as being deliberately out to destroy the American economy in order to undermine personal freedoms, and that the speed of his agenda was a part of this strategy...

... Conservatives see themselves as an oppressed minority, holding on to knowledge that isn't represented in the wider media and culture: "Conservative Republicans passionately believe that they represent a group of people who have been targeted by a popular culture and set of liberal elites - embodied in the liberal mainstream media - that mock their values and are actively working to advance the downfall of the things that matter most to them in their lives - their faith, their families, their country, and their freedom."

So who are the protectors of this knowledge, the sources of information they trust. Obviously, Rush Limbaugh is widely admired -- but at the same time, he's seen as being overly abrasive at times.

The real unblemished champion, the one they most identify with on a personal level, is Glenn Beck: "Two aspects of the discussion on Beck among conservative Republicans were particularly noteworthy. One was a common fear among the women for his personal safety, a belief that his willingness to stand up to powerful liberal interests was putting his life, as well as the lives of those working with him, in danger. Of course, his willingness to face this danger head on only adds to his legend."

And the base sees themselves as an emerging, growing movement -- manifested in the Tea Parties -- that will restore the country to its proper roots, but that is dismissed by the media ...
--

See also:

• Palin, Noonan, and the fears of euro America
• The roots of Klan 2.0 and 912 – A justified fear of change

Planning for the collapse of Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs is prospering using the strategies that gave us the Great Recession.

I suppose they would say that they know how to use these innovations safely. Their rivals were simply too dull, too weak, to use such powerful tools.

If Goldman is lucky their leaders will rule like kings. If they are unlucky their leaders will rule like barons -- and we'll be picking up the pieces.

If we still can.

If I were running the Treasury I'd be setting up a plan to respond to the collapse of Goldman Sachs.

Just in case.

--
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The evolutionary wonder of reading – hints from intracranial electrophysiology

I don’t know why creationists get hung up with the Platypus or the retina. I think it’s much more interesting that humans can read, despite it only being around for a few hundred years. For example …

Rare Procedure Pinpoints the Location, Speed and Sequence of the Brain's Language Processes: Scientific American

As part of preparation for their [epilepsy] surgery, three adults had electrodes implanted in Broca's area and anterior temporal cortex to allow doctors to pinpoint which areas of the brain would be best to remove. During the procedure, known as intracranial electrophysiology, researchers asked the patients to silently sound-out words they saw on a screen and to fill in the missing verb in the proper tense or the proper form of a missing noun. Meanwhile, the researchers were recording the local electric field potentials from the wired areas of subjects' brains to the nearest millisecond—and millimeter.

After studying the readouts, the researchers found that in these normally reading adults, word identification, grammar and pronunciation all activated parts of Broca's area—and in a very neatly defined sequence. Like clockwork, it took about 200 milliseconds to identify a word, 320 milliseconds for grammatical composition and 450 milliseconds for phonological encoding…

… Previous studies had shown that the brain takes about 600 milliseconds to form vocal speech. So the speed with which each of these processes occurred was not as big of a surprise to Sahin and his colleagues as the fact that these three distinct tasks were done separately, in a tightly timed sequence, and within millimeters of each other in the brain…

… The electrical readouts … help to dispel the theory that another part of the brain, Wernicke's area, is primarily responsible for reading and hearing language. Their data show that, in fact, Broca's area also activated during the reading and identification phases. These findings, "indicate that the role of Broca's area…should be characterized in more general terms," Hagoort and Levelt wrote…

Everyone wants to see this study repeated in persons with reading disorders, but this kind of opportunity is rare. We all owe thanks to these patients who helped out with this study while awaiting some pretty scary surgery.

See also:

• Hyperlexia: an explanation of why we can read? – 2004
• Reading and hand signals (2009)
• Be the Best You can Be- Understanding why reading is hard (Oct 2009)