The death of printed books

Discussions about the death of printed books miss the point. All these tears over the demise of a book you can lay in your lap, annotate in the margins, crease the page corners of, ponder until you daydream, leave in a purposeful stack, when you need to mark your turf in the stacks alcove, these tears for a tearable page, are beside the point---

which is---

Can we live in a world without  book jackets? 

Science and modern science

The popularizers of natural science, and most scientists, stress the importance of repeatability as a token of validity, as the measure of truth.

That leaves one's own experiences as, statistically insignificant.Jan Cox, himself coming of age during the heyday of this philosophical trend, would smile at his students, and say, while pointing a finger at his skull, here is your lab. 

This environment of the natural sciences relies on a false division of inner and outer experiences. The inner are supposedly subjective, and thereby invalid. Only the external world can be set up so tests can be repeated. 

The problem with this view is that nobody really lives in a world divided into inner and outer. There is, to use an old Latin term, "in media res," in the middle of things, which describes the situation humans participate in, in learning, communicating, studying, anything. 

This middle ground, neither in nor out, but both, is the human experience. I don't understand it completely now, but it is an approach for study--this middle ground. 

That is the relevant arena, and in fact, not only does modern science ignore this, they are uncomfortable with this prospect.

The natural sciences would.have to confront the valid question of why people disagree, have contradictory experiences and conclusions. Life was simpler when you could lop off half of reality, the so-called subjective side.

We've got the lab set up.