Uncle Everybodydies

This is fun. Though to be fair, I think it's only recently that "Mother Nature" has gained the cloying connotations. It comes from the mystery religions that position the mother as both the giver of life and the destroyer - the chthonic deities that facilitated the cycle of decay and growth.

Reading Journal: Contingency, irony, and solidarity

In the first part of this book Richard Rorty challenges the (almost universal) assumption that science is in the business of describing the truth. Instead of thinking of science as clearing the window that allows us to see truth, we should see it as providing tools that we can use to navigate our surroundings. I tend to bristle at this sort of thing: You wonder if the philosopher is pausing to check the implications of his tortuous argument against the world outside his head. But then, there have been a series of physicists doing exactly that - checking the implications of quantum mechanics against the world we can see and touch and coming to the conclusion that what we think of as reality may not be real. Crazy I know. To describe this sort of thing you really need a cranky old physicist with a french accent: