Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

What the bleep is happening to Bitcoin, and why?  Its value hit a historic peak on Monday, October 6. A bitcoin was worth $123,857 that day.  Of course since I called that a "peak" you have probably already figured out that the value has come down since.  Pretty dramatically, too. On Monday, Oct. 20 that was down to $110,245. On November 6. $103,976.  Then came the big drop. Before Thanksgiving, the value got as low as $86K before beginning to claw its way back up.   Here's a link: Bitcoin value real time chart - Google Search In part the problem is the Federal Reserve. Bitcoin speculators want interest rates down?  Why? Because higher interest rates tend to support to dollar, and Bitcoin is likely to prove the beneficiary of a flight from the dollar.  If I can't get much of an income stream from just owning US bonds, I may well sell the bonds (for dollars, naturally) and then convert those dollars into the dominant cryptocurrency.  This impu...

When I was young (back when 'analog clocks' were known simply as ... 'clocks') I had a tough time learning how to tell time on them. The adults around me kept saying "big hand" this and "little hand" that. Sorry: one of them was long but thin. Is that big or little? The other one was short but thick. Is that little or big? I didn't really get over this until I started narrating it to myself in more explicit terms. "The fat short one tells the hour, the long thin one tells the minute." That is still my rule as a writer -- explicitness and clarity even at the expense of concision. So everyone can understand that the photo I've included here indicate that ten minutes have passed since 10 o'clock not that fifty minutes have passed since it was 2 o'clock!

  In a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (PNAS), scientists at the Carnegie Science Institute claim that chemical signs of photosynthesis, and so of life, have shown up in rocks at least 2.5 billion years old. Vegetative life existed on earth that far back. Until now, photosynthesis was generally traced back only to 1.7 billion.  "Good for the scientists," you might say, "it clearly helps make them stand-outs within their special field of study.  But should it matter to the rest of us?" I submit that it should.  One reason is that as one pushes back the dating of the earliest emergence of life, one shortens the amount of time for the chemical, pre-biological evolution that may have been necessary to get the history of life underway. How long a span of time is necessary for life to emerge on a planet, when circumstances (such as the distance to the nearest sun, the size of that sun, etc.) are amenable? There is only one case ...

  In his classic book, PRAGMATISM, William James tells a story about a squirrel.  Or, maybe it is about something else.  You decide.  He asks us to consider an argument among camping buddies in the Berkshires. It seems that a squirrel had gotten itself positioned on the trunk of a tree so that the tree was in between its own body and the body of one of the campers, on the other side.  The camper, wanting to catch sight of the squirrel, started walking around the tree. The squirrel (randomly so far as we can tell, not out of anti-observer animus) moved around the tree to which it clung, in such a way as to keep itself on the opposite side from the man. When they had each travelled in this way 360 degrees around the tree, an intriguing question arose.  Had the man at this point gone round the squirrel? James noted that the man had gone round the tree, and the squirrel had stayed on the tree.  This was enough for some of the disputants -- he had gone roun...

I mentioned here earlier this week that, in college, I was taught a Straussian version of Thomas Hobbes.  That is: the typical Straussian position in interpreting a wide range of early modern political thinkers is that X was secretly an atheist but was pretending to believe in God because of the whole fear-of-persecution thing.  The political philosophy can be understood only once one penetrates beneath the veneer of winking conformism about religion. Just a quick further note along those lines today.   That is (despite contrary views such as the one I discussed here Tuesday)  a fairly easy sell as to Hobbes. And Hume.  A little more difficult (IMHO) with regard to Spinoza, and much more difficult with regard to Montesquieu and Locke. And it is almost impossible to look at Maimonides in the manner that the Straussians want.   The founder of the Straussian view was, as one might imagine, Leo Strauss (1899 -1973), and the grand name for his characte...

"The crowbar is all inside your head" she said to me, "And we can demonstrate it mathematically, "I'd like to help you here in Alexanderee, There must be fifty ways to use your lever." She said, "It's really not 'Eureka' I exude, Furthermore if one should break it's not me who will be sued You built a Death Ray pal so you'll live if I am crude, There must be fifty ways to use your lever." You just find a firm place, Ace Fulcrum's the plan, Stan Don't fear the big weight, Fate Just make the Earth move. Hop on the horse, course You don't need dialectic Chariot'll do, Lou Just make the Earth move.... 

