Action Figure

Getting all medieval on your ass is..... Doc Angelic!!

h/t Mark Shea

Mottoes

Get your daily Calvin-Hobbs fix at http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/

Feast of St. Catherine of Alexandria

St. Catherine of Alexandria
Symbolism. The martyr's crown. The wheel on which
she was tortured. The sword by which she was beheaded.
The books and astrolabe for her erudition.

TOF's Faithful Reader may recall that the parish church in Oberhochwald/Eifelheim was the Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria, whose feast is today. She was one of the most popular saints in the Middle Ages, especially so in universities.

Clearing the Tabs

An informative potpourri today, O Faithful Reader.



1. Darwin Catholic reports on Slate's denigration of women and its desire that they be more like men, which is the only truly worthy aspiration. Motherhood, it seems, detracts from productivity in business, a cog in which machine is or should be the goal of all. The delight, as Brandon points out in the comments, is to see Slate acting as a shill for corporate interests.

2. Meanwhile, Wired lets us know that those people should not be allowed to "breed." One supposes that "everything old is new again" and the search for the superman continues. Why are they called "progressives" if they simply repeat century-old tropes? What judgment Darwin would make of this!!

3. An intriguing new blog in which issues of climate science are debated among professionals. Each "issue" starts with a statement of the problem followed by three to five "guest blogs" by scientists on one side or another. Best of all, the comments are in two buckets: one for scientists and the other for everyone else. That way the loonies can more easily be ignored. The linked issue regards the possible imminent occurrence of a new Maunder minimum.

4. James Bowman comments on the continuing vandalism of works of art by the barbarians of the New Age. Artists of the past must and will be brought into line with current goodthink.

5. The estimable John C. Wright points us to a video in which a woman walks along the streets of NYC and is accosted by all the usual suspects.This is a parody of another video by feminists which triggered an internecine battle between those wishing to expose the harassment of women and those concerned that all of the harassers shown were POCs.

6. Atheist John Gray on "The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins." Gray's point is that Dawkins is not a very scientifical fellow and approaches atheism with the unfortunate pulpit-pounding of a religious zealot. Of course, that Dawkins is a Calvinist preacher has long been obvious. What is genetic determinism but predestination in a lab coat.

7. Our old buddy Aristotle comes in for some kudos from unlikely sources. Despite getting many facts wrong -- supposing our translations are accurate as to the meanings of the terms then in use -- his methodology was sound, and is used to this day. So, he should get a retro-Nobel Prize; or at least a reappraisal of his physics. Aristotelian physics, the author contends "is a correct and non-intuitive approximation of Newtonian physics in the suitable domain (motion in fluids), in the same technical sense in which Newton theory is an approximation of Einstein's theory."

8. Speaking of which, Hassing once gave a lecture examining the revolutionary nature of classical physics versus both the Aristotelian physics that preceded it and the quantum physics that supplanted it. He discusses the various shaky foundations that underlie the Newtonian world-view.

9. In line with which is a paper by Nancy Cartwright on How the Laws of Physics Lie.

ΨΦ

A new and curious magazine/journal has come to TOF's attention; viz., Sci Phi Journal, Issue #1 of which can be found here. It is a curious mixture of science fiction and philosophy. I mean, whoever heard of that escapist stuff taking on issues of high philosophy.

Issue #1 features four short stories and a novelette, plus five articles on philosophy. Each of the stories is followed by a short supplement on the philosophical issues it tackles. The philosophy articles are not supplemented by short stories tackling the issues raised, however.

The Table of Contents for Issue #1

FROM THE EDITOR
By Jason Rennie
 
SHORT FICTION

DOMO
By Joshua M. Young
FALLING TO ETERNITY
By David Hallquist
COSMIC FOAM
By Frederick Best
ABANDONED RIVER, DRY WATER
By Jane Lebak

ARTICLES

IN DEFENSE OF THE MATRIX SAGA: APPRECIATING THE SEQUELS THROUGH PHILOSOPHY
By David Kyle Johnson
STAR TREK’S PRIME DIRECTIVE: MORAL GUIDELINES, EXCEPTIONS,
AND ABSOLUTES
By James Druley
PERSONHOOD IN H. BEAM PIPER’S LITTLE FUZZY
By Stephen S. Hanson
“I AM GROOT”: AN ARISTOTELIAN REFLECTION ON SPACE ALIENS AND SUBSTANCE
By Daniel Vecchio
ENDANGERED SPECIES: EXPLORING ENHANCEMENT, GENETIC ENGINEERING, AND PERSONHOOD THROUGH THE WORLD OF SWEET TOOTH
By Ruth Tallman

