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Greg Proops presents a BBC review of Kerouac’s influential 1957 book, with interviews with the survivors. (The 127 foot continuous roll manuscript was real, auctioned recently, but being the product of the single benzedrine trip is apocryphal, apparently – several edits too before publication, already ten years old when first pubished. Interesting that Jack was a misunderstood US patriot despite close association with Ginsberg and Burroughs before the book, and King of the Beats afterwards during the peace, love and revolution of the 60’s. Drove him to drink and death. What’s so funny ’bout …)

Plenty more TEDTalks here.

Including the delicious Erin McKean. Next time someone quotes a dictionary definition at me as part of an argument, I will be pointing them at this one.

And given that I’ve recently reported on reading “Breaking The Spell”, here is a link to Dan Dennett speaking on dangerous memes – ideas to die for. Just a fluke 😉  and on religions as natural phenomena.

And lots more; E.O.Wilson, Steven Pinker – and Eddi Reader sings too.

This is from 2005 but a good excuse to update the link to TED.

RTFM

Think I’ve seen this before, but picked-up this link from Anecdote.

…. well,  to fill the turbine hall anyway ?

A minor variation on the previous Zen-Minimalist known as Moonlight, with upper-case capitalisation restored, and with the header, footer and extensive side-bar links restored.

Phew !

Ooops sorry folks, I seem to have an error with my template – lost most of my header and side-bar information. Unfortunately I’m on my travels, so it will be next weekend before I can fix.

As you will have noticed I’m a big fan of the BBC, and regularly pick-up stories from there, as well as referring to Melvyn Bragg’s incomparable “In Our Time” series. I only recently came across Laurie Taylor’s “Thinking Allowed” series on social science subjects, and I’ve been listening to old editions. Too many good topics to list.

Today I saw this news story and listened to this edition of “Thinking Allowed” from 20th June this year. The importance of alcohol (and other stimulants) to intellectual endeavours of times past and present was interesting enough, the association of beer with agricultural settlement too, and the unlikely British accented Felipe Fernandez-Armesto bemoaning  sherry being forbidden at student tutorials at Tufts in the US positively surreal.

The Bavarian Oktober-(well September to avoid beer during Ramadan)-Fest in a Palestinian West-Bank village was heartwarming enough but this quote especially interesting …

At one point, a young man who has come from Ramallah confides to me that he is a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant offshoot of the Fatah faction.

This shy young man tells me why he – a Christian – wanted to join the quasi-Islamist group, branded a terrorist organisation by Israel and its allies for a string of suicide bombings in Israeli cities.

Then he looks down at the glass of beer in his hand, and around at the smiling crowds, and says it is the first day he has been truly happy for many years.

Same day as this happens of course. Slow progress.

Couldn’t resist commenting on this post on Joel Martin’s blog “Insights into Cultural Understanding“. Thanks for the reciprocal link Joel.

I’m reading Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell” at the moment.

I’ve made it clear I’m a fan of Dennett as a pragmatic philosopher, unlike Dawkins as an unreconstructed logical-positivist reductive-determinist scientist. Their language and quality of argument are chalk and cheese. “Breaking the Spell” is explicitly an argument against god and religion aimed at an American Christian audience. That said the chapter “Belief in Belief” reads philosophically like the final word in epistemology and ontology generally – it really does.

Interestingly he concludes said chapter with the conclusion of his earlier work “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”.

Should Spinoza be counted as an atheist or a pantheist? He saw the glory of nature and then saw a way of eliminating the middle-man! As I said at the end of my earlier book :

“The tree of life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but is actual, and if it is not Anselm’s “Being greater than which nothing can be conceived” it is surely a being that is greater in detail than anything any of us will ever conceive in detail worthy of its detail. Is it something sacred ? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. The world is sacred.

And in summary :

“The belief that belief in God is so important that it must not be subjected to the risks of disconfirmation or serious criticism has led the devout to “save” their beliefs by making them incomprehensible even to themselves. The result is that even [those that profess belief] don’t really know what they are professing. This makes the goal of either proving or disproving God’s existence a quixotic quest – but also for that reason not very important.”

The real debate starts with the value of believing in God, despite that.