The title is a quirk of etymology, having been born in the Greek courts, spread through the early Chrisitan’s spiritual and philosophical defences, and ended up meaning something like a “regretted guilt”. Not so here. I prefer the alternative title: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Socrates voices by Plato On one hand, this is a document. On one hand, this is a story. On...
Editorial notes: This Essay was found as a ‘draft’ entry in Everything2. It seems to be a continuation of the thought process recorded a few days earlier in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and it ends with a number of points for future consideration. It is published here with minor changes. I had first considered illustrating the...
Editorial notes: This Essay[I] was found as a ‘draft’ entry in Everything2 and it is not clear whether it was complete and ready for publication. It is published here with minor changes. A follow-up draft was recorded a number of days later, containing further thoughts on this matter. Beauty. The grandest of human values is beauty. It is the experience of the beautiful that brings...
This is for you. I love you. Love is the quintessential romantic, irrational, human experience. It is in the first place the domain of its clients, although readily owned by the poets. As for others. The philosophers are permitted access, though they often regress into poets too; describing love as sacred, profound, and utterly existential. In the penultimate place in the line for love, in front...
Editorial notes: Shai documents his interpretation of Locke’s Theory of Knowledge[I] which, he explains, “is famous for being based on the principle that the mind is a blank slate” and that the mind is “gaining everything it knows by experience”. The need to acquire experience in order to gain knowledge is a principle by which Shai chose to live his life. Knowing now that this was his guiding...
Editorial notes: This Essay was found as a ‘draft’ entry in Everything2 and is published here with minor changes. BTW, if you are already here, check out the links in the second line of the title, below. Just hovering over them will give you some insight into Shai’s unique way of thinking and expressing himself. Discovering Geology at the Gariwerd Mountains; or...
I’m currently – 03/05/13 – in the process of updating this. I’ve added the section “Update (May 2013)”, which is still a work in process (i.e. otherwise I would delete this note here). The title of this node comes from a Nature communication in which recent research linking the prion protein (PrP) and the amyloid-beta (Abeta) protein was discussed. This is a...
De-extinction is the restoration into the world of living specimens of animals that had once been extinct. There are three technologies for de-extinction currently being explored, each one with a target species its project hopes to de-extinct. A. Back-breeding. This is only possible where there exist living species with genetic homologues to the target extinct species. By this method, the desired...
In 2011, Universe published the ghoulishly-titled book 1001 Games You Must Play Before You Die[1]. The obvious question then follows, “Well, what’s number one?” The list’s ordered chronologically, but even so, it’s a game called The Oregon Trail. It’s from the mid 70’s. Today that makes it vintage, ten years ago it was old school, and ten years before...
A lot of what scientists do is curating nature. That is, describing the different bits of nature, at different scales, categorizing them, and listing their relationships, in which they look for patterns. Scientists did this when they undertook the Human Genome Project, a massive effort to describe the chemical composition and order of human DNA. Having a map of human DNA only spurred further...
