Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Superconductivity is one of those things, like fusion energy or quantum computing, that are always JUST ABOUT TO make a big splash in the world, change everything ... and ten years ago this was just on the verge of happening too, and in another ten it will still be right on the knife's edge of realization. And so on. The notion that superconductivity will be the next big thing comes from experience of materials at very low temperature, Properly cooled materials (most often metals such as lead, tin or aluminum) conduct direct current (DC) electricity without energy loss: resistance vanishes.  If you've watched cheesy old sci-fi movies in which aliens tell humans "resistance is futile" you will probably be at work on your puns already. Still ... the absence of current resistance is enticing. It is a prospect with no end of possible practical applications. But, of course, the process of cooling the proposed superconducting material below the threshold temperature and ke

  Samantha Barbas’s  Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in  N.Y. Times v. Sullivan : Publication date, August 2024. UC Press.  A fascinating case: Times v. Sullivan  (1964) constitutionalized the law of libel.  I'll review facts that will be familiar to the former law students among you: the Montgomery, Alabama police commissioner filed a lawsuit against the Times over an advertisement the Times had published that, the lawsuit claimed, harmed his reputation. The US Supreme Court said that criticism of public officials, even harsh criticism, and even that which may sometimes be erroneous, is integral to our system of ordered liberty. Such criticism is protected by the first amendment unless it is "published with knowing falsity or reckless disregard for the truth."  Samantha Barbas has now written a new book about the case. Apparently, her chief slant is that implied by the subtitle: that the Sullivan case is generally perceived as a first-amendment case

 I know someone who knows someone who just won a Nobel Prize! Just two degrees of separation! I won't name the intermediary link.  But she is an old college friend of mine who married into the Ambros family. She thus became the in-law of a biologist named Victor Ambros [with no "e"], a professor at UMass Medical School.  And Professor Ambros just won the Nobel Prize in medicine for work on microRNA.  Allow me to bask in reflected glory. And here is a link should you want to know more about his work.  U.S. Scientists Win Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of mRNA (usnews.com) And a word to the ghost of Alfred Nobel.  You're forgiven for that high-explosives thing. 

 In a television commercial for an insurance company, a child (9 ish?) causes some consternation. After the adults around him start bemoaning "the economy," the child asks, "what's the economy?"  They can't answer, and he ends up deciding to 'Google it.'  Let's try to answer. It is a question from a child [actor], but not a childish question.  Even a 9 year old is probably familiar with the catch-all term "society".  How about telling him that "the economy" and "society" are the same fact, looked at from two different points of view. Or, if he doesn't know either word so this doesn't help, speak to him in single-syllable bits, and tell him they are "two names for the fact that folks all have to find ways to work and live with folks."  When we refer to society as "the economy," we're thinking about this living-together thing in terms of limits, and choices made in awareness of limits. 

 Last week I posted about Wilhelm Wundt, and said that he was a structuralist, as distinct from a functionalist, in psychology. What does this mean?  It means that his goal was to break down consciousness into elements, and then to suggest how the elements combine, or could have combined, to create the whole structure that we know through introspection.  For Wundt the structure begins with sensation. At first blush a sensation is a physical fact -- light striking an eye, for example, The physical facts are much the same for us as they are for other creatures. But we are humans, with minds. So (WW's line of thought here)... we have apperception, a process that turns sensations into something different. Apperception turns sensation into intuition.   Wundt saw his laboratory's experiments were an effort at learning something about this transformation.  One issue that troubled him was: how does the human mind acquire its intuition of space? These three dimensions of extension into

I believe several Mayors of the city of Waterbury, Connecticut, have been indicted. Some have served time.  There are protocols for this in Waterbury. Regular training for what to do when the federal marshalls show up and want to speak to the Mayor.  Nobody who grew up in Connecticut is all that impressed with the indictment of Mayor Adams in the city to our southwest.  One neat thing about the indictment though, is that they don't play the cutesy games other indictments do when they are made public. The bill of indictment is readily available.  In fact, I'll just give you the link in case you haven't come across it elsewhere. https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/u.s._v._adams_indictment_1.pdf But what do I mean by "cutesy games"? The anonymization of terms with pretty obvious referents. Some US Attorneys would have referred to "Country Number 1" yet made it obvious what country was referenced. Maybe with a reference to a waterway that rhymes with the word