July 2009
22 posts
“By cutting the mammoth in pieces, we only observe mice.”
– Sornette on Dragon-Kings vs. Black Swans (via FT Alphaville)
“Be paranoid about data security”
– Anatomy of Twitter Attack
Survey of economic models that predicted the... →
Busy. Father in hospital.Trying to win coding competition. Google wave conference. I leave for Jerusalem in 9 days.
Rene Girard | Christianity will be victorious in... →
N.T Wright says US Episcopals "off the rails" →
S responds to E’s comment:
How is one thought process better than another? Only in result, not in terms of thinking. It would be foolish to apply judgments about the behavioral and physical world to the mind - as senseless as applying property laws to the number π. That said, memorization is not a trivial activity and could be as creative a mental act as solving a puzzle. But if the...
“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual...”
– JM Keynes
E on this:
We have not yet learned to think. What often passes for such are lists of facts with no order except the march of time, which also is forced on us. Can we be taught to think? Or is thinking, by necessity, something that comes from within instead of without?
An educator can pass off a list of facts for memorization, but where can thinking be facilitated? Might not institutions,...
I’ve joined the fray. Comments on Caleb Stegall and Patrick Deenen’s remarks at the Front Porch Republic in the now heated debate with First Things commentators Jody Bottum, R.R. Reno and Joe Carter. My entry, on Love and Locality in the Confucian Tradition, is also now available at First Things.
Italy I
Milton himself was troubled by doubts on the real reasons why he had undertaken the trip to a country a virtuous and religious man should have carefully shunned. ‘Why Italy?’ he asked himself. ‘Was it that, like another Saturn, I might find a hiding place in Latinum?’ He answered is own questions a little defiantly, as if afraid of not being believed: ‘No. It was...
The Tamil Tigers had human shields by the tens of thousands, not just by the dozens and hundreds like Al Qaeda. They put people between themselves and the government and say “you have to kill all the people to get to us.” So the government obliged them. The government killed thousands of civilians.
MJT: Tamil civilians?
Kaplan: Yes. They killed thousands of civilians in the course...
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