Michael Flynn's Blog, page 114

m_francis @ 2009-04-04T23:54:00

The Way the Future Was

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m_francis @ 2009-04-04T14:22:00

Do Emergent Properties Constitute an Emergency?

This was found on veniaminov.blogspot.com/2009/02/this-this-thisthis-but-that.html and suggests why emergent properties are a natural consequence in the "Aristothomsist" view, but very hard to explain in the Cartesian schema. 

                   
For instance, if a reductionist claims that one section of "my" molecules (colloquially called "my arm") caused another section of "my" molecules (colloquially called "my fist") to collide with a section of

m_francis @ 2009-04-03T18:39:00

Slippery Slope?  What Slippery Slope? 

First they came for those terminal in great pain.  Then they came for the terminal.  Then they came for those with low "quality" of life.  Now they come for those simply in the mood. 

www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,512251,00.html

The next step is when they wonder why "consent" is such a big deal.  Where Singer prophecies and the Dutch have already gone. 


Philosopher Edward Feser on Descartes as Newspeak

Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Moliere, Locke, and the other mo

m_francis @ 2009-04-02T18:17:00

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/02/muslim.minister.defrocked/index.html

For nearly 30 years, [Ann Holmes:] Redding has been an ordained minister in the Episcopal Church. Her priesthood ended Wednesday when she was defrocked.

The reason? For the past three years Redding has been both a practicing Christian and a Muslim. . . . .

“The church interprets my being a Muslim as ‘abandoning the church,’ ” she said. “And that [there:] comes an understanding that you have to be one or the oth

m_francis @ 2009-04-01T13:37:00

Dante: The Video Game! I found this on Mark Shea blog.  He comments: 
The game designers have made a few changes:  Dante is a beefed up veteran of the crusades who seizes Death's scythe to plunge the depths of hell and rescue Beatrice's soul, which has been stolen by Lucifer after she was brutally murdered while her love was away at war. 
As long as it is only a few minor changes.....
 Vast volumes of social anthropology could be written to describe the change in world view between the the actual

m_francis @ 2009-03-31T16:30:00

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

"Earth Hour Candle Sets Mississauga Townhouse Ablaze"--headline, National Post (Canada), March 30

+ + +

Up Jim River

Our intrepid heroes are on Gatmander,

Gatmander was a dim world.  Her sun was more distant than most and gleamed in the sky as a blue-white diamond.  Young women were known to hold their splayed fingers to the sky and imagine that the sun was set in an engagement ring.  Daylight on Gatmander reminded visitors of a spotlight running across a dusky plain. 
 

m_francis @ 2009-03-30T10:22:00

Manalive

The Chesterton Society has made a movie of Chesterton's Manalive.  This is a book of his I've not read.  Perhaps I shall. 


Then we have this


This is a Great Science Fiction Headline

"Giant Lobster Takes Over U.S. 1 in the Florida Keys"--headline, Florida Keys Keynoter, March 27 

Next stage, takeover of I-95.


Maybe Because it's Vacuum-Packed?

"Space Smells Funny, Astronauts Say"--headline, Space.com, March 27   

After the Ball is Over

"Diners Can 'Have a Ball' at Testicle Festival"--headline,

m_francis @ 2009-03-29T16:16:00

Fifth Sunday in Lent

Food for Thought

Eating assimilates an object to a subject by destroying the object.  Knowledge assimilates an object to a subject by preserving the object. To doubt the objectivity of knowledge requires that we be confused about the difference between knowing something and eating it.-- James Chastek
Yet, this has been confused in modern thought.  Understandably so, because the perceived object only exists within us as a change-of-state of our own body.  Sights and sounds and s

m_francis @ 2009-03-28T20:10:00

Happy Birthday, Pere!

He's the one in the middle, back. 
Four score years and four today. 


I asked him once when did he first feel he was an "old man." 

His answer: On his 20th birthday. 

Why would he feel old then? 

He celebrated his 20th birthday on board USS Sea Sturgeon as it departed Iwo Jima to take him back to Hawaii. 

Some of this came up at dinner today.  Basheer asked him where he was when the war ended, and he said, On a troopship heading for Japan. 

Nothing is more black than a ship i

m_francis @ 2009-03-25T19:38:00

The Myth of the Renaissance

This is worth its own post

 

Henri Matisse famously said, "The Renaissance was decadence!"  Compared to what had gone before, very little that was new occurred during the Renaissance.  Few new ideas or new technologies appeared.  Architecture became a slavish imitation of the Greeks and Romans.  Only in painting was there brilliance: the development of perspective and its flowering in the realism of narrative paintings.  (Although Matisse regarded this as backsliding.)