The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.At The Paris Review, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi parses the opening ceremony of the London Games and finds it to be a semiotic mess — a jumble of signifiers never exceeding haphazard pastiche. We should have expected no less, he argues, as its director, Danny Boyle, has always shown himself, as a filmmaker, to be more of an “executive technician” than an artist of coherent vision. The erraticism of the opening ceremony — indeed, its mild insanity — follows from the striking inconsistency (in many senses) of his oeuvre: Boyle’s films range from the high of “Trainspotting” to the (very) low of “Sunshine,” with the treacly, manipulative “Slumdog Millionaire” falling somewhere in between.  The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.  Guns Might Kill People After All: Evan Selinger examines the old gun lobby saw, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” at The Atlantic. Philosophers call the sort of view of technology it embodies instrumentalism: technologies can be used as instruments to any end subjects choose to put them — in the case of guns: shooting tin cans, hammering nails, or killing people, among many other uses — but they are in themselves neutral. Selinger expounds on the trouble with this position: “By equating firearm responsibility exclusively with human choice, the N.R.A. claim abstracts away relevant considerations about how gun possession can affect one’s sense of self and agency.” In the words of French philosopher Bruno Latour, “You are different with a gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you.”  Automating Humor: At his blog, Zach Weinersmith considers the possibility of an algorithmic joke generator. He begins with some very entertaining evolutionary speculations — it’s not clear how literally we should take them — that show why the following principle should be true of us humans:  Confusion —> Understanding —> Pleasure (CUP)  From here he goes on to discuss and refine the principle, relating it to humor and the “one-liner” joke. Finally, he considers some formal rules that might be fit to generate these one-liners mechanically. It should be said, this post is highly speculative. But it is equally captivating.  At The New Statesman, a discussion of the relation between existence and the Internet.  A rumination on Barack Obama’s recent utterance, “You didn’t build that,” at The Washington Post.  At The Guardian, a review of Michael Foley’s “Embracing the Ordinary.”  Crooked Timber posts a revealing graph of the relation between how great a sport is and how much it belongs at the Olympics.  And finally, at Three Quarks Daily, a video clip of Gore Vidal sparring with William Buckley. The term “pro-crypto-Nazi” — presumably minted for the occasion — turns up.
In this week's links: A confused opening to the London Games; how to write joke algorithms; and an inquiry to the nature of guns.