The future is always watching.--Alaric Phlogiston
A collection of Harper Lee's private letters failed to sell at auction at Christie’s on Friday. The six letters, which were written between 1956 and 1961 or were undated, were estimated to be worth between $150,000 and $250,000. The bidding opened at $80,000 and stopped at $90,000.
Rachel Dolezal, the president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, has resigned, according to a letter from her that was posted Monday. Her parents, who are white, allege that she has been lying and presenting herself as black when she is not. She began identifying herself more with the African-American community in 2007, according to her parents. Now why is her identity as another race any different than having another identity as a gender, as Jenner did?
A collection of Harper Lee's private letters failed to sell at auction at Christie’s on Friday. The six letters, which were written between 1956 and 1961 or were undated, were estimated to be worth between $150,000 and $250,000. The bidding opened at $80,000 and stopped at $90,000.
Rachel Dolezal, the president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, has resigned, according to a letter from her that was posted Monday. Her parents, who are white, allege that she has been lying and presenting herself as black when she is not. She began identifying herself more with the African-American community in 2007, according to her parents. Now why is her identity as another race any different than having another identity as a gender, as Jenner did?
Who is .....Freeman Dyson?
Martin Luther married Katherina von Bora, one of 12 nuns he had helped escape from the Nimbschen Cistercian convent in April 1523, when he arranged for them to be smuggled out in herring barrels. "Suddenly, and while I was occupied with far different thoughts," he wrote to Wenceslaus Link, "the Lord has plunged me into marriage."At the time of their marriage, Katharina was 26 years old and Luther was 41 years old.
Martin Luther married Katherina von Bora, one of 12 nuns he had helped escape from the Nimbschen Cistercian convent in April 1523, when he arranged for them to be smuggled out in herring barrels. "Suddenly, and while I was occupied with far different thoughts," he wrote to Wenceslaus Link, "the Lord has plunged me into marriage."At the time of their marriage, Katharina was 26 years old and Luther was 41 years old.
Materialists imagine a world built out of atoms. Platonists imagine a world built out of ideas. This division into two categories is a gross simplification, lumping together people with a great variety of opinions. Like taxonomists who name species of plants and animals, observers of the philosophical scene may be splitters or lumpers. Splitters like to name many species; lumpers like to name few. Holt is a splitter and I am a lumper. Philosophers are mostly splitters, dividing their ways of thinking into narrow specialties such as theism or deism or humanism or panpsychism or axiarchism. Examples of each of these isms are to be seen in Holt’s collection. I find it more convenient to lump them into two big groups, one obsessed with matter and the other obsessed with mind. Holt asks them to explain why the world exists. For the materialists, the question concerns the origin of space and time and particles and fields, and the relevant branch of science is physics. For the Platonists, the question concerns the origin of meaning and purpose and consciousness, and the relevant science is psychology.--Dyson in his NYT review of Holt's Why Does the World Exist?
An interesting idea--that I cannot assess--is that of the miscalculation of the value of labor. According to current accounting rules, inanimate objects like pencils, clothing, or any type of inventory are assets, but people are expenses. This notion states that labor should be classified as an asset on the balance sheet.
The Federal Reserve’s “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households" report contains some interesting info. “When asked if they have set aside an emergency or rainy day fund that would cover three months of expenses, only 45 percent of respondents indicate that they do.” 47% of Americans could not cover a $400 emergency expense.
The book, Countdown to Zero Day, by Wired magazine writer Kim Zetter, shows that – apart from being an extremely irresponsible and dangerous act of sabotage – the deployment of Stuxnet against Iran has led to an acceleration in development of cyberwarfare. The U.S. had been demanding that other countries refrain from engaging in cyber warfare techniques until it emerged that the U.S. itself, along with Israel, had deployed the extremely destructive virus against Iran. The NSA had been authorised to launch Computer Network Attacks (CNA’s) for over a decade. Twenty different countries have announced digital warfare programmes since the exposure of Stuxnet in 2010.
The rings sometimes seen around the Moon is called a corona. Rings like this will sometimes appear when the Moon is seen through thin clouds. The effect is created by the quantum mechanical diffraction of light around individual, similarly-sized water droplets in an intervening but mostly-transparent cloud. Since light of different colors has different wavelengths, each color diffracts differently. Lunar Coronae are one of the few quantum mechanical color effects that can be easily seen with the unaided eye.
