Two kinds?

Let’s Become More Divided In this time of hyperpartisanship, leave it to writers to put us all into pens.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/opinion/Two-types-of-people.html?smid=em-share

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction

Welcome to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. This work-in-progress is a comprehensive quotation-based dictionary of the language of science fiction. The HD/SF is an offshoot of a project begun by the Oxford English Dictionary...

https://sfdictionary.com/

KSR on ideology, science & philosophy

"Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation. In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts. But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation, that can't be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology, and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act. Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above; and so is science, although it's the different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus. That surely makes science central to a most interesting project, which is to invent, improve, and put to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming buzzing inrush of the world as possible. What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader."

==

"We have to create and employ an ideology to be able to function; and we do that work by way of thinking that is prone to any number of systemic and one might even say factual errors. We have never been rational. Maybe science itself is the attempt to be rational. Maybe philosophy too. And of course philosophy is very often proving we can’t think to the bottom of things, can’t get logic to work as a closed system, and so on. And remember also that in all of this discussion so far, we are referring to the normal mind, the sane mind. What happens when, starting as we do from such a shaky original position, sanity is lost, we defer to another discussion. Enough now to say just this: it can get very bad."

"The Ministry for the Future: A Novel" by Kim Stanley Robinson,
88

==

On money as social trust-

"And when definitions of value shifted from talking about interest rates to talking about social trust— when finance and theories of money fell through a trapdoor in daily normality, down into the free fall of philosophy’s bottomless pit— when people began to wonder why money worked at all— wonder why some people were as gods walking this Earth while other people couldn’t find a place to lay their head at night— it turned out there was no very good answer. Certainly no answer at all when it came to investment strategies you could count on. Money was made of social trust. Which meant, in this spasmophilic moment, with everything changing and the ground falling under one’s feet in immense tectonic jolts, that money itself was therefore in limbo. And that was scary. Vast amounts of paper turned to vapor. The banks of the developed Western world were too connected to fail; if one or two of the big ones went down, the rest would shrink in on themselves and wait for the state to reestablish trust before either lending money or even paying what they owed. Why pay a creditor that might be non-existent next week? Best wait and see if they survived to press that debt in court."

377

On technology-

"Doesn’t it follow that technology has been the driving force in history? We are the driving force in history. We make do, and on it goes. All right then. Enough of philosophy, I’m afraid I’m getting confused. Yes. Let’s move on to some specific examples. Have you heard of those drones developed to shoot mangrove seeds into the mud flats, thus seeding hundreds of thousands of new trees in terrain difficult of human access? Very nice, but that same drone could shoot a dart through your head as you walk out your door. So it illustrates my point, if you care to think about it. Our tools are expressions of our intentions, so what we want to do is the key driver. I’ll save that for our next foray into philosophy, which we will certainly schedule soon. Meanwhile, what do you think of these new bioengineered amoebae that are now grown in vats to form our fuel, while also drawing carbon out of the atmosphere? Kind of a next-stage ethanol? Useful."

— The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson
https://a.co/55QB5gB

McKibben review in NYRB...

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

The trouble with the present

The Present
by Billy Collins

Much has been said about being in the present.
It's the place to be, according to the gurus,
like the latest club on the downtown scene,
but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.

It doesn't seem desirable or even possible
to wake up every morning and begin
leaping from one second into the next
until you fall exhausted back into bed.

Plus, there'd be no past
with so many scenes to savor and regret,
and no future, the place you will die
but not before flying around with a jet-pack.

The trouble with the present is
that it's always in a state of vanishing.
Take the second it takes to end
this sentence with a period––already gone.

What about the moment that exists
between banging your thumb
with a hammer and realizing
you are in a whole lot of pain?
What about the one that occurs
after you hear the punch line
but before you get the joke?
Is that where the wise men want us to live

in that intervening tick, the tiny slot
that occurs after you have spent hours
searching downtown for that new club
and just before you give up and head back home?

 

"The Present" by Billy Collins from The Rain in Portugal. © Random House, 2016

It's the birthday of biochemist and pharmacologist Gertrude B. Elion (1918), who developed drugs to treat leukemia, malaria, herpes, and AIDS..
https://t.co/IpgOBoICxf
(https://twitter.com/g_keillor/status/1352953216397316097?s=02)

62 most groundbreaking documentaries of all time

.@tnyfrontrow's comprehensive list of the 62 most groundbreaking documentaries of all time, from 1930 to today. https://t.co/FV0Letd68D
(https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1352512700694355969?s=02)

Meetings

Associate Deans (@ass_deans) tweeted at 6:49 PM on Thu, Jan 21, 2021:
Do we really need to meet about this??
Yes.
Why??
Because if we don't meet people will wonder why they need us.
Oh. Good point.
(https://twitter.com/ass_deans/status/1352418150994898948?s=02)

Extraordinary

Happy Inauguration Day!