  Still waiting for my "real ID" as I write these words.  I had all the information and documentation in the hands of the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles more than a month ago -- and aced an eye test to boot, and was told I would get the new supercharged form of a drivers license, the real ID form, the get-me onto-airplanes version, in two weeks   Hasn't happened.  Have to call to complain now.  Just venting....

The Notre Dame Philosophy Review   tells us of a new book on Thomas Hobbes' philosophy of religion, reviewed by Arish Abizadeh of McGill University.   If I recall the relevant undergrad course properly, Hobbes' view on religion was straightforward. He was willing to worship in any manner his sovereign tells him to worship -- to worship a thousand gods, or one, and that one conceived as three persons, or as simply One.  "Any law has reason enough for my obedience."  At another level, Hobbes was suspicious of religious fervor, precisely because fervor in the worship of a Leviathan in the heavens, distinct from the Leviathan on earth, is always in danger of spilling over into opposition or insubordination with regard to the latter. "I'm looking at you, Oliver Cromwell!" The first-level view may be said to be delivered with a wink: "You're the boss, so I'll go along with Trinity-talk Sire." The second-level view was heartfelt. Between thos...

A few days ago, on November 15, we passed a rather random unobserved anniversary. That was the 158th anniversary of the debut of the first stock ticker machine. It was unveiled, appropriately, in New York City, by its inventor Edward A. Calahan.   Calahan was building upon the now ubiquitous telegraph, combining it with a printer so that institutions that chose to get one could receive a steam of stock prices, transaction by transaction, from a particular exchange whose action they were following.  The transactions would print out on a tape. The machine with its click click clickity click became quite familiar very rapidly, and lasted a long time. I seem to remember that the father in the old Addams Family sitcom had one in the family abode. Also, the tape generated by such machines could then be cut up and thrown out of windows on festive occasions like so many streamers.  Hence the expression "ticker tape parade".    So: congratulations Mr. Calahan for gi...

  The following is from QUORA. Why do some people believe that the concept of God preceded philosophy, even though influential philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard were atheists who believed in God before them? Huh?   This was an AI-generated question, and it illustrates how absurd AI can get. I'm not sure what it means to say that the "concept of God" preceded philosophy. Let us make things easier by speaking of "worship".  The worship of gods certainly preceded philosophy.  Heck, the worship of a single supreme capital-G God may be said to go back to around 1350 BCE, a long time before Thales. So it happens to be the case that our earliest record of worship of God precedes what we generally call philosophy. What sense does it make to ask why people believe such a plain truth?   But then the AI generated question takes a  really weird turn. The evidence that shows that the "concept of God" is not so old is attributed to a trio of philosopher...

 Of course, your cash will be delivered in a sealed paper bag. And of course it will only happen if you are at home -- no baiting porch pirates. WSJ headline, Nov. 14 print edition "Robinhood offers cash deliveries -- for a fee".   The virtual brokerage Robinhood has alied itself with  delivery app Gopuff to allow customers to withdraw cash from their Robinhood bank accounts and have it brought right to their door. For at most a $6.99 delivery fee you can avoid having to go out to the ATM and have money delivered in a sealed paper bag while they are at home. You don't have to be a weatherman to know whatnow? 

There was a referendum in Ecuador over the weekend. President Daniel Noboa, who is generally regarded as friendly to foreign investors, wanted the referendum to set the stage for new constitutional deliberations.  I won't discuss here want kind of new constitution he wants.  I'll only say that potential investors -- buyers of Ecuador's bonds or of stakes in its corporations, etc., have expressed ambivalence about the result of the vote, and something slightly darker than ambivalence about Noboa's plans for a constitutional convention.  In general, they think, a "yes" vote would enhance Noboa's political capital. That would be good.  On the other hand: why does he have to want THIS?  A convention in 2026 could prove unpredictable and, so, definitionally, risky.    Who knows but that populist opposition to Noboa, and to the aforesaid investors, could sway whatever deliberative body is actually convened?  A recent report from Gramercy, an influential...

In September 2019, after President Trump (first time around) fired John Bolton, a distinguished philosopher wrote the following in that philosopher's blog. John Bolton :    Bolton is a genuinely dangerous man, and I am delighted to see him gone.    His summary dismissal highlights the odd but welcome fact that Trump is a dove.    A belligerent dove, a bullying dove, a bombastic dove, an ignorant dove, a feckless dictator-loving suck up of a dove,  but a dove nonetheless.    This is a dangerous world.    We must take our comfort where we can find it. The philosopher was Robert Paul Wolff, and I quoted that at the time in this blog, without commentary. Dr Wolff passed away early this year. Here is a link to an obit.   North American Kant Society - In Memoriam: Robert Paul Woff (1933-2025) I'm afraid that his analysis of the Trump/Bolton pairing does not seem as sound now as it did at the time.  Trump is not a dove -- he...

