Moorings
Brancaster Staithe in North Norfolk last Friday evening.
Quote of the Day
From a blog post by Paul Krugman about Trump’s worsening delusionism: a quote from George Orwell.
”We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Abide With Me | Charles Lloyd
One of my favourite hymns, reimagined.
Long Read of the Day
The Revolution Will Arrive on Time: Why Mamdani’s Fast Bus Socialism Is More Radical Than You Think
This essay by Nathan Newman about a campaign proposal by Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York in the forthcoming election, is interesting because it challenges the lens through which most of us think of cars and cities.
Mamdani has announced a plan to take back a chunk of the public property called streets to speed up buses by dedicating more lanes to public transit, reclaiming kerb space from private parking, and giving priority to people over cars. This is revolutionary, says Newman, because it means the city treating its street real estate as something to be managed for the public good (moving the most people in the most efficient way), rather than as a private good where individual car owners reign.
You can hear the screams of car-owners from here.
City streets may be publicly owned on paper, but in practice they’ve been given over to a car-driving minority – usually free of charge – while the non-driving majority fights over sidewalk scraps. New York’s 6,300 miles of roads include around 19,000 lane-miles for driving and a staggering 3 million free on-street parking spaces. By design, all of this street space is devoted to moving or storing cars, even though less than a third of New Yorkers commute by car. Meanwhile, truly public uses of streets – like dedicated bus lanes, bike lanes, and pedestrian space – remain microscopic slivers of the pie (e.g. bus lanes are \<0.1% of street area). In short, generations of policy have handed over priceless public land to the private automobile, free riders literally and figuratively, while straphangers and pedestrians get crumbs.
I read this on an electric bus in Cambridge yesterday afternoon that was inching — and I mean inching — its way along a Grange Road that was jammed with near-stationary cars, most of which contained a single individual.
Worth your time.
My commonplace booklet
Either way, ‘academic freedom’ is one of the great misnomers; for it always involves disciplined and accountable speech. This is one of the great implied, original lessons from Thomas Kuhn’s account of science back in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. All science is disciplined by general norms of intellectual life (including the norm against deception and lying) and by ones particular to a given scientific field (involving accepted standards of rigor, of citation practices, of how to present graphics and data, of authorship protocols, of ethics approval, etc.)
As an aside, of course, these norms of disciplined academic speech are never quite stable. For example, at the moment, thanks to the widespread availability of cheap and computationally powerful AI, we’re clearly in a period of norm transition. The AI apparatus fails to give proper credit to the sources in the training data, and it is also used by academics in ways that would have been censured not so long ago.
Eric Schleisser, writing in Crooked Timber.
Linkblog
- Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
Many moons ago I was captivated by a book — The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees — by Karl von Frisch, in which he described how honey bees communicate directions to feeding places by dancing. I remember finding it hard to imagine how that was accomplished. Imagine my delight, then, to come on a fabulous video made by researchers at the Georgia Tech College of Computing who reproduced von Frisch’s experiments. It’s seven blissful minutes long.
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