Please join my very excellent contributors Mark Pringle @markpingle (Boundedly Rational Decision-Making under Certainty and Uncertainty: Some Reflections on Herbert Simon), Marco Novarese @mmarconov ((Simon’s (Lost?) Legacy in Agent-Based Computational Economics)), and myself @M_W_Q for a live Twitter chat about Herb Simon — to be conducted by @PalgraveEcon taking place on the 15th Feb at 8am PST & 4pm GMT.
. . . and hanging around in Nashville. It was 40 years ago (crikey!) that the early stirrings of Frampton Comes Alive! began it’s juggernaut domination of the charts. Thoroughly underrated (tarnished by the teen idol label) people seem to overlook that along with Jimmy Page, PF at 14 was possibly the youngest working serious musician on the scene. Part of the appeal of Frampton was I think that his music was upbeat and he was just a very assessible geezer whose success we were happy for. Somehow he lost his mojo symbolised by the parting of his beloved guitar, amazingly rescued from the wreck of a plane crash with which he was only reunited after 31 years — see last clip. And yes, PF is still up to the task of making good music — notably his last outing Thank You Mr. Churchill. And let’s not forget that it was his school chum a one Dave Jones that reinvogorated PF’s career as guitarist albeit on that immensely crap Glass Spider tour. And yes, Peter there are many of us who support your policy of keeping phone photos/recording fuckery to the first three songs — and that’s two songs too much.
Another notable birth (at least to me) on this date is Wilbur Scoville, the patron saint of chilli heads such as myself. Pleasantly surprised that Google is marking Wilbur’s birth: The Telegraph picks up from Google. Below is my 15 year old Robert Charles Chilli tie. I think I’ll have an extra lashing of Endorphin Rush (my daily) and some of my Dave’s Private Reserve 2000 (500,000 to 750,000 Scoville units).
Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon — published today.
John Gray reviews Dominic Johnson’s God Is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human. Though I haven’t read this book, based upon this review the title and the subtitle “How the Fear of God Makes Us Human” seem to be the wrong way round. Indeed, the main title seems superfluous. But first, Nicholas Taleb puts his two cents in.
From an evolutionary perspective, irrational belief isn’t an incidental flaw in human beings. It has made us what we are.
The irony of the new atheism is that it is pre-Darwinian. Making sense from the chaos of human events, religions provide something that science cannot offer, but which most people still desperately want. Accordingly, the new atheists have turned science into a religion: a gospel of enlightenment that can deliver the world from darkness. Possessed by this ersatz creed, which has all of the flaws of conventional religion and none of the saving graces, our crusading unbelievers are comically oblivious of their own need for faith.
In addition to checking out the Walker Percy documentary if you are a fan of the great man, please consider making a contribution to this project — all is explained in the video. This project expires in just over a week — it would be a crying shame if it doesn’t come to fruition. Come on folks — surely there are 100 hundred passionate Percy fans out there that could come up with, on average $197 each, to make this project happen.
“So that in the same moment one becomes victorious in science one also becomes victorious in love. And all for the good of mankind! Science to help all men and a happy joyous love to help women. We are speaking here of happiness, joy, music, spontaneity, you understand. Fortunately we have put behind us such unhappy things as pure versus impure love, sin versus virtue, and so forth. This love has its counterpart in scientific knowledge: it is neutral morally, abstractive and godlike—”
. . .
Who am I?
I am he who loves. I am in love. I love.
Who do you love?
You.
Who is “you”?
A girl.
What girl?
Any girl you please. You.
How can that be?
Because all girls are lovable and I love them all. I love you. I can make you happy and you me.
Only one thing can make you happy and it is not that
Love makes me happy. Knowing makes me happy.
Love is God, because God is love. Knowing God is knowing all things.
Love is not God. Love is music.
. . .
“Well, what is the purpose of life in a democratic society?”
“A democratic society?” I ask him, smiling.
“Sure. Isn’t it for each man to develop his potential to the fullest?”
“I suppose so.”
“What is your potential?”
“I don’t know, what?”
“Doc, you have two great potentials: a first-class mind and a heart full of love.”
