Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The United States seems to have lost a comforting illusion. The Republican trickery of keeping a seat open for a year until their own guy could fill it, then four years later rushing through a confirmation because ... the next guy couldn't be allowed to fill it -- this has been rather hard on the notion that Supreme Court Justices are in some important sense above the grubby world of politics. Should we regret the loss of that illusion?  In a book I wrote decades ago, about the history of the politics of the Supreme Court, focusing on the period from FDR to George H.W. Bush, from the court-packing plan to the Clarence Thomas hearings, I took a broad position I called "minimal formalism."  A full-blooded or maximalist formalist would answer "yes" to this question. Indeed, he would probably say, "It has not always been an illusion, for important parts of American history it has been the truth -- we should regret, first, the fact that it became an illusion and...

  Joe Madison, a radio host with a show on Sirius XM Urban View, announced Nov. 8 that he will not eat solid food until, as he put it, “Congress passes, and President Biden signs,  the Freedom to Vote Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.” This could be Big. Bigger than anyone is yet saying. Bobby Sands big. So far as I know he has stuck to it. And there is a clock running. The human body needs food, and seldom survives without it for more than 70 days.  (Bobby Sands, the notorious IRA Provo who demanded he be treated by the Ulster authorities as a political prisoner rather than a criminal, died 66 days in.)  That is Joe Madison, not Bobby Sands, above. 

  An AUMF is a Congressional "Authorization for the Use of Military Force."  Our constitutional scheme contemplates a declaration of war as exactly that, the way in which a President as commander in chief receives authorization for the use of military force.  But the U.S. hasn't declared war on anyone for 80 years. And we made peace with those foes 76 years ago.  Since then, there has been a lot of use for military force. Our executives have not been shy about it. We have the fancy initials AUMF by way of a simulation of the original system. So it would be good to see an Aumf (try pronouncing it as a word, it's kind of fun) repealed. that would be a simulation of making peace.    Putting AUMF Repeal Into Context (justsecurity.org)

Nanotechnology is engineering on a very small scale: atom by atom.  One critical consideration in nanotech is that it works at a scale quantum mechanical effects are important.  I love this stuff. I am of the opinion that contemporary science is much too devoted to distinctions among layers of reality defined by scale. So ... physics deals with atoms, chemistry with molecules, biology with organisms. Each presumes its own set of laws and generally ignores rthe laws of the level below it, aside from general hand-waving acknowledgements when diplomatic. Yet the walls among the disciplines are falling down.  That is a subject for other days, it simply explains why I find nanotechnology -- not so much science as a branch of engineering, operating on the border between physics and chemistry.  Only days ago a team of researchers from two great universities, the University of Toronto on the one hand and Rice University on the other, reported the first measurements of the ul...

I've mentioned before in this blog the book Lost in Math, by Sabine Hossenfelder, a prominent German particle physicist.  The idea behind the title of the book is that contemporary physics is too wedded to the beauty and symmetry (even "supersymmetry," like the kind of symmetry that comes from the planet Krypton) and inadequately concerned with the search for data. It may be that physicists have to accept ugly math that does nothing more beautiful than matching the data, in order to move forward. Today I come back to Hossenfelder and her book in order to quote one particular passage, about Karl Popper. It seems plain enough, but in the context of her broader point there is some ambiguity to it.  For now, I'll just provide the quote: "What I learn [at a certain conference/workshop she attended] is that Karl Popper's idea that scientific theories should be falsifiable has long been an outdated philosophy. I am glad to hear this, as it's a philosophy that n...

Several sad stories have now emerged for the victims of the Astroworld Disaster this month. What fascinates me most, though, is the League Table instinct.  You have to imagine editors in budget meetings. "Can we call this the worst concert disaster ever? The worst at a rap performance? One of the top ten ever? I need a league table!" Of course, this is 2021 and you are a tad more realistic if you imagine that as a Zoom meeting than if you think of railing across a single large table. For the drama of the thing of course you can do it either way. It's your imagination, not mine.  Personally, I think Astroworld lends itself to compare and contrast exercises with Altamont.  The Altamont Free Concert in Dem. 1969 had such a huge impact not because of the great number of deaths ("only" four) but because the idea of hiring Hells' Angels as a security crew seems so monumentally boneheaded.    Here's a link to a contemporary account.  The Rolling Stones Disaster...

  If anything screams "established science" it is the image of the periodic table. Invented 152 years ago, it now adorns the walls of every high school science classroom on the planet.  I knew there had been changes over the years -- those two rows at the bottom especially turn out to be the fruit of discoveries subsequent to Dmitri Mendeleev.  So I recently did some googling, looking for celebratory articles about this two years ago, as the icon passed the 150 years mark.  What I  found was disturbing. The mountains may crumble and Gibraltar may tumble type of disturbing. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132190-400-three-reasons-why-the-periodic-table-needs-a-redesign/