Saturday, November 28, 2009

Disignorance

Wow is this a great holiday or what. Here is another story that speaks for itself. This link,
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/carroll09/carroll09_index.html
is to the comments of a theoretical physicist Sean Carroll and the cool thing is, here is a scientist, not a science popularizer, so, after you read his assessment of what modern physics is lacking, notice---the number of times he says we don't know the answer to that and, his solution "think harder." This is a real scientist here talking, and there are some comments to be made on this category of person.
1. Real scientists have fun. That is why they are not more interested in the work of Jan Cox. (Of course now that Jan is dead, it is a question a living teacher, which I am not about to get into here.). Real scientists already DO a low grade version of "real work," and it is ------- fun beyond words.
2. But as I hinted, these fun having scientists are not driven by the psychological discrepancies which motivate many to search for some version of Real Work. So they miss the push to go forward and miss, well, everything. That's okay. We recognise our brothers even if they fail to get the family connection. Of course most who seek to solve a certain disignorance, never find the real work either. And at least the scientists are having real fun. Their yellow circuits are flashing on newness, they are living on an edge.

3. Real scientists do not have to face the primordial problem of how do you remember to (let's say, remember the work, it has different names.) All the natural scientist has to do is glance at the physical world surrounding him---that is where his intellect is focused, and the external world is where his achievement comes from. The natural scientist is using the mechanical mind for the job it is designed to do. Of course they are going to put words where words can't go. But you can't have everything. So the link I am giving is to an example of the most fun you can have with words on.

The link should be above, but here it is again:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/carroll09/carroll09_index.html

Friday, November 27, 2009

A holiday license

Quoting is something I do sparingly, even of Jan Cox, ---usually, but
I just got the following from a newsletter associated with
wordsmith.org. What grabbed my heart was the Indo European root of the
word 'science.' The info is in the derivation of a word, scienter:
Quote:
scienter
PRONUNCIATION:
(sy-EN-tuhr)
MEANING:
adverb: Deliberately; knowingly.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin scienter (knowingly), from scire (to know; to separate one
thing from another). Ultimately from the Indo-European root skei- (to
cut or split) that also gave us schism, ski, shin, science,
conscience, and nice.
End quote.

And this reminds me of one of the astounding things Jan Cox said: and
this is a close quote. He said, if you do not know the etymology of a
word, you cannot use it properly. His example was the 'word cakewalk.'

And quoting Jan, I found this recently, after some comments I made in
an attempt to convey something Jan helped me glimpse, about faith.
Here is a quote from a paper Jan wrote and numbered 6950.
"That which is real and practical requires no faith, but still- a man
must believe in the work or he wastes his time. If a man does not
believe in what he does, nothing will happen. If a man does not
believe in the ideas of the work, he can never think in a new way...No
man can be converted to this work."

end...quote....