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Blogging still a bit sporadic since the move to the US, something to do with the new domestic habits as much as anything else.

Reading habits are mainly bedtime or when sitting in the countryside during a weekend picnic or evening sunset, though it’s starting to get too cold for the latter.

After concluding Rand, I went onto Machiavelli’s Prince and was a bit disappointed, perhaps the exploits of the Borgia’s just seem tame these days 😉

Been enjoying Dostoevsky’s Karamazov Brothers, finding lots of quotable passages, though still somewhere like a third to go.

To catch up on a couple of must-read references I’ve skipped over earlier, I recently acquired ..
Wittgenstein – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations
J S Mill – On Liberty, The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism

Reading the preambles and intros, original and new and skimming their content, they appear to be what the doctor ordered. Dismayed to find that “PI” looks like the most difficult read of the bunch.

Whenever I do get to browse favourite blogs, I seem to get hooked on the YouTube finds of Bifurcated Rivets. Addictive stuff.

In other places I’ve been active on MoQ-Discuss and Friends of Wisdom recently. Took the trouble to read Nick Maxwell’s autobiographical piece earlier today. Sounds familiar ? Taking up where Popper left off put me in mind if David Deutsch.

Two great links from Sam. One on disproportionate condemnation of Israel in the “mid-east-problem” context, the other on neo-con politics via Chris Locke.

 Both feature extended video links of BBC documentaries.

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Ian Clifford
Toronto

I suggested in a recent Friends of Wisdom thread, that  I didn’t really “care” whether global warming was caused by human activity, nor even whether it was “real”. The answer to neither question changes my belief that we should be concerned enough to work out what to do in response to the facts.

That is, we can learn from history, but not in simple “we did that and caused this, therefore if we do this we can achieve that” kinda ways. Life’s just complicated enough. 

Anyway, at first glance, this graph (linked also via Jorn) looks like a pretty random distribution of historical temperature fluctuations …. until you notice the right end of the graph has years as it’s time axis, and the left has hundreds of thousands of years. No idea how good the source data or its representation are, or even whether the western equatorial pacific temperature is a representative data point, but the graph is indeed scary. It’s 400,000 years since we had a period with average temperatures like the last 5 years, and for the last 100 years we’ve been 2 or 3 standard deviations higher than the long time average for the last 1,350,000 years, a period covering several ice-ages and retreats !!!

Plenty of caveats about the distortion of a graph with such a skewed distribution of data points and axes, but it still certainly seems significant.

Great link from Jorn to a Wikipedia page on Cognitive Biases. Doesn’t include the “halo effect”, but plenty of variations on that and a lot more besides. Naturally I think it’s a good page, but I’m not biased, no honestly …

Georganna Hancock at Writer’s Edge captures this simple piece of advice from Barbara Samuel on how setting detail contributes to the quality of a novel. Worth remembering.

Is all philosophy and religion are about says Jorn of “Values and Choice“.

Philosophy and religion necessarily gravitate to the extremes of a middle-ground that naturally exists. I like it.

I referred earlier to re-discovering the “myxobacter” example of simple bacteria performing some amazing feats when acting acting in unison, as an example of “emergence” of unpredictably “intelligent” phenomena from complex systems of simple units.

Well, here Johnnie Moore picks up a link to another example – cholera bacteria reaching a “quorum” before “deciding” to release toxins. Equally relevant to my agenda is Johnnie’s point in linking to the piece – the self-doubt of Bonnie Bassler, the scientist involved in the work.

Updated my gallery with some photos taken at yesterday’s “Trail of Tears” motorcycle rally, (some 10,000 bikes, up to 200 per minute for almost an hour) which follows part of the route from Ross Landing (in Chattanooga, TN) to Waterloo (beyond Florence, AL), taken in 1838 by Cherokee Indians en route to being deported the other side of the Mississippi. It comemorates a particularly sad piece of history because for some three generations or more they had been living in relative harmony amongst the European settlers, trapping and trading, and even taking on homestead life-styles, before civil wars amongst those indian tribes rejecting the expansion of white-men into their lands, led to congress taking action.

The route to the Mississippi used the Tennessee River, except for the section through what is now Huntsville, beyond the shallows at Muscle Shoals, round which they were marched during time of drought, many to their deaths.

Reading the Lenny Susskind / Lee Smolin anthropic principle debate at The Edge, I noticed Susskind opens with this no-win disclaimer …

The problem is that the easiest ideas to explain, which sound convincing to a general audience, are not always the best ideas.