Posts in Education
Words Worth Noting - November 28, 2025

“My taste is for the sensational novel, the detective story, the story about death, robbery, and secret societies; a taste which I share in common with the bulk at least of the male population of this world.”

G.K. Chesterton “Novel-Reading” in T.P.’s Weekly April 7, 1911, reprinted in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)

Carney's high-falutin'... endless international chitchat

In my latest Loonie Politics column I describe Mark Carney’s chronic jetting about blabbing to his fellow Davos Man sophisticates instead of sitting at his desk making hard choices as proof that he really believes words are deeds, especially fancy abstract ones. And as brazenly hypocritical on the dreaded “carbon pollution”.

Words Worth Noting - October 3, 2025

“The period during which light was ‘sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle’ was a period of crisis – a period when something was wrong – and it ended only with the development of wave mechanics and the realization that light was a self-consistent entity different from both waves and particles. In the sciences, therefore, if perceptual switches accompany paradigm changes, we may not expect scientists to attest to these changes directly. Looking at the moon, the convert to Copernicanism does not say, ‘I used to see a planet, but now I see a satellite.’ That locution would imply a sense in which the Ptolemaic system had once been correct. Instead, a convert to the new astronomy says, ‘I once took the moon to be (or saw the moon as) a planet, but I was mistaken.’ That sort of statement does recur in the aftermath of scientific revolutions.”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition