Category Archives: uncategorized

A Tyee debate: It Bears Repeating: Renewables Alone Won’t End the Climate Crisis | The Tyee Memo from a Climate Crisis Realist: The Choice before Us | The Tyee Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a … Continue reading →

In the recent Aeon essay Is there anything especially expert about being a philosopher? , David Egan draws an analogy between the relationships between philosophical and scientific expertise and between acting and music. I found it interesting and potentially relevant … Continue reading →

Aeon has re-circulated an essay from last March which claims that belief in meritocracy is harmful without even identifying exactly what “meritocracy” is. In order not to be accused of the same omission I will identify a meritocracy as a … Continue reading →

The previous item (about generating Carbon nanotubes etc after “burning” off just the hydrogen from methane using CO2 as the oxidant) raises a point that soot is mostly just unburned carbon and repurposing it as such may ultimately be a … Continue reading →

This was referenced in the promotional supplement to the Dec 2019 issue of Scientific American. The idea is to combine methane and carbon dioxide to produce just water and unoxidized carbon – with the carbon in an economically attractive form … Continue reading →

In Pluck and hard work, or luck of birth? Two stories, one man | Aeon Essays, David Labaree explores the role of luck and privilege in his own life. Commenter Tom Horton asks “When you finally drop the merit illusion … Continue reading →

A recent essay by Neil Levy in ‘Aeon Ideas’ asks: Is virtue signalling a perversion of morality? Here’s my answer. From hypocritical priests and preachers to conspicuous displays of environmental concern, virtue signalling has always been part of our nature. Whether … Continue reading →

Mathematics is a process of staring hard enough with enough perseverance at the fog of muddle and confusion to eventually break through to improved clarity. I’m happy when I can admit, at least to myself, that my thinking is muddled, … Continue reading →

When one has been persuaded of an extreme view there is a danger of over-reacting in the opposite direction and turning to believe everything that is said against it and also against less extreme versions of the same view. I … Continue reading →

UBI advocate, Scott Santens, has produced A Visual History of the #YangMediaBlackout  in which he shows many examples of what appears to be systematic ignoring of Andrew Yang’s campaign (esp by MSN). This seems to be an example of the … Continue reading →

I can imagine falling in a playground whose features I remember and where I undoubtedly may have fallen several times. If I do that repeatedly I can come to feel that the imagined event really happened exactly as I imagine … Continue reading →

“Now I’m awake, but the idea is gone.” Why came it upon me to type that just now? At first ’twas a puzzle, but now it has come to me. Like the guy in “Forgetting” I had sent me a … Continue reading →

This includes some bits that I find helpful for thinking about both Tiananmen and the recent rise of the populist right. Source: Development as a chapter in the moral tale of economics | Aeon Essays

Physicists brought up in the modern system will look into your eyes and explain with all sincerity that they’re not really interested in understanding how nature really works; they just want to successfully predict the outcomes of experiments. This would … Continue reading →

In almost any imaginable theory an experiment involves the preparation of a system in what we call a “state” and the subsequent observation of various quantities which we call “observables”. The observable quantities might be lengths, colours, states of matter, … Continue reading →

In the promo for his piece: Post-empirical science is an oxymoron, and it is dangerous | Aeon Essays , Jim Baggott is identified just as a “popular-science author”, but in fact he’s also a real scientist with research awards and applied … Continue reading →

This could be used as part of a rebuttal to Searle’s silly ‘Chinese Room’ argument. Source: An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have | Aeon Ideas

In response to the dismay caused by recent disclosures of past events where he wore dark makeup, Justin Trudeau has said: “Darkening your face, regardless of the context or the circumstances, is… unacceptable because of the racist history of blackface,” … Continue reading →

If saying climate change is real could be seen as partisan activity just because some candidate or other denies it, then surely the same would apply to all advertising for, say, Coke or Pepsi if some candidate expressed a preference … Continue reading →