Author: manwithoutqualities

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walker percy

Walker Percy Wednesday 138

As a consequence of the unprecedented appearance of the triad in the Cosmos, there appeared for the first time in fifteen billion years (as far as we know) a creature which is ashamed of itself and which seeks cover in myriad disguises. One semioticist defined the subject of his study as the only organism which…

friedrich hayek

Reissue of Hayek’s The Sensory Order

The University of Chicago Press has alerted me that TSO is almost as good as here — so order now through the usual channels so as to not waste anytime in getting your hands on a copy. Cognitive neuroscienceCognitive scienceFriedrich Hayekphilosophical psychologyPhilosophy of mindSensory Orderviktor vanberg

stigmergy

A systematic approach to cancer: evolution beyond selection

This recent open access paper in Clinical and Translational Medicine caught my attention primarily because it invokes the concept of stigmergy. It’s unusual, though not surprising, that the idea is now finding some currency in medicine. Eukaryotic cells have an entire panoply of communicative and cooperative mechanisms. Since the individual cellular participants can have independent goals in…

alcohol

Martini time

Staying true to the spirit of the recipe as handed down by the patron saint of martinis, Luis Buñuel, here is a marriage made in heaven. The London Nº1 is an absolutely superb well-priced not gimmicky new gin on the market: so smooth, it was palatable straight up ice-cold! Where I respectfully deviated from Buñuel was my use of Fee Brothers bitters rather…

liberal education, virtue signalling

The Cultured Life and why it is worth pursuing

Joseph Epstein, still as sharp as a whistle, in The Weekly Standard. JE’s coinage “virtucrat”  (“any man or woman who is certain that his or her political views are not merely correct but deeply, morally righteous in the bargain”) is the precursor to the term “virtue-signaling”, the condition befalling many academics, politicians and in all probability many…