Pope, Not-Yet-Easter 2013

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More on Philip Roth

February 1st, 2013

Philip Roth

Philip Roth: Unmasked

American Masters explores the life and career of Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novelist Philip Roth, often referred to as the greatest living American writer. Reclusive and diffident, Roth grants very few interviews, but for the first time, allowed a journalist to spend 10 days interviewing him on camera.

The result is Philip Roth: Unmasked, a 90-minute documentary that features Roth freely discussing very intimate aspects of his life and art as he has never done before. The film has its world theatrical premiere March 13-19 for one week only at Film Forum in New York City and premieres nationally Friday, March 29 on PBS (check local listings) in honor of Roth’s 80th birthday.

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Philip Roth on PBS

My local public TV station will air a program on Philip Roth at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time today, Good Friday. I am looking forward to this program. (I live close to Roth's home town Newark, New Jersey.)
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Ronald Dworkin on Atheism and Religion

This is an interesting essay: Ronald Dworkin, Religion without God New York Review of Books (April 4 [sic], 2013).

The New York Review's blurb states: "Before he died on February 14, Ronald Dworkin sent to The New York Review a text of his new book, Religion Without God, to be published by Harvard University Press later this year. We publish here an excerpt from the first chapter."
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Early Morning in Liberty Park

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President Obama and Political Hackery

President Obama is sometimes a person of extraordinary gifts. For example, his recent talk to students in Jerusalem was eloquent, wise, and humane. But sometimes Obama is a creature of pure expedience. See his endorsement of Mayor Jerramiah Healy of Jersey City. This endorsement is truly appalling. Healy is a tawdry political hack.

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Meister des Hausbuches (1475)

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President Obama's (Semi-)Secret Global Warfare

This op-ed piece discusses Obama's secret and semi-secret use of drone warfare around the world: Mary L. Dudziak, Obama's Nixonian Precedent, NYTimes (March 21, 2013).

Ms. Dudziak concludes, "The Cambodia bombing, far from providing a valuable precedent for today’s counterterrorism campaign, illustrates the trouble with secrecy: It doesn’t work."
I would have thought that the bigger problem is the possible illegality of secret drone warfare around the world.
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John Sexton

Although I personally very much dislike the "superstar" system that President Sexton apparently has run at NYU - faculty superstars, so-called, get paid a lot more than "ordinary" faculty members - I find it hard to sympathize with the NYU arts & science faculty's vote of no confidence in him. Sexton has done an awful lot to make NYU one of the world's leading universities.

Your opinion?

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Rand Paul II

Rand Paul lecture on foreign policy
See also Douthat on Rand Paul..
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Hero Worship

Hero worship reminiscent of that for Josef Stalin.
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Rand Paul, Drones, U.S. Citizens, and Due Process

Rand Paul defends due process for U.S. "noncombatants" (citizens) on U.S. soil. 

See C-Span.

Rand Paul for President?
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USA SCIENCE & ENGINEERING FESTIVAL – ROLE MODELS IN SCIENCE & ENGINEERING ACHIEVEMENT

Lofti Asker Zadeh

Lotfi Asker Zadeh -- Computer Scientist and Mathematician

The Father of the scientific concept,"Fuzzy Logic", as well as "Fuzzy Sets" and "Fuzzy Systems"

You've likely heard of the term "Fuzzy Logic", or "Fuzzy Mathematics". But despite what their names may imply, there is nothing inexact about these scientific concepts were formulated, says Lotfi Asker Zadeh, the famous UC Berkeley University mathematician and computer scientist who coined the names of these theories and spent a career advancing their applications.

Known as "The Father of Fuzzy Logic",Lotfi was born in 1921 in Baku, Soviet Azerbaijan to an Iranian father (a journalist) and a Russian mother (a pediatrician). In 1931, when Zadeh was ten years old, he moved with his family to Tehran, Iran where he was enrolled in Alborz College (an American-run Presbyterian school), where he was educated for the next eight years. In 1942, he graduated from the University of Tehran with a degree in electrical engineering and emigrated to the U.S. the following year, enrolling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Why He's Important: While a professor and scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, he published his seminal work on "Fuzzy Sets" in 1965 in which he detailed the mathematics of what he called the Fuzzy Set Theory. In 1973, he formally proposed his theory of "Fuzzy Logic", which, based on precise formulas, began allowing scientists, mathematicians and others to make accurate, realistic research data decisions when working in environments of incomplete information, uncertainty and imprecision. Fuzzy Logic does this by allowing for approximate values and inferences as well as for incomplete or ambiguous data (fuzzy data) -- instead of relying solely on crisp data (binary yes/no choices).

