Random Thoughts

The following position arose from a blitz chess game played on the Internet Chess Club this afternoon. I am white, and black is to move. As you can see, material is even; white has all his pieces but the Rd1 trained against the enemy kings' shelter, a strong knight on f6, and is threatening to win an exchange with Nxe8 -however good or bad that move may be, given the strength of the knight in the game position. Black is in control of the c file, and is apparently controlling his king's position well enough; in particular, the h7 square, attacked by Nf6 and Qh3, is defended by Nf8, Qe7, and…

As elections to renew the european parliaments get closer, the political arena in Italy fails to deal with the matters that should interest voters, and instead concentrates on the behavior of Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. In a crescendo of events, each of which could have brought less gutsy politicians to resign, the italian press is getting totally dominated by the personal matters of the prime minister. Let me give a brief summary below. A trial proved that Berlusconi had corrupted an English lawyer, Mills, to get a false testimony from him; a law masterfully crafted by…

    What follows is a sociobiological rebuttal of white supremacy.  It purports to be a proof that no race can lay the claim to outright superiority as the best evolved example of homo sapiens sapiens. Anatomically modern man (homo sapiens sapiens) spread into continental Europe approximately 35,000 years ago.  The land was within the icy grip of the Great Ice Age or Pleistocene Epoch (1.8 million to 10,000 years ago) and the glacial shelf reached, at most extreme global coverage, to the northern edge of the Mediterranean Sea.  At the time of entry into Europe…

Random Noise #12 : Freedom of Speech and of the Press Freedom of speech is a right and a duty. Faced with injustice, we have both a right and a duty - a duty-right - to speak out against it. Politically motivated censorship can only do its dirty work in absolute secrecy.  But once that censorship becomes public knowledge, it achieves the opposite of its desired effect when it amplifies and unifies the voice of outrage. ... the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is the…

Nanobots seem to be well on their way to drastically expanding human life. Clusters of them are already regenerating the spinal cords of mice (Project, 2007), and soon it should be possible to program them to repair all of our aging and defected cells (Lindsay, 2005). But nanotechnology is not the only thing in our favor. Scientists have recently even begun to conquer the telomere problem (Mann, 2009). By making the lifestyle changes known to be currently effective towards extending vitality, such as cutting sugar intake, we may yet live long enough to live forever.  References: Lindsay…

Rarely does a scientific hypothesis - at least, not a useful or an interesting one - admit of a straightforward up-or-down, yes-or-no verdict. Valuable hypotheses survive the test of time in countless engagements with reality. The war against ignorance is a war of attrition.      - David Lindley, Boltzmann's Atom, p. ix

The Buzzword Blog #2 : What is a Buzzword? A buzzword is a word with a vague meaning, and which is commonly used in speech or writing to express a vague idea.  The buzzword category includes words which are commonly used, and commonly over-used in bureaucratic and managerial environments. Buzzwords give rational thinkers the impression of being used merely to impress the hearer or reader with the user's apparent knowledge. Buzzwords should be distinguished from jargon words.  All words coined for use in science, law and the arts to express a rationally explainable meaning are jargon…

If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance 'God'.    - Jerry Coyne, Nature, Sep. 19, 1996

The Buzzword Blog #1 Invent your own ism! Sometimes the natural grammar of the English language can permit an excessive freedom in the coinage of new words and terms.  For example, there is a seemingly endless supply of roots to which the -ism suffix can be attached.  I have coined two new words to express this flexibility of the language. Ismization. Ismization: n. - the process of creating a new political movement by adding the suffix -ism to a root, without necessarily employing any process of rational thinking. Libidinism. Libidinism: n. - the freedom to think up a new social,…

Finally, there is this possibility: after I tell you something, you just can't believe it. You can't accept it. You don't like it. A little screen comes down and you don't listen anymore. I'm going to describe to you how Nature is - and if you don't like it, that's going to get in the way of your understanding it. It's a problem that physicists have learned to deal with: They've learned to realize that whether they like a theory or they don't like a theory is not the essential question. Rather, it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment. It is not a question…