Science, religion, Dawkins, Dennet, etc., etc.
Eschatology and Scientific Cosmology: From Conflict to Interaction
By Robert John Russell
The move to a kenotic response to natural theodicy offers a promising road to pursue in future research and could lead to a reconstructing of eschatology which gives intelligibility and credibility to Christian hope in light of scientific cosmology.
Pride
Pride is like a chicken sitting on a heat lamp, or like a cue ball in your underwear. You don’t even care, do you?
Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
“Who else is there of the direct blood-line? Only the vacant Aunts, Cora and Clarice, the identical twins and sisters of Sepulchrave. So limp of brain that for them to conceive an idea is to risk a haemorrhage.”
I Rock? No, sadly not.
While I was in my room on the precipice of studying, the tv was playing in the background, specifically the news, and I thought I heard the announcer mention the Iraq Steady group, which I assumed to be a reference to the “neutral” political team about to release a report on the quagmire. I thought it was supposed to be called the Iraq Study group but then didn’t seem shocked if they renamed it the Iraq Steady group, as if they had no problem stating their intentions in advance of staying the course. I also thought the naming was a sarcastic gesture, perhaps done by a young dope smoking Republican who listens to Rock Steady. And then of course I realized that I just misheard the announcer and my mistaken journey was all for not.
In short, it was all very confusing. Which then made me wonder on a different note if we could get away from the swamp/quagmire metaphors, that was Vietnam, and try something more along the lines of fog/miasma metaphors.
I think I’ve written too much…
French, the language
During the 2004 presidential primaries, Senator John Kerry, a fluent French speaker, dropped a remark to an inquiring journalist for French television. Life on the campaign trail, he said, was “affreux” — that is, “awful” or “dreadful.” Not “terrible,” the obvious word, but “affreux,” a more subtle choice. For the French, selecting the precise word is the equivalent of a firm handshake or a level look in the eyes in the United States. With two simple syllables, Senator Kerry had passed a crucial French character test.
Dunkleosteus
L’art de vivre
Guiliano urges readers to reject what she calls “the twin hoaxes” of deprivation as the key to weight loss and indulgence as the cause of weight gain. She insists that pleasure “has proved to be the most powerful and lasting motivation. … If we can all harness the pleasure principle, we can lose weight, as French women have done for generations. All we need is to learn a sense of proportion and cultivation of taste. Do that and we should never feel deprived.”
‘Everything is Vanity’ says the teacher.
Abstraction has been less a search for the ultimately meaningful … than a recurrent push for the temporarily meaningless: that is, things that are found not often in exotic realms but rather on the edges of banality, familiarity, and the man-made world.
Devil in his heart?
‘Child, our Lord sent you half-way around the world to bring you to us.’
The experiences of a Polish foreign exchange student with his American fundamentalist host family.
Sit Up Straight
“A 135-degree body-thigh sitting posture was demonstrated to be the best biomechanical sitting position, as opposed to a 90-degree posture, which most people consider normal,” said study author, Waseem Amir Bashir, a researcher at the University of Alberta Hospital in Canada. “Sitting in a sound anatomic position is essential, since the strain put on the spine and its associated ligaments over time can lead to pain, deformity and chronic illness.”
Klaus Kinski
via ToM
Recommended: Stuart Kauffman’s “Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred”
In this essay, Kauffman “frames a new scientific world view of emergence and ceaseless creativity, which, he notes, is ‘awesome in what has come to pass in reality, and God enough for me and many, where God is the creativity of the universe, yielding a global ethics of respect for all life, the planet, awe, wonder and sprituality cut free from a transcendent God’.”http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman06/kauffman06_index.html
Ben Stein on Warren Buffett
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Can-Spam is a sham
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the alleged spammers. In a little-noticed opinion issued in mid-November, a three-judge panel acknowledged the e-mail messages in question may have included a false Internet address and a nonworking “From:” address, but concluded that they nevertheless were permitted under the federal antispam law known as the Can-Spam Act.
Exposed in Space
By combining these experiences with our knowledge of outer space, scientists have a pretty clear idea of what would happen if an unprotected human slipped into the cold, airless void.
An Email Primer
Often enough we are faced with a question that can best be answered by someone else, possibly a complete stranger. The upside of the Internet is that we can quickly contact folks without much effort. The downside of the Internet is that people can contact us without much effort. This reality is very present in academe today — where senior professors constantly gripe about being overwhelmed by inappropriate e-mail, to the point where some hide their e-mail addresses. Graduate students and researchers of all kinds, meanwhile, agonize over how to approach an eminent scholar with a query, and trade strategies for actually getting an answer.
What is thought?
Over the Thanksgiving weekend at my former office, I met a most interesting fellow, Eric Baum, who wrote a book on the materialist and evolutionary theories of thought. For Flockers interested in the Dawkins discussion, you would be wise to look at his book:
In What Is Thought? Eric Baum proposes a computational explanation of thought. Just as Erwin Schrodinger in his classic 1944 work What Is Life? argued ten years before the discovery of DNA that life must be explainable at a fundamental level by physics and chemistry, Baum contends that the present-day inability of computer science to explain thought and meaning is no reason to doubt there can be such an explanation. Baum argues that the complexity of mind is the outcome of evolution, which has built thought processes that act unlike the standard algorithms of computer science and that to understand the mind we need to understand these thought processes and the evolutionary process that produced them in computational terms.
Making cracks at the PU students is too easy to do here.
What does private and wealthy Princeton University have in common with the public and less-wealthy University of Central Arkansas?
Still catching up on the internet…
BuzzFeed linked a number of interesting articles concerning youtube and its relationship with corporate entertainment.
The New Violin
“Wood reached the limits of its potential in the first half of the 18th century,” Martin Schleske, a leading violin maker from Munich, asserted in a recent lecture in Germany. “I have no doubt that if Stradivari were alive today with the same force of innovation, he would have already discovered the fascinating acoustic properties of graphite fibers and would have ushered us into a new golden age of violin making.”
Women and Education
As late as the 1980s, according to economist Elaina Rose, women with PhDs or the equivalent were less likely to marry than women with a high school degree. But the “marital penalty” for highly educated women has declined steadily since then, and by 2000 it had disappeared. Today, women with a college degree or higher are more likely to marry than women with less education and lower earnings potential.
Partying with Capote
They danced through the night, then walked out into the dawn and discovered that the world they knew was gone.
This is the record. . .
that started it all for me, all being my affection for Tyrannosaurus Rex and T-Rex. It was May 1971, the month I graduated from high school (Justin F. Kimball in Dallas, for those keeping files), and I was flush with a few dollars I had received for graduation gifts. I hadn’t heard anything by the band, but they looked cool on the sleeve and the songs had poetic or fantastic titles like “The Children of Rarn,” “The Wizard” or “Suneye”.
Peace On Earth?
A Pagosa Springs resident is resisting an order by her homeowners’ association to remove a peace symbol-shaped wreath from an exterior wall of her home.
Washington Crossing Bridge
If you go down to the foot of 43rd Street in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh, you can find a bit of trail which parallels the Allegheny River. I imagine that eventually this trail will be linked with other trails along the three rivers, but for now, you can walk a little way, admire the Washington Crossing (40th Street) bridge, and then walk back again.
