A story in this morning’s Austin American-Statesman bears the headline “Parents feel ‘alienated’, seek ouster of school’s principal.” According to the story,
The parents said [Austin High School Principal John] Hudson does not support parents, students or teachers, and said he does not revere some of the 126-year-old school’s traditions. They fault him for cutting the number of pep rallies and reading a book during one of the few athletic events he’s attended.
In this NY Times article, Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg quotes approvingly Richard Feynman’s dictum that “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” Seems to me that the corollary would be, “Scientists understand about as much about what they’re really doing as a tree does about photosynthesis.”
Although I was just a little kid in the late ’60s (my adolescence coinciding with the 1970s), I have memories of those heady times. Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Revolution in the air.
Most of that program didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to. (How could it have?) The utopian vision of unlimited sex without attachment or consequences, and unlimited quantities of mind-expanding yet harmless drugs, turned out to be illusions, and extremely destructive ones for all too many people.
But: today they send kids to rock-and-roll summer camp. Far out, man!!! I mean, during Activities Period do you get to choose between Pot Smoking and Hotel Wrecking? From the perspective of a 12-year-old in 1970, coming to realize how unhip Boy Scout camp was (they didn’t like long hair there) and the devastating effect that the mere sound of an amplified guitar could have on one’s elders, I’d say that part of the ’60s dream came true after all.
In a previous post, I listed some of the books I’ve read over the past few months, and offered to publicize my appraisals of those works for anyone who might be interested. So far, I’ve had no takers (not surprising, in light of the number of readers that that offer is, realistically, likely to have had), so I kind of feel like responding to my own hypothetical question. (Isn’t that really the motive for a whole lot of writing?) What was the best book on that list?
I dunno.
And I mean that seriously, and as a challenge of sorts to anyone who would try to force me to make a choice.
I mean, here, to raise a more general point: a principled objection to the entire practice of ranking and rating, that leads to the practice of Top Ten Lists.
Continue Reading »
Currently blogging from B.B. Rover’s, a fine Austin establishment that I can commend without reservation to my readers. More about that in a bit, should it become relevant.
In my last post, I promised to install a what-I’m-reading-now gizmo in my sidebar, and to do so pronto. And that was 3 or 4 days ago. Let me say, in partial, but only partial, exculpation: I tried. (How much of the intervening time I’ve actually spent working on said installation, I will leave concealed, so as to also conceal the degree of exculpation claimed.) What I’ve discovered: the best such plug in is one called Now Reading, written by Rob Miller of Lancaster, UK.
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January 1, 2008. Akemashite omedetoh gozaimasu. Out with the old, in with the new. Time to take stock and to plan ahead. Blah, blah, blah.
During 2007 I put up a total of 30 posts on Milinda’s Questions. On average, about once every 12 days. Not a stunning total. The topic breakdown, using my none-too-informative classification scheme, was:
| Buddhism | 13 |
| Psychopharmacology | 4 |
| Philosophy of Mind | 3 |
| Politics | 3 |
| Metaphysics | 1 |
| Travel | 1 |
| Uncategorized | 7 |
This post is motivated by a discussion I’ve been having over on Unknowing Mind, which has led into the similarities and differences between science and religion. The long quotation I’m about to present seems to me to present in particularly perspicuous fashion the essential differences between the two activities and their accompanying attitudes, and constitutes a much-needed caution against facile equations of the two. It’s from Winston King’s A Thousand Lives Away: Buddhism in Contemporary Burma. Published in 1964, the book is long out of print, so by reproducing this passage here I hope, among other things, to call attention to King’s work. (Winston King passed away in 2000.)
What about the quality and degree of commitment found in religious experience and scientific experiment? Despite superficial similarities, there seems to be a radical difference.
An e-mail I just received this afternoon from Ashin Ariyadhamma links to this Newsdesk Special story claiming that General Maung Aye, second-in-command in Burma’s military junta, has stage a coup against Than Shwe. Earlier I saw speculation concerning a split in the junta’s top ranks at mizzima.com, a Thailand-based website reporting news from Burma. The activists at organizations such as Mizzima.com and Irrawaddy.org perform a valuable service by doing their best to report on what’s going on inside Burma, and they provide details (including higher casualty figures) that can’t be obtained from mainstream Western news media (much less from Burma’s corrupt official press.) Nonetheless, they are relying to a large extent on hastily relayed word-of-mouth reports, and some of what appears on those sites must be taken with a grain of salt. Stay tuned.
