Vom Funkturm / From the Radio Tower

A few pictures from a recent trip to New York City and Boston are now up on my deviantART page.

BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix program had three amazing DJ sets this past fall: Boys Noize, DJ Mehdi & Busy P, and The Twelves. I saw both Boys Noize and Busy P in Zurich this year and their Essential Mixes nicely capture their respective talents. (The first half of DJ Mehdi & Busy P’s Essential Mix — the one DJ Mehdi was responsible for — can be skipped though.) I’ve never seen The Twelves, but hearing their Essential Mix makes me hope they’ll visit my neck of the woods soon.

Also, Busy P’s mix features the A-Trak remix of YYY’s “Heads Will Roll”, which I wasn’t familiar with before. Now I realized that there are quite a few remixes of that song, the best of which are, in my opinion, those by Passion Pit and DIGIRAATII.

Enjoy!

On Wednesday, I was given the opportunity to give a reply to a talk by Peter Meyer on the evolutionary background of violence at the 8th Dialogue on Science on “Violence in Human Society” at the Academia Engelberg. Videos of Meyer’s talk and my reply are available here; a direct link to my video can be found here. Furthermore, I’m blogging about the conference (in German) here.

This and seven more pictures from Budapest.

From the latest New Yorker (well the latest that arrived in my mail anyway):

“Well, it’s as we suspected—twelve inches equals a foot.”

Very funny:

(Via Farhang Erfani at Continental Philosophy.)

I was in Venice over the weekend and uploaded some of the pictures I took to my deviantART page. Alas, I was too lazy to find any original titles for them. The new pictures start with this one.

The 2008 update of The Philosophical Lexicon includes an entry inspired by Ayn Rand. Alas, one that isn’t very favorable to her polemical style (and to some degree her overall system of thought with its tendencies to over-psychologize things, I suppose):

rand, n. An angry tirade occasioned by mistaking philosophical disagreement for a personal attack and/or evidence of unspeakable moral corruption. “When I questioned his second premise, he flew into a rand.” Also, to attack or stigmatise through a rand. “When I defended socialised medicine, I was randed as a communist.”

(Via Leiter Reports.)

MCLA has an intriguing post up over at Strange Blue Planet in response to my “Consent and Coercion: The Power of Stockholm Syndrome“. MCLA makes the following provocative pronouncement: “Human society as we know it is Stockholm syndrome at a gigantic scale.”

To back up this claim MCLA mentions several institutions and social facts where the mechanisms of Stockholm syndrome might be at work. While I don’t fully agree with all the points made, the post is still an engaging read. Check it out!