Falling in Triplicate

I was about to write up this “spooky” synchronicity when there were just the two items linked by coincidence, but now we are three.

Someone (who shall remain nameless) used the phrase “falling from (my) grace” in an e-mail to me today and, when I hit the CD button in the car on the way home from the office, the next track (on Muse’s Absolution CD, already part-way through in the player) was the track Absolution. Singing along at the top of my voice as one does, imagine my surprise when I found my self innunciating the line “Falling from your grace”.

Not surprising therefore that I remarked on a character in the film “Monsoon Wedding” speaking the line “I seem to have fallen from your grace.”

Of course such “synchronicities” say as much about how our consciousness works as anything else, but the irony is that Matt Bellamy, leader and lyricist with Muse, is a conspiracy theorist of the highest order in his lyrics and publicly expressed opinions. Which is a pity because he has a way with both words and sounds, and an interest in the things that matter, even if he’s a little short on wisdom. There is time and I hold out hope on that score.

Lack of Imagination

Sorry, but these two links are BBC news stories too … 

Actually that’s not quite true, this one is a link from a link from a BBC story, but I was intrigued by “The Jamestown Foundation“. Clearly a “fear-based” reds-under-the-bed, al-qaeda-behind-the-sofa, vigilante basis, but coupled with what looks like a non-partisan “neutral” reporting line, with well informed sources.

This one ithough, s the BBC, on education something we’ve been banging on about on both MoQ-Discuss and Friends of Wisdom. I thought this was a very telling comment from Sir Richard Sykes (Director of my old college) ..

“A science curriculum based on encouraging pupils to debate science in the news is taking a back-to-front approach … Science should inform the news agenda, not the other way round.”

Science isn’t perfect, but there is a viscious circle if over-simplified reporting of science becomes the basis by which science is defined to future scientists. So how should science inform the news agenda ?

Social networking in overdrive.

I’m a few days late with the Google / YouTube story, but if you’re being fair I’ve made it pretty clear I’m a fan of both already. What I like about this BBC news story, is this line …

It’s social networking in overdrive.

 … the other key dimension to this true semantic web quest.

The other interesting point was the comparison of YouTube with MySpace, which though not entirely fair, does say something about Murdoch jumping on the blogging bandwagon five years too late and missing the point.

MySpace … was once a place to hang out if you were online and aged between 15 and 25 is rapidly going mainstream and becoming a middle-aged society. That is just, like, so uncool. 

I can just see the Hamsters announcing they’ve got a MySpace web-page. Oh, really they already do ? Mind you they’d be flattered to be seen as middle-aged. Stick to the axe Slim. 

House Dynamics

Been having the usual “300 channels but nothing on” moan about US TV, even premium cable, recently … find yourself watching a couple of sitcoms, a few of the usual police / detective / hospital soap dramas, and re-runs of old BBC dramas if you’re not careful, before heading screaming for YouTube and the blogosphere. Occasionally you do just have to channel hop or sit through a film just to take in the advertising element to appreciate the culture you’re in.

House is an exception. Creative and addictive, even if as a Brit it involves double takes on Hugh Laurie in the leading role. Management guru Tom Peters rates it too … the relentless act, act, act, test, test, test style, and treatment of students as peers he mentions. I particularly like the managers who have to deal with his style, but clearly understand how to value it.

Prescott Back’s Right to Wear Veil !

I despair at the political / rhetorical posturing around such important issues, but couldn’t resist a chuckle at the thought of John Prescott donning the veil. Jack Straw had started an interesting debate.

Chicken and egg though, is it the serious politicians or the serious press that demand these polarised simplifications ?

Ongoing reading & blogging …

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.

Averroes (Ibn Rushd)

Latest BBC “In Our Time” is an excellent discussion on Muslim philosopher generally known as Averroes. Worth listening to in it’s entirety. (Ibn Rushd on Wikipedia)

Points of interest for me …

Etymology – I have a thing about spotting B’s and V’s but it’s so clear here. The patronymic family naming prefix “son  of” or simply “from” or “out of” in the Av, Ab, Ave, Aven, Von, Van, Bin, Ben, Ibn, (and all the European son / sen suffices of course) The whole B, V, M, Mp, Mb, N blur. The two versions of the name here are just alternate pronunciations of the same underlying concept of being someones child, and clearly just an evolution of the sound in the telling from Proto-Indo-European (Aryan) origins. But I’m no expert.

Ave … Roes / Rush
Ibn … Rushd / Rushdi / Rashid

(The other example that fascinates me is the R & T – rta / art / craft – combinations that Pirsig dwells on.)

Afterlife – as Aristotle’s continuity of intellect, in limbo in the Dante “Divine Comedy” sense, but also as a continuous (eternal) semantic web whose Platonic forms are merely intersected by temporary brains and individual minds.

Philosophy – as the definitive reading of religious texts. Supported by rationale that only the examined life can provide (“look around” says the Quran). Hierarchical interpretation from the head of a “church” down simply being different abstractions or metaphorical simplifications for different practical purposes. From scholars and theologians down to the “masses”. (Nice lead into St Thomas Aquinas later “scholastic” work.)

Fascinating. Nothing new under the sun.

Culture of Fear – Who Benefits ?

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.

EEStor

HQ: Cedar Park, Texas
CEO: Richard Weir (ex IBM)
CTO: Carl Nelson
Founded: 2001
Product: Patented Barium Titanate Super Capacitor “400HP Rapid Charge Battery”
VC Backers: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Feel Good Cars
Ian Clifford
Toronto

Anthropogenic Warming ?

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.