This Strange Moment
A message to you from the fleeting present.
For when this moment passes (and it will pass, as all things do), every effort will be taken to erase it from memory, to exclude it from the official record.
Practice of neurosurgery on Saturn
The practice of neurosurgery on Saturn is almost identical to the one practiced on Earth. Because the art of practice of Medicine was transferred by homo sapiens sapiens “exearthed” 30 years ago from Earth to Saturn.
[…]
These cases give us the means of reflection to improve the practice of Neurosurgery.
Bois also criticizes the whole practice of pigeonholing voters into two established categories, of forcing people to have to reduce themselves, essentialize their political views. He criticizes the aforementioned political compass charts. It is reminiscent of Edouard Glissant’s idea of the ‘right to opacity.’
Bois destroys and humiliates this essentialization, this hijacking of human complexity in spectacular fashion. At first, he plots all the ‘normal’ and mainstream politicians according to their views on the political compass chart. Then, he introduces us to some of the Reform Party politicians. They fit onto it, but their views are so bizarre, that he introduces a third scale, a z-axis, the ‘fascination index,’ to plot them correctly.
A Deadhead Sticker on a Cadillac: Don Henley’s ‘The Boys Of Summer’ at 40
Instead of the counterculture being a metaphor for lost love in ‘The Boys Of Summer’, therefore, the lost love is a metaphor for the counterculture.
The Kekulé Problem: where did language come from?
Language can be used to sum up some point at which one has arrived—a sort of milepost—so as to gain a fresh starting point. But if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems I wish that you would write to me and tell me how you go about it.
I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, “wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?” So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.
Writing in a report summary in 1979, Calhoun noted that “no single area of intellectual effort can exert a greater influence on human welfare than that contributing to better design of the built environment.”
Universe 25: The Mouse “Utopia” Experiment That Turned Into An Apocalypse
[…] the experiment design has been criticized for creating not an overpopulation problem, but rather a scenario where the more aggressive mice were able to control the territory and isolate everyone else. Much like with food production in the real world, it’s possible that the problem wasn’t of adequate resources, but how those resources are controlled.
Ultimately Calhoun’s work functions like a Rorschach blot—people see what they want to see. It’s worth remembering that not all lab experiments, especially contrived ones such as Universe 25, apply to the real world. In which case, perhaps the best lesson to learn here is a meta-lesson: that drawing lessons itself can be a dangerous thing.
[why am i posting Serious Stuff at 7:25 am on Xmas Day? well i could explain why i’m up, and it isn’t because i’m excited about my presents. maybe i can explain why i have nothing better to do, even. but for now, i just was surfing a bit, while waiting for the oven to heat for some fresh bread for holiday dinner at a friend’s place, and wanted to note this article (as a former applied scientist, bogusness in science is still of interest), and as always, whenever something is too edgy for Facebook i stick it here. make myself feel like i’m doing something about it.]
“You can cheat to get a paper. You can cheat to get a degree. You can cheat to get a grant. You can’t cheat to cure a disease,” he says. “Biology doesn’t care.”