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"99.999% of statistics are made up on the spot."
Today someone asked for a new book of letters by published by the daughter of Richard (Fineman?)Feynman. The name didn't ring a bell at first. She said he was a scientist, a mathmatician. I sent her downstairs to look at the review books and the science books. Then I started thinking I knew that name like maybe he taught at UT or something. I guess not though because I see now that he died in1988. For some reason I assosiate the name with a flier I saw for a lecture about Buckminster Fuller...also I associate Feynman with my friend Steve who knew (knows) a lot about math and engineering probably mentioned (raved about) them both. When topics like DDT or Feynman come up in the stacks people say "Ask Will."
(Will is a young quick talking, curly red haired savant. His hair is curly. He's not actually that curly. I guess there should be some hyphens in there.)
I've been shelving history books all week since the film and lit sections are closed down for renovation...the other day I had a small discussion about scientology, happiness, Siddhartha, and eastern philosophy which has got me thinking about religion.
A few years ago when I was working at the 007 hpb store register in Austin, a guy, nice enough, spent some time raving about a book called Why Religion Matters by a guy named Huston Smith. (Did I have a neighbor named Huston Smith once?) I never got very far with the book before because it is full of big words that I don't use very often...words like: Promethian, epistemological, Reductionism, Faustian, ineluctable corollary, metaphysical, Parmenides, nihilism, Postmodernism, Cosmological Shortcomings, Hottentot science, materialism, Consilience, incommensurable, quantium mechanics, empericism, al-Mahdi, samsara and kakemono.
But NOW, armed with my large French-English dictionary, I think am ready to tackle it.
1) Promethian-well that not in there, but isn't that the guy who flew too close to the sun...or the guy who stole fire from the gods?
2) epistemological-adj epistemologique.
hmm...Let's Google:
"from the greek words epista meaning knowlege and logos meaning word/speech a branch of philospohy that deals with the nature, orgin, and scope of knowlege"--wikipedia
ok that's an easy one that I pretty much already knew...when i think epistemological I think, "The study of what can be known." Thank you PHIL101. Now were getting somewhere.
3) Reductionism- When I think of reductionism I think of simmerin' down but this can't be about cooking. Yaneer knows better:
Concepts in Complex Systems
Yaneer Bar-Yam
"Reductionism
Reductionism is an approach to building descriptions of systems out of the descriptions of the subsystems that a system is composed of, and ignoring the relationships between them.
For example, considering a biological system to be composed of molecules with certain structures, or considering a molecule to be composed of atoms.
Note that once positions of atoms in a molecule are specified, relationships between the atoms are also specified. Similarly, once the relative locations of molecules are specified in a biological organism, relationships between these molecules are also specified. Taking into account such relationships is beyond a purely reductionist approach.
However, it is also considered "reductionist" to consider specifying the positions of atoms of a biological organism a specification of the organism. Some consider this reductionist because it is difficult to obtain macroscopically relevant information from this approach, or because this approach is not practical, others because of the notion of strong emergence, that there is more to a system than the specification of parts and their relationships.
The mathematics of reductionism is, at its most basic, the use of fractions which holds that dividing and multiplying are opposites. The statement 2(1/2)=1 is the idea that dividing a system into two parts and then putting them back together restores the original system. This is valid for systems where only the total mass of a system matters, such as for weights, or for collections of small weakly interacting particles, like a pound of flour. The existance of many systems that can be effectively described in this way is important for the study of complex systems as it provides one aspect of a contrasting notion of a simple system. However, it is not generally true."
ok that's clear...um hey all this learnin is making me sleepy, but I really want to know the answer to the burning questions like why birthcontrol is wrong? and why all the unrest in the mid-east? And why am I not happy 100% of the time like an evangelical christian or a Scientologist?
What would Faust do?
