Mathematicians are not driven by truth so much as by beauty. There is nothing exceptional about this claim, and it is only surprising to those who are not themselves mathematicians. The driving force of beauty in mathematical research has occasionally been documented; G. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apo… Read full post »

 I have moved into my father's house.

The choice was between this and something much closer to homelessness.

My father will not be there, however. I have only just recently moved him into an assisted living center not too far away, because his dementia (which may be early onset Alzheimer's) had… Read full post »

Andrew Leonard has a note over at Salon proper about the smack down Obama just levelled against the hedge funds that were trying to extort taxpayer money for their shares in Chrysler. I've nothing to add to Leonard's comments (here) , and merely observe that the group that was holding on… Read full post »

Earlier this year, Merchant Books republished Russell and Whitehead's three volume work the Principia Mathematica in paperback for about ¹/₁₁^th the price you'd have had to pony up for even a used set of the Cambridge edition (any year). I am the only person I know who could even… Read full post »

When people ask, I tell them I saw Pirates of the Caribean and it changed by life. (I mean, seriously, why IS the rum gone?)

 First, let's be clear that not everything I say -- or even most of what I say -- is presumed to have an lingering significance. But… Read full post »

Quite aside from the disturbing fact that there are people in this country so utterly devoid of any scrap of decency that they would presume to defend torture is the extent to which those who would presume to criticize such viciously willful degeneracy have handed the terms of the debate… Read full post »

I did not set out to document a scientific controversy when I sat down to write my dissertation. I had long since figured that the dissertation was just another hoop (Jump, Sparky! Jump!) and the only requirement was to write it. The majority of people who crash and burn on their… Read full post »

There is a well known Buddhist saying that, "if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." My understanding of this aphorism is that, since the Buddha nature wells up from within if only you've the attention to listen to it, the "Buddha on the road" is a fraud to… Read full post »

Human beings do not naturally think.

This is, I would argue, a defensible claim, but only after one has spent some time on the nuances of the term "naturally."

On the one hand, anything that occurs within space &/or time is natural, and this will clearly include instances of human beings… Read full post »

The economic downturn for me began some 35+ years ago when the profession I had not yet even chosen as my own decided to become more businesslike. Rather than maintain the professoriate as a genuine profession, it was recognized that more money could be made by turning it into a job.

Like o… Read full post »