Behold, it’s August. Well not really, not where I am. I’m kind of lying when I say that. It is August where B&W is (if B&W is where its database is), but it’s not August where I, typing these words onto this little computer screen, am. So if I (as opposed to someone else) say it’s August, I’m telling a falsehood, because where my body is, it’s 4:30-ish in the afternoon on July 31. But I’m also not telling a falsehood, because it is August in other places – but it’s not August for me, the one uttering the sentence. So is it a lie, or not?

Oh stop playing silly buggers. Anyway the point is it’s August or … Read the rest

Thought for the Day – or perhaps I mean Provocative Cryptic Assertion via Adapted Quotation for the Day. Identity is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

I had this thought partly because of the ever-present dreary discussion of the Religion Question in US Politics (yawn). I’ve noticed that one ploy people resort to when anyone suggests that religion does not belong in the public sphere, is to conflate their religion with their ‘identity.’ It then occurred to me that that conflation, and confusion (because it is a confusion – religion is not ‘identity’), is what is going on – is the subtext, as it were – of the other side in the argument about Islamophobia we had a few days … Read the rest

And here is Mark Pitely’s list:

1) Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – Julian Jaynes. Brilliant, eye-opening, and quite possibly wrong. It definitely changed by thinking, even my thinking processes.

2) How to Read a Book – Mortimer J. Adler. Fascinating. I love all of his library science efforts.

3) Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies – Douglas Hofstadter (et al). My coding and AI leanings are showing. Great stuff here that it lightyears ahead of the rest in AI. His methodologies and tactics changed my approaches.

4) Cybernetics – Norbert Weiner. Complicated and varying, even unfocused, but a glimpse of how his mind worked.

5) Blood Rites: Origin and History of the Passions of War- … Read the rest

Do excuse me – I just feel like making a small boast. Doing a little auto-back-patting. I won’t take long – and anyway there is a sort of point behind it.

It’s Normblog’s first birthday, by the way – and he chose the occasion to mention his favorite blogs, in which select group he included B&W. I blushed unbecomingly to see that. And the same day – the very same day, I tell you – a guest poster at Pharyngula (guests are posting there to keep things going while PZ is at a conference in Calgary or Saskatoon or Kamloops) told the world of his discovery of B&W – so that my face became even more frighteningly florid. But … Read the rest