In an effort to be optimistic, John proposes these wonderful quotations, especially destined to travelers, readers and music lovers — John’s friends.
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Optimistic quotations for January 2012
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Happy 2012?
John is worried about what will happen during 2012 … and the succeeding years. Unfortunately, optimism is not featured on the menu. He sees it like this.
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John’s favorite reads of 2011
Thanks to recommendations from sister Marjie and friend Jean, 2011 was a year when John was introduced to a number of authors he had never read — some recent, some less so. These included Nick Tosches, Cormack McCarthy and Junot Diaz. But there are some old acquaintances on the list too.
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Where is perception (Part 2)
At the end of the last exciting episode, we left off just as signals were racing up the optic nerves from the retina, en route for the brain!
The optic nerves arrive at a thingie (technical term…) called the thalamus, in the middle of the lower part of the brain, right at the top of the brain stem. The thalamus receives sense data from various organs and relays it out to different parts of the brain for handling, like a dispatcher. It sends optical data to a whole set of places at the back of the brain in a region called, logically enough, the visual cortex. Continue reading
Where is perception? (Part 1 of 2)
An earlier article, Reality and perception (2) — perception = the five senses. discussed how our body’s sensors (aka, the five senses) only detect a limited range of stimuli. Our ears only “hear” pitches from about 20 to 20,000 Herz; our eyes only “see” light between the ultraviolet and the infra-red frequencies, and so on. The article stopped there, as its intent was only to indicate why we do not perceive the physical world (space, fields and particles) as it really “is” (a result of natural selection).
The article also mentioned that we “perceive 400nm light as violet in our minds/brains”, but opted out of discussing that further, pointing out that it “is another subject…”. A pretty cowardly way of avoiding the subject, right? So now let’s go into it a bit further, but not too far… Continue reading
If this is globalization…
Consider the following aspect of today’s policital-economic scene:
- Unhindered market competition between economies whose salary standards are abysmally different;
- the permanent threat of “off-shore” relocation; Continue reading
Freud, the individual and the need for skepticism
John’s interest was piqued lately by two articles he read on psychology and what it can tell us about living in a society which claims to foster individualism while it in fact employs all possible means to promote conformity.
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The evolution of Delusion
The concept of a monotheistic creator has had a long and varied career.
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Great quotation #1
(English translation follows…)
“Les démocraties occidentales ne sont que les façades politiques du pouvoir économique. Une façade avec des couleurs, des drapeaux, des discours interminables sur la sacro-sainte démocratie. Nous vivons un époque ou nous pouvons discuter de tout. A une exception pres: la démocratie. Elle est là, c’est un dogme acquis. Ne pas toucher, comme dans les musées. Les élections sont devenues la représentation d’une comèdie absurde, honteuse, où la participation du citoyen est très faible, et dans laquelle les gouvernements représentent les commissaires politiques du pouvoir économique.” José Saramago, “La lucidité”. Cité dans le Monde Diplomatique d’avril 2007.
John’s translation:
Western democracies are but the political facades of economic power. A facade with colors, flags, endless speeches about sacrosanct democracy. We live in an epoch when we can discuss everything. With one eception: democracy. It s there, an acquired dogma. Do not touch, like in a museum. Elections have become presentations of an absurd, shameful comedy, where citizen participation is feeble, and in which governments play the political representatives of economic power. José Saramago, “La lucidité”. Quoted from Le Monde Diplomatique of April 2007.
Compare the oft-cited line of John Dewey: ”As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.”
Reality and perception (3) — space, particles and pizza
Limited perception is good for you
In order to understand a possible reason why Natural Selection has left us with such limited perceptions of what is around us, let’s suppose we could see individual atoms. When we saw a pizza, all we would see were points somewhat spread out in space. Similarly, if our smell detectors (whatever they are) were different, we could not detect the wonderful odour of tomato and garlic and pepperoni and cheese and… but I’m getting carried away. And if we could not touch pizza-size objects, we could not eat them. Quel horreur!
And if our ancestors had seen particles in space instead of, say, an attacking lion, well, they would not have had any descendants — us! So we really are talking about adaptation for survival.
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Reality and perception (2) — perception = the five senses
Selective perception
First, what to do we see and why do we see only that? Let’s start with sight.
Men (to repeat, including women…) have eyes which contain light captors, or detectors (rods and cones, which are distributed differently on the retina of the eye). There are three points here:
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Reality and perception (1) — space, particles, cats and natural selection
We men (including the approximately 51% of us who are women) are used to seeing “ordinary” objects around us: tables and chairs, cats and dogs, books and pictures, cabbages and — yes, still today — kings, as well as beings we love and those we do not love so very much at all. So we are naturally taken aback, in fact we are outright dubious, when we are told that reality is not like that. Science tells us that what is “out there” is a vast amount of space (not an empty backdrop, but actually something…) filled with particles so small that the distance between them is really, really big compared to their own sizes. Not only that, but we are told that these particles are actually waves, or both waves and particles, and that nobody can actually measure simultaneously where they are and how fast they are moving (or how much energy they possess and when). To top it all off, we are told that space is not only curved but is expanding.
Whaaa?
We may indeed wonder, if the physical world is like that, why can we not see it like that? There is an answer to that question.
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John’s favorite reads of 2010
These are presented in the order in which John read them. This year’s reads included more Richard Powers, more science of various sorts, some excellent novels and Joe Bageant’s wonderful memoire plus analysis of a certain part of the USA.
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John’s favorite reads of 2009
John has finally given in and accepted that “read” can be a noun and not just a verb. These are not necessarily all books published in 2009. In fact, maybe only one of them was. Reading for 2009 included lots of Richard Powers and books on neuroscience, but also a re-read of “Gravity’s Rainbow” and a wonderful Chinese book.
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John’s favorite books for 2008
(This was first published as a Facebook note.)
These are not necessarily books written in 2008, just ones John read during the year. He has not picked the top ten, just the top ones, and there happen to be ten. Here they are, in no particular order. The list includes some books on evolution, some excellent novels and a wonderful classic John had not yet discovered.
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