Scribal Terror

"There's nothing you can know that can't be known"

Beatles' philosophy adumbrated here.

Horace (65-8 BC) on man and God

 

If a man looks with loving compassion on his suffering fellow men, and out of bitterness inquires of the gods,"Why do you afflict my brothers?" then surely he is gazed upon more tenderly by God than a man who congratulates Him on being merciful so that he flourishes happily, and has only words of adoration to offer. For the first prays out of love and pity, divine attributes, and so close to the heart of God, and the other speaks out of selfish complacency, a beastly attribute, which does not approach the circumambient light of the spirit of God.

On being smart

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment; Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition. -- Rumi

I would rather be able to feel contrition than to define it. -- Thomas a Kempis

He's a "real pissant" too -- and "very rarely stable"

From Neatorama via Ace

Morality quiz

What are your answers to the baby dilemma and the trolley dilemmas posed in this Time poll? My answers were "couldn't" all down the line although I admit I came very close to pulling the switch on 3a:

An out of control trolley is heading down a track toward five unsuspecting people and will surely kill them all. You could throw a switch diverting it to a siding, but an equally unsuspecting man is standing there and the train will kill him instead. Could you throw the switch, killing one to save five?

Maybe if there were fifteen or fifty instead of five, it would have made a difference as far as voting goes, but in fact I have no idea what I'd really do in such a situation.

Here's a previous ST post on the trolley dilemmas.

Go play with Platonic solids

like these

here at the U of I where they're having a conference on the Timaeus. Here's the relevant Wikipedia entry:

The Platonic solids feature prominently in the philosophy of Plato for whom they are named. Plato wrote about them in the dialogue Timaeus c.360 B.C. in which he associated each of the four classical elements (earth, air, water, and fire, with a regular solid. Earth was associated with the cube, air with the octahedron, water with the icosahedron, and fire with the tetrahedron. There was intuitive justification for these associations: the heat of fire feels sharp and stabbing (like little tetrahedra). Air is made of the octahedron; its minuscule components are so smooth that one can barely feel it. Water, the icosahedron, flows out of one's hand when picked up, as if it is made of tiny little balls. By contrast, a highly un-spherical solid, the hexahedron (cube) represents earth. These clumsy little solids cause dirt to crumble and break when picked up, in stark difference to the smooth flow of water. The fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron, Plato obscurely remarks, "...the god used for arranging the constellations on the whole heaven". Aristotle added a fifth element, aithêr (aether in Latin, "ether" in English) and postulated that the heavens were made of this element, but he had no interest in matching it with Plato's fifth solid.

Euclid gave a complete mathematical description of the Platonic solids in the Elements; the last book (Book XIII) of which is devoted to their properties. Propositions 13–17 in Book XIII describe the construction of the tetrahedron, octahedron, cube, icosahedron, and dodecahedron in that order. For each solid Euclid finds the ratio of the diameter of the circumscribed sphere to the edge length. In Proposition 18 he argues that there are no further convex regular polyhedra. Much of the information in Book XIII is probably derived from the work of Theaetetus.

In the 16th century, the German astronomer   Johannes Kepler attempted to find a relation between the five known planets at that time (excluding the Earth) and the five Platonic solids. In Mysterium Cosmographicum, published in 1596 , Kepler laid out a model of the solar systemin which the five solids were set inside one another and separated by a series of inscribed and circumscribed spheres. The six spheres each corresponded to one of the planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter). The solids were ordered with the innermost being the octahedron, followed by the icosahedron, dodecahedron, tetrahedron, and finally the cube. In this way the structure of the solar system and the distance relationships between the planets was dictated by the Platonic solids. In the end, Kepler's original idea had to be abandoned, but out of his research came the discovery of the Kepler solids, the realization that the orbits of planets are not circles, and Kepler's laws of planetary motion for which he is now famous.

The illustration shows Kepler's model.

Headline of the day

      Lack of sex may encourage hard work

via FIU

From "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

So the next time someone disagrees with you, remember to say thank you.

Just a thought

Once you label me you negate me.

--Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)