“The physics of fire ant rafts could help engineers design swarming robots”
Headline on post at Watts Up With That March 6, 2022 [https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/03/06/the-physics-of-fire-ant-rafts-could-help-engineers-design-swarming-robots/] and press release on EurekAlert! March 2, 2022 [https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/945224] – I quote it not because I doubt it but because to me in conjures up images not of a bright future but of “Leiningen Versus the Ants”.
“I deny that biology can destroy the sense of truth, which alone can even desire biology. No truth which I find can deny that I am seeking the truth. My mind cannot find anything which denies my mind.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News November 7, 1908, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022
In my latest Epoch Times column I defend the desire of normal people to protect pleasant neighbourhoods from social engineering cement.
“Ok so who wants to go up on the first Oral Tradition powered rocket?”
Tweet by Jonathan Kay February 10, 2022 [https://twitter.com/jonkay/status/1491931186427576354]
“Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the Unknowable. But there it sits, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”
H.L. Mencken, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail April 6, 2009
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the only thing our Prime Minister knows about a “business case” for exporting LNG to Europe is that he’s going to make sure it stays closed.
“Few are presumptuous enough to dispute with a chemist or mathematician upon points connected with the studies of labour of his life. But almost any man who can read and write feels at liberty to form and maintain opinions of his own upon trade and money …. The economic literature of every succeeding year embraces works conceived in the true scientific spirit, and works exhibiting the most vulgar ignorance of economic history and the most flagrant contempt for the conditions of economic investigation. It is much as if astrology were being pursued side by side with astronomy or alchemy with chemistry.”
Gen. Francis A. Walker, a professor at Yale and later president of M.I.T., quoted by Milton Friedman in CATO Policy Report Vol. XXI No. 2; another source on which my notes are culpably incomplete calls him “probably the most famous American economist of the nineteenth century” and director of two national censuses, which latter claim Wikipedia confirms, adding that he was wounded at Chancellorsville, fought in other battles, became a POW, was made a brevet brigadier general at age 24, and went on to a series of other achievements that make one wonder what one has done with one’s own life.
“there are aspects of our experience which hint at an incompleteness in what we are and that encourage the expectation of a fulfilment whose ground could only be in something or someone other than ourselves. Peter Berger has drawn our attention to ‘signals of transcendence’ found in every life: (a) an argument from order (essentially the intuition that history is not a tale told by an idiot; the parental role of comforting a frightened child is not the acting of a loving lie); (b) an argument from play (cheerfulness, not to say joy, keeps breaking in); (c) an argument from hope (something is held to lie in the future which is necessary to the completion of the present); (d) an argument from damnation (our outrage at Hitler and Stalin is an intuition of the transcendent moral seriousness of the world); (e) an argument from humour (there is a perceived incongruity in our experience which ‘reflects the imprisonment of the human spirit in the world’). I would want to add to these an argument from mathematics. The nature of that subject is a hotly disputed philosophical question, but for many of its practitioners its pursuit has the character of discovery rather than construction. They would agree with St Augustine that ‘men do not criticise it like examiners but rejoice in it like discoverers’. Here is the intimation of an independent world of everlasting truth which we are able to explore.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist