Born on this day. The following extract from Bernard Williams’ brilliant (but dense) Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. René Descartes was born on 31 March 1596 in a small town near Tours, now called la-Haye-Descartes, where the house of his birth can still be seen. His family belonged to the lesser nobility, his father and…
I’ve been singing the praises of Glenn Loury and John McWhorter of Blogging Heads (“Where great minds don’t think alike”) here and here. Another channel that is doing terrific work in the fight against illiberalism and its most conspicuous manifestation, i.e. the suffocation of free speech, is The Saad Truth. He has had some fascinating guests who, as…
Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life. ***** Everybody talks about the horrors of drink, which are real enough, but not about…
Here’s an extract from the fourth article by Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez from this special Human-Human Stigmergy issue. Pierre-Paul Grassé identified for the first time the importance of indirect (environmental) stimulus-response patterns while studying how termites were capable of creating complex habitats through coordination without central command. The most singular characteristic of this stigmergy, as Grassé called the phenomenon, is that…
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
I’ve been singing the praises of Bulleit bourbon on the grounds that it out performs most of the bourbons I’ve tried that are double and even triple the price. So I was rather excited to discover a bottle of Bulleit aged 10 years (about $45). Unfortunately it was a big disappointment and certainly was not…
One of the most powerful (yet capable of immense subtlety) voices I’ve come across of late. This album is exceptional in the choice of material, superbly recorded (not over-produced) and last, but not least, backed by a very strong lineup of musicians including Tommy Sancton and Lars Edegran — and that’s class that really does shine through. Yes,…
“These studies are useful, pleasant, and entertaining, young friend, because the mind does not encounter in them the abstractions of theology, the uncertainties of medicine, the intricacies of law, nor the ruggedness of mathematics. It is all satisfying, all delightful, all enchanting, and all educational, both physics as well as natural history. It doesn’t exhaust…
The seventh in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Shu-Heng Chen and Ying Fang Kao Herbert Simon is a quintessential interdisciplinary scholar who has made pioneering contributions concerning the notion of bounded rationality, has built models based on it, and has also made important advances in…
Here’s an extract from the third article by Ted Lewis and Richard Bergin from this special Human-Human Stigmergy issue. A human stigmergy framework for product development Many investigators over the past century have attempted to quantify human innovation as a property of social organizations such as corporations as well as individual entrepreneurs. Andergassen et al. argue that innovation appears…
manwithoutqualities 