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...