Near the southern border of the western Massachusetts town of Longmeadow, near where it borders Connecticut, one finds a very fine and not-at-all expensive Greek restaurant named Grapevine. Now, suppose you are in downtown Chicopee, somewhere in the neighborhood of John's Pizzeria [nowhere near as classy a place, to be honest] and you want to get to the Grapevine. What is the easiest way to do that? You'll be starting off near 391. Get onto that highway and continue (westbound) for about 2 miles until you can get onto I-91 (southbound). You'll then take 91 for about 7 minutes, if the traffic allows, and then get off exit 1, the last exit before you find yourself in (gasp) Connecticut. This exit will dump you onto route 5, and you stay on there, still southbound, until you find Maple Street. This entails going past a lot of places familiar to anyone who loves Hollywood movies that involve small towns -- a small library with that Carnegie-ish look, a t...
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I recently encountered, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, a review of a book called THE OPEN FUTURE. It argues for a proposition that, I believe, is broadly correct. Time is real and creative. The future is something that does not yet exist. In fact, as regular readers of this blog may remember, I believe in a "growing block" theory of reality-in-time. The past and present are both real. The present is the forward surface of a growing block, and the future is everything that the block has NOT yet reached. The book in question is written by a fellow named Patrick Todd and it costs $80 (which discourages me from purchase.) The reviewer, Mitch Green, is a professor at the University of Connecticut. I have a great deal of fondness for that institution: the flagship public university of one of the three states in which I have resided throughout all of my life, and the one in which I have spent more of it even than in NY or Massachusetts. So ... yeah Huskies! Green descr...
I'm about to disclose to you a cliff diving fact I learned in a magazine recently, and then explain why it stuck in my head. SInce it is unlikely that any reader of this blog gives a damn about cliff diving, this may seem odd but, hey, it's my blog. To pad this out a bit, I'll start with the sourcing. The following fact comes from the Sept. 2016 issue of SELF magazine. SELF is a woman's health periodical, which includes some celebratory pieces on distaff athletes, and I encountered this issue while sitting in a waiting room with a dearth of other worthwhile material. Moving on..... Here's the fact. If a cliff is 30 meters above the water, then a diver will hit the surface of the water at 50 miles an hour. I haven't done the computation to check it out. On this planet, IIRC, an object in freefall due to gravity moves toward the center of the earth at an accelerating pace, velocity increasing at 9.8 meters per second per second. So: what struck me as w...
Someone on yahoo!answers indicated recently that he is preparing to take part in some sort of debate of fatalism versus free will. He wants to take the "free will side" and he wants to know what argument he has to be most prepared to meet and how he might meet it. I'm happy that inquiring minds want to know. Here's how I responded. --------------------- Let us conceive of "free will" in "incompatibilist" fashion. The basic idea is that the necessity of my actions is logically incompatible with responsibility for credit or blame --- if I robbed the bank from causes that were already implicit a second after the Big Bang, then I could not have done otherwise and am not responsible, in an intuitively powerful sense, for robbing the bank. So, we WANT to believe in free will (indeterminism) because it will make sense out of what we're going to do anyway -- punish bank robbers. That isn't yet an argument in its favor. But you can create...
I came across the following while web surfing. It doesn't seem to have any elevated origin, besides an anonymous person trying to be clever (and in this case succeeding). Predict everything, expect nothing. I like it. "Predict everything, expect nothing" is a perfectly good axiom. I take it to mean, "plan your future as best you can, but don't be disappointed if and when the plans don't work out right -- they seldom will -- and learn to roll with the punches." But of course it's a lot snappier than my paraphrase. Let's get behind this and try to make a cliché of it. I predict success for that endeavor. But of course I don't expect it.
------------------------- We could kick off a new line of thought by asking a qualitative question: why did the stock price of XYZ Inc. fall yesterday? When we ask a “why” question of that sort, we are making a presumption: that facts in the world – in this case, facts in a peculiar but well-defined social institution – have causes, and these causes are susceptible to rational explanation. In this case, we might say (recalling what a high school teacher told us about economics) that the value of XYZ shares fell in order to preserve the equality of supply and demand. But that doesn’t really get us far. The supply of stocks is relatively inelastic. New issuances of stock, especially new issuances of those stocks listed in any of the leading indexes, are rare events, and we can leave them aside for now. Let us take it as a given that a constant amount of XYZ continues to circulate. Then we’ll be especially interested in demand. What does i...
Charles Darwin once wrote to Asa Gray, "The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known gradation my reason tells me I ought to conquer the odd shudder." This quotation is well known. But Matt Ridley, a columnist for the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, devoted last week's column to Darwin and the eye, and he has me thinking abou the matter anew, too. The eye was presumably giving Darwin shudders because it is a very complex organ. One has a tough time imagining any single "random variation" that would give a newborn of some mammalian breed a pair of eyes that its parents had not had. THAT would be an implausible jump. Thus, the eye must have come about through increments. Yet it seems difficult to construct a chain of slow increments from no sight at all to the full carbon-based cameras that mammals suggest. As Ridley asks rhetorically, "What use is half an eye?" I was going to write something more he...
Headnote: I have just learned that the great scholar Jacques Barzun has died. It is hardly a life cut short -- he was born on November 30, 1907, so he was about a month short of turning 105. Still, for those of us to whom his life and work mattered, he had come to seem immortal. And in any sense that scholarship can secure: he is. For now, I will proceed with the material prepared for this and the following two entries in this blog. But I will have more to say about Barzun here soon enough.] Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist who did a good deal to educate the non-scientists of the world about the biology of evolution, passed away back in 2002. He might be surprised to learn that his name has now become a bone of contention [a fossilized bone of contention?] among economists. Of course it isn't all that surprising that there should be cross-fertilization between biology and economics. Ask Malthus about this. Ask Herbert Spencer. Still, my understanding is that this wasn...