The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences

 The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

— Werner Heisenberg, born in 1901

 Andrew Young’s Real Info

 “The Slow Race” is what we might call a light poem. It is not particularly philosophical, even if the river is life, and the walking is living. Yet, there is something right in Young’s description of the river, even if we have never seen it. The weir is a comb. The water is silver hair. The river is weighted down with “sky and earth.” A “flawed” turn does push the river back. Something true and irreducible about the inner qualities of the observable world has been stated.

COVID-RELATED FATALITIES: Restaurant Industry in Free Fall; 10,000 Close in Three Months.

Sydney’s Best Cafe Openings of 2020 

Literature

The books authors loved to read in a year of living precariously

YOU CAN ONLY BE AVANT-GARDEFOR SO LONG BEFORE YOU BECOME GARDE: Ka-Ching! Anti-Establishment Singer Bob Dylan To Sell Catalog For Upwards Of $300M.

(Classical reference in headline.)

“Science seems to be saying: yes, attending to beauty is exceptionally helpful and, also, we should pay no attention to beauty” — Michael Strevens (NYU) on scientific progress and “unreasonable constraints”

“Oh, writers, little do we know what unexpected power our words may have. And, oh teachers, little do you know how much every utterance from your lips may be cherished by hundreds of students a generation later” — Claudia Mills (Colorado)

If the “many worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics is true, “then many observers across the many worlds are living Humean nightmares” — and “maybe we are in a slightly nightmarish Humean world after all,” explains Charlie Huenemann (Utah State)

Descriptions of what people do “are significantly stronger in shaping behaviour and cognition” than prescriptions telling people what to do — and this has implications for the ethics of science communication, argues Uwe Peters (Bonn, Cambridge)

Where did Simone de Beauvoir find “an image of adulthood she could live with”? — in the character of Jo March from Alcott’s Little Women, explains Mary Townsend (St. John’s), who understands Beauvoir’s “satisfaction in simple negation of everything religious”

“Not even the Sixties flower children were as countercultural as philosophy is today, and philosophers are clever enough to know their odds” — Jeannette Cooperman with some observations about the Daily Nous Non-Academic Hires page

“Once a Genius asked me a question in the Q&A after my talk, and then walked out before hearing my answer” — Agnes Callard (Chicago) moves from “The Queen’s Gambit” to some general points about how “Genius is a personality-laundering scheme