In Boston again, for the second time in a month. Feeling the winter here cut through my coat collar reminds me of places even further north. Incidentally, I just came across this rambling bit, from a nondescript text file I left on my own desktop in November 2006. There are not enough stars in Boston. (More…)
Sand Dollars “What’s effective is not the placebo, but the meaning of the treatment,” writes the doctor Harriet Hall in Skeptic Magazine. “We enter into a human relationship with a caring person who offers to help us.” Hall is talking about placebos, those pills used by doctors and scientists that don’t contain any medicine, but (More…)
[via TEDTalks] It’s been a while since I’ve been in philosophical mode, but this speech really set it off. If, like me, you’ve been leery of cracking open a Richard Dawkin’s book for fear of the smoldering, repetitive pile of polemic that’ll pour straight out into your lap, but are still curious, take a look (More…)
Meant to post this two weeks ago, but got myself into a massive time sink after reading this article online: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” by Alan Sokal. No hurry though, this is apparently old news for most people who care about the matter — the paper was published in (More…)
Just kidding! Well, it might happen at some point in the unforeseeable future. To be honest, I never got past being mono-lingual. Telling people I’m fluent in Mandarin and French gives a nice warm fuzzy feeling and all, but speaking the two languages occasionally really is not like knowing them. If anything, there is a (More…)