I have looked into most philosophical systems and I have seen that none will work without God.
— James Clerk Maxwell, born on this date in 1831
It has been said that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but may it not be truer to say that to be absolutely powerful a man must first corrupt himself?
— Terence Rattigan, born in 1911
A few months ago, the fearsome music critic Greil Marcus came across an old song he’d never heard before. Though the radio, against doo-wop harmonies and wandering guitar arpeggios, a woman crooned, “It isn’t nice to block the doorway / It isn’t nice to go to jail / There are nicer ways to do it, but the nice ways always fail.”
Great Protest Music Outlasts Its Time (And Then Comes Around Again)
Your burning questions about the APS review answered
Q&A WITH DAVID THODEY: We sat down and fired eight questions at the chair of the APS Review panel. Here are his answers, published in full.
Corruption Gutted South Africa's Tax Agency ...
Why UK's civil service recruitment went back to the drawing board
What are 'success profiles' and how can they help government foster a level playing field for both internal and external candidates? Rupert McNeil, chief people officer in the UK civil service, outlines the approach.
One of BC's Hindi Guru once noted, "I know some people who are so poor, so incredibly poor, that all they have is money".
From her:
By nature, a society that forgives and rehabilitates its people is a society that forgives and transforms itself. That takes a radical kind of love, a secret of which is given in the Lord’s Prayer: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.And let us not forget the guiding principle of “the least among us” found in Matthew: that we are compelled to care for the hungry, thirsty, homeless, naked, sick and, yes—the imprisoned.
Use the first couple weeks at new job to be hyper-observant about how staff operate: Is it hierarchical? Do people stay super late? Can you take digital ideas directly to an editor, or should you talk to your direct supervisor first? Is the vibe formal and quiet, or chatty and social?
Informal Inquiries : This World is not ConclusionWhen diversity means uniformity | The Spectator
Conversations Gone Awry: Detecting Early Signs of Conversational Failure. Justine Zhang, Jonathan P. Chang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lucas Dixon, Nithum Thain, Dario Taraborelli.
“One of the main challenges online social systems face is the prevalence of antisocial behavior, such as harassment and per-sonal attacks. In this work, we introduce the task of predicting from the very start of a conversation whether it will get out of hand. As opposed to detecting undesirable behavior after the fact, this task aims to enable early, actionable prediction at a time when the conversation might still be salvaged. To this end, we develop a framework for capturing pragmatic devices—such as politeness strategies and rhetorical prompts—used to start a conversation, and analyze their relation to its future trajectory. Applying this framework in a controlled setting, we demonstrate the feasibility of detecting early warning signs of antisocial behavior in online discussions.”
A teenage girl grieving the death of her infant daughter is sitting on the almost unbearably beautiful shore of a Swiss mountain lake. Her own mother, a pioneering feminist and political philosopher, has died of complications from childbirth exactly a month after bringing her into the world. Her philosopher father has cut her off for eloping to Europe with her lover — a struggling poet, whom she would marry six months later, after the suicide of his estranged first wife.
200 Years of Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece as a Lens on Today’s Most Pressing Questions of Science, Ethics, and Human Creativity
A word to the wise: Why wisdom might be ripe for rediscovery - The Globe and Mail
Fraud is pervasive in South Korean academia—in some cases, professors have ghostwritten for their students.
↩︎ Quartz
The Oder drew a border line up and down the country, writing a Here and a There in the sandy earth. Under it, however, countless watery question marks and intertwining letters tugged in both directions, east and west, a water-script of histories granted continuity through the river, under it, beyond it, its tributaries and ramifications annotating the landscape, reversing its sides with befuddling mirror images of the sky and its blues of Here and There.
Esther Kinsky. River. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017, translated from the German by Iain Galbraith.
'Favouritism is corruption ‒ and it's going unchallenged'
Corruption is more than just the extreme cases, says the head of Victoria's corruption watchdog.
It’s common for Christian wedding vows to include the phrase “till death do us part” . . . but the truth is that marriages don’t always last.
The circumstances under which they can end, though, range all over the board. Who’s allowed to call it quits: the husband, the wife, their families, some higher (secular or spiritual) authority? What cause, if any, is required before you can cut the tie? What hoops do you have to jump through, and what are you allowed to do afterward?
Continue reading
I said something like, “Remember how we always talked about how, if we ever had the chance to ethically eat human meat, would you do it? Well, I’m calling you on that. We doing this or what?”
After a motorcycle accident, a man asks his friends to eat his amputated leg with him.
↩︎ VICE
Isn’t it weird that the best ideas we have just…. pop into your head? I have no idea how to trace them. They just show up.@Tyler any research into this area?
Dean Keith Simonton springs readily to mind, noting he has a new book coming out this year on genius. Here are some overview pieces on simultaneous discovery, and of course those tend to stress environmental factors. Here are some approaches to the multiplicative model of creative achievement. I am a fan of that one. What else?
I said something like, “Remember how we always talked about how, if we ever had the chance to ethically eat human meat, would you do it? Well, I’m calling you on that. We doing this or what?”
After a motorcycle accident, a man asks his friends to eat his amputated leg with him.
↩︎ VICE
"When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels"
~Edward Dahlberg
~Edward Dahlberg