A Few More Articles from the AIMS Testimonial Tour

The Yale Daily News reports on the General's personal experiences while in prison and touches on a few other points from his talk.

The Harvard Crimson focuses on the General's comments about the counterproductive nature of food aid to North Korea.

More coverage by Radio Free Asia and Voice of America should be forthcoming.

"So much din from so many philosophical brainboxes!"

From An Apology for Raymond Sebond (1576) by Michel de Montaigne, a review of ancient Greek philosophers' conceptions of God that is evidently meant to underscore the futility of reason in religious matters and to lend support to the righteous "ignorance" of Catholicism---as a nonreligious person (or perhaps because of my Episcopalian upbringing), I think they're all quite lovely actually, especially in light of their multiplicity and the skeptical uncertainty that Montaigne attributes to their adherents:

Thales was the first to inquire into such matters: he thought God was a Spirit who made all things out of water; Anaximander said that the gods are born and die with the seasons and that there are worlds infinite in number; Anaximenes said God was Air, immense, extensive, ever moving. Anaxagoras was the first to hold that the delineation and fashioning of all things was directed by the might and reason of an infinite Spirit; Alcmaeon attributed Godhead to the Sun, the Moon, the stars and to the soul; Pythagoras made God into a Spirit diffused throughout all nature and from whom our souls are detached; for Parmenides God was a circle of light surrounding the heavens and sustaining the world with its heat; Empedocles made gods from the four natural elements of which all things are compounded; Protagoras would not say whether the gods existed or not or what they are if they do; Democritus sometimes asserted that the constellations and their circular paths were gods, sometimes that God was that Nature whose impulse first made them move; then he said our knowledge and our intellect were God; Plato's beliefs are diffuse and many-sided; in the Timaeus he says that the Father of the world cannot be named; in the Laws he forbids all inquiry into the proper being of God: elsewhere, in these very same books, he makes the world, the sky, the heavenly bodies, the earth and our souls into gods, recognizing as well all the gods accepted by ancient custom in every country. Xenophon records a similar confusion in the teachings of Socrates: sometimes he has Socrates maintaining that no inquiry should be made into the properties of God; at other times he has him deciding that the Sun is God, that the soul is God, that there is only one God and then that there are many. The nephew of Plato, Speusippus, holds God to be a certain animate Power governing all things; Aristotle sometimes says that God is Mind and sometimes the World; at times he gives the world a different Master and sometimes makes a god from the heat of the sky. Zenocrates has eight gods; five are named after the planets; the sixth has all the fixed stars as his members, the seventh and eighth being the Sun and Moon. Heraclides of Pontus meanders along beneath these various notions and ends up with a God deprived of all sensation; he has him changing from one form to another and finally asserts that he is heaven and earth. Theophrastus is similarly undecided, wandering about between his many concepts, attributing the government of the world sometimes to Intelligence, sometimes to the sky and sometimes to the stars; Strato says God is Nature, giving birth, making things wax and wane, but itself formless and insensate; Zeno makes a god of Natural Law: it commands good, forbids evil and is animate; he dismisses the gods accepted by custom---Jupiter, Juno and Vesta; Diogenes of Apollonia says God is Time. Xenophanes makes God round, able to see and hear but not to breathe and having nothing in common with human nature; Ariston thinks that the form of God cannot be grasped: he deprives him of senses and cannot tell whether he is animate or something quite different. For Cleanthes God is sometimes Reason, sometimes the World, sometimes the Soul of Nature, sometimes absolute Heat surrounding and enveloping all things. Perseus, a pupil of Zeno's, maintained that the name god was bestowed on people who had contributed some outstandingly useful improvements to the life of Man---or even the improvements themselves. Chrysippus made a chaotic mass of all these assertions and included among his thousand forms of gods men who had been immortalized. Diagoras and Theodorus bluntly denied that gods exist. Epicurus has shiny gods, permeable to wind and light, who are lodged between two worlds which serve as fortresses protecting them from being battered; they are clothed in human shape, with limbs like ours which are quite useless.

Ego deum genus esse semper duxi, et dicam coelitum;

Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus.

[Personally I have always thought, and will always say, that a race of gods exists in heaven. But I do not think that they care about the actions of the human race. (Ennius apud Cicero, De divinat. II, 1, 104.)]

So much din from so many philosophical brainboxes! Trust in your philosophy now! Boast that you are the one who has found the lucky bean in your festive pudding!

Pictures from Testimonial Tour: Harvard

Here are some pictures from a stop on AIMS' testimonial tour, and here's a Radio Free Asia article on North Korea's military bunkers along the DMZ that is based on information provided by the refugee who is currently touring. I'll be posting more of the articles that come from the refugee's interviews during this tour, but I think that it would be inappropriate for me to report directly on the information that he has provided. For context, the refugee was a general (sanja) in the North Korean military and the director of a military trading company. He possesses extensive knowledge of the government's actions and organization and of conditions in the country.

Guns and Butter, or Nukes and Genetically Modified Food

Two great diavlogs on the critical issues of our time over at Bloggingheads this week:

Robert Farley and John Mueller discuss the low probability of a nuclear attack and the negative political consequences of our excessive concern with nuclear weapons.

Michael Specter and Chris Mooney discuss denialism in science--why large segments of the public express hostility toward vaccines and GMOs and how we ought to contextualize concerns about these and other technologies.

FreeRice Toolbar

The FreeRice project has a new toolbar that you can download, with every five terms you search yielding 2,500 grains of rice for the hungry---up to 5,000 grains per day. The toolbar operates through Yahoo's search engine, so if you are like me and don't particularly like the Yahoo format, just look up 10 random search terms with the toolbar and then go back to your regularly scheduled Google programming. For people who don't have as much free time as they'd like to earn rice by playing the original game, it's a fast and easy way to help feed the hungry.

