May 2013
21 posts
Adkin, Neil. 2000. “Did the Romans Keep Their Underwear on in Bed?” Classical World, v.93, n.6: 619-620.
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...
“The plaintiff would call a bystander to witness with the words ‘licet...”
– Edward Courtney on the XII Tables. Didn’t know about this.
“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.
“There is a crucial difference between the human condition and Russian roulette:...”
– David Deutsch (2011)
“There is no intrinsic tendency in gene pools for particular genes to increase or...”
– Richard Dawkins (2009)
Lest is an elegant word and I don’t understand why an editor would prefer an unbearable circumlocution.
“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...
“Disaster threatens us only if we perpetuate the division between science and our...”
– Jacob Bronowski
“ῥώμης γὰρ ἀμείνων ἀνδρῶν ἠδ’ ἵππων ἡμετέρη σοφίη”
– Our expertise is better than the strength of men and horses (Xenophanes)
“The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is...”
– Karl Popper
“We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the...”
– Nietzsche
WatchMy thought process: (1) awesome: springtime! (2) so sad: it’s like the Berlin Wall! (3) Springtime for Hitler.
April 2013
45 posts
On Borges, Particles and the Paradox of the... →
“The theory of relativity is a beautiful example of the basic character of the...”
– Einstein (1954: 238–239)
Why not make all my verbs bold in a world of cheap typography?
“Most of human sentences are in fact aimed at getting rid of the ambiguity which...”
– Jacob Bronowski
“Einstein, as you know, was a delightful person who had a special capacity of...”
– Jacob Bronowski
“Our world is filled with things that are neither mysterious and ghostly nor...”
– Hofstadter and Dennett (1981)
“I think nearly everything people write is too long.”
– Jacob Bronowski
“Food gives everything strength, but a man’s seed comes from all the...”
– Hippocrates, On childbirth
Meet the 28-Year-Old Grad Student Who Just Shook... →
I played Candy Land yesterday and realized that somewhere along the line I conflated it with Chutes and Ladders.
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.
Do you ever wake up to random emotions? I woke up this morning dreading the Christmas season.
“My wife Katherine has been, and remains, a source of encouragement and...”
– Gary Bowman in his preface to Essential Quantum Mechanics (2008)
“Nothing so far as I can make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure...”
– Ezra Pound on Finnegans Wake
“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).
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...
“The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever...”
– Kurt Gödel
“I’ll tell you what the big advantage of homosexuality is. If you’re...”
– Jerry Seinfeld