NOVELLETE

THE IDEAL MACHINE
By John C. Wright

BOOK REVIEWS

LARRY CORREIA'S MONSTER HUNTER INTERNATIONAL BOOK 1
Reviewed by Peter Sean Bradley

All of the entries are quite good, but special mention must be made of the estimable Mr. Wright's "The Ideal Machine," which is delightfully Laffertyesque in its account of a First Contact in rural Virginia involving two military helicopter pilots, a priest, and the aforesaid machine.

Germanobeastnaming

German, the Legoblock language, can construct new words from old. For example:

Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän

is a fine example, should you ever need a single word to designate the captain of a Danube steamship for a travel company. He (or she, we hasten to add) would be a Danubicsteamshiptravelcompanycaptain. Think how this would reduce the word count in your latest manuscript!

Of particular interest are the names of beasts:

There is the appropriatelynamed skunk (Stinktier – stink-beast) and sloth (Faultier – lazy-beast) and the humourslynamed platypus (Schnabeltier – beak-beast).But what are we to make of the racoon (Waschbär – wash-bear) and the slug (Nacktschnecke – naked-snail). At least these keep genus or order straight. However, the porpoise is Schweinswal (pig-whale) and it is hard to see how pigs come into it, Linnaeus-wise.

Most puzzling of all is the squirrel: Eichhörnchen, which breaks down either as:

Eiche (oak tree) + Horn (horn) + -chen (little) or "little oak horn"

or more mysteriously as:

Eiche (oak tree) + Hörnchen (croissant) or "oak croissant"

Croissant? The Austrians, though Darwinianly challened, at least seem reaonable in calling the squirrel:
Eichkätzchen or Eichkatzerl, meaning "oak kitten"

Fun and Games on the Old South Side

Haven't seen this sort of action in the neighborhood since they tore down the Delaware Terrace projects. The cops raided a house about a block away from TOF, looking for a fellow who had been dealing heroin on a nearby playground. There is an alley running behind the duplexes shown in the picture, and the playground is across that alley. In TOF's youth, that playground was actually a cornfield, improbably surrounded by houses and (on one side) by a carpet factory. Every spring the farmer would drive his tractor down from the hill and plow it up and plant corn. Eventually, a new generation of kids arose who regarded the corn as free for the taking, so he gave up and sold out and the city built a park where people could pedal heroin. The carpet factory is also gone. There is a drug store on the site.

From the story:

Easton police served a narcotics search warrant and made one arrest Wednesday morning on the city's South Side.
Elijah Thompson, 23, was taken into custody as part of a Vice Unit investigation into heroin dealing at Milton Street Playground, police Lt. Matthew Gerould said at the scene.
Police obtained a search warrant for a car behind the home, Gerould said, and found $1,500 worth of heroin in the vehicle, Gerould said. Drugs were not found in the house but packaging materials were, Gerould said.

If you take a gander at the picture, you will see a big stone house in the background. This was the first house in the area and was built and inhabited by Francis Schwar (pron. Schwär), from an extensive family of stone masons. The area was once known as "Schwartown" for the large number of relatives scattered about. Their daughter was TOF's grandmother, who lived two houses to the left, off frame. Two houses farther down is the TOFian Fortress of Solitude.

Special Response Team action is actually rare these days on this side of town. But some years ago, before the projects were torn down, a dead body turned up at the intersection in the background. In another incident around the same time, a car full of urban youth pulled up to the red brick house across the street to the left from the Schwär house in the background, and took refuge inside. (That house, too, had once been a Schwar house.) Shortly after, another car pulled up and a hand emerged from the window with a gun, but found no target but a tree. That incident was captured on a nearby security camera. The first car, the one from which the youths had emerged, was being sought by cops for a drive-by shooting in the West Ward. Apparently, the cops were not the only seekers. The gun-brandishers were organizationally related to the targets in the original fusilade.