Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 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. 

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 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...

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...

  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...

Moving from the lofty epistemologyical/metaphysical realm of yesterday's quote to the  questions of national character. A thought from a wise French observer of our country.   I  accost an American sailor and inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a few years. In these words, which fell accidentally, and on a particular subject, from an uninstructed man, I recognize the general and systematic idea upon which a great people direct all their concerns. [ Democracy in America Vol. II, Part One, Chap. 8.]