“Yes.”
“So what do you do with them?”
“I don’t know, what?”
“Know and love, what else?”
“Yes.”
“And win at both.”
“Win?”
“Is there anything wrong with being victorious and happy? With curing patients, advancing science, loving women and making them happy?”
“No.”
“Use your talents, Doc. What do you know how to do?”
“I know how to use this.” I pick up the lapsometer.
“What can you do with that?”
“Make people happy.”
“Who do you love, Doc?”
“Women, knowing, music, and Early Times.”
“You’re all set, Doc. One last thing—”
“Yes?”
“Where is your crate of MOQUOLs?”
“In a safe place.”
“Let me have them. The situation is critical and I think we ought to get them in the right hands as soon as possible.”
“No. I’d better not. That is not part of our contract.”
“Why not?”
“They are dangerous. I can’t be too careful.”
“What dangers?”
“Physical and political dangers.”
Recent paper with open access co-authored by a doyen of stigmergy theorists, Guy Theraulaz. (H/T to Simon Garnier).
A nuanced and civil discussion with Glenn Loury and John McWhorter — the best discussion I’ve come across on this issue yet.
As ugly as a teenage millionaire pretending it’s a whizz kid world
You’ll take me aside, and say
“Well, David, what shall I do? They wait for me in the hallway”
I’ll say “don’t ask me, I don’t know any hallways”
But they move in numbers and they’ve got me in a corner
I feel like a group of one, no no they can’t do this to me
I’m not some piece of teenage wildlife
Bowie saw to fruition the promise of the Beatles’ A Day in The Life, transmuting the banality of popular music into high art. The touch paper for my interest in music coincided with Bowie sweeping away the prevailing musty blue-jeaned long-haired style of the day (Deep Purple and the like) AND along with the opening sequence (a second line with dirge and upbeat swing) featured in the Bond film Live and Let Die (July 1973), my interest in music was set for evermore.
Full report here and here and here and here.
That Arcade Fire and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band lead a commemorative parade for Bowie might seem incongruous — but it’s really not. New Orleans is a city that knows a thing or two about music (all music), theatricality and resisting the relentless homogeneity of life. Bowie contemplated being a jazz musician, encouraged by his elder half-brother Terry, who turned him onto music generally and jazz in particular: the saxophone was Bowie’s first instrument. But Bowie soon came to realize that he could “fake” it as a rock ‘n roller far better than he could as a jazz muso.
Beyond the seismic tremor (a metal fist in a velvet glove) of Ziggy Stardust, the first musically “exotic” of Bowie albums, Aladdin Sane (Ziggy sending postcards from a decadent America), forced the then teen fan into adult musical sophistication via the piano playing of Mike Garson. And so from ’71 to ’80 we went on a thrilling 11 year musical ride, deeply philosophical, literate and melodic, without ever being ham-fisted. Aside from the single Space Oddity (what 22 year old these days could come up with such classy lyricism), Bowie consistently found his voice in the muscularly grim The Man Who Sold the World, the “warm” despair of Hunky Dory, the dystopian nihilism of glam-trash Diamond Dogs, the painful psychosis of Station to Station, the beautifully bleak Low, and the Über modern “Lost in the Cosmos” Scary Monsters. (Young Americans, Heroes, Lodger and even Pinups gave me immense pleasure but weren’t, to me at least, as powerful as the aforementioned).
Back to Bowie and New Orleans. Garson has a lead role in Time, a dramatic burlesque-type song that fits well within New Orleans’ and Berlin’s cabaret traditions, and was actually written by Bowie while in New Orleans. The appeal of the theater of intimate decadence was continued by Bowie in the BBC’s production of Baal.
To my mind, while Louis Armstrong sits at the head of 20th Century music, an English kid from Brixton, is at his side joining James Booker, Gatemouth Brown, Levon Helm, Curtis Mayfield, and Frank Zappa. One might say that Bowie being commemorated in New Orleans is closing of the musical circle — at least to my mind.
And the rumour spread that I was aging fast . . . When God did take my logic for a ride
manwithoutqualities 