I'll just leave a link here, without further explanation.  You'll Never Guess What Happened to Saudi Arabia's 100-Mile Skyscraper A certain impressively futuristic project is now looking a bit like the abandoned Tower of Babel. 

 How did hominids first reach Europe? Both the early homo sapiens and their nearderthaler cousins?  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251011105529.htm  The simple answer is "by walking -- that is, by simple ground based migration". We don't have to get fancy here.  If homo sapiens originated in eastern Africa as is now generally presumed, anyplace else in the vast Africa OR Eurasian land masses could have been reached by enough walking over time.   But archeologists want to be more specific.  And as the story on the other side of the above link indicates, there is news here.  We don't have to presume that the original discoverers of Europe passed just north or just south of the Black Sea.  Instead, they could have come across a land bridge that existed right through the middle of the Aegean between 1 million and 400,000 years ago.  A simple matter for specialists, you say?  Yes, but I enjoy the fact of curiosity about th...

 I am happy to report that on Wednesday November 5 the Justices of the US Supreme Court gave the lawyers from the US Justice Department a hard time during oral arguments on the legitimacy of President Donald Trump's monarchical tariff system last week. The question is whether Trump's extraordinary sweeping impositions, and modification, of tariffs on a country by country basis can be said to be warranted by the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.   The only honest answer is "no". Fortunately, most of the Justice seem inclined to give that honest answer, upholding the courts below. Chief Justice John Roberts (an appointee of President George W. Bush) said flatly that this law "has never been used to justify tariffs. No one has argued that it does until this particular case." Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, appears to want to be part of a decision that emphasizes that Congress has no power to delegate away its own proper constitutional r...

Ya gotta be kidding me.  Three hundred and fifty?  I cited New Scientist Wednesday . Today I'm invoking it again in connection with another of my favorite subjects -- the mind/body problem.  What 350 different theories of consciousness reveal about reality | New Scientist The article, by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, breaks the 350 contemporary contending theories into ten buckets: 1. materialism 2. non-reductive physicalism 3. quantum mechanical 4. information based 5. panpsychic 6. neutral monism [buckets one and eight are the non-neutral monisms]  7. dualism 8. idealism   9. anamolous and altered states [i.e. taking 'parapsychology' seriously]  10. challenge [i.e. accepting that the answer is beyond human capacity -- as suggested perhaps by the above cartoon].  My own preferred view, emergentism, is treated by Kuhn as a form of non-reductive physicalism, bucket 2. 

The next mayor of New York City is .... Zohran Kwame Mamdani. Mamdani and I share a birthday.  He was born on October 18, 1991, the day I turned thirty-three.  At any rate, I believe I have already shared my view that Mamdani's election in likely to be a disaster for the City that has now placed itself in his hands.  I would like today to address the question: will that disaster help or hurt President Donald Trump? I've heard one theory that Trump needs a good bogeyman.  After all, Nancy Pelosi was his bogeywoman for a long time. She remains in the House of course but has faded into the background and her successor in party leadership there, Hakeem Jeffries, has a much lower profile.   The mayor of New York City has long been a national figure -- Jimmy Walker, Fiorella LaGuardia, John Lindsey all come to mind -- even though the post doesn't seem to work as a stepping stone to higher office. So ... a mayor of New York, one who attaches the label "socialist" ...

I ended yesterday's entry with the idea of hope.  We can reasonably hope that it is possible to build a sustainable capitalism, and that certain investors and fund managers now active are engaged in this work -- uniting the profit motive with the save-the-planet motive.  After completing work on that post I found an article in NEW SCIENTIST with the headline "Solar energy is going to power the world much sooner than you think."  Let us pay a little attention to the case made in this article by Madeleine Cuff, a London based reporter who has devoted years to environmental/energy issues.    Solar energy is going to power the world much sooner than you think | New Scientist Cuff cites an analysis by a UK based think tank that said that solar has been the largest source of new electricity globally for the last three years in a row.  The good news, the reason for Cuff's optimistic headline, is that over the last 15 years, the cost of installing a solar system h...

