Posts by richard
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to James Butler,
“Once rockets go up / Who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department” / says Werner von BraunOddly enough, one of my dinner companions this evening mentioned that he had met Von Braun when he (the fellow diner, not Von Braun) was an undergraduate. For old Usenet hands, this gets awfully close to an invocation of Godwin’s Rule, ;-)
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
(By the same token, people who ritually complain that Foucault is hard seem to be fine with the fact that Richard Feynman is hard, for reasons that frankly escape me.)
Actually, maybe we agree. There is a difference between simple as in easy, and simple as in uncomplicated. The latter is what science strives for, and what Feynman achieves, but in the humanities it may often be complexity that is embraced, as it offers a road to nuance.
But simple as in easy is what we read on the bus.
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Einstein certainly made things a great deal harder than they were before. That’s hardly an argument against!
Depends on your perspective, I guess. The photoelectric effect and the perihelion precession of Mercury were much easier to understand after Einstein got through with them :-)
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to James Butler,
I wonder if it comes down the old discovery vs. invention conundrum (I’m sure it has a name, at least wrt. Mathematics, but I forget what).
Platonism v. empiricism. I read it on the bus. [Not!]
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
By the same token, people who ritually complain that Foucault is hard seem to be fine with the fact that Richard Feynman is hard, for reasons that frankly escape me.
In fairness to Feynman, he is appreciated within the field for his ability to make things easier than they were before. This is true of his “Feynman Lectures” (which I will occasionally pull off my shelf as I prepare a lecture of my own) and also his science – “Feynman diagrams” are a stunningly useful computational tool. There is story that Schwinger’s students (a contemporary of Feynman’s, who shared the Nobel with him, but did not achieve the same rock-star status), who were required to use Schwinger’s approach, would furtively check their results by doing the same calculation with Feynman diagrams at home. Don’t know if it is true, but it COULD be true.
Foucault on the other hand, is often suspected (perhaps unfairly) of making things harder than they were before.
For my money, Terry Pratchett’s series on The Watch covers some of the same ground as Discipline and Punish, and I can read those on the bus :-)
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
Question: how many of you here are Usenet veterans, and is that where you learned your culture of internet argument?
I wondered this too.
Listening to A Certain Person on this thead (at times) has been like listening to OMcS or ES hold forth about climate change (or pretty much anything to do with maths) on s.c.n-z and get spanked by a bunch of people with PhDs in the physical sciences, some of whom actually worked on this stuff for a living.
He gets regularly pwned but just doesn’t seem to realize and keeps on hopping around (just a flesh wound I guess).
I am not expecting him to completely change his mind, but I have seen arguments on PAS that have caused me to change my thinking, sometimes by adding shading of nuance and sometimes by 180 degrees.
But I have not seen any real suggestion that he is genuinely engaging with the topic (or the many people who have provided detailed and specific examples of how university philosophy has worked pretty much as it is billed – by providing them with critical and analytical skills they can apply in a host of different settings. Instead he simply ignores contrary evidence and tells us breezily that most of this stuff you can learn by looking at a book as your ride the bus.
Which is why, now that I think about it, why I stopped reading Usenet.
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to BenWilson,
Ben, I am amused to see another person whose current profession likely qualifies them for public support in Danyl's world putting their hand up for the direct and personal benefits they obtained from the formal study of philosophy :-)
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Nabakov once set an essay question in the exam for his Russian literature paper at Princeton: list the contents of Anna Karenina’s handbag. (This information is not given in the text.)
More likely Cornell or Wellesley, if it happened at all.
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to linger,
I can almost guarantee that the Karenina reference must have been something like “Stars all pretty much behave the same way during their time on the main sequence, but different star types each go wrong in their own way”.
[And Richard’s followup confirms this.]
Nice try, but no. (Well correct in format, but not in content.) Anyone else want a go??
Actually, at this I am just procrastinating my actual writing -- but a search on google for my full name and "tolstoy" gets the slides from a talk I gave a couple of years ago as the first hit.
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
I’m struggling to imagine this. Levin and Kitty are Hadrons, Anna and Count whatshisname are Bosons?
That’ll cost you. I did say it was a private university. But it’s a reference to the opening paragraph, and I have heard a number of other scientists repeat the line (some without attribution, so it is possibly even a micromeme at this point), so it clearly helps make my point stick.
[Actually, I am writing a paper but if I get time later, I might post it gratis, as a public service.]
Anyway, my basic point is that you don’t need to spend money – particularly other peoples money – to read Tolstoy. In my case all you needed was a job with a long commute.
There is a huge difference between reading a book on the train and taking a class for credit. Anna Karenina is perhaps a trivial example, but I am a much better scientist for having taken a few philosophy classes for credit, when I had to express (and occasionally defend) my opinions in tutorials and essays.