Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Viktor Orbán was already possessed of those domineering, intolerant ways of thinking and behaving that are all too evident in him today. There was also an expediency about him, one without any principles. But not only that. He was, in addition to all of this, sincere and likeable." - difficult to reconcile

Homo Kádáricus - inspiration for Homo Hungaricus?

"It is statistically incontrovertible that incomes tripled in real terms between 1956 and 1989" - it's quintupled since then

"In Hungary, the land of the greatest popular uprising in post-war Europe ... Not one leading communist functionary or head of the various secret services was ever convicted of a single crime."

"We know that in our business so much is about classroom relationships, being able to adapt to the moment, having a feel for what students enjoy and of course, behaviour management."

"We believe an excellent all-round teacher will get better results with what might seem a dubious approach (such as grammar-translation), than a less gifted teacher trying to use an allegedly superior method." - there is also the issue of the teacher, irrespective of their gifts, using a methodology that they are personally committed to. Methodology has to be negotiated between class and teacher.

"If the approach provides the elements above - input, output, repetition and reinforcement, interesting material, explanation and so on, it should work"

"The listing of words by gender on paper or by display acts as an added reinforcement." - I remember the long tables of spelling patterns Miss Terrapin put on the board when I was at Becontree.

"A good worksheet will often contain a variety of exercise types which move from easy to harder, recycling vocabulary and structures several times"

'To minimize suffering and maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law - a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security."

"Nature imposes nothing that Nature hasn't prepared you to bear." - an Atomic Explosion is imposed by Man.

'If you'd seen what I've seen, you would too' - if I hadn't seen HBO's Chernobyl, I wouldn't have been so profoundly affected as I was by this section of the book.

'It never was any better, it never will be any better. It will only be richer or poorer, sadder but not wiser, until the very last day.'

'But you promise to begin restoring Man's control over Nature. But who will govern the use of the power to control natural forces?'

"In fact, a great deal of natural philosophy is simply a process of linguistic simplification - an effort to invent languages in which half a page of equations can express an idea which could not be stated in less than a thousand pages of so-called 'simple' language."

"For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human potrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature, and the ineffable logos of God." - Man, Nature and God - this triangle interests me.

Bell's theorem proves [all solutions to the measurement problem] have to be weird...[But] there's a difference between being weird and being incoherent or unintelligible"

Once you give up Copenhagen, "there's more than one option on the table ....then how do you decide?...Is it because you have certain prejudices about what's interesting and what's not interesting?"

For Einstein and Bohr's generation, philosophy was part of the core educational curriculum in central Europe.

"the distinction between reality and our knowledge of reality, between reality and information, cannot be made" - isn't this what experiment is all about?

"There is no fundamental boundary", [Zeilinger] said. "There is a transition from classical to quantum, but that is not a boundary"

But as the saga of Neptune and Vulcan shows, it is far from obvious when a theory should be discarded in light of conflicting evidence, rather than rejecting some other assumption used in making the prediction.

"WMAP's data supports the notion that galaxies are nothing buy quantum mechanics writ large across the sky." - there is no 'classical world' which the "quantum world' turns into at some scale, the universe is entirely described by quantum mechanics.

But the rise of cosmology made the inadequacy of the Copenhagen interpretation more acute. How can you draw a line between the observer and the observed system, as Bohr had required, when the system in question is the entire universe?

"But the wave function never collapses, and the different branches of the universe are extraordinarily unlikely to interact." - but it's not impossible that differents branches could interact...and what happens to the conservation laws when the universe branches?.

So physics trudged along, not knowing that a major revolution had happened in an adjacent field.

"It is theory, and thus science itself, which tells us what is or is not ... observable"

"As Quine put it, "Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body" - ah, old friends

"The only place quantum physics enters into the argument is that according to the mathematics of quantum theory, entangled photons will behave in the way Ronnie's roulette balls did." - ok, understand the usefulness of roulette to explaining 'locality' and it's alternatives, but not to 'contextuality'. Nor is it clear that entanglement is nothing more than a conservation law.

"We like to think that we are freely choosing the conditions of our experiments - and, if that's an illusion, the idea that the photons somehow have all our actions pre-encoded within them is difficult to imagine. But technically, this kind of 'superdeterminism' may be a logically possible option for escaping Bell's theorem"