Michael Flynn's Blog, page 14

The Olde Curmudgeon -- Chapter 2

...continued from Chapter 1.

Chapter 2. Three Things

The sour-faced old man settled into the booth across the table from Jack Heller, and Jack wondered fleetingly if he had made a mistake by inviting him.  The fellow had a battered black notebook in which he jotted a few notes, slapped his pen down, and slammed the cover. "There!" he said with some satisfaction. "That will show the Manichees!"

Jack shook his head. "What?"

"Private joke.  Sorry."

"You said you knew why our meetings were so ineffectual.  You said I had to know three things.  I really only have to know one thing.  How to get corporate to approve our capital request to build a new storage tank."

The old man bobbed his head while Jack spoke, but ended by shaking it sideways.  "I thought you said you had a problem."
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This is Kool

STEREO [Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory] is a pair of telescopes parked in the L4 and L5 solar Lagrange points.  These are along Earth orbit about 93 million miles ahead and behind us.

STEREO-A's Heliospheric Imager captured Comet ISON tracking left to right as it heads toward its close encounter of the hot kind: it will graze the sun on Thursday.

The video covers Nov. 20 to Nov. 22, 2013.
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Ye Olde Psychopath

In an amusing article in Smithsonian Magazine, a brain scan researcher discovers that he is a psychopath:

The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath
Quote:

[James] Fallon seeks to reconcile how he—a happily married family man—could demonstrate the same anatomical patterns that marked the minds of serial killers.

“I’ve never killed anybody, or raped anyone,” he says. “So the first thing I thought was that maybe my hypothesis was wrong, and that these brain areas are not reflective of psychopathy or murderous behavior.”

But no, a scientific theory is never discarded because of contrary evidence.

[W]hen he underwent a series of genetic tests, he got more bad news. “I had all these high-risk alleles for aggression, violence and low empathy,” he says, such as a variant of the MAO-A gene that has been linked with aggressive behavior. Eventually, based on further neurological and behavioral research into psychopathy, he decided he was indeed a psychopath—just a relatively good kind

Doncha love it?  The theory can't be wrong.  The correlations can't be merely correlative.  He has to be a good psychopath.  This would be like discovering:

a study of ballet dancers reveal genetic markers for strong ankles
Joe has genetic markers for strong ankles
Therefore, Joe (who does not dance) is a new kind of ballet dancer: the non-dancing ballet dancer!
Is there nothing the New Phrenology can't discover?
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The Olde Curmudgeon -- Chapter 1

Chapter 1. A Chance Meeting

Jack Heller was glad to get away from the plant and deliberately drove several blocks out of his way to stop at a restaurant he was not known to frequent. The meeting had not gone well and he was convinced that although at the end everyone was agreed on taking action there had not been a clear action plan regarding who was to do what and by when. Too many meetings ended that way, with the illusion of action. Meanwhile, cash was dripping out from the bottom line -- sometimes even gushing out.

The restaurant was a mid-level eatery with booths set between dark wood partitions, or partitions of something that was intended to resemble wood. They were much like the cubicles within which his office staff labored, or did something that was intended to resemble labor. A partition ran down the center of the room with booths on either side of it. More booths ran along the walls. Jack did not think the restaurant could fit any more tables in the room, yet it did not seem to be crowded. A good use of floor space, he judged.
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Odds and Ends

One of these days I'll find out how to make a link internal within a post.  Meanwhile, here are the minitopics for today's tab clearance:

The Obamarama Roll-out
There Are People Who Write Like This
A Novel Proposition
The New Phrenology
Government of the zombies, by the zombies, for the zombies
Ancient critters you never heard of
Diversity in Your Fiction
The Pope Reads Science Fiction
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Slouching Toward Philadelphia

TOF was tied up for most of Philcon. Having committed himself to attending a symposium in Greenwich Village on Saturday, there was no point hustling down to Philly Town for Friday, especially inasmuch as TOF had not been scheduled for diddly squat at the con except for an autographing on Saturday morning when no one would be awake to request one, and a panel on Sunday morning, which he decided to attend just to see if anyone was awake.

They were.

A few.
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Summa origines scientiarum

Article 2. Whether the Scientific Revolution was uniquely Western. Article 3. Whether Christianity enabled the rise of science in the West

The Eleventh Hour

of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
We interrupt the Summa for the annual Armistice Day post:






Harry Singley, TOF's grandfather
"Guv"

A letter written by Sgt. Harry Singley, 304th Engineers, Rainbow Division, AEF, my mother's father.






First day of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive
26 Sept. 1918

"It was on Sept. 26 when the big drive started in the Argonne Forest and I saw all kinds of things that I never witnessed before.  We started out on the night of the 25th.  At 9 o'clock we commenced a tank road and worked our way almost to the German's front line trenches.  At 2:30 one of the greatest of all barrages was opened.  It was said that between 3500 and 4000 guns, some of them of very large calibre, went off at that hour just like clock work.  We worked on this road under shell fire until about 3:45 and then went back until the infantry went over the top at 5 oclock.  We followed with the tanks.  That is the way the Americans started and kept pounding and pushing ahead until the great day on Nov. 11.  ...

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Summa origines scientiarum: Articulus 1

Question I. Whether Christianity promoted the rise of science Article 1. Whether there was a Scientific RevolutionObjection 1.  It would seem otherwise, because the term science is not well-defined. Lindberg (1992), for example, provides no less than seven different definitions.  Therefore, there was no Scientific Revolution because there is no one thing called science.

Objection 2.  It would seem otherwise, because the term science means "knowledge" and mankind has always accumulated knowledge.  Therefore, there was never a scientific revolution.  

Objection 3.  It would seem otherwise, because, as Charles Homer Haskins wrote, "The continuity of history rejects such sharp and violent contrasts between successive periods" of history.  Therefore, Science emerged gradually and not through a “revolution.”

Objection 4.  It would seem otherwise, because a revolution consists of definitive points of change, and is carried out during a short time according to a plan.  But the development of science took place over an extended time and was unplanned.

On the contrary, British historian Herbert Butterfield wrote that the Scientific Revolution “outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes… within the system of medieval Christendom.”
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Summa origines scientiarum: Proœmium

FidesIn a fictional quote attributed to a fictional character, Jack McDevitt has Gregory MacAllister write:

Faith is conviction without evidence, and sometimes even in the face of contrary evidence. In some quarters, this quality is perceived as a virtue.
-- Jack McDevitt, Odyssey (2006) Ch. 12

The McAllister character is being deliberately provocative here, but this version of "faith" is one widely bruited, mostly by people who don't think they have one.  A contrary view comes from Christoph Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna, who stated in one of his lectures:

A blind faith, one that would simply demand a leap into the utter void of uncertainty, would be no human faith. If belief in the Creator were totally without insight, without any understanding of what such entails, then it would likewise be inhuman. Quite rightly, the Church has always rejected "fideism" -- that very sort of blind faith.
-- Christoph Cardinal Schönborn,
"Creation and Evolution: To the Debate as It Stands"
(First Catechetical Lecture for 2005/2006: Oct. 2, 2005, St. Stephan's Cathedral, Vienna)

But faith, of course, is simply the latinate version of "trust" or "truth." To keep faith simply means to trust someone or something. To trust the "evidence," for example.Read More