May 2013
21 posts
Adkin, Neil. 2000. “Did the Romans Keep Their Underwear on in Bed?” Classical World, v.93, n.6: 619-620.
May 25th
8 notes
A quick bit of philological oneirology
Not very long ago I was telling someone about my experience of deja vu within a dream. It ranks among the stranger moments of my life. My memory of the dream has fragmented and I have only a few strong impressions of the whole, but I just found the journal entry I wrote upon waking up: I had deja vu in my dream last night. / I went to LA, I thought for the first time, / but suddenly realized I...
May 24th
15 notes
“The plaintiff would call a bystander to witness with the words ‘licet...”
– Edward Courtney on the XII Tables. Didn’t know about this.
May 20th
4 notes
“Nothing is strange to the dreamer.”
– nihil est magnum somnianti, Cicero (Div. 2.68.141). Translators take some liberties with magnum here, which is to say, it has an interesting semantic range. Here it must be closer to strange or unusual than significant or important.
May 20th
7 notes
May 17th
7 notes
“There is a crucial difference between the human condition and Russian roulette:...”
– David Deutsch (2011)
May 17th
10 notes
May 16th
12 notes
“There is no intrinsic tendency in gene pools for particular genes to increase or...”
– Richard Dawkins (2009)
May 16th
May 13th
11 notes
May 13th
6 notes
Lest is an elegant word and I don’t understand why an editor would prefer an unbearable circumlocution.
May 8th
5 notes
May 8th
12 notes
“It is plainly evident to us that there is something securely known even if the...”
– Galen (Opt.Doct.1.48) This was pretty much the extent of my epistemology until Mills introduced me to Karl Popper a few years ago. As silly as ancient Greek sophistry was on this matter, we live in an age still sillier, as the extent of our knowledge is magnified by the awesome technologies that we...
May 8th
9 notes
“Disaster threatens us only if we perpetuate the division between science and our...”
– Jacob Bronowski
May 7th
9 notes
May 7th
11 notes
“ῥώμης γὰρ ἀμείνων ἀνδρῶν ἠδ’ ἵππων ἡμετέρη σοφίη”
– Our expertise is better than the strength of men and horses (Xenophanes)
May 4th
10 notes
May 4th
1,091 notes
“The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is...”
– Karl Popper
May 3rd
2 notes
May 3rd
3 notes
“We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the...”
– Nietzsche
May 3rd
6 notes
WatchWatch
My thought process: (1) awesome: springtime! (2) so sad: it’s like the Berlin Wall! (3) Springtime for Hitler.
May 2nd
9 notes
April 2013
45 posts
On Borges, Particles and the Paradox of the... →
Apr 29th
5 notes
Apr 29th
9 notes
“The theory of relativity is a beautiful example of the basic character of the...”
– Einstein (1954: 238–239)
Apr 29th
1 note
Why not make all my verbs bold in a world of cheap typography?
Apr 26th
1 note
Apr 26th
8 notes
“Most of human sentences are in fact aimed at getting rid of the ambiguity which...”
– Jacob Bronowski
Apr 25th
4 notes
Apr 25th
11 notes
“Einstein, as you know, was a delightful person who had a special capacity of...”
– Jacob Bronowski
Apr 25th
1 note
“Our world is filled with things that are neither mysterious and ghostly nor...”
– Hofstadter and Dennett (1981)
Apr 24th
8 notes
Apr 24th
1 note
Apr 24th
9 notes
“I think nearly everything people write is too long.”
– Jacob Bronowski
Apr 23rd
7 notes
Apr 23rd
15 notes
“Food gives everything strength, but a man’s seed comes from all the...”
– Hippocrates, On childbirth
Apr 23rd
8 notes
Meet the 28-Year-Old Grad Student Who Just Shook... →
Apr 22nd
7 notes
Apr 22nd
7 notes
I played Candy Land yesterday and realized that somewhere along the line I conflated it with Chutes and Ladders.
Apr 22nd
4 notes
Jerry: I thought that new promotion was supposed to be a lot more work.
George: Yeah, when the season starts. Right now I sit around pretending that I'm busy.
Jerry: How do you pull that off?
George: I always look annoyed. When you look annoyed all the time, people think you're busy.
Apr 22nd
14 notes
Apr 19th
9 notes
Do you ever wake up to random emotions? I woke up this morning dreading the Christmas season.
Apr 19th
11 notes
“My wife Katherine has been, and remains, a source of encouragement and...”
– Gary Bowman in his preface to Essential Quantum Mechanics (2008)
Apr 19th
3 notes
Apr 18th
9 notes
“Nothing so far as I can make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure...”
– Ezra Pound on Finnegans Wake
Apr 18th
3 notes
“And Joyce was a poor sick fucker who probably died with his balls somewhere up...”
– Hunter S. Thompson in a letter to Lionel Olay (February 16, 1962).
Apr 18th
3 notes
Apr 17th
11 notes
caille: On the other hand, Super, there’s always late Borges for a counterpoint: “It is granted to no one to traverse more than an infinitesimal part of the palace. Some know only the cellars. We can take in some faces, some voices, some words, but what we perceive is of the feeblest. Feeble and precious at the same time….we are already dead when nothing touches us, neither a word nor a...
Apr 17th
12 notes
“The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever...”
– Kurt Gödel 
Apr 17th
15 notes
“I’ll tell you what the big advantage of homosexuality is. If you’re...”
– Jerry Seinfeld
Apr 16th
7 notes
Apr 16th
2 notes