 Roughly five years ago an energy-themed  private equity fund named JOG Capital changed its name to Carbon Infrastructure Partners, because the change reflected its new emphasis.  I wrote about this at the time, and happening across my old piece in some recent web-surfing, I wondered how the subsequent years have treated them.  Their website is here: https://carboninfrastructurepartners.com/about/ -- you will find there a brief account of their own transition from JOG.  You won't find out what JOG originally stood for -- perhaps founders' initials played a role. It is not important.  What is important is that CIP describes itself as investing in companies with find creative ways to remove, reduce or avoid CO2 emissions.  If THIS is profitable there is hope for a sustainable capitalism.  So: is it?  Unfortunately, we don't have good public data on this yet. CIP closed on its first fund of the new post-JOG era, CIP Energy Fund I, in 2022. [By "...

On this holiday we should spare a moment to remember Bram Stoker (1847-1912), the novelist and dramatist who gave to vampire lore its classically Victorian formulation.  I say "dramatist" because Stoker -- an Irishman -- was an actor at, and the manager of, a London theatre beginning in 1878. To an ambitious Irishman in the arts in the 19th century, politics notwithstanding, going to London was "making the big time." Indeed, it is still thus, as you can see from the attitude of the Dublin musicians in the recent bittersweet romantic movie "Once."  It is, I submit, worth spending the time and pixels to make that observation because Stoker gave to vampire lore the element one might expect from a man who crashed the London dramatic scene in his early thirties. Dracula is the same way. A man trying to make it in the big time.  One theme of the famous novel, I submit, is that although the Count could be a frightening bigshot to the peasants of Transylvania, alt...

  I have written here before about Henry James' novel, THE SACRED FOUNT.  Today I'll discuss one detail in it.   James offers up a protracted discussion between two characters, each speaking in oddly cryptic fashion, in which they seem to end up stumbling accidentally into a Platonic metaphor -- indeed THE Platonic metaphor, of wisdom as an escape from the darkness of a cave.  The unnamed first-person narrator is talking here to Ford Obert.  They had first run into each other at the train station at the start of this weekend gathering. Obert is sometimes called "Obert RA," signifying in British usage that he is a member of the Royal Academy.  Near the end of the book, Obert has caught up again with narrator to say that he has been thinking about the question they had discussed earlier (to wit, the way the life force can seemingly flow from one member of a couple to another, enervating one and energizing the other). He has found it illuminating.  I...

  Julia Roberts in a psychological thriller: what could be better? I approve of Julia Roberts in just about anything else.  But in AFTER THE HUNT she is wasted, as is the viewer's time.  BBC called it "more of an admirable project than an engaging drama. "  And that is being kind.  Roberts plays a professor of philosophy, at Yale, on the edge of receiving tenure. The stakes are rather low for something marketed as a "thriller": will a #MeToo scandal keep her outside of the magic threshold of academic tenure?  I'll spoil it for you (no harm done, I assure you!), the answer is "yes," at least for a period of five years.  The implication of the final scene -- a flash-forward -- seems to be that her character, Alma, has recovered her upward path five years after the events displayed in the main narrative line.  Back to the mainline. The harassment scandal involves Alma's Platonic but flirtatious man friend, Hank, who is also a candidate for tenure...

 I hope I have made clear to regular readers of this humble mind that I am not a believer in panpsychism.  My own view of the mind-body relation, on the other hand, is a form of emergentism, which ends up in a place quite similar to old-fashioned mind-body dualism and interactionism.  But I did find of interest a recent paper's breakdown of the three broad arguments for panpsychism: the continuity argument, the Hegelian argument, and the Agnostic argument.  In brief that means: 1) Continuity.  All matter must have some element of mind in it because otherwise there would be a radical and incomprehensible discontinuity in the history of matter in the world. 2) Hegelian. Panpsychism offers a sort of dialectical synthesis between materialism and dualism with the upside of each and the downside of neither. 3) Agnostic. No idea of the intrinsically non-experiential [something neither mental nor proto-mental] could even be intelligible to us. The overall point of the p...

  When I was a kid, grownups would sometimes advise me that to make my counting approximate the passage of seconds, it would help to say "one Mississippi, two Mississippi...."  Other times, though, they would say that the right phrasing was "one one-thousand, two one-thousand ...." Can both be valid?  Mississippi has four distinct beats.  "One-thousands" only has three.  Wouldn't the latter system yield shorter seconds than the former?  A little experimentation since has found that I do tend to pronounce the four syllables of "Mississippi" roughly as rapidly that the three of "one thousand". Those esses, eh?  One tends to slide right through them.  One the other hand, after the word "one" I reach a full stop then press forward with the "the" sounds.  I think we may say roughly that the space in between the two words acts as a beat, so both expressions are four beats.  One childhood quandary at last resolved at 67...

