One of the great challenges in blogging is a frame of reference. All bloggers should be able to answer the question: Why do I blog?
Some blogs are well-focused, some are random reflections, some well thought out, some not.
Twitter has helped the blogosphere by providing a home to those of limited thought to reach out to those of limited attention span. Twitting is to communication what candy floss is to nutrition. Initially a quick hit, but, in the end, unsatisfying. Read the rest of this entry »
One of my favorite quotations is Ecclesiastes 9:11 (New King James Version)
11 I returned and saw under the sun that-
The race is not to the swift,
Nor the battle to the strong,
Nor bread to the wise,
Nor riches to men of understanding,
Nor favor to men of skill;
But time and chance happen to them all.
George Orwell (”Politics and the English Language,” in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays [New York, 1950,]p84 “translated” the verse into nominalized modern sociological jargon:
“Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits not tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must be invariably be taken into account.”
Jaan Puhvel, professor of classics and Indo-European Studies at the University of California notes that Orwell’s rendering amounts to parody (retaining content, but debasing form)
Or, as the popular idiom puts it, life is a crapshoot.
Economist philosopher John Gray suggests that the present crisis of capitalism is not like the Great Depression, but rather more like the collapse of communism. Dave here - it is an interesting comparison. Just as the Soviet empire collapsed under the weight of an unsuccessful war in Afghanistan, the American empire collapses under the weight of its own military misadventure in Iraq. And just to ensure the death knell of an insolvent empire , Obama chooses to enlarge the American presence in Afghanistan.
Back to John Gray on the crisis, from the attached Guardian clip. It is not possible to get the show back on the road. We are at the end of debt-based financial capitalism. There is no obvious replacement paradigm , thus we are in for an extended period of uncertainty. Read the rest of this entry »
The Return of a Static universe and the End of Cosmology, a paper just published online in the Journal of Relativity and Gravitation, argues that in 100 billion years, everything else we can see will have been pushed so far away by the universe’s expansion that all other sources of light will have been redshifted beyond our ability to detect them. All evidence of the big bang will have disappeared and all matter other than that in our galaxy will be invisible. Indeed, our view of the universe will look suspiciously like it did in the pre-Hubble days.
The authors go on to ponder what this means in terms of the anthropic principle: the idea that we exist in a universe that’s got conditions favorable to life largely because anything else would preclude any life arising that could ponder the universe. They suggest that there’s another layer of complexity on top of that, namely that we only recognize that there is an anthropic principle observationally verify that we live in a very special time in the evolution of the universe!”
One of the great challenges in blogging is a frame of reference. All bloggers should be able to answer the question: Why do I blog?
