(By saying rays impacted tree growth, the Beeb goes further than the data actually warrant. Cosmic rays are positively correlated with tree growth, but their effect may be negligible. It may be something else, also correlated with the rays, that has been affecting growth rates.)

The source paper is available here:

but a subscription is required to view more than the abstract.

On Sunday, I took some more photographs of the entropic balcony:

• viewed from the east
• viewed from the south

Now, if you'll look at the image of the balcony when viewed from the east, then you'll see that the south-eastern support post was attached to the balcony by way of a plate. The plate was affixed using two nails, one top and one bottom. I say was in each case because the displacement of the post has caused its nail to be pulled.

There is a passage[1] in Locke's Essay Concerning Humane Understanding of which I took special note from the first time that I read it:

5. That men should keep their compacts is certainly a great and undeniable rule in morality. But yet, if a Christian, who has the view of happiness and misery in another life, be asked why a man must keep his word, he will give this as a reason:—Because God, who has the power of eternal life and death, requires it of us. But if a Hobbist be asked why? he will answer:—Because the public requires it, and the Leviathan will punish you if you do not. And if one of the old philosophers had been asked, he would have answered:—Because it was dishonest, below the dignity of a man, and opposite to virtue, the highest perfection of human nature, to do otherwise.

The reason that this passage stood-out and stands-out for me is that it contains a fundamentally sympathetic statement of a godless morality, and indeed fairly clearly exhibits the parallel between the might of G_d making ostensible right for the Christian, and the might of the State making ostensible right for the Hobbsean.[2] Locke's philosophy, epistemological and ethical, is heavily informed by a belief in a loving G_d, yet here Locke seems to reveal sufficient subtlety to do rather well without that G_d.

There's another striking passage[3] in that same work:

50. If we look upon those superior beings above us, who enjoy perfect happiness, we shall have reason to judge that they are more steadily determined in their choice of good than we; and yet we have no reason to think they are less happy, or less free, than we are. And if it were fit for such poor finite creatures as we are to pronounce what infinite wisdom and goodness could do, I think we might say, that God himself cannot choose what is not good; the freedom of the Almighty hinders not his being determined by what is best.

51. A constant determination to a pursuit of happiness no abridgment of liberty. But to give a right view of this mistaken part of liberty let me ask,—Would any one be a changeling, because he is less determined by wise considerations than a wise man? Is it worth the name of freedom to be at liberty to play the fool, and draw shame and misery upon a man's self? If to break loose from the conduct of reason, and to want that restraint of examination and judgment which keeps us from choosing or doing the worse, be liberty, true liberty, madmen and fools are the only freemen: but yet, I think, nobody would choose to be mad for the sake of such liberty, but he that is mad already. The constant desire of happiness, and the constraint it puts upon us to act for it, nobody, I think, accounts an abridgment of liberty, or at least an abridgment of liberty to be complained of. God Almighty himself is under the necessity of being happy; and the more any intelligent being is so, the nearer is its approach to infinite perfection and happiness. That, in this state of ignorance, we short-sighted creatures might not mistake true felicity, we are endowed with a power to suspend any particular desire, and keep it from determining the will, and engaging us in action. This is standing still, where we are not sufficiently assured of the way: examination is consulting a guide. The determination of the will upon inquiry, is following the direction of that guide: and he that has a power to act or not to act, according as such determination directs, is a free agent: such determination abridges not that power wherein liberty consists. He that has his chains knocked off, and the prison doors set open to him, is perfectly at liberty, because he may either go or stay, as he best likes; though his preference be determined to stay, by the darkness of the night, or illness of the weather, or want of other lodging. He ceases not to be free; though the desire of some convenience to be had there absolutely determines his preference, and makes him stay in his prison.

Now, regardless of whether we agree that a being can be free and yet determined by something (not, as I believe, a contradiction if that something is internalized in the determined being), the fact remains that a G_d of this sort is more law-driven than many would conceive G_d to be.

Anyway, what brings all this to mind is that, lately, I have been reading (albeït in somewhat desultory manner) The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart. Chapter 15 (The Haunting) contains a section entitled Stopping Locke, which ends thus

Locke's vague conjecture that matter might be able to think, of course, is Spinoza's avowed doctrine. […] Leibniz's magesterial refutation of the founder of British empiricism, in brief, is a covert assault [Spinoza]. Furthermore, [in Leibniz's mind] Locke — like Descartes before him — is really just a feeble imitation of Spinoza: he leaves in doubt that which his dark master pitilessly destroys.

[…]

Leibniz's unstated intuition that Locke was something of a Spinozist, incidentally, is probably more insightful than is generally allowed in modern interpretations of the great empiricist's work. Locke wrote much of his Essay while living in exile in Holland from 1683 to 1688, during which time he purchased all of Spinoza's works and mingled in circles that included some suspiciously freethinking characters. Furthermore, the parallels between his work and that of Spinoza extend well beyond those suggested by Leibniz. To be sure, as a conciliation-minded member of the Christian establishment, Locke toned down or obfuscated some of the more radical implications of his Spinozism — a task for which his inimitably wobbly prose was particularly well suited.