Yosemite in Fall

Some photos from a day trip---yes, they were all taken in the same field, but they're still very pretty:

Tripping with Popular Scientists

. . . or, How to Make Carl Sagan Sound Like Kermit the Frog:

Another video with Kermit and Stephen Hawking here, plus more content at the Symphony of Science website (h/t: 3 Quarks Daily)

In Praise of Tramadol

Tom Barnett has a post praising the non-narcotic painkiller, and I must wholeheartedly concur with his opinion:

Started it yesterday and it was like flipping a switch from screwed-up to normal: ate normal, got tired normal, slept normal (no weird dreams), felt hungry in a normal way when I got up (no nausea), and felt rested when I got up (instead of just plain scared). In short, a drug that truly promotes recovery instead of just holding the line on pain. The downside is minor: the slightest fuzz that is very easy for me to navigate and punch through as required for thinking (like a semi-bad allergy late-afternoon).

Non-narcotic, centrally-acting analgesic, Tramadol goes by many names.

It's calling card: it mimics the actions of opioids (they call it a "stripped down version" synthetic version of Codeine) but, in chemical terms, does not belong to that class.

What I know: it masks the pain very effectively and produces a mild sense of euphoria but something way short of the fuzzy elevation you get with the codeine derivatives. And the side-effect of depressed breathing is negligible--for me at least, whereas it was profound for the Vicoden/Percocet/etc. Ditto for any itchiness, constipation, etc.--all too mild to mention.

I only wish I had had it from the start. Would have made for a much easier weekend.

Apart from the obvious hesitation instilled in me by the fact that I'm not a physician, this really is the kind of medication that makes me want to run out and recommend it to anyone who is experiencing a similar level of pain. Because of nerve pain created by my bone disease, I've pretty much taken every opioid out there at one time or another, though never for very long before it became clear that the pain was preferable to the nausea, numbness, and mental fog that those medications create. I expected similar effects (or the ineffectiveness of most non-opioids) from Tramadol, but the results have been entirely different. 

First, the pain is *gone*---not just blunted, but gone, which is incredible. Second, for the five months that I've been taking it, it hasn't caused any nausea or numbness. Unlike Barnett's experience, the mental fuzziness and depressed breathing have been appreciable, but not so great as to make me even consider giving up a medication that works so well that I can actually walk around and even go running without pain for a few hours a day (I only take one dose because I worry about my body becoming habituated to it over time, which it is beginning to). If anyone is looking for a non-narcotic alternative to Vicoden, Codeine, etc., I highly recommend considering this medication.

Passage of the Day

From Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) by Thomas Hardy, an instant reminder of why Hardy is awesome:

When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.

(The image above is of fields in South West England, or "Wessex." Thomas Hardy revived the use of the ancient Saxon name for this area by making Wessex the fictionalized setting of his novels. h/t: Social Biking Blog)

Passage of the Day

From Arcadia (1993) by Tom Stoppard, how the sciences-humanities (or Enlightenment-Romanticism) divide can turn academics into chauvanistic idiots:

VALENTINE: (Casually) Well, it's all trivial anyway.

BERNARD: What is?

VALENTINE: Who wrote what when . . . 

BERNARD: Trivial?

VALENTINE: Personalities.

BERNARD: I'm sorry---did you say trivial?

VALENTINE: It's a technical term.

BERNARD: Not where I come from, it isn't.

VALENTINE: The questions you're asking don't matter, you see. It's like arguing who got there first with the calculus. The English say Newton, the Germans say Leibnitz. But it doesn't matter. Personalities. What matters is the calculus. Scientific Progress. Knowledge.

BERNARD: Really? Why?

VALENTINE: Why what?

BERNARD: Why does scientific progress matter more than personalities?

VALENTINE: Is he serious?

HANNAH: No, he's trivial. Bernard ---

VALENTINE: (Interrupting, to BERNARD) Do yourself a favour, you're on a loser.

BERNARD: Oh, you're going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A greater philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars---big bangs, black holes---who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money? And why are you so pleased with yourselves?

. . . If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.'

Valentine doesn't make much of a reply, but I came across this section of an interview with a newly tenured physicist in Anna Neumann's new book Professing to Learn that I think will serve the purpose. Actually, since this physicist recognizes the shared analytical mission of academics, his argument is more conciliatory than Valentine's would be:

I think physics . . . like any truly analytical discipline . . . is a study of the human mind. It's the study of what it means to be who you are. It's a study of your own person. And so by looking out there, I'm looking in here. And physics, to me, is an unbelievably precise and efficient and beautiful---incredibly beautiful---way of studying myself. And of studying others, other humans. . . To me, that's what it's all about. 

And it's similar with mathematics, and similar with philosophy. With philosophy, it's very explicit---you're asking questions about the human condition after all---and about the whole range of human emotions. With mathematics, you're studying conceptual structures . . . [and t]hough you're not studying the full range of human emotion, you're at least studying things which are in your head . . .  But physics [is] about things out [there]. But after all, we're made of those same things . . . [so] those things that we see out there, fundamentally replicate themselves in here [within oneself] . . . In studying the things out there, you're led to mathematical and philosophical ideas that, again, address the human condition. And truthfully, any focused thought [in any discipline] will address the human condition ---any rigorous focused thought.

(The painting above is "Et in Arcadia Ego" ("I am in Arcadia too") or "The Arcadian Shepherds" by Guercino, ca. 1628.)