Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim!

So said Pope.  No, not that Pope.  The one who wrote poetry. 

In another venue, TOF chanced to encounter the following encomium to evolution:

The brain evolved in the same way the fins evolved: because their evolution conferred survival advantages in given situations.

Now the curious thing was that this statement was made by an individual (whom we will call "Adam Apple") who also asseverated that there was no τελος in nature.  I will wait a moment for my reader to stop banging his forehead against his desktop.  You could damage your computer screen that way.   

....(waiting)
....(waiting)

χmas Time is Here By-Golly

As dependable as holly and mistletoe are the old fundamentalist claims that Christmas is "really" just a pagan festival.  In a recent Letter to the Editor of our local paper, a writer whom we will call "Mr. G" called it "bizarre" to acknowledge a deity with a "mere human construct" like a calendar.  By this we must suppose that cathedrals, statues, stained glass windows, Handel's Messiah, and the designations BC and AD are "bizarre."  Well, tastes vary, we suppose. 

This post is a somewhat expanded version of my reply, which appeared a couple days later.  
 
Mr. G claimed that Dec. 25 was the pagan Roman celebration of the winter solstice.  But this cannot be true for the excellent reason that:

1. the Romans did not celebrate solstices and equinoxes, and 
2. Dec. 25 was not the solstice!  

Interview With the Flynn

I have been interviewed.

Science Fiction Theater

Hoo-ah.  This was a favorite TV show of mine when I was a kid.  When media science fiction was not all space wars and monsters.

It's also interesting to visit an alien civilization; viz., the 1950s.

The War Between Reason and Religion

Agobard of Lyons, "On Hail and Thunder" (9th Century)

A certain stupidity was spread a few years ago, when some cattle died, so that people said that Grimaldus, the Duke of Benevento, had sent men with powder that they sprinkled through the fields and mountains, meadows and springs – because he was hostile to the most Christian Emperor Charles, and cattle died from this sprinkled powder. We have heard of, and seen, many men seized for this reason, some of them struck down and slain, but most of them tied to boards, thrown into the river, and killed. And, what is truly amazing, the very ones who were seized would give evidence against themselves, saying that they had such a powder and they had sprinkled it. For thus the devil, when his power was received into them by the secret and righteous justice of God, was able to enter them to such an extent that they became false witnesses against themselves to the point of death. And neither instruction nor torture nor death itself deterred them from daring to speak this falsehood against themselves.

This was believed by everyone, so that there was scarcely anyone to whom it seemed absurd. They did not consider rationally, how such a powder that would kill only the cattle and not the rest of the animals could have been made, or how such stuff could have been carried across regions so broad that people could not have sprinkled them with powder, not even if all the Beneventan men and women, old and young, had come through the region with three full carts of powder.

So much stupidity has already oppressed the wretched world that Christians now believe things so absurd that no one ever before could persuade the pagans to believe them, even though these pagans were ignorant of the Creator of all things. On this account, therefore, we have brought this last incident into the midst to our discourse, because it is similar to the topic on which we are speaking and can give an example of inane seduction and true impoverishment of sense.

Flynn in the Window

No, I don't know why it appears sideways.  But the Barnes and Noble at PA 33 and Freemansburg Ave. in Easton will be hosting your humble servant for an afternoon of reading and signing.  We can only hope my fan shows up.

The photo was captured by my daughter with her phone as she was walking by. 

Fun With Statistics

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Steven Pinker, whom we last saw here making a hash of the mind-body "problem" and earlier denying the existence of human dignity, is a Public Intellectual.  Now, someone who intellectualizes in public may have other bad habits, and here we find him setting eyes rolling among both statisticians and historians with a book entitled The Better Angels of Our Nature. 

Dr. Pinker sometimes presents as a scientist, but on closer examination, we find he is only a psychologist.  (Yes, yes, I know; but for me the touchstone is physics.)  It is unclear what aspects of training in the psyche provides expertise in historical analysis or even in statistics.  Psych majors often take Stats-for-psych-majors, but this ought not be confused with the true quill.  Certainly, any author who gets his name in larger type than the title of the book is an Important Author. But perhaps this is no more than a distinguished expert in one field trying to import that distinction to an alien field, with indifferent results.

(Yes, yes, I know.  But TOF does not pretend to be a Public Intellectual or even an Important Author.)