Tesla won the AC/DC wars and that was a good thing, because AC is much more useful for the long-range transmission of electrical power than is DC. Right? Well, maybe it's more complicated than that. I had accepted the above as gospel until quite recently, when I encountered a brief reference in W. Brian Arthur's nook, COMPLEXITY AND THE ECONOMY, suggesting there was more to it. Arthur is writing in very general algebraic terms about a lock-in of one technology by historical events, path inefficiency etc. The usual example for this sort of thing is the QWERTY keyboard. I wasn't aware that the AC/DC thing gets on such lists also. So I did a bit of googling and found this article from two years ago: Extreme Tech .
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In the front matter of the December issue of Harper's, Rebecca Solnit writes about the climate change talks in Paris. I'm afraid I can't follow her points very well, because my mind has been distracted to the guessing game of when she wrote this essay. It was obviously written before the Paris talks, which concluded with an agreement December 12th . The political/diplomatic leadership of the 196 nations involved committed to keeping global warming at or below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Solnit essay was not only written before that (and phrased sensibly in the future tense), it was probably written before the terrorist attack on the streets of Paris on November 13, 2015. She writes of "the possibility that the most important activity in Paris this month will happen not in any meeting room but in the place where most revolutions happen: the streets." Context indicates that she meant that scruffy activists in their street demonstratio...
Following up on yesterday's observation. The original Hebrew word for Satan is a noun meaning obstruction or opposition. Likewise, the Greek "diabolos" means "slanderer." These are hardly terms one employs for a faithful employee. So the etymology would seem to pose a problem for the warden/functionary view I mentioned yesterday. But well after the origin of such terms, and well before Dante's time, Satan had taken on some of the contours of a functionary. The concept of a Great Chain of Being suggests, after all, a harmonious universe where everything has its place, presided over by God, so that the very concept of an active adversary of God on the cosmic level comes to seem absurd, and there is little left but room for a warden who is sometimes also a trickster. The Nicolas Cage movie DRIVE ANGRY comes to mind in this connection.
I was binge-watching THE WIRE recently, but the theme song "Way Down in the Hole," kept causing my mind to wander to theological questions. The lyrics end as follows, "Don't pay heed to temptation, for his hands are so cold, "You gotta help me keep the devil, Way down in the hole." Within post-biblical Christian theology, the role of the devil in cosmology is very ambiguous. Is he a servant of God, or is he an adversary? Is he sort of a frenemy? If, with Dante, you see Satan chiefly as a prison warden of hell, then Satan would seem to be a servant of God. He rules over a "kingdom" only in the sense that a warden does. He superintends the punishment that the higher authority has decided should be meted out. God is the Governor and the legislature, the judges and juries, all in one Being. Satan is the humble obedient prison warden. Yet Satan's presence there too is a punishment. The "warden" analogy falters here. You can ...
On December18th I posted here a discussion of Galen Strawson's 2011 book, THE EVIDENT CONNEXION: HUME ON PERSONAL IDENTITY. I promised then that I would come back to the subject. The very short version is this. Hume understands personal identity to depend on the mind. It can't depend on the brain, or the body generally, because for Hume our knowledge of enduring physical objects is quite limited -- we know bundles of sensations that act together with regularity. So personal identity depends on the mind, and Humean philosophy needs an active (to some extent an enduring) mind to do the work of generating "fictions" (in some sense) about enduring physical objects and causal relations among them. But when Hume tries to analyze the mind and what we know of it, it too rather crumbles in his hands. He finds that he could make sense of the knowing mind only if he believed either in a soul or in a strong knowable connection of cause and effect. Hume rej...
I gather that one of the points, perhaps the point, of the common bumper-sticker four-word expression above is that one should neither think nor act nationally. Nation states are clumsy things, too large to be local (except in rare cases), yet too small and exclusive for their own self regard to constitute wise stewardship of the planet. Is that it? or am I missing something here? I haven't actually seen such a sticker on the roads in some time. Meanwhile the mass media is endlessly immersed in the ultimate exercise in thinking nationally: the US presidential election cycle. Most of us will spend a lot of hours thinking and talking about it, in some sense even being entertained by it, way in excess of any impact we could conceivably have on it. BTW, my new year's resolution this year is a simple one. Diet. Diet back down to 180 lbs. I've let myself slip up into the 190 neighborhood. This was facilitated by the usual holiday season self-stuffing practices and aggrava...
As the old year crawled to an end, we all received a respite from boring campaign news by a reprise of the "affluenza" story. To review: lawyers for Ethan Couch maintain that his parents spoiled him so thoroughly that he cannot tell right from wrong, that is, he is insane. They lost on that point, and he was convicted of drunk driving that resulted in the death of four people. BUT the sentencing judge seems to have concluded that there was a mitigating factor there, because he suspended the sentence of imprisonment. Maybe the judge simply wanted to reward the creation of a clever portmanteau. Anyway, Couch never spent a day in lock up over those four deaths, although as a convicted felon he was required to check in regularly with his probation officer, and to give up alcohol. Apparently, upon the surfacing of a video suggesting that he was violating the latter condition, he violated the former. He has disappeared. So, in two sentences: 1) Couch was thought to have...