In 1300, Dante was made one of the six Priors of Florence, the top political office in the city-state. The citizens of Florence were so suspicious of the danger of political power that they limited the terms for only two months. The politics were so rugged that Dante ended up banished and the circumstances show up in The Inferno. He never returned--alive. In 1865, on the 600th anniversary of his birth, some of Dante's remains were collected from his tomb in Ravenna, and given to Florence, to be displayed at a world congress of librarians. The little bag of ashes disappeared in the 1930s, and then in 1999 the national central library in Florence announced that two employees had accidentally found it, in an envelope on a dusty shelf in the rare manuscripts department.
Wendy Kopp founded Teach for America (TFA) in 1989 after writing her Princeton University thesis on the need for a “national teaching corps” of elite college grads who would serve students on short-term stints in low-income neighborhoods. “Between 2000 and 2013, “ researchers at the National Educational Policy Center reported, “TFA's yearly operating expenditures increased 1,930 percent — from $10 million to $193.5 million. Of those expenditures, TFA annual reports show that about a third of operating costs are borne by the public.” They have recently come under scrutiny as many of their employees are social activists.
Wittgenstein, unlike Heidegger, did not establish an "ism." He wrote very little, and everything that he wrote was simple and clear. The only book that he published during his lifetime was Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, written in Vienna in 1918 and published in England with a long introduction by Bertrand Russell in 1922. It said that philosophy is simple and has limited scope. Philosophy is concerned with logic and the correct use of language. All speculations outside this limited area are mysticism.
During World War II, he wanted to serve his adopted country in a practical way. Being too old for military service, he took a leave of absence from his academic position in Cambridge and served in a menial job, as a hospital orderly taking care of patients.
Wittgenstein’s response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was pretty awful. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room.
While South Africa has no shortage of red wine grapes planted (with Cabernet Sauvignon taking the top slot), those make up 45 percent of the country's grape plantings. Surprisingly, white wine grape varieties, led by Chenin Blanc, make up 55 percent of the total.
Multiverse: The essence of quantum physics is unpredictability. At every instant, the objects in our physical environment—the atoms in our lungs and the light in our eyes—are making unpredictable choices, deciding what to do next. According to Everett and Deutsch, the multiverse contains a universe for every combination of choices. There are so many universes that every possible sequence of choices occurs in at least one of them. Each universe is constantly splitting into many alternative universes, and the alternatives are recombining when they arrive at the same final state by different routes. The multiverse is a huge network of possible histories diverging and reconverging as time goes on. The “quantum weirdness” that we observe in the behavior of atoms, the “spooky action at a distance” that Einstein famously disliked, is the result of universes recombining in unexpected ways.According to WasPo, American women now weigh the same as American men did in the 1960s.
The great physicist Freeman Dyson was interviewed about his book of essays Dreams of Earth and Sky on BookTV and was asked about his favorite sci-fi writers. He gave a few suggestions and then said this about sci-fi and their writers: They are all wonderful stories, but people primarily concerned with religion than science and that is the truth, religion goes far deeper into history, goes far deeper into our way of thinking than science so I am an advocate of science fiction not because it has anything to contribute to science but because it has a lot to contribute to wisdom.
The great physicist Freeman Dyson was interviewed about his book of essays Dreams of Earth and Sky on BookTV and was asked about his favorite sci-fi writers. He gave a few suggestions and then said this about sci-fi and their writers: They are all wonderful stories, but people primarily concerned with religion than science and that is the truth, religion goes far deeper into history, goes far deeper into our way of thinking than science so I am an advocate of science fiction not because it has anything to contribute to science but because it has a lot to contribute to wisdom.
Professors at the University of California at Berkeley have been officially warned against saying such things as "America is the land of opportunity." Why? Because this is considered to be an act of "micro-aggression" against minorities and women.
laissez-faire or laisser-faire (les-ay-FAIR): n. 1. The practice of noninterference in the affairs of others. 2. The economic policy allowing businesses to operate with little intervention from the government. ety: From French, literally “allow to do”. Earliest documented use: 1825.
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