Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

Two mistakes in 50 words ALCAN (not Alcan) and Marine Highway (not Maritime) - how many haven't I picked up?

'This is the failure to recognise that there is a fundamental difference between difference between the law that expresses a moral principle and the law that is only a social regulation."

'There is a danger in the general requirement of good faith. The general requirement in the German code was used during the nazi regime to support the false morality that no one could in good faith deal with Jews.' The Merchant of Venice?

"Such relationships cannot be fruitful if they are conducted on the footing that each side is trying to outwit the other as in a business bargain." - a very jaundiced view of bargaining.

"[The judges of England] have needed the stuff of morals to be supplied to them so that out of it they could fashion law; when they have had to make their own stuff their work is inferior."

"...the force behind the law [is] the citizen's sense of obligation."

"But once once night fell the town was lit up and everyone was having fun. We will never die, they say to themselves, there's gold enough in those hills"

"No society has yet solved the problem of how to teach morality without religion."

"But the true principle is that the law exists for the protection of society. It does not discharge its function by protecting the individual, annoyance, corruption and exploitation ; the law must protect also the institutions and the community of ideas, political and moral without which people cannot live together."

"It is the power of a common sense and not the power of reason that is behind the judgements of society." Macintyre would phrase this differently.

"...it is not possible to set theoretical limits to the power of the state to legislate against immorality." Yes, those limits are political.

"A State which refuses to enforce Christian beliefs has lost the right to enforce Christian morals."

like his treatment of grammar, dislike his treatment of intelligence

can't believe you could write about Seattle in the 1990's and not mention Grunge :-o

An orange is orange

So the brain is not a computer, so what sort of information processing device is it, a comparer?

that's it?

That was food, now for cooking :-)

"This process of modularisation, or specialisation, can be viewed as a self-organising response as the child's brain develops and marshals resources in an efficient way." De Bono was years ahead of his time.

Language emerges in an item based way - why do we teach grammar at all?

does a shared attentional framework overcome Wittgenstein's problem with ostensive definition?

There are now 15 million Mormons worldwide, the population has increased fivefold since Spotlight was written in 1993. Wow!

"It is the nature of Human beings to expect more of others than of themselves;"

"It is in this that animals differ from man; man can, in the long run, develop a conscience."

"historians better get used to the idea of representing their study in some visual form"

"Asian brewers were thus "pasteurising" their alcohols centuries before Louis Pasteurising suggested gently heating wine and milk to kill spoilage microbes."

Fiction had become the focal part of weeklies an biweeklies by the turn of the century, comprising more than fifty percent of the published content.

"An interesting addendum in connection with Vasárnapi Újság is its linking of Gypsies with crime. That association was established in 1907, already in the photographic era, through pictures showing the Gypsies accused of the staggering murder in Dános."

"Finally there is the UK's openness to the new Europe of Poland and the Czech Republic, the more recent members of the European Union, which has created spare capacity in the jobs market and reduced the bargaining power of British born employees...." quite prescient here.