Times notes

Of note in today's Times:

* Henry Louis Gates is a repeat victim of high-profile racial profiling, says Stanley Fish. It happened at Duke ("the plantation") years ago. If the police entered my home under the same circumstances I might very well find myself taking a belligerent stance, too, and decline to produce identification immediately upon demand.

* Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man

“Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.”

The Kurzweil version of technological utopia has captured imaginations in Silicon Valley. This summer an organization called the Singularity University began offering courses to prepare a “cadre” to shape the advances and help society cope with the ramifications.

I taught "Biotechnology and Ethics" last year, we read and discussed "the Singularity." Like other unthinkable things, it may not happen... or it may not happen when Ray Kurzweil and others think it will. But neither is it a mere sci-fi fantasy. Kurzweil may be crazy but he's now on the radar of serious and sober people. We'd better be thinking about how to "cope."

* Dr. George Tiller is only the latest in a long line of tragic victims assaulted or murdered by lunatics who've been stoked by right-wing talk radio hate speech, as Bill Moyers documents. Those of us who preach tolerance must recognize its limits: we must not give the hate-mongers (including all those fairly unbalanced Fox shills) a free pass. They devalue free speech.

* And more happily, it was a pleasure watching the Hall of Fame induction ceremony this afternoon. The Henderson and Rice induction speeches were not that impressive, clearly having been ghosted. But as usual the so-called second-tier inductees stole the show. Joe Gordon's daughter touchingly observed that her Dad, who'd not had a proper funeral, had at last reached his final resting place. Tony Kubek, another warm Voice of the Game from my youth, garrulous as ever, took me back to all those Games of the Week. He and Curt Gowdy were the only game in town, in those pre-ESPN/-Fox Sports days.

Gotta get back to Cooperstown. Mark it: July 25, 2010.