After I read all of that literature (very little) I branched into philosophy of science. I kept running into the philosophy of language but stayed away from it as much as possible. One day I took the plunge into cognitive philosophy--which meant I had to read the language works.

I used to teach some seminars just for fun on AI, Consciousness, and whatever I wanted to read that semester (using Dennett, Nagel, Searle, and Harry H and Marvin M, among others).

And, shamefully, I 'work' in the mainstream media. These days, as a freelance writer on art; previously as a film and theatre critic.

I try to sneak stuff in, but it's a Sisyphean task. The editorial bias against anything to do with math/science is enormous (beyond a few familiar stereotypes: mad scientists, lack of humility, just another belief system, etc).

Yes, I can't keep out of the GMT page lately. It tends to make me pretend to be saner and act at least semi-lucid, while here in Frogspawn I just free-associate.

Three hundred and eighty two pages of free association. It'll make an excellent doctoral thesis for somebody one day.

But for how long?

<Mind you, a new equality of ignorance seems to be emerging. The old rule-of-thumb was that it was safe to assume readers knew about Shakespeare, but not the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Now the rule is: nobody knows anything.>

Absolutely correct! Further, there is nothing that everyone knows. It is astounding.

Indeed. My way of putting this (or possibly my way of putting something quite different) is:

"It's not that I always land on my feet. It just seems that way, because whatever body-part happens to hit the ground first is immediately redefined as a foot."

I'm fascinated by religious belief: I've never had the slightest trace of it myself - belief qua belief has always seemed an absurd way to organize one's thoughts - but I live in a country that was seemingly saturated in religion just a generation ago, and where it is now receding fast. Supporting, I think, the contention that religions generally are tribal groups, something to identify with and belong to (and be sanctioned to hate the other guy).

Even though all three authors recognize this, they still spend too much time teasing apart the contradictions inherent in various theologies, cosmologies, etc. But those contradictions are the point, sometimes the only one: faith is irrational by definition, and wouldn't work as faith if it made complete sense.

The depressing thing is that all these belief systems -- which functioned perfectly well 500 years ago, when a Christian never met a non-Christian, a Muslim never met a non-Muslim, and *nobody* ever met a Mormon or a Scientologist -- have found ways of adapting to the 21st century, despite the obvious existence of other faiths.

Most people, apparently, just don't think about it. It's all perfectly thoughtproof, so books like Dennett's can only speak to the converted. And Hitchens is funnier.

One of my lesser hobbies is inventing religions.

A hypothetical exam question: Devise a religious belief system based on Avogadro's number, use it to show that certain sexual acts are wicked and that the sacred text [6.02252 x 10^23] supports this contention; and then refute it.

I had a very, very smart, world class professor (Don Campbell) who gave a major talk on the evolutionary benefits of religion (basically, keeping people in line) even though he was clearly in the other camp. He just couldn't figure out why anyone believed all this stuff and was willing to think about it in an intersting way. I think he was right, but his answer wouldn't bring joy to many.

Here's a related issue (http://www.legendsforums.com/off-to...)

<There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world.

However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to population references). Assuming an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, this computes to 108 million homes - presuming there is at least one good child in each.

Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that, for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh, and get onto the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household. This amounts to a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. Therefore, Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second -- 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousands tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them---Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch). 600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere.

The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles per second in 0.001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.>

+

Hmm. Depending on the composition of those snacks and the lack of bathroom breaks, I don't think the Santa-goo would be pink.

But goo it would be. Some forms of goo, however, can survive extremes of temperatures and pressure. Maybe Santa isn't dead: just a protoplasmic blob of extremophile bacteria....

Math is so non-forgiving. My rule is: math gets harder and hard until no one can do it at all.

<Paul Simon is a better
songwriter than Leonard
Cohen> Oh dear,what a
pointless thing to say.
Comparisons of this kind
are just plain meaningless.

I do think though,that Paul
Simon's contribution has been
gigantic and can be taken
for granted.Has anyone,for
instance,ever written a
"storytelling song" to
rival "Duncan"?

I try telling young folk about the 1970s, when the only rock venue in all of Ireland was a boxing stadium in Dublin - where a random personage would appear every three months or so, if you were lucky.

Which is why, in 1978 or thereabouts, I saw Dory Previn, Lou Reed and Tom Paxton and Van Morrison - in the same year. Incredible. Then Elvis Costello played a cinema, John Cale played a place called the TV club, and everything changed. The promoters discovered punk. On one memorable night, The Clash played a gig in one part of town while the brilliant John Otway did his thing for me and 26 others in another venue. Unprecedented. And I didn't miss missing the Clash: I later spent a strange afternoon with Joe Strummer, more or less live.

And you try telling that to the kids these days, and they won't believe yer.

<Has anyone,for
instance,ever written a
"storytelling song" to
rival "Duncan"?>

Yes. <Cable Hogue> or <Chinese Envoy> by John Cale. Dunno what they're about though. Chinese Envoy has a Maupassant link, however.

Tom Paxton, I think, was the first time I heard the venerable "Wit & Wisdom of Ronald Reagan/ Dan Quayle/ George W Bush" joke formula - hey folks, look, a blank record/book/mind.

His version was a song that went "This is a song called The Ballad of Spiro Agnew." [strums guitar once]
"Gonna tell you 'bout Spiro Agnew
And all the fine things he's done.
Yeah."

Mythical Kings, Hollywood Signs, I guess Dory was quite OK really. Years later, I knew her daughter. I think she, Dory P, even did a version of Janis Joplin's Mercedes Benz, which took cojones. Beats Cohen's sleazy little betrayal anyhow.

Not one of Len's finer moments, that song. Good though it is.

Heh, reminds me of a Valentine's Day card I sent once:

"Sure that everything worth much
Was in the Slav and not the Dutch
Sure that the way to cause alarm
Was the benthic depths of the Winawer Swarm
I never learned how to get laid
Down, down, down
Where the Spanish is played."

You;ve got a EMU.

More of a memo really.

I'M SO BUSY AT WORK AND WITH KOREAN IMMIGRATION I haven't even been able to read my favorite magazine-- <Frogspawn>--

The magazine where you have to do 2 hours of research to understand each post.

Love it or leave it!!

If you can't stand the heat, get the heck out of Nagasaki.