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Philosophy

The Long View: The Years of Rice and Salt

This book review is the source of one of my favorite cocktail party theories: a number of seemingly well-established sciences are built upon an n of 1. In a grand sense, geology and biology fall into this category, since the big theories like plate tectonics and evolution depend on one

The Long View: Being and Time

Heidegger's star has dimmed a bit, but his heavy German prose is still famous. Being and Time By Martin Heidegger Translated from the German Seventh Edition By John Macquarie & Edward Robinson First edition (Sein und Zeit) 1927 __________ HarperPerennial 2008 589 Pages, US$19.9 9 ISBN 978-0-06-157559-4

The Long View: Marcus Aurelius: A Life

Another Roman history lesson, courtesy of Frank McLynn's biography of Marcus Aurelius. I have been slowly re-reading [for probably the twentieth time] G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, and I also find Chesterton's description of Classical Rome strikingly allusive. For Eastern Christians, the Roman

AI Winter

Scott Locklin shares my general dubiousness about artificial intelligence in general, and trendy analysis techniques in particular. He suggests that the surfeit of gassy marketing claims about machine learning techniques will eventually kill any actual technological progress in the field by making everything disreputable. Lest you think Locklin and I

A Man Called Ove Book Review

by Fredrik Backman Washington Square Press, 2015 337 pages ISBN 978-1476738024 This is a funny, funny book. I cannot remember laughing out loud quite so much, quite so often, with any other book I've read recently. Ove's responses to the ordinary annoyances of life are purely

The Long View 2005-05-02: Human Mice; Roe Misapprehension; Gödel versus Immanence

I remember being struck by this story when it came out. If your human-mice hybrids start acting too human, the obvious solution is to just kill them all! Human Mice; Roe Misapprehension; Gödel versus Immanence No, deranged scientists are not trying to create human-mouse hybrids that have squeaky voices and

The Long View: Is Mathematics Constitutional?

A recent popular [well, as popular as a massive book full of equations can be] exposition of mathematical Platonism is Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality. It even has practice problems in it with devoted communities of amateurs trading tips on how to solve them. Mathematical Platonism, or