science
fruit flies and free will
There’s an interesting news story from last year about fruit flies and free will that I found via The Pinocchio Theory blog in this post on theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman.
This is something I’d like to explore in great detail, but for now I just want to throw a few ideas out there. Basically, the study […]
The Intellectual Laziness of Rejecting “Theory”
Suppose you legitimately wanted to grasp the writings of an intellectual, but they proved to be difficult for you to understand. What course of action could you take? Would you try your best to do a close reading? Would you consult secondary sources to see if they could shed some light on the topic? Would […]
“Postscript on the Societies of Control” by Gilles Deleuze
I. Historical
Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school (”you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (”you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa ‘51 could exclaim, “I thought I was seeing convicts.”
the obligations of science.
Leon Lederman, Nobel Laureate in Physics (author of The God Particle)
“I have always believed that the scientist’s most sacred obligation is to continue to do science. Now I know that I was dead wrong. I am driven to the ultimately wise advice of my Columbia mentor, I.I. Rabi, who, in our many corridor bull sessions, […]
Decoding the Human Social Genome
In “The Selfish Gene” evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins lays out the groundwork for what has become known as Memetics. Dawkins’ “meme,” a mixture of the words “gene” and “mime,” describes the function of ideas and how they are shared in human society. The “gene” part of the word “meme” makes the assumption that ideas propagate […]
2008 The Institute of Illogical Operation. 