Site Recommendation {?}

This site's owner claims to be interested in calling attention to failures of critical thinking. It seems to me that it would be a failure of critical thinking to take all of the various unfortunate outcomes listed here as irrefragable failures of critical thinking 

I think a more pertinent question may be "What's the point?"

What's The Harm? 

This NOAA online tool offers a look at how extensively sea level increases may impact coastal property. Pair this up with the dire forecasts in a recent HuffPo blog "Coastal Cities are Doomed!" and you might just decide to pass up that deal on a timeshare near Cannon Beach.

So, Boston, NYC, and Miami are doomed. Bad news for sure! But "'tis an ill wind that blows nobody good," and according to NOAA's hokey visualization (zoom in to see the visualization icons), the Toledo Oregon Skateboard Park is destined (at 6 ft. above mean higher high water) to become a rather inviting-looking water recreation area.

The Egyptian Theater at Coos Bay is apparently a lost cause, however.

Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts

I kind of look at it this way. In eras past, the intellectual and material wealth of a civilization inhered in its achievements--its "great works." Today, however, we are somewhat more fair and egalitarian and such.

So, instead of giving one lady a Taj Mahal, putting up one guy's Great Pyramid, or interring one big shot's massive terra cotta army, we give more or less everybody a shot at an SUV, a smart phone, and a venti non-fat caffe caramel macchiato -- Did I say that right? -- (and we have pretty much determined that it's not a good idea to try to "consume" all of them at the same time).

Mass-produced consumer goods instead of unique Wonders of the World. Paradigm shift. Different measures of value.

What if Shah Jehan had said to his twenty-thousand artisans, "Hey guys, instead of building a monument for the eons, why don't you take all these materials we have assembled, the finest gems and stone gathered from all over the continent, and each of you just do something to amuse or impress your friends?" What if Khufu had commanded his 7000-strong labor force to render the giant limestone blocks into small representations of whatever was on their mind at the time? What if the master builders of Chartres had said, "Hey, you village peasant-types, here are some pieces of stained glass. See how many cute pictures of kittens you can make out of them."

Yeah, the historians of the future are going to have to adapt their discipline's techniques to include a robust capacity for intellectual waste management.

Hey, there may be some things of relative value in there, though. Who (except the historians of the future) can tell? Perhaps it's like that infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters theorem..Except that we are now dealing with around two billion . . . umm "monkey surrogates?" . .  and maybe about the same number of social media content input interface instances.

So yeah, it could take a quite a while before anything really valuable shows up.

Oh yeah, and what if the Ming Emperors, weary of many decades of costly maintenance, had opted for an ad-based funding model for the Great Wall of China? Just asking you to think about it.

Historians of the Future, Sorry About All My Photos Called DSC987234534.jpg or Whatever

I submit that social media content models, like living species, survive and compete by adapting to environmental and population pressures. The content-life-forms classified here as demolisticles suggest a lemming-like survival strategy that is not particularly effective and contributes little to the ecosystem as a whole.

To me, the interesting part is that, while broad appeal was often a critical success factor in pre-Internet publishing, recently social media have enabled content providers to realize a measure of popularity within very narrowly-scoped audience demographics. Such popularity does not emerge from intrinsic content value, but rather from specialized audience-specific references and relevance to a group identity.

40 Signs You Can Publish Any Old Crap Nowadays as Long as It's Well-Targeted 

Site Recommendation

Some to read online, some downloads, even some audio book links.

Open Culture Free Science Fiction Classics on the Web

Thoughts While Studying at Hanlin Academy Sent to My Colleagues at the Chi-Hsien Academy

At dawn I hasten toward the Purple Hall,
At dusk I await edicts from the Golden Gate.
I read book after book, scattering rare manuscripts all around.
I study antiquity to search for the ultimate essence.
Whenever I feel I understand a word,
I close my book and suddenly smile.
Black flies too easily defile the pure,
A lofty tune like "White Snow" finds few echoes.
By nature carefree and unrestrained,
I've often been rebuked for eccentricity.
When the cloudy sky becomes clear and bright,
I long for visits to woods and hills.
Sometimes when the cool breezes rise,
I'll lean on railings and whistle aloud.
Yen Kuang angled in his T'ung-lu Creek,
And Hsieh K'e climbed his Ling-hai Peak.
When I finish my task in this world,
I shall follow them and try my fishhook.

