Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  What a bloody stupid television ad. My perfectly dry friend Teddy is especially mystified. 

The state police in Minnesota pepper sprayed, and detained, journalists trying to cover the demonstrations over recent homicide cases involving policemen as perps. The spraying and detentions came on Friday, April 16. After this several media organizations asked the governor to intervene. Governor Walz tweeted that in response, " convened a meeting ... with media and law enforcement to determine a better path forward," or at least in the hope that the latter wouldn't put all their knees on the necks of members of the former.   Then came a backdown. On Saturday, the state police said they would in fact change their behavior. Golly gee, thanks for not making it impossible for them to do their jobs, just so you can continue to do a due process flaunting version of yours in opaque conditions, the way you'd like it.  Holly molly we're all grateful. 

  The nice folks at blogger have informed me, without giving any sort of reason, that they are discontinuing the "follow by email widget." This means, I gather, that you will no longer be receiving automatically emailed update on comments posted here.  Sorry.  The neighborhood is going to hell.

 An economist I interviewed recently spoke of two "transformative technologies" that are going to make it possible for the human species to abide on the earth in a sustainable way. On the one hand, there is carbon capture and storage -- technologies for taking carbon out of the air and turning it into, say, bricks, or other useful materials. We have it in solid form and get some use out of it, and the atmosphere has been freed of that much carbon.  In its early form, this will be carbon capture and STORAGE,. The carbon bricks will be put underground. Over time, presumably, uses for them will be found. At least that's how my friend saw it. See the pick. But as a market enthusiast, I think some bright person might get busy creating a demand for these carbon bricks. The demand will drive the supply and they'lll never spend any time underground.  The second technology about which my source was enthusiastic? hydrogen fuel cells. As the techniques of carbon capture take car...

Continuing the thought from yesterday ... my recent reading includes MALIGNANT GROWTH, a work by Alan Marcus, which is specifically devoted to the dark side of the "microbe hunting" paradigm in medical research. What happens if one diligently pursues the microbe that isn't there?  In 1887, a Dr Robert Morris wrote in POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, "It seems more than probable that all malignant growths belong to the infectious microbic diseases, and that by to-morrow we shall have the tiny causators."  That phrase, "malignant growth" as a synonym for cancer tumors, the defining characteristic of the disease, gave Marcus his title. The line also seems, more than any other datum, to have inspired his thesis: that from Morris' time until the First World War, scientists all over the world sought to understand and cure cancer by chasing a phantom, the non-existent cancer microbe. Further, Marcus contends that many of the institutional structures that we think...

  Microbe Hunters was the title of a wonderfully successful science-popularzing book written by Paul de Kruif and published by Simon & Schuster in 1926.  The book is on its face a set of capsule biographies of prominent biologists from Leeuwenhook to Paul Ehrlich. Leeuwenhook invented the microscope: Ehrlich found a cure for syphilis in 1909.  But de Kruif had an underlying organizing principle by which he made his selection. The book was about the pragmatic successes of the germ theory of disease. Specifically, a 'typical' disease has one cause, and the cause is usually a germ. The way to cure (or immunize people from) a disease is to find the germ that causes it, then either(a) find a way to kill that microbe without doing damage to the surrounding tissue (a "magic bullet" as Ehrlich called such a discovery) or find a way to assist the body's own immune system in doing the same. Hence, the title of the book.  The only character in the book to get two chapter...

 One of the many bad things about living through a pandemic is that one doesn't get to overhear great lines in a random crowd anymore. There aren't any random crowds where lots of unrelated conversations might be going on.  So, I can't blame this on that. It is a thought that occurred to me, I'd like to live long enough to overhear this in a crowd. "Lazy? I'm the opposite of lazy. I'm hypo-allergenic."