The descent of Edward Wilson

Dawkins hates E.O. Wilson's new book. No surprise. But what if the cooperation meme really caught on?

"To borrow from Dorothy Parker, this is not a book to be tossed lightly aside. It should be thrown with great force. And sincere regret." The descent of Edward Wilson

The present of a Stoic

The OleMiss Museum, a half-mile walk through the woods behind Rowan Oak, includes an exhibit of Greek and Roman antiquities. One is a bust of Marcus Aurelius. Thought about him on my walk again yesterday.

For a man cannot lose either the past or the future: for what a man has not, how can any one take this from him?

...the longest liver and he who will die soonest lose just the same. For the present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, if it is true that this is the only thing which he has, and that a man cannot lose a thing if he has it not. 

Richard Ford on living

Just home from Oxford, MS, from where I tweeted this morning about the great stock Richard Ford places in living. Today's Times Magazine punctuates the point. Note Ford's reply to Andrew Goldman's impudent smartass question:

NYT: It has been six years since your last novel was published, and I gather you weren’t writing for some of that time. What were you doing? Jack Daniel’s and the “Today” show? 

RF: Living, it’s called living. You might call it wasting time, but I just call it living. Going bird hunting, reading books, watching the Red Sox, doing things with my wife that we wouldn’t have time to do if I was writing a book. There’s a whole lot to do once you can get out from under the yoke of working.

Richard Ford Is a Man Who Actually Listens - NYTimes.com

Bookshelf Porn

A photo blog collection of all the best bookshelf photos from around the world.

Bookshelf Porn

Can Physics and Philosophy Get Along?

"Precisely because science deals with only what can be known, direct or indirectly, by sense experience, it cannot answer the question of whether there is anything — for example, consciousness, morality, beauty or God — that is not entirely knowable by sense experience. To show that there is nothing beyond sense experience, we would need philosophical arguments, not scientific experiments." Can Physics and Philosophy Get Along? - NYTimes.com

Sir Paul meets Lord Russell

McCartney describes his meeting with Russell.

Somehow I got his number and called him up. I figured him as a good speaker, I’d seen him on television, I’d read various bits and pieces and was very impressed by his dignity and the clarity of this thinking, so when I got a chance I went down and met him. Bertrand Russell lived in Chelsea in one of those little terrace houses, I think it was Flood Street. He had the archetypal American assistant... (continues) How Bertrand Russell Turned The Beatles Against the Vietnam War | Open Culture

The science of memory

I keep forgetting to read Moonwalking with Einstein. Maybe I'll remember to watch its author's TED Talk.

"In 2005 science writer Joshua Foer went to cover the U.S. Memory Championship. A year later he was back -- as contestant. A year of mental training with Europe's top memorizer turned into a book, Moonwalking with Einstein, which is both a chronicle of his immersion in the memory culture and wonderfully accessible and informative introduction to the science of memory."

Joshua Foer | Profile on TED.com

Science Tales

Science Tales "looks into belief in chiropractic and homeopathy; denial of moon landings, climate change and evolution, the anti-vaccination movement, and related subjects. It concludes with a tremendous piece on the forces that give rise to anti-scientific/anti-evidence movements, which Cunningham attributes to the deadly cocktail of cynical corporate media-manipulation and humanity's built-in cognitive blind-spots." Science Tales: short comic stories about science, skepticism, evidence and woo - Boing Boing

"We have to let things go"

"We live, then, in a dark time here on our tiny precious planet. Ecological devastation, political and economic collapse, irreconcilable ideological and religious conflict, poverty, famine: the end of the overshoot of cheap-oil-based consumer capitalist expansionism...

Humans tend to try to manage things: land, structures, even rivers. We spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and treasure in imposing our will on nature, on preexisting or inherited structures, dreaming of permanent solutions, monuments to our ambitions and dreams. But in periods of slack, decline, or collapse, our abilities no longer suffice for all this management. We have to let things go. All things "go" somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms..."

Ernest Callenbach's Last Words to America | Mother Jones 'via Blog this'

Against Chairs

Against Chairs: "sitting for extended periods during the day dramatically increased participants’ risk of death. The result held even among participants who exercised regularly, and although there’s the usual confusion over causation and correlation, the study falls atop a growing pile of evidence that long times spent seated are a contributing cause of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, depression, and practically innumerable orthopedic injuries. It does not matter if you are young, eat well and live an otherwise active life. Just being seated, in excess, will hurt you." 'via Blog this'

The remedy:

Walk & Talk - The West Wing Reunion from Martin Sheen