As I write these words, Robert Roberson still sits on death row.  But he is still alive, and another scheduled date for his execution is in the rear view mirror.   This is what has so far prevented the execution of Roberson. In 2013, Texas enacted a specific legal avenue allowing prisoners to challenge allegedly wrongful convictions by arguing that changes in the field of forensic science have undermined the conviction or, in the alternative have exonerated the prisoner completely.  This is popularly known as the "Junk Science Law" -- formally Article 11.073 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. The "shaken baby syndrome" [or "abusive head trauma"] is the key here. A medical/physical fact like a bruise, a fever, a broken bone  is often consistent with several hypotheses about cause.  No trauma by itself tells us it was the consequence of abuse. That is an inference that, in a criminal trial, the finder of fact, paradigmatically the jury is supposed to d...

  When I was young and foolish, I believed in the story I heard in a sappy song on the radio about the climactic "night Chicago died," the time when Al Capone decided to go down fighting rather than going to prison so he "called his men to war 'gainst the forces of the law". There was no such night.  But it does make a  good story. For those of you young-uns who may never have heard it: you've missed out.  Here's a link.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR0gjl66PVs&list=RDtR0gjl66PVs&start_radio=1 Whatever happened to Paper Lace? 

If I had my druthers -- if I had unlimited resources so money was literally no object -- would I want to abandon the grind of writing on deadlines and for specific assignments?  No. I'm 67, still writing within that grind, and hopeful that when it is my chance to die, I will die at my desk. Why? Having an assignment is grounding.  It means I am responding to market demand. Somebody wants what I am producing. That realization is energizing, not enervating. Also, writing on deadline to an assignment is exciting.  Imagine looking at a blank window with just a quick note about the assignment at the top along the lines of "editor wants 600 words on BDC Cap cushions by 5."  I have a good deal of material on BDC cap cushions spread out among different computer files and some of my interview material is in pen scrawls on old-fashioned dead tree notebooks.  But ... put them together into a coherent story in 600 words?  Ah ... challenge! I do still want to write some...

I have only recently discovered that a fellow named Owen Gingerich ever lived or died.  Yet he and I have very much overlapping timelines -- I was born when he was 28, and he died just two and a half years ago. Now that I know who he was, I am sorry I didn't learn of him sooner. So here is a post for Gingerich, concluding "science week" at Jamesian Pragmatism Refreshed.   Gingerich was an astronomer, and an important participant in debates over what we understand by the word "planet," debates that centered -- while he was most involved in them -- on the case of alleged planet Pluto.  Gingerich was also a teacher of the Harvard University course "The Astronomical Perspective," a core science course for non-scientists. To me what is most fascinating about Gingerich, though, is his work as a historian of science, and especially of the early modern developments in astronomy and physics beginning with Copernicus and continuing through Newton's day. In 2...

Yesterday I wrote here on palm oil plantations. My point was that their creation at the expense of forests has bad effects, such as has justified the EU in barring palm oil from such plantations as imports.  The bad effect on which I focused then involved the greenhouse issue of the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and the value of "carbon sinks" such as forests.  This equates to the dis-value of their removal even if "temporary" while the commercially preferred sort of vegetation grows in. At any rate, I also mentioned that there are other problems with such plantations. One of those other problems is water pollution. Here is a fact sheet: https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/is-palm-oil-harming-the-environment   The gist of the water pollution problem is an excess of nutrients in the run off, run as Palm Oil mill effluent, or POME.  This leads to algae blooms in bodies of water downstream, which depletes oxygen levels, which creates dead zones where marine lif...

In September the European Union announced, for a second time, that it has delayed the launch of its anti-deforestation law.  In case you came in late ... this is a law that bans the importation of commodities into any of the member nations if the production of those commodities is deemed conducive to the destruction of the world's forests.  One flashpoint in debate on the subject is palm oil. Indonesia and Malaysia together produce nearly 88% of the global supple of the stuff.  They do it by converting their pristine forests into palm plantations. The heavy machinery involved in clearing the land itself emits hydrocarbons. But, more damningly, it causes soil erosion and water contamination. Beyond either of those points there is the main one.  Forests are major carbon sinks.  They absorb carbon from the atmosphere into the biomass of the vegetation.  When we speak of "net carbon zero" as a goal we mean creating a world in which as much carbon comes out of t...

Welcome to "science week" at my humble blog. To begin: the standout in the Nobel Prize awards this year, the one likely most fascinating to observers outside the field itself, is ... Medicine.  This year's award for advances in medicine went to researchers who opened up new vistas in the study of immunity. Immunity, and related matters such as vaccination -- these have been on a lot of minds of non-experts since the Covid epidemic, and even more intensely since a rogue member of the Kennedy family became the US Secretary of Health. The apotheosis of the non-expert.    The Nobel Prize winners were rewarded for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance. Breaking that down a bit: "immune tolerance" means simply that our immune systems tolerate our own tissue.  The system doesn't go after our own tissue in the ways it goes after foreign matter. So ... anyone who doesn't have an autoimmune disorder such as lupus or multiple sclerosis by definit...

  Bad things are happening to the auto industry and related industries in the United States in recent weeks. You may not have heard, because so much else has dominated the news cycles. But ... bad things are happening.  On Thursday, September 11, Tricolor Holdings entered bankruptcy.  This was not the standard corporate "let's try to reorganize and shed some of this debt" bankruptcy, chapter 11. No: Tricolor went right to "let's just liquidate and be done with it" bankruptcy. Chapter 7.  A rare admission by corporate leadership that there is nothing to salvage there. Who was Tricolor? It was a company that lent to car buyers and that sold used cars at auctions. It was a considerable presence in the southwestern US, specializing in lending (and/or selling used cars to) Spanish-speaking buyers.  Its name is a reference to the Mexican flag.  Soon thereafter attention turned to CarMax. This is a bigger player than Tricolor in both of the markets they share, sub...

  File this post under "random quotations". The subject of this quote is the philosophical inquiry into cause and effect. I may have cited the book that the italicized bit below appears in, before in this blog, but I doubt I have referenced this particular passage. The more specific question under discussion is whether "natural selection" is an explanation of evolutionary change: that is, whether it names a cause of which the origin of a new species may be an effect. Suppose that to be a student in a certain classroom R, students must pass a test indicating that they read at the third-grade level. Some students A and B are admitted on the basis of this test, and others C and D are excluded. The use of this test amounts to a selection process, and the existence of this process explains, in one perfectly good respect, why it is true that "All of the students in room R read at the third-grade level." Nonetheless ... the existence of this selection process doe...

 The Chicago Fire of 1871 began 154 years ago today. It is said to have begun in the barn of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, and ended as a burn zone four miles long and one mile wide. It is often said to have begun with the kick of a cow.  There is no good reason for THAT belief. Indeed, the contemporary view is that the cow is, as Ockham would say, an entity introduced into the chain of cause and effect without necessity. With wooden structures, large open doors, lanterns that were themselves simply small fires, and high winds: who needs a cow?   In the days after the fire had burnt itself out, the notion that Mrs O'Leary had been milking her cow and the latter had kicked the lantern was one of several competing rumors. Another was that  a boarder in the O'Leary house, Dennis "Peg Leg" Sullivan, had slipped into the barn to have a few drinks with some of his friends. During their partying they started a fire, not by knocking over a lantern but simply by smokin...

 I've never involved myself in debates about the QWERTY keyboard versus alternatives. I will say, though, that it would be better to have "t" further away from "w".  On a different line, maybe?  This arrangement makes the typing of "not" for "now" or vice versa all too easy, I'm guessing that is the reason that Thomas Paine wrote "Now is the time for all good men...." In a first draft he surely wrote "It is now the time..." only to start worrying that some middleman would turn that accidentally into "It is not the time."  "Not is the time for all good men..." seems more nonsensical than "It is not the time"  so the latter would be more likely to survive as a typo than the former. And of course the now/not reversal is worse than nonsensical.  It produces a sensible sentence with a meaning exactly the opposite of what is intended.     

New book. May be of interest to some of those who follow this blog. The Cartesian Brain , a collection of essays edited by Denis Kamboucher, Damien Lacroux, Tad Schmalz and Ruidan She, has just been published by Routledge. It looks at Cartesian writings far beyond the Meditations . One might get from the Meditations the impression that Descartes didn't care all that much about the brain, and nascent neuroscience. After all, the "I think" is accomplished by an incorporeal spirit.  Actually, it turns out, he did care about the particulars of the human brain. and not just the pineal gland either.  One fascinating tidbit I get from the review of this book recently posted in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews is the applicability of the "law of the conservation of motion" to the action of mind on brain. I put the phrase in quotes because in Newtonian and post-Newtonian physics, our physics, there is no such law.  There is a law of the conservation of momentum: but tha...