Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The Republic of India experienced a terrible heat wave, and more than 700 heat deaths, in 2024. Frequency and intensity of heat waves in the country have increased steadily over decades. With regard to the monetary measurement of the 2024 heat wave: there was a loss of 247 billion potential labor hours, chiefly in the construction and agricultural sectors, amounting to a cost of $194 billion dollars.  India is sometimes regarded as a climate-change anomaly. In a fortunate way. At one scientific conference on the subject, researchers presented a world map on which the degree to which an area’s 2024 temperatures deviated from historical baseline was illustrated by color, from deep red to white. The scientists acknowledged they didn’t know why India was strikingly pale. The pattern is paradoxical: India is subject to devastating summer heat waves, but on an annual basis it is warming more slowly than other countries.    The public danger posed by heat waves may be under...

The philosophical novel is alive and well as a literary form, and a venue of philosophizing. I think of John Updike, ROGER’S VERSION (1986), Rebecca Goldstein, THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM (1993), David Foster Wallace, INFINITE JEST (1996), E.L. Doctorow, ANDREW'S BRAIN (2014), and John Irving, AVENUE OF MYSTERIES (2015).  But let us go back to Wallace.  I included INFINITE JEST in my little list above because it is explicitly philosophical, built as it is around the challenging notion that "the truth shall set you free. But not until it is finished with you." Confronting reality may indeed set us free from the impediments of our preferred delusions.  But it is painful to let them go.  Separately, an earlier book of Wallace's, THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM, make an intriguing use of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a use that justifies the title.  BROOM starts with the news that an elderly woman is missing from her retirement home.  The missing person was once, in her youth, a stud...

The good news: 2024 YR4 is no longer considered a threat to the earth. The bad news: its course suggests it may strike the moon. The consequences of a moon strike are under active discussion, as is the matter of what the human species might do about it before the predicted time (December 2032).  Some background? Late in 2024, astronomers discovered a building-sized asteroid, 2024 YR4, on a course that made collision with Earth possible. They at first estimated that as a 3% possibility of a collision. It was not the human-extinction threat beloved by science fiction screenwriters, but it could have created widespread damage wherever on land it might hit, or generate a tsunami in the event of an ocean impact.   More recent data about 2024 YR4 suggests that, though the Earth is safe, the prospect of a hit on the moon is respectable, about 4%, or 1-in-25.  Some scientists are concerned that a l unar impact could increase the meteoroid flux by up to 1,000 times, flooding...

  I vented here not long ago about the difficulty I was having upgrading my driver's license, instead of merely renewing it: getting it renewed into a "Real ID" with the star in the corner that will allow me to take airplane flights without fuss or an extra charge. I am happy to inform you that the hold-up, whatever exactly it was, has been resolved in my favor.  I have the new license in my wallet now -- it has a gold star in the top right corner, just like in the sample above. There is also (again as in the sample) a pale black-and-white drawing of a bird in the middle, just to the right of the photo.   I don't think that is there for every state, it may be a Massachusetts thing. Anyway: nobody has given me a gold star since elementary school.  Happy day!  

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...