In practice there’s no reason to suspect that any particular piece of information is inadequate before it is revealed to be otherwise. But in theory there’s no reason to exclude anything from suspicion. It is characteristic of all interpretations, meanings, and values that they are never the last word. They are all potentially obsolete. Reality is not just occasionally precarious – it has no permanent foundations whatsoever. It is the nature of knowledge to be fragmentary and partial. This is the first and final, the ultimate source of anxiety.
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And what’s the significance of the need to tilt your head to read western QWERTY emoticons, but the eastern ones are looking straight at you? Not what I’d expect culturally. But perhaps the difference here is that the western versions require fewer keystrokes – we’re in more of a hurry.
The Geographic points out that emoticons date back to 1881, when the American magazine Puck published “Typographical Art” for melancholy, indifference, astonishment, and joy. Emotions a bit more subtle than the ubiquitous smiley face, no?
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Look at Korea, he writes. They’ve come around to Western economic ways. They’ve even adopted Western religions. Why does Japan insist on remaining distinctly different? Let’s face it. Western culture is going to dominate the world, and if the Japanese aren’t willing to give up their quaint and antiquated culture, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.
This strikes me as disrespectful, insulting, and unenlightened.
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The gush of filth is a reminder that we have surrendered our independence to a technology we cannot master. … The challenge goes beyond oil slicks and moral revulsion. In the bigger picture, big oil has no long-term future: sooner or later the contemptible little sheikdoms that have arisen upon a pool of liquid greed will sink back into the desert. But why should BP and the emirs script the endgame?
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Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?
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Are Sperm Donors Really Anonymous Anymore? (Slate) In an age of sophisticated genetic testing, the concept of anonymity is rapidly fading. With some clever sleuthing—tests that can track down ancestral origins, donor numbers, and bits of biographical information—parents and offspring can find out the donors. “With DNA testing and Google, there’s no such thing as…
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What’s it like to have an anonymous sperm donor for a father? Many people think that because these young people resulted from wanted pregnancies, how they were conceived doesn’t matter to them. But … when they are adults, sperm donor offspring struggle with serious losses from being purposefully denied knowledge of, or a relationship with,…
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National politics may well determine the future of health care. How to make sense of the angry rhetoric coming from the political right. While MSNCB runs antagonizing documentary footage of Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan, the New York Times publishes a thought-provoking essay by philosopher J.M. Bernstein. It’s called “The Very Angry Tea Party” (emphasis…
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Rising Plague (Brad Spellberg) Before getting to the numerous recent news items on antibiotic resistance and urinary tract infections, let me quote from Dr. Brad Spellberg’s Rising Plague: The Global Threat from Deadly Bacteria and Our Dwindling Arsenal to Fight Them. (In the following, “community-acquired” means an infection that begins outside a hospital, and fluoroquinolones…
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The controversy about the overuse of antibiotics in raising livestock (see the last post) is background for an interesting scientific study that took place in the Galapagos. It looked at the spread of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria among animals that were totally removed from antibiotics. Would antibiotic resistance become widespread in the absence of…
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Unlike climate change, where there’s a large contingent of denialists who spread doubt about the scientific evidence, no one denies that antibiotic resistance is a problem. There is controversy, however, on the question of just how much the widespread use of antibiotics contributes to the problem. The mechanism is not in dispute: If you expose…
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Among medical specialties, some are more prestigious than others. You can generally tell which ones are more prestigious by how well they pay. Surgery and cardiology, for example, rank at the top of the prestige scale. Psychiatry and dermatology are near the bottom. One can also ask if some diseases are considered more prestigious than…
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There’s a nice piece in The Atlantic on risk-taking behavior – something that applies to many aspects of life, not just how we treat the environment. (Emphasis added) How do such management disasters occur? The easy answer is, there’s a financial incentive for going forward, and a financial disincentive for holding back. Program managers are…
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