Other Achievements: Fuzzy Logic and his Fuzzy Set theory in general have been applied to numerous fields – from computer technology and control theory to artificial intelligence. Lotfi is also credited, along with John Ragazzini in 1952 with pioneering the development of the z-transform method in discrete time signal processing and analysis. These methods are now standard in digital signal processing, digital control, and other discrete-time systems used in industry and research. His latest work includes computing with words and perceptions.
Education: Lotfi received his Master's degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1946, and his Ph.D in the same discipline from Columbia University where he taught for 10 years before joining UC Berkeley in 1959.

In His Own Words: Commenting how he came up with the name "Fuzzy Logic," he says: "I decided on the word 'fuzzy' because I felt it most accurately described what was going on in the theory. I could have chosen another term that would have been more 'respectable'. For instance, I had thought about using the word 'soft', but that really didn't describe accurately what I had in mind. Nor did 'unsharp', 'blurred', or 'elastic'. In the end, I couldn't think of anything more accurate so I settled on "'fuzzy'".

At age 92, Dr. Zadeh still remains active in his field. He serves as an editor of the International Journal of Computational Cognition, and his website at UC Berkeley lists him as Professor in the Graduate School of Computer Science. In addition, his Facebook page reports that he still goes to his office at UC Berkeley everyday whenever he is not out of town at national or international professional conferences.

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Infrared Andromeda

Ain't nature magnificent?

ESA/Herschel/PACS/SPIRE/J.Fritz, U.Gent/XMM-Newton/EPIC/W. Pietsch, MPE

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Robust Conversation

Some politicians (and some other people too) are wont to say, now and then, that the public should "have a conversation" about this or that issue. But most political talk is not much like a dinner conversation; most of it is much more like an argument. People who agree about fundamentals have conversations. The rest of us have arguments (unless we keep quiet).  &&& The dynamic evidence page

An Interesting Meditation on Pope Benedict XVI

Ross Douthat, The Ratzinger Legacy NYTimes (March 2, 2013):

It was the work of Ratzinger’s subsequent career, first as John Paul II’s doctrinal policeman and then as his successor, to re-establish where Catholicism actually stood. This was mostly a project of reassertion: yes, the church still believes in the Resurrection, the Trinity and the Virgin birth. Yes, the church still opposes abortion, divorce, sex outside of marriage. Yes, the church still considers itself the one true faith. And yes — this above all, for a man whose chief gifts were intellectual — the church believes that its doctrines are compatible with reason, scholarship and science.

[snip, snip]

[Ratzinger] did stabilize Catholicism, especially in America, to an extent that was far from inevitable 40 years ago. The church’s civil wars continued, but without producing major schisms. Mass attendance stopped its plunge and gradually leveled off, holding up even during some of the worst sex abuse revelations. Vocations likewise stabilized, and both ordinations and interest in religious life have actually risen modestly over the last decade. Today’s American Catholics, while deeply divided, are more favorably disposed to both the pope emeritus and the current direction of the church than press coverage sometimes suggests.

[snip, snip]

But for all of Catholicism’s problems, the Christian denominations that did not have a Ratzinger — those churches that persisted in the spirit of the 1970s and didn’t reassert a doctrinal core — have generally fared worse. There are millions of lapsed Catholics, but the church still has a higher retention rate by far than most mainline Protestant denominations. Indeed, it is difficult to pick out a major religious body where the progressive course urged by so many of Ratzinger’s critics has increased vitality and growth.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t some further version of reform, some unexpected synthesis of tradition and innovation, that would serve Catholicism well. And if such a path exists, Pope Benedict was probably not the leader to find it.

But he helped ensure that something recognizable as Catholic Christianity would survive into the third millennium. For one man, one lifetime, that was enough.

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Mubarak and Morsi

Mubarak is set to be retried. See Retrial of Egypt's Mubarak and sons set for April 13 Will Morsi eventually end up where Mubarak did?



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One of the glories of British journalism...

One of the perennial glories of British journalism is the capacity to take old news and give it new life by discovering it all over again. Such was the case on the front page of today's Daily Telegraph, which claims to have found that "Iranhas activated the Arak heavy-water production plant" that in fact started operations in 2004, and was formally opened by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.

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Goodbye to Academia

I enjoy watching, on C-Span, the authors who say they had to leave academia to do the thinking and writing they wanted to do. (Of course, the authors who appear on C-Span are those who managed to make a go of it: we are witnessing a kind of victor's history.) &&& The dynamic evidence page