Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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A moment of amazement

There is stuff on the surface of the moon that was put there at the end of the 1960s. Stuff that was put there not by robots but by frail organically-evolved human beings. Put or left there by members of a species that only three score and six years before had been struggling with the basics of heavier-than-air flight. A baby born at the time of the Kitty Hawk flight [where liftoff and touchdown were separated by all of 260 meters] would barely have qualified for social security by the time that Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. THAT span represents one of the most extraordinary feats of recorded history. Let us take a moment to be amazed. And understanding of the deniers. It is still difficult to wrap one's head around. Perhaps it is just easier to deny. Wow. And yet it happened. Wow.

Bad choice of a time to die

Tim Curry? Oh, noooo. A lot might be said about the late Tim Curry, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Amadeus, Spamalot, and so forth. What I wish to say is simply that he passed away on August 25. The very same day that Dolly Parton shuffled off this mortal coil. If [let us not ask why] you wish to leave the world weeping, you wish to get a big send-off, funeral orations, bloggers exhuming every discoverable fact about your life and death for a month to come -- if you wish any of that, dear reader, try to put some space between your death and that of a Dolly Parton. She has taken all the oxygen out of the eulogistic room. Rest in peace, TC.

I buy therefore I am

There actually exists an important company within the world of trucking named Descartes. I say "within the world of trucking" because it is not strictly a trucking company. It doesn't own trucks or hire drivers. It is, rather, a logistics technology company, offering techie services for fleet management. Descartes is headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario. The newly contentious US/Canada border and trade issues have made Descartes important for folks like me, who write about matters financial. It may also have made its "logistics support" more important for many potential customers. So ... mazel tov. Anyway: Descartes has recently bought up another company doing related work -- Tai Software, of California. Descartes bought Tai for $100 million cash. On an utterly related corporate point: there is a stable-materials company headquartered in Doylestown, Pennsylvania "The Horse, Inc." by name. A company executing a good industry roll-up could acq...

The signals we're sending

The human species has been sending signals into outer space since Marconi's day. After all, once radio waves are out there, they just keep going. Marconi's first crude experiments, at his family estate in Italy, took place in the middle 1890s -- so, 130 years ago. Famously, less than 20 years later the radio operators of The Titanic stayed at their posts on that awful night in April 1912 tapping out Morse code distress signals. In principle, an extraterrestrial intelligence one hundred and fourteen light years away from us could even now be picking up on those signals. What do such beings make of them? Do they take them to be evidence that "we Fl'korgians are not alone!"? There is a rhythm to them -- those signals from The Titanic -- that likely seems an intelligent construction. Dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot. Pause and repeat. Over and over. My guess is that if the Fl'korgians have technology powerful enough to pick up on that pattern at th...

Origin of life on earth, part two

Yesterday we asked when and how life on earth began. We didn't answer that question. We offered a scenario for a proto-life, but also noted that much more would have to happen for that to become cellular life as we generally understand the term. It is possible that life -- considered as something DISTINCT from the proto-life I discussed yesterday, had two origins. There were two paths forward, so to speak, bacteria and archaea. The bacteria developed first. Muh later, the archaea developed and absorbed the bacteria so the later became the energy producing part (the mitochondria) of larger cells. As to the timing? The best guess sets the early RNA replication (proto-life) at about 4 billion years ago. There were complicated cells, leaving a fossil record, by 3.5 billion years ago, so each of the two paths described above had been executed by then. IF any of this is right. Science proceeds by falsification, and this all may be falsif...

Origin of life on earth, part one

The origin of life on earth -- a lasting scientific mystery -- may have a lot to do with alkaline hydrothermal vents. These are geysers - like vents found in the ocean floor. Marine biologists have long noted that they create the sort of chemically rich and energy intensive environment around them that mimics the electrochemical conditions found in cells. So ... maybe (thinking that thought in reverse) the cells of the world are indeed to this day mimicking that sea floor environment. In this context, with the vents themselves offering abundant energy, scientists can model the creation of RNA molecules, some of which prove to be self-replicating, although in a highly imperfect fashion. Does it make sense to call this already "life"? Probably not. Call it "proto-life" if you will. There is some irony here, though. We often think of life as paradigmatically bound up with the absorption of sunlight. Light, through photosynthesis, becomes plant mat...