Everything on the earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
nibbled away, the petal fell, falling
until the only flower was the falling itself.
Water is another matter,
has no direction but its own bright grace,
runs through all imaginable colors,
takes limpid lessons
from stone,
and in those functionings plays out

the unrealized ambitions of the foam.

- Pablo Neruda

{Thierry Legault}

(look lower-left)

Lula da Silva and Hu Jintao are considering scrapping the US$ in favour of reals and renminbis in their trade transactions.

I can empathize with the very human habit of imposing boundaries upon experience, and subsequent desire to appeal to these boundaries for all manner of quacksalvery. I recently found myself defending the case that (1) words can have meaning without having clear boundaries- that is, boundaries are not a necessary condition for two people to use the same word understandably between one another; and (2) that many meaningful words lacking clear boundaries do, in fact, exist. I brought forward the example ‘game’; the debate was born in the term ‘religion’.

“[...] how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game and what no longer does? Can you give the boundary? No. You can draw one; for none has so far ever been drawn. (But that never troubled you before when you used the word “game”.)”

“One might say that the concept ‘game’ is a concept with blurred edges.

- But is a blurred concept a concept at all?

Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?

= Frege compares a concept to an area and says that an area with vague boundaries cannot be called an area at all. This presumably means that we cannot do anything with it.

But is it senseless to say: “Stand roughly there”? Suppose that I were standing with someone in a city square and said that. As I say it I do not draw any kind of boundary, but perhaps point with my hand – as if I were indicating a particular spot.”

“[...] the transformation of European civilization is analagous to the transformation confronting developing countries around the world today”

- Joseph E. Stiglitz, In: Polanyi, K. (1944, republished 1994), The Great Transformation

!Nefarious Dogma!

“Gehe nur an ihm zu Grunde — ich weiss keinen besseren Lebenszweck als am Grossen und Unmöglichen, animae magnae prodigus, zu Grunde zu gehen.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche (1874), Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil
der Historie für das Leben.

I am slated to defend my Ph.D. (Astrobiology / Geology). Spacetime constraints:

Date: Friday the Eleventh of December Two-thousand-nine

Time: 16:00

Venue: Theodor Jacobsen Observatory, University of Washington Campus, Seattle

Lewis’ case for his ‘Tao’. Unclear, incomplete. Worthwhile if you wish to learn about Lewis, I suppose.