I would hardly agree that Locke's prose were wobbly, let alone that it were inimitably so; in fact, I don't think that a person given to wobbly writing would be capable of the sort of perspicacious thinking that got Locke as far along as his did. But the point remains that some of what I noted in Locke, such as in the two paragraphs of the Essay that I quoted, demonstrates that Locke represented some of the same tendencies as did Spinoza. Any notion that Locke borrowed heavily from Spinoza would have to confront what was already indicated by Locke's background and writings before he fled to Holland (and, earlier, before Spinoza had published anything); none-the-less, it would hardly be surprising if Leibniz indeed feared that Locke were in effect an agent of Spinoza's philosophy.

---

[1] Book I Chapter II ¶5, in the 1894 edition edited by Alexander Campbell Fraser (which is the edition that I read).

[2] The Hobbsean will assert that the State makes possible a manner of living whose goodness is not itself derived from the dictates of the State. Many Christians would want to make a similar claim for the goodness of the manner of living made possible by G_d. However, if pressed, most of them would not answer as did Ευθύφρων in the fable by the old philosopher Πλάτων; rather, they would feel compelled to hold that not simply instances of goodness but the distinction of goodness were creäted by the power of G_d. But Locke himself proves an apparent exception to my characterization. (See above.)

[3] Book II Chapter XXI ¶50-1.

Meanwhile, zenicurean alerted me to

Up-Date (2020:10/06): The original link is no longer valid, but here are articles on the spider in the academic literature:

Now here's a nice bit of presumptuous silliness:

Mr Lundestad [secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee], however, hopes Americans take pride in the award as recognition of the much higher confidence in America in almost all parts of the world since Mr Obama was elected.

Imagine how the typical European would reäct to the claim that they should take pride when some European figure is given a pat on the back by a group of American conservatives or neo-conservatives.

If one is still trying to understand what the H_ll happened, one might find useful:

Years ago, core computing tasks were performed on shared mainframe computers, with individual users assigned terminal devices to communicate with the mainframe computer. Some of the terminals were smart, and able to enhance the interaction. Notably, the CTC Datapoint 2200 was in fact itself a programmable computer (in production five years before Steve Wozniak's Apple I), and was the direct ancestor of the x86 computers of to-day. But few of smart terminals themselves ran any code other than to provide interface for communication with the mainframe. (And the dumb terminals ran no applications.) There were efforts to get the general population using mainframes by way of terminals located in their homes, but these efforts enjoyed limited success.

Then the idea of personal computers caught hold, so that a large share of the population indeed computed at home or in the office. But the computing itself was primarily done at basically the same physical location as was the user. It was possible to add some communications hardware to the computer, and then use it as a terminal device, but most of the tasks that had previously been performed on a mainframe were now being performed locally.

When the 'Net came into wider use, some people started having the thought that perhaps it would be an advancement if principal computing tasks were moved onto the Internet, which is to say onto serving computers that were available by way of the 'Net. Unsurprisingly, I see this as a return to an earlier, previously unpopular model.

Now, sometimes, changes in an infrastructure can breathe new life into essentially older technologies; and one shouldn't reject this idea of moving back to locating core computing on remote machines simply because we had previously reduced its relative use. But I find it a signally unappealing idea, because it removes the independence of personal computing. I very much like the fact that I can do everything without communicating except communication itself. I have local applications for text processing and for type-setting, for multimedia generation, for mathematical analysis, and for programming. For these things, I don't have to rely upon a connection to the 'Net nor upon someone's server.

While there are some tasks that might be better performed by a network of distributed service, there is no particular reason for handing responsibility to such a network for mundane tasks that users could easily be performing with local equipment. And the introduction of the opaque buzzword cloud to refer to distributed service on the Internet does nothing but get my back up.

Anyway, I was prompted to ventilate by this story:

T-Mobile Sidekick users have had things such as contact information and photos stored on the cloud, which in this case is to say some servers that T-Mobile has leased from a division of Microsoft, which division is aptly named Microsoft/Danger. Well, the servers weren't properly backed-up, they crashed, and most or all that they held is just … gone.

[Up-Date (2009:10/15): Microsoft has now largely reversed itself, declaring we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way.]

The Woman of Interest alerts me to reports that Marge Simpson is to appear on the cover of the November issue of Playboy.

To see Elmer Fudd in drag, watch The Big Snooze (1946, directed by the egregious Robert Clampett).

The short-term result of the Nobel Committee giving the Peace Prize to President Obama will probably be to increase his political capital in some amount (in a context where polls shows his domestic approval trending downward and at or below 50%). In the long-run, this award will prove damaging to popular American perceptions both of Europe and of the Democratic Party.

American perceptions of Europe will suffer, because the only distinctive objectives had by President Obama which enjoy majority support are objectives at which he will not succeed. And American perceptions of the Democratic Party will suffer because it will be seen not simply as seeking the wrong things but as doing so in alliance with alien forces.

Very shrewd. The real result of this demand will be to make it more difficult for states to agree to limit emissions, which in turn will allow the Saudis to sell more petroleum. (Nor will they take much blame for failure to reach agreement, as that would interfere with Yank-bashing.)

While Franken has at times resorted to worse intellectual dishonesty than in this case he exposes, here he is right on the mark. As Franken's line of questioning and the answer that it elicts show, the statistic in question tells us virtually nothing about whether the outcomes of arbitration would be considered equally or more favorable to employees than are the outcomes of litigation. It is, in other words, a garbage statistic.

Firms are entitled to require arbitration as a condition of doing business with them, but those who deal with these firms are likewise entitled to require that there be no such imposition as their own condition of doing business.