by Dave Maier Here’s a joke I remember from my childhood. A man takes a taxi. The fare comes to $9.63, so the passenger gives the driver nine dollars, two quarters, a dime, and three pennies. The driver looks at the money dubiously; whereupon the passenger asks “Isn’t that correct?” The driver’s answer: “It’s correct,…

by Dave Maier I haven’t commented on politics since the election, not least because I have no special expertise. But like lots of people, I spend too much time on the internet. When I fire up my iPad, it gives me several headlines. The Washington Post sends me a daily email with dozens of links.…

by Dave Maier I’ve tried a couple of times already, in this space, to make sense of the relations between sound, noise, and music. (See here and here) (also here). Here’s another chapter in that ongoing story. If music is the art of tone, and noise is not, then we need to understand how noise…

by Dave Maier If you’re a philosophical pragmatist, you spend a lot of your time checking out various philosophical tools. You’re also not so keen on (or: kind of obsessed about overcoming) the modern/Cartesian philosophical consensus concerning the conceptual dualism of subject and object. Taken together, this means that you are looking in particular at…

by Dave Maier As a philosophical term of art, pragmatism is a uniquely difficult to define. This is because pragmatists don’t care about essences or definitions, and when presented with apparent problems with this or that definition of pragmatism, they (we) are likely to shrug. Who cares what something is called, when what matters is…

by Dave Maier Fatale (Ed Brubaker, writer; Sean Phillips, artist) Once upon a time there were comic books about superheroes, which only juvenile delinquents read. Then there were graphic novels, which were respectable (and mostly not about superheroes). Comic books were still around, though, and it eventually became respectable to read them as well, if…

by Dave Maier This post started out as one about the mathematical question of whether 1 = 0.9999…, an issue which confuses a lot of people. This confusion shouldn’t be surprising, as it involves infinity; and if you’re not confused about infinity, then you probably don’t understand it. Unfortunately what I had to say about…

by Dave Maier It's that time of year again, when lists of all sorts start appearing everywhere you look. 2016 featured a *lot* of ambient, space, and other electronic releases, and only the hardiest of us got through more than a small fraction of it. I certainly didn't, anyway, so while our list (and accompanying…

by Dave Maier On the afternoon of Election Day, I was in the local library doing a particularly nasty jigsaw puzzle (I like to do them at the library, because they have such big tables there that you can spread out as much as you want), and I happened to overhear a conversation among a…

by Dave Maier I had not intended to return to the issue of marijuana legalization so soon after my last such post, but this will be my last post before the November election, and there are ballot initiatives about marijuana legalization in no fewer than nine states – four medical marijuana (Arkansas, Montana, Florida, and…

by Dave Maier Carolyn Ives Gilman’s 2015 novel Dark Orbit is intensely concerned with the extent to which reality outstrips or transcends our knowledge and/or sense perception. Indeed, the jacket copy tells us that one character’s “most difficult task may lie in persuading the crew that some powers lay [s/b “lie”?] beyond the boundaries of…

by Dave Maier Consider how difficult it has been to get Big Tobacco to admit that cigarette smoking is bad for you at all, let alone that it kills many thousands of people every year. In particular, you might remember that time when all the major executives swore under oath at Congressional hearings that cigarettes…

by Dave Maier It’s been a while since my last music post, but I have to admit that the impetus for this one was less that fact, or even the release of Star Trek: Beyond, than the fact that I have not (*cough*) progressed far enough in my reading (even after finishing several more books…

by Dave Maier As someone who lived through the surreal drug-war dystopia of the 1980s, I have always assumed that the collected forces behind it (right-wing authoritarianism, progressive nanny-statism, the law enforcement, private-prison, and Big Pharma lobbies, general aversion to other races and/or dirty f’ing hippies, inertia and lack of imagination, etc.) would render it…

by Dave Maier If you ever meet a guy who tells you that he is a skeptic, most likely he means that he doesn’t believe in angels or fairies or anything “metaphysical”. Maybe he is a member of CSICOP (the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, publishers of Skeptical Inquirer magazine). We…

by Dave Maier Math is pretty easy when you’re just starting out. You’re just adding and subtracting and multiplying and dividing. They might even let you use calculators, but even if they don’t, you’re just dealing with whole numbers, the kind you use when you’re counting on your fingers. (Sometimes they spring some newfangled versions…

by Dave Maier I don't usually watch the opening or closing ceremonies of the Olympics – I like to think of the Super Bowl halfime show as an aesthetic catastrophe uniquely American in nature – but I did see the Sochi closing ceremony, which celebrated Russian achievement in the arts. Or some of them, anyway.…

by Dave Maier Drones seem to be in the news lately, with much negative commentary. Now, I can understand those brought up on classical and pop music wanting harmonic movement in their music, but it's not like drones are a crime against humanity. In any case (Emily Litella to the white courtesy phone) I haven't…

by Dave Maier Last month in this space I discussed physicist Lawrence Krauss's suggestion that in advancing certain cosmological theories (concerning the early universe, dark matter, dark energy, and so on) he had thereby put to rest the age-old philosophical question “why is there something rather than nothing?”. I agreed for the most part with…

by Dave Maier Most philosophical chestnuts leave me cold. Their standard formulations usually have some confusion or preconception or equivocation in there somewhere, so that even when the original puzzle makes sense, the real philosophical action has moved on, often to places unrecognizable to the layman (for good or ill). Take the one about whether,…