The current issue of The New Yorker, the one with Trump (the "great weight") being whisked away on the wings of the exasperated American eagle, notices something completely different in the sky: "Oumuamua," that mysterious 2017 dot of light Harvard astrophysicist Avi (no, auto-correct, not "Aviation") Loeb called "plausibly of extraterrestrial-technology origin." In resisting the “Sagan standard" for extraordinary claims, he makes a Jamesian "will to believe" sort of point. Is there really a chance he's right? It certainly is "thrilling to imagine the possibilities"...

Swinging on a Star
...It’s often said that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The phrase was popularized by the astronomer Carl Sagan, who probably did as much as any scientist has done to promote the search for extraterrestrial life. By what’s sometimes referred to as the “Sagan standard,” Loeb’s claim clearly falls short; the best evidence he marshals for his theory that ‘Oumuamua is an alien craft is that the alternative theories are unconvincing. Loeb, though, explicitly rejects the Sagan standard—“It is not obvious to me why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he observes—and flips its logic on its head: “Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.” So long as there’s a chance that 1I/2017 U1 is an alien probe, we’d be fools not to pursue the idea. “If we acknowledge that ‘Oumuamua is plausibly of extraterrestrial-technology origin,” he writes, “whole new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery open before us.”

In publishing his theory, Loeb has certainly risked (and suffered) ridicule. It seems a good deal more likely that “Extraterrestrial” will be ranked with von Däniken’s work than with Galileo’s. Still, as Serling notes toward the end of “In Search of Ancient Astronauts,” it’s thrilling to imagine the possibilities: “Look up into the sky some clear, starlit night and allow yourself the freedom to wonder.” ♦

Elizabeth Kolbert

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/25/have-we-already-been-visited-by-aliens?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

Why It’s Not Too Late to Learn New Skills

A lesson I've been gratefully learning from my septuagenarian students:

"...try recalling what it felt like to learn how to do something new when you didn’t really care what your performance of it said about your place in the world, when you didn’t know what you didn’t know. It might feel like a whole new beginning."

Margot Talbot

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/18/is-it-really-too-late-to-learn-new-skills?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

Jesus and Mo-“better”

https://www.jesusandmo.net/comic/better/

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Dewey & George Eliot

No one, to my knowledge, has ever commented on Dewey's reading of Eliot (including Dewey), but it is worth noting that there are similarities between the social vision in her novels and that of his philosophy. Steven Marcus has observed the remarkable coincidence of Eliot's social theory and that of Charles H. Cooley, the American sociologist who was Dewey's student and whose thinking resembles his in important respects. See "Human Nature, Social Orders and 19th Century Systems of Explanation: Starting In with George Eliot," Salmagundi 28 (1978): 20–42.

Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy

Middlemarch

"Finale “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.”

The final sentence of Middlemarch is one of the most admired in literature, and with good reason—it is “quietly thrilling,” as Stanley Fish, the literary critic, has written. The book ends, as it began, with Dorothea, and it discovers what may be redeemed from disappointment. Dorothea’s fate is not to be another Saint Teresa, but to be a heroine of the ordinary—the embodiment of George Eliot’s grave, demanding, meliorist faith. It reads, “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” A vein of melancholy runs through the sentence. Dorothea’s impact upon the people around her is diffusive, like vapor vanishing into the air. Things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been—but ill they still are, to some degree, and are not likely to be otherwise. Acts are unhistoric; lives are hidden; tombs are unvisited—all is unmarked and unnoticed. With its series of long clauses and then its short final phrase, the sentence concludes with a perfect dying fall. I cannot imagine reading these words and not sighing at the end of them."

"My Life in Middlemarch: A Memoir" by Rebecca Mead

"A new year, a fresh clean start"

Twenty-five years ago today, Bill Watterson published his last 'Calvin and Hobbes' comic strip. It is a celebration of joy, friendship, and love, which is an appropriate reminder for kids of all ages at the start of every year.

#GoExploring
#LIVELife https://t.co/rjgLu74CMP
(https://twitter.com/mkguliford/status/1344765974348750849?s=02)