J. B. Lightfoot was a great 19th century scholar of the early church; he is still widely cited. The quote below is at the end of an essay on Polycarp of Smyrna that he wrote in response to the then-anonymous author of the book Supernatural Religion (1874). In this, and …
The central question Church tradition has the apostle John as the author of the Gospel according to John, and the three letters of John (1 John, 2 John, 3 John). By “the apostle John” I mean John, son of Zebedee, brother of James, one of the twelve named apostles in …
Or: ignorance of physiology can lead to misinterpretation of the New Testament. John’s gospel has the following in the description of the crucifixion (John 19:31-35): 1 Therefore, the Jews asked Pilate in-order-that the bodies should not remain upon the cross on the Sabbath since it was the Preparation …
Kratopistia is a Greek term I have just invented, for the irrational belief in the effectiveness of force to solve problems. It’s the one-word rephrasing of what people mean when they use terms like “bringing them to heel”, or “it’s the only language these people understand” or “we …
The sides were unequal in the gunfight at OK Corral . One side was the three Earp brothers (Virgil, Wyatt and Morgan), with Doc Holliday. The Earps all had pistols. Doc Holliday had a shotgun and a pistol. The other was a selection of Cochise County Cowboys: Ike and Billy Clanton …
I have just finished reading Musa Al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke . To quote the summary on that page: How a new “woke” elite uses the language of social justice to gain more power and status … He argues that “woke” language is used both defensively and offensively in …
Lucy Letby is a nurse who worked in the neonatal intensive care unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital. She was accused, tried and convicted of murdering seven infants, and attempting to murder seven others. I encourage you to look into these cases, as they are, quite clearly, absurd. Quite …
I found myself watching the first episode of the original (1978) Battlestar Galactica. Early on, the naïve peace-loving humans are sailing into a trap set by the dastardly Cylons. The humans are expecting to sign an armistice, while the Cylons plan to use the distraction of the ceremony to destroy …
There is an important translation error in many English versions of the New Testament. Consider, for example, 1 Timothy 4 verses 7 and 8, in the New International Version Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales; rather, train yourself to be godly. For physical training is …
I use the Vim text editor. I have used it for many years, my fingers know where to go and what to type, to do what I want to do. If you told me I wasn’t allowed to use Vim for a particular task, but had to use something …
Quoting from Aimé Césaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism” (1950) ( as translated by Joan Pinkham ): The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder. In 1913, Ambassador Page wrote to Wilson: “The future of the world belongs …
From Henry J. Kaiser: Western Colossus by Albert P. Heiner (1991), pp 283-4. Behind this informal way of operating was a tried and true principle from construction days: choose good men, give them the ball, and let them run with it. By delegating to his men almost complete responsibility, Kaiser …
I suppose the United Kingdom will not collapse completely in my lifetime, but it’s hard to imagine it can keep going much longer. Consider the following snapshot of interaction with the National Health Service (NHS). For background, my wife and I live in Birmingham, the second largest city in …
In a CNN interview in September 2024, Hillary Clinton said that, without moderation and monitoring of social media content, we would “lose total control”. I thought to go back to the original interview, to see what she meant. As one might predict, the quote is not quite as it seems …
From Rob Henderson’s Nov 2024 interview at Wellesley College , transcribed in Henderson’s substack post : A lot of graduates and students of elite universities will attempt to co-opt the suffering of marginalized people. They’ll identify whatever commonalities they share with historically marginalized groups and then essentially co-opt the …
This is John Kerry, no less, in a World Economic Forum discussion, no less, saying that: “It’s really hard to govern today” because of the “problem … of building consensus”. This because people “self-select where they go for their news”. There is “a lot of discussion now about how you …
Nietzsche’s publisher, Ernst Schmeitzner, expressed his frustrations at Wagner and his circle at Bayreuth: Wagner is not even reading Nietzsche’s book … He said to me that people only read Nietzsche in so far as they cling to him [Wagner] … He got off some really nasty remarks about Nietzsche …
[The United Nations] owns the science, and we think the world should know it. This is a quote from the World Economic Forum 2022 Special Agenda Dialog on “Tackling Misinformation” , starting at 41:58. The person speaking is Melissa Fleming , the Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, United Nations. She is a …
John Gage was at Berkeley during the student protests in the sixties. He later went on to be vice-president of Sun Microcomputers. Interviewed in the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties (at 40 minutes), he talks about the effect of watching the response of the authorities: I’d never realized that …
Trinh Nhoc is 90 years old. He rather sweetly describes himself (in French) as a “un bon cordonnier vietnamien” — a good shoemaker from Vietnam. In 1970, the coup happened in Cambodia. That first night, I remember Cambodian soldiers knocking on the door of my shop. They knocked for five minutes …
Christopher Lasch wrote a book called The revolt of the elites and the betrayal of democracy (1996). The first essay in the book — “The revolt of the elites”, describes the fall of the aristocratic elites, and the rise of a new meritocratic elite — “the best and brightest”. These new elites …
Following links from a New York Times article on cars and privacy , I confirmed the surprising fact that Nissan’s December 20th 2023 USA privacy policy contains the following under the heading “Categories of information we collect and disclose”: Types of Personal Data collected Sensitive personal information, including driver’s …
From “National Defense” (1981) by James Fallows, pages 110-111. In an attempt to define more precisely the qualities a leader must display to produce trust and cohesion among his troops, a team from the Army War College interviewed majors who had led rifle platoons in Vietnam several years earlier, asking …
This is a question about debate in science. I’m not asking about what we disagree on, but if we do disagree, where should we disagree? Let’s imagine that the scientific authorities have a strong policy that lacks good evidence, and might be harmful. For example, what if the …