--Li Po (trans. Joseph J. Lee)

From Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry

Not to deny that Americans' political predispositions color their responses to issues raised in public policy, but I find this article's interpretation of research on attitudes toward government surveillance disturbingly shallow. 

First, it looks to me as though the overall percentages did not change much between 2006 and 2013. That is--the number of Americans opposed to government agencies snooping on them (regardless of their party) remained roughly the same. Similarly, the number of folks accepting the surveillance stayed about the same.

The article's characterization of the data as indicating a "virtually unyielding preference for partisanship over principle" seems purely a matter interpretation. Framed in another way, the data might be used to provoke interest in why the snooping-opposed faction tended to identify more as Democrat back in 2006 and more as Republican in 2013 (and vice versa). In that light, we should be grousing about our population's fixation on single-issue politics over party loyalty, or some such thing.

Second, a lot of variables underwent change between 2006 and 2013--not just the party of the US President. For one thing, the iPhone hit the market in 2007. Could it be that some folks just started becoming real introspective about government eavesdropping after realizing how much of their daily lives they were pumping through the aether with the mobile playthings they find so addictive?

I don't think the data this article cites means what they say it means.

NSA Confidential: We Love Big Brother If He's Got the Right Party Affiliation

This blog post propounds a seemingly effective rebuttal to Stephen Hawking's aliens-as-conquistadors scenario. But its fundamental point apparently boils down to "Extraterrestrials advanced enough to accomplish space exploration (and overwhelm us with their technological superiority) won't bother because of the lack of a demonstrable ROI."

Along the route to making this point, the author manages to stand up some straw man arguments against such ideas as "we're the only intelligent life in the universe" and "we'd make good subjects for scientific study."

For me, Hawking's scenario delivers a Pascal's Wager-like persuasive payload against which this blogger's dismissiveness is ineffective. Consider Pascal's thought with the concept of intelligent extraterrestrial life in place of divinity:

If I saw no signs of a divinity, I would fix myself in denial. If I saw everywhere the marks of a Creator, I would repose peacefully in faith. But seeing too much to deny Him, and too little to assure me, I am in a pitiful state, and I would wish a hundred times that if a god sustains nature it would reveal Him without ambiguity  Pensees

Would it not be a better wager for us in our "pitiful state" to accept a belief in the potential danger of advanced alien explorers than to assume that we can adequately calculate the economic disincentives to their putting Earth on their list of hostile takeover targets?

Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

I give it thumbs up, a green light, a full popcorn bag . . . whatever. Oblivion is an entertaining and well-put-together movie with a refrigerator-logic story line and a post-apocalypse setting. Visually, it is lovely. Its special effects are top-notch. Its pacing is near-perfect. Best of all: it's not a sequel, a reboot of an over-appreciated franchise, or an extended commercial for a video game.

Cruise offers up a workmanlike performance, which is appropriate considering he plays a futuristic drone-repairman-cum-soldier, Andrea Riseborough is seductive yet eerily unnatural as his nubile companion who, having "taken the red pill," prefers her Reality just as it appears, thank you very much. 

You have likely seen elements of this story in numerous other movies, but not as neatly and appealingly prepared, packaged, and presented. The appreciative viewer just needs to be a little more like Victoria ("I don't want to know . . .") than Jack, troubled by intrusive recollections of a history he does not understand. Who really cares if the recipes have been done elsewhere if  the meal is delicious nevertheless?

Oblivion (2013)

Graham Hancock may be wrong but his heart (and head) are in the right place. TED may be right (about Reality) but they seem to be doing it wrong.

I have been following with interest the controversy surrounding Graham Hancock's TED talk video and the TED officials' decision to remove it from their Youtube channel.

I have long appreciated Hancock's speculative non-fiction. His ideas may well turn out to be incorrect but they do not deserve to be "sequestered" simply because they are incompatible with the TED organization's apparently prevailing preference for a materialist agenda.

Of course, where TED is paying the bills they can do what they will with their properties. But in the much larger public space where they do not exert control they seem to be fomenting a massive Streisand Effect that weakens their reputation and diminishes their credibility.

Graham Hancock's post on Google+ contains numerous links that provide background and commentary on this matter for those interested.

Graham Hancock's G+ post on the TED controversy