What, Why & How do we Know ?
Talking of anniversaries, how did I overlook that Wednesday this week was the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday – the day to celebrate (!) James Joyce’s Ulysses’ central character Leopold Bloom. Thanks to Frizzy Logic for the reminder.
I finished it here. Learned a lesson here. I’d started here.
This year is 30 years since Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published. To mark the event ….
Fritz Schabmuller and Gregor Schleicher are doing the ZMM route (on Harley’s) to raise money for charities (Medicin sans Frontieres & The White Ring). They leave Ingolstadt on 1st July then starting in Chicago they are doing the whole route from Minneapolis arriving San Francisco 29th July. Their web site includes a daily blog.
Mark Richardson, motoring journalist with the Toronto Star, is also doing the trip, as a sabbatical writing project, departing Minneapolis 19th July, to arrive San Francisco by the 30th.
I wish them all luck. Gary Wegner’s route map. My route map.
If you’re on their route look out for them and give ’em a wave.
The Demystification of Management Systems Science. Seems an apt title. Spookily I just came across this PhD course material presented at Helsinki University of Technology, in a cross-search hit on Pirsig, the day after coming back from a meeting / conference at the HUT in Espoo. An interesting paper by David Hawk at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Been reading his “What is Life” (1944) and “Mind and Matter” (1958), together with his own autobiographical sketches. Marvellous stuff. These physicists who first came into contact with quantum physics, were clearly all deeply affected by the strange view of “reality” it presented and how this related to human scale everyday reality. Einstein famously struggled with “god playing dice”. Heisenberg too I’ve read and found the same philosophical and moving experience. Stops you in your tracks.
“What is Life” is a very interesting discourse on genetics and evolution – the Lamarckian metaphor, despite the clear Darwinian causality – and the relationship between quantum scale physics and DNA biochemistry – fascinating. Life and crystals as negative entropy or free energy. Roger Penrose provides a glowing introduction of this theorectical physicist’s contribution to molecular biology.
“Mind and Matter” goes further into the subject / object divide in scientific reality – and leads straight into the Vedic Upanishads and Eastern “mystical” “holistic” views being much closer to the quantum world view. He’s no cod philosopher either – he draws on Spinoza, Descartes, Schopenauer, Kant et al, and rails against the Greek legacy in western culture, whilst still naturally defending its correct position in science itself.
(Didn’t notice if Fritjof Capra and Michael Talbot cited Schrödinger – must check that out. I wonder if that erstwhile budding molecular biologist Robert Pirsig ever read Schrödinger. Intriguing.)
Sohail Inayatullah – Paper written in 2001, not long after 9/11 (during Afghanistan but before Iraq) by Sohail Inayatullah editor of New Renaissance. Wonderfully optimistic view of “emergent” and “transcendent” world order likely to arise from common ground amongst creative intellectuals in both the west and muslim / non-west.
That shared common ground being a sustainable, earth-centred, ecological perspective. ie not so much east meets west, but (mystic) east and (rationally scientific) west meet Gaia. I wonder.
I get lots of my post ideas from cross-search-hits – people looking for subjects not really covered by my site, but with some words in common as far as Google’s indexing is concerned.
Well this site “Strip Mining for Whimsy” blogged it’s own cross-hit.
As I do, Joshua has spotted a hit with an item of interest despite the fact that most hits are literally about strip mining in his case. The common metaphor is the real link.
Following on from the Frizzy Logic link in the previous post but one about metaphor, I browsed queen-B’s links to all sorts of interesting linguisitic blogs and resources – via Language Hat en-route naturally. She has an excellent FrizzyLinks page.
World Wide Words site by Michael Quinion on the actual and apochryphal etymologies of English expressions, both common-place and obsure.
Also the Online Etymology Dictionary.
What am I doing wrong ? I have MS VM 3810, Firewall and Virus Scanning as well as Anti-Spyware from McAfee and Lavasoft, all updated today. All seem to detect and clean out CoolWebSearch, but nothing stops it re-appearing only minutes later and hijacking my browser. The fu**ing ba**ards. Of course, the cowards don’t put contact details on their lousy pages either. Grrrr.
Frizzy Logic & Metaphor – Frizzy Logic is a blog I came across on a common search hit. This is one of many interesting articles spotted ….. no time to read right now ….
Includes a review of MITECS – the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences. Looks interesting.
Graham Horton’s Quotations Page. Quotations pages are a bit of a cliche, there are so many of them (and what would we do without Einstein), but this one I thought had so many applicable to novelty and discovery, scientific or otherwise, that I had to link. Herewith a sample, of those most apt …
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. Thomas Huxley
If we had had more time for discussing we probably would’ve made a great many more mistakes. Leon Trotsky
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. John Maynard Keynes
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. Alfred North Whitehead
To say that a man is made up of certain chemical elements is a satisfactory description only for those who intend to use him as a fertilizer. Hermann Joseph Muller
There ain’t no rules around here! We’re trying to accomplish something! Thomas Alva Edison
Some things need to be believed to be seen. Guy Kawasaki
The physicist’s greatest tool is his wastebasket. Albert Einstein
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? Albert Einstein
Very few people do anything creative after the age of thirty-five. The reason is that very few people do anything creative before the age of thirty-five. Joel Hildebrand
It was, no doubt, partially because of Fourier’s very disregard for rigor that he was able to take conceptual steps which were inherently impossible to men of more critical genius. Rudoph E. Langer
A man with a new idea is a crank until he succeeds. Mark Twain
Science is everything we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else. David Knuth
And many more ….