2016 — 8 July: Friday
What fresh onslaught awaits the intrepid web wanderer1 this morning, I wonder? Or should I just download Linux Mint 18 and set to work?
I've mentioned...
... some of the issues I have with crowd-sourced data. Seems I was "right" to worry, though whether metaknowledge is the "answer" remains to be seen:
... physicists intensely debated how to interpret quantum mechanics, and for decades thereafter textbooks recorded the dispute as a lopsided battle between Albert Einstein ... and everyone else. In fact, 'everyone else' was recycling the same arguments made by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, while Einstein was backed up by Erwin Schrödinger. What looked like one versus many was really two on two.
Quite how you can quantify awareness of what you don't know would be a neat trick. Not relying on Fox News would help, I suspect.
Thugs rule?
Another fascinatingly plausible essay. Not that the god-botherers will be bothered over-much by it. Source and snippet:
An unbiased extra-terrestrial observer would consider that Homo sapiens' polygyny is simply undeniable. Case closed.
But the likely insights wouldn't stop there. Anyone sufficiently disentangled from the unconscious biases2 we all suffer from might well note that humanity's polygynous heritage doesn't only influence how men and women behave toward
each other. It also explains one of our species' most important imaginary creations: monotheistic religion.
Because Carol's update...
... yesterday mentioned the shock she heard being expressed (by English tourists she encountered in France after the shock result of the EU referendum) I sent her my thoughts on a possible explanation:
I hope the fallout at least gives your more sensible voters a reason to think twice before voting for the populist appeal-to-the-lizard-brain candidate. I honestly don't know if what's just played out here had its roots in Eton school rivalries (Eton being the holy of holies in terms of our political ruling elite's privileged education "system") or whether the three main proponents of "Exit" were actually just as shocked as I was at their unexpected (unintended?) victory. Though all three have now evaporated.
The fact that HM the Q's "Loyal Opposition" has simultaneously imploded from the top down is, as far as I know, without precedent. There are several deep-seated, and very nasty, fault-lines in the UK and its components. Add to that the bigotry, racism, religious, and class divides and who but an idiot would ever want the job of governing?
Now, on my return from the traffic gridlock that is local Friday mid-morning shopping during road repairs, I find an FT story (sans comment) in my email. Snippet:
I wasn't close to them, because politically minded public schoolboys inhabited their own Oxford bubble. They had clubs like the Bullingdon that we middle-class twerps had never even heard of. Their favourite hang-out was the Oxford Union, a kind of children's parliament that organises witty debates. A sample topic: "That sex is good ... but success is better", in 1978, with Theresa May speaking against the motion.
Nurse! More meds!
Back again...
... this time after a tiny spot of 'repair' work to the web browser settings Iris uses that had left her locked out of her access to email, followed by a welcome snack lunch in the "Rising Sun". Traffic remains fairly well-snarled, and there was a "60" limit showing at the entrance to the motorway, north-bound.
I gave up reading...
... "New Statesman" shortly after Christa died. It was dumbing down, and my focus was elsewhere. I later gave up "Private Eye" too — I couldn't read it without getting angry. Since January, Iris has been passing along copies of "The Spectator". Reading the political commentary and opinions therein is like wandering into a Bizarro world of hard-edged certainties that are orthogonal to much of what I cling to by way of my own preferred set of home-grown prejudices. I find it hard to be certain about anything, including whether or not what I'm reading in such "news" is intended as satire.