“[T]he present Pope, who abhors the liberal arts and this kind of mind, cannot stand these novelties and subtleties; and everyone here tries to adjust his mind and his nature to that of the ruler.” Piero Guicciardini, describing Pope Paul V (1550–1621) Astrophysicist and Hubble Telescope guru Mario Livio suggests that you substitute the name of some current political ruler… Read more »
There are some words that I use a lot in this blog. This is the first in a series of attempts to “get pithy” with my explanations of these words. It’s probably going to rain today. Long before there was math, the human brain figured out a “gut level” understanding of when rain was more likely than not. One way… Read more »
I like history books that surprise me with something important that I should have previously known. Daniel Immerwahr starts his recently-published How to Hide an Empire: a History of the Greater United States with a photocopy of a draft of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous December 7, 1941, “Day of Infamy” speech. Scratched out of the draft is a mention that… Read more »
This classic image from The Simpsons characterizes this blog well. However, some posts do seem to take off on their own, usually because of forwards from Twitter and Facebook followers that I don’t even see. I have also been getting some traffic from the new social media site sponsored by Wikipedia, called WikiTribune, found at WT.Social. You have put your… Read more »
Ever since Aristotle tried to simplify the complexity of ethical reasoning down to his one-word concept of virtue, successive theologians and philosophers have been throwing out words or short phrases for labeling their life’s work formulations. Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) came up with his duty-based categorical imperative. My own study of this field in the 1990s was heavily influenced… Read more »
“The brain is a machine that remembers the past in order to predict the future.” — Dean Buonomano [1] Schlemiel and schlimazel are two Yiddish words known to many only by their mention in the theme song to the old television show Laverne and Shirley. In the classic definition, the schlemiel is the bungler who is always spilling soup on… Read more »
Say you are playing a card came and someone hands you a shuffled deck of cards for you to examine, and while going through the deck you see three cards of the same value in a row in the deck, say, three kings. You likely say, “Whoa, this deck is not properly shuffled; the cards aren’t random.” But you may… Read more »
