Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I've written about the Voynich manuscript here only once, years ago. Here's a quick review: Wilfred Voynich was an early 20th century ms dealer, and the manuscript that bears his name was a mysterious book he bought from the Jesuits, a book that originated in the 15th century (something carbon dating has confirmed). In the century since Voynich made its existence known to the world, nobody has been able to make hide nor hair of it, except for the guess -- based on the illustrations -- that its a medical or pharmacological text. The usual guess has been that the author performed some sort of cryptographical trickery upon Hebrew, although even that still isn't a matter of consensus. And, even if it were, that wouldn't get the job done. What trickery? Now some new information. A team of Canadian scientists think their algorithm has worked it out. Or at least parts of it. They derive this as the first sentence of the text, translated and decoded, " She made...

Somehow bitcoin imitators have gotten the impression that designing a new crypto currency is easy. It isn't. It was a subtle work of coding and for that matter an unlikely convergence on infrastructural questions that produced bitcoin. Others have successfully piggybacked on that, creating alternatives with a tweak here and there. But bitcoin retains its dominance. And trying to do the whole thing again from scratch? Good luck. Miracles don't cluster, as Daniel Webster used to say. Enter Etherium. This is a crypto currency supported by the largest crowdfunding project in history and software called the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or DAO.   Early on Friday, June 17th, someone began exploiting a flaw in the DAO and stole 3.6 million of the "Ether" (the units of this currency) -- given the dollar/ether exchange rate just before the attack, this amounts to a loss to the participants of US$80 million. In the words of Tom Simonite, who wrote about this ...

I recently saw the latest biopic about Apple co-founder and re-fashioner of industries Steve Jobs. It was a fine movie. The Rolling Stone reviewer calls it brilliant. But it hasn't been a commercial success.  Why not? I don't know, but I'll make the simple observation that it is the antithesis of an action film. It isn't even a very visual film, it could almost have been done on the radio. Everything depended on the dialog. Still, that dialogue was very well-written and acted by a world-class cast. It is written as a three act play, and each act is a product launch. Various backstage dramas each time precede the moment when Jobs walks on stage to unveil a new product to the world. We also get some quick flash back scenes to events the characters are talking about, and some very brief news anchor narration in inter-act transitions. The essentials of the familiar story are conveyed through this structure. Job and Woz co-founded Apple. As it outgrew them, Woz ...

As some of you may have gathered from my "experiment in chronology" last week, I'm giving a lot of thought to how I will organize my next book. This is going to be the more scholarly re-working of my last book that I've mentioned both in that book and in some of my responses to critics. But it won't simply be Gambling with Borrowed Chips with end-notes and a bibliography added. It will be different in important organizational respects. A narrower chronological focus, in particular. I won't be going back over the Renaissance and Reformation. I probably won't even be going as far back as 1990, last week's "experiment" notwithstanding. I may start in 1994, when a lot of remarkably pertinent things happened. The above photo, BTW, is of a 1994 Ford Ranger. Anyway, my book would distinguish between the big picture items one first thinks of when thinking of a year, and the little pictures. It would discuss the little pictures in four ...