The AI impacts survey records responses from researchers in artificial intelligence and machine learning. When asked, 50% of the researchers who responded thought there was a 5% or higher chance of “future AI advances causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species”. 50% gave a …
As I walked home from my job as a lecturer in Birmingham University, I often noticed this banner on the fences of the all-surface sports pitches: Discover. Develop. Achieve. I remember recoiling each time I saw it, and thinking, consciously: “That’s a bit fascist”. A little later, I watched …
A friend of mine was interested in the way that the Google Bard AI would reply when asked about masking in Covid-19. This is an interesting topic because someone’s attitude to masks has such strong political valence in the United States. In my friend’s conversation with Bard, it …
Benny Goodman and his band were struggling to break out with their new music. From the link above: The next night, August 21, 1935, at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, Goodman and his band began a three-week engagement. … Goodman started the evening with stock arrangements, but after an indifferent …
Pierre Sprey was a major contributor to the design of two of the most successful aircraft in US military history — the F-16 and the A-10 . He was very critical of the current F-35 fighter design as dangerous, buggy, and ineffective, and blamed the procurement process for the poor design and …
This is Rob Montz in an interview with Glenn Loury . Montz describes his experience of his undergraduate education in Brown University: … if you can get that injection of humility — I mean for me it was […] you being forced to confront a mind that is inarguably much greater than yours that …
Milan Kundera, in the essay “The Day Panurge No Longer Makes People Laugh”, published in “Testaments Betrayed” (1993): These are the passages wherein Rabelais’s [The Fourth Book] becomes fully and radically a novel : that is, a realm where moral judgment is suspended . Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality …
This is an extended version of a fairly well-known quote from the essay “Paths in the Fog”, by Milan Kundera, published in his essay collection “Testaments Betrayed” (1993). Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their …
What would happen if it became easy to remove anyone you choose by using ad-hominem attacks with weak and subjective evidence? I imagine most of us could think of some compelling examples from history, that we would not want to emulate. The previous post was about a group trying to …
A group of “public health practitioners, educators, students, advocates, and allies” has written an open letter demanding that the American Public Health Association (APHA) cancel an eminent speaker on public health, Dr Leanna Wen . As they explain: Currently, Dr. Wen is slated to be a speaker presenting on “Backlash,” [!] and …
From Dominic Cummings’ blog: On the referendum #20 — the campaign, physics and data science : PPS. If you are young, smart, and interested in politics, think very hard before studying politics / ‘political science’ / PPE at university. You will be far better off if you study maths or physics. It will be …
Warning : this page refers in a general way to a legal case involving sex with children. Though the facts are ugly, I believed it important to document some reactions to the case, as insight into the world-view of some influential thinkers in 1970s France. As a preface, consider the “irresponsibility …
Dominic Cummings, writing on the failures of UK government , reminded me of my career as a junior doctor: I made many mistakes and was saved from the consequences of them usually by quiet calm capable women aged 23-35 paid a fraction of the senior management, and without whom the entire …
Tara Henley , quoting William Deresiewicz’s forthcoming book “The End of Solitude”: To be an individual, the years have taught me, takes a constant effort. These essays are an offering to those who wish to be one, too.
Karl Popper argues that two-party first-past-the-post democratic systems are superior to other forms of government, in that they make the representatives and their parties more responsive to rejection by the voters. His view of desirable government is “thoroughly practical, almost technical” — it is a system designed to best answer the …
Dominic Cummings on the irrationality of the well-educated : Why is almost all political analysis and discussion so depressing and fruitless? I think much has to do with the delusions of better educated people. … Generally the better educated are more prone to irrational political opinions and political hysteria than the worse …
Charles Marlow is the narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . For those of us who remember the film Apocalypse Now , Marlow corresponds to Martin Sheen’s character, Captain Willard. In this quote from the book, he is talking about soldiers and sailors from Roman expeditions to Africa around …
Dr Wyatt Tee Walker was a pastor, civil rights leader and anti-apartheid campaigner. Among many other roles, he served as chief of staff to Martin Luther King. Walker and Steve Klinsky founded the Sisulu-Walker Charter School of Harlem. They talk about the principles and importance of the school in the …
These are from the standard work “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction”, Third Edition, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2017). As you can see, I’ve tried to be true the intent of the text, by using long quotes in continuous sections, with their own headings. Page 3: A. What …
Here is a quote about American intellectual liberals from “No name in the street” by James Baldwin, pages 29-31. I returned to New York in 1952, after four years away [in Paris], at the height of the national convulsion called McCarthyism. … it was a foul, ignoble time, and my contempt …
A while ago, a friend pointed me to the reasoned discussion at Google of their decision to switch development of their TensorFlow machine-learning library from Python (with C++ and CUDA) to Swift. The justification has date “April 2018”. I remember thinking at the time that an important part of the …
Julia isn't growing fast enough to compete with Python
Here is another quote from “Fumbling the future: how Xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer”, by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (1988). It is just another example of how important it is to talk to the people who are doing the work. The Xerox Computer Science …
This is another notable quote from “Fumbling the future: how Xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer”, by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (1988). One of the villains of that story is a Xerox executive called Bob Sparacino. He had come to Xerox from General Motors, and …
I recently bought and read “Fumbling the future: how Xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer”, by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (1988). Its a story so tragic that I was almost in tears in various points. To summarize, Xerox became extremely successful by identifying the nascent …
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! Upton Sinclair, 1934