Saturday, 30 January 2010
I am not a great painter. I am not dead. There are significant differences between Oskar Kokoschka and myself, yet I must understand him if I am to understand myself.
29 JANUARY 2010 – Not all climatologists seek the truth about global warming in comfortable university labs. Some look for evidence of desertification in the field. A dry, dusty, rocky field – in fact, something like a desert. According to an AP dispatch in the Washington Post: Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called for [...]
Not all climatologists seek the truth about global warming in comfortable university labs. Some look for evidence of desertification in the field.
19 JANUARY 2010 – Today is the anniversary of the birth, in 1798, of Auguste Comte. Comte had little use for journalists – ironic, since it was a class of British “higher” journalists, led by Lewes, Morley and Harrison, who elevated the odd and nearly-unreadable French philosopher to everlasting prominence. And he is still in the news today.
Comte had little use for journalists – ironic, since it was 19th century British “higher” journalists, led by Fortnightly stalwarts Lewes, Morley and Harrison, who elevated the odd and nearly-unreadable French philosopher to everlasting prominence.
Saturday, 16 January 2010
11 OCTOBER 2009 – After being diagnosed as “comatose” 23 years ago, doctors finally get it right: He was paralyzed. From The Daily Telegraph: Doctors and nurses deemed him a hopeless case whereby his consciousness was considered “extinct”…When he woke up after the accident he had lost control of his body. “I screamed, but there [...]
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Saturday, 16 January 2010
14 JANUARY 2010 – One of the favorite devices used by political scientists of the literal variety is the “doomsday” clock. According to the Telegraph, they’re resetting the thing today. In view of the rest of the news, especially in Haiti, this overtly political pseudo-scientific gesture seems even more trivial than usual. Nevertheless, if you [...]
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Thursday, 14 January 2010
The world, this one anyway, is going to end. But when and how is the anybody’s-guess part.
Thursday, 14 January 2010
Anthony O’Hear: One of philosophy’s longest known but best concealed secrets is that science itself is, in a certain sense, irrational. Its irrationality derives from the fact that scientific knowledge, if we have any, depends on the assumption that the universe is ordered, at least to the extent that things we have observed and discovered in the past are a good guide to the future we have not yet experienced.
George Henry Lewes: In the struggle of life with the facts of existence, Science is a bringer of aid; in the struggle of the soul with the mystery of existence, Science is a bringer of light. As doctrine and discipline its beneficence is far-reaching. Yet this latest-born of the three great agents of civilisation—Religion, Common-Sense, and Science—is so little appreciated by the world at large that even men of culture may still be found who boast of their indifference to it, while others regard it with a vague dread which expresses itself in a dislike, sometimes sharpened into hatred. [This article is published with an attached comment by P. Anderson-Morshead.]
Comte at 212.
19 JANUARY 2010 – Today is the anniversary of the birth, in 1798, of Auguste Comte. Comte had little use for journalists – ironic, since it was a class of British “higher” journalists, led by Lewes, Morley and Harrison, who elevated the odd and nearly-unreadable French philosopher to everlasting prominence. And he is still in [...]