What little understanding that survives

Education is what survives when what has been learned [taught is] forgotten. 

B. F. Skinner, New Scientist, May 21, 1964. US psychologist (1904 - 1990)

Do you not know, my son, with what little understanding the world is ruled?

Pope Julius III

Emotional intelligence, adjustment and intelligence

Study* with 1.011 adolescents in Mysore, India:

"Intelligence was predicted by adjustment, emotional intelligence, socioeconomic status and an interaction of these variables and the prediction percentage is quite high - R2>30%."

* "A study on relationships between intelligence, emotional intelligence and adjustment among adolescents" - Sitaram, Lakshmi e Saraswathi, University of Mysore Dec-2004

Ant-Christ

From David Wojnarowicz's "A Fire in My Belly" video, pulled from the National Portrait Gallery in 2010

Thinking difficult thoughts

Another of God's greatest gifts: the ability to doubt, to think difficult thoughts and weigh conflicting options with clarity and subtlety.

Joe Klein
Time.com, Thursday, Aug. 05, 2010

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2008733,00.html?xid=newsletter-daily#ixzz0vkAOIUQ9

Future anxiety

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted
fools the way to dusty death.

Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more

it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth
Act 5 Scene 5
Words of Macbeth

A Fraude da fraude

Não é só no brasil que aparecem arqui-vigaristas:

In May 2008 the Fraud Discovery Institute, which claims to be a consumer watchdog organisation, reported that laboratory test results of Herbalife products showed lead levels in excess of limits established by law in California under Proposition 65. The Fraud Discovery Institute was founded by fraudulent entrepreneur Barry Minkow, who served seven years in jail for stock fraud, and since disclosed that his company was profiting from the allegations by shorting Herbalife stock.

Memory-Editing Drugs

Did you find director Michel Gondry's argument for his "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind" movie too far-fetched?

Well... read on.


The Messy Future of Memory-Editing Drugs | Wired Science | Wired.com

The Messy Future of Memory-Editing Drugs

• By Brandon Keim
• April 10, 2009 |
• 3:10 pm |
• Categories: Brains and Behavior
• 
  

The development of a drug that controls a chemical used to form memories sparked heady scientific and philosophical speculation this week.

Granted, the drug has only been tested in rats, but other memory-blunting drugs are being tried in soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. It might not be long before memories are pharmaceutically targeted, just as moods are now.

Some think this represents an opportunity to eliminate the crippling psychic effects of past trauma. Others see an ill-advised chemical intrusion into an essential human facility that threatens to replace our ability to understand and cope with life's inevitabilities.

Oxford University neuroethicist Anders Sandberg spoke with Wired.com about the future of memory-editing drugs. In some ways, said Sandberg, our memories are already being altered. We just don't realize it.

Wired.com: Will these drugs, when they become available, work as expected?

Anders Sandberg: A lot of discussion is based on the false premise that they'll work as well as they would in a science fiction story. In practice, well-studied, well-understood drugs like aspirin have side effects that can be annoying or even dangerous. I think the same thing will go for memory editing.

Wired.com: How selective will memory editing be?

Sandberg: Current research seems to suggest that it can be pretty specific, but there will be side effects. It may not even be that you forget other memories. Small, false memories could be created. And we're probably not going to be able to predict that before we actually try them.

Wired.com: What's the right way to test the drugs?

Sandberg: The cautious approach works. Right now, there are small clinical trials using propranolol to reduce post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a good start. We should also find better ways of doing the trials, because we don't really know what we're looking for.

When testing a cancer drug, we look at side effects in terms of toxicity. Here we might want to look at all aspects of thinking, which is really hard, because you can't test for all of them.

In the future, since we're getting more technological forms of recording and documenting our lives, those will have a bigger part in testing the drugs. We'll be able to ask, How does this help in everyday life? How often do you get "tip of the tongue" phenomena? Does it increase in relation to the drug?

Wired.com:
It seems that it would be easy to test "tip of the tongue" drug effects on the sorts of small things one recalls on an everyday basis. But what if it's old, infrequently recalled but still-important memories that are threatened by side effects?

Sandberg: It's pretty messy to determine what is an important memory to us. They quite often crop up, but without us consciously realizing that we're thinking of the memory. That's probably good news, as every time you recall a memory, you also tend to strengthen it.

Wired.com: How likely is the manipulation of these fundamental memories?

Sandberg: Big memories, with lots of connections to other things we've done, will probably be messy to deal with. But I don't think those are the memories that people want to give up. Most people would want to edit memories that impair them.

Of course, if we want to tweak memories to look better to ourselves, we might get a weird concept of self.

Wired.com: I've asked about memory removal — but should the discussion involve adding memories, too?

Sandberg: People are more worried about deletion. We have a preoccupation with amnesia, and are more fearful of losing something than adding falsehoods.

The problem is that it's the falsehoods that really mess you up. If you don't know something, you can look it up, remedy your lack of information. But if you believe something falsely, that might make you act much more erroneously.

You can imagine someone modifying their memories of war to make them look less cowardly and more brave. Now they'll think they're a brave person. At that point, you end up with the interesting question of whether, in a crisis situation, they would now be brave.

Wired.com: You use another example of memory-editing drugs for soldiers in your article with S. Matthew Liao, that if the memory of a mistaken action is erased, a soldier might not learn from his remorse.

Sandberg: To some extent, we already have to deal with this. My grandfather's story of having been in the Finnish winter war as a volunteer shifted over time. He didn't become much braver from year to year, but there was a difference between the earlier and later versions.

We can't trust our memories. But on the other hand, our memories are the basis for most of our decisions. We take it as a given that we can trust them, which is problematic.

Wired.com: But this fluidity of memory at least exists in an organic framework. Might we lose something in the transition to an abrupt, directed fluidity?

Sandberg: There's some truth to that. We have authentic fake memories, in a sense. My grandfather might have made his memories a bit more brave over time, but that was affected by his personality and his other circumstances, and tied to who he was. If he just went to the memory clinic and wanted to have won the battle, that would be more jarring.

If you do that kind of jarring change, and it doesn't connect to anything else in the personality, it's probably not going to work that well.

Wired.com: In your article, you also bring up forgiveness. If we no longer remember when someone has wronged us, we might not learn to forgive them, and that's an important social ability.

Sandberg: My co-author is more concerned than I am, but I do think there's something interesting going on with forgiveness. It's psychological, emotional and moral — a complex can of worms.

I can see problems, not from a moral standpoint, but legal. What if I hit you with my car, and to prevent PTSD you take propranolol, and afterwards in court think it wasn't too serious? A clever lawyer might argue that the victim's lack of concern means the crime should be disregarded.

I'm convinced that we're going to see a lot of interesting legal cases in the next few years, as neuroscience gets involved. People tend to believe witnesses. Suppose a witness says, "I'd just been taking my Ritalin" — should we believe him more, because we've got an enhanced memory? And if a witness has been taking a drug to impair memory, is that a reason to believe that her account is not true?

With this kind of neuroscientific evidence, it's very early to tell what we can trust. We need to do actual experiments and see measure how drugs enhance or impair memory, or more problematically, introduce a bias. Some drugs might enhance emotional memories over unemotional, or vice versa.

Wired.com: Is it paranoid to worry that someday people will be stuck drifting in a sea of shifting and unreliable memories?

Sandberg: I think we're already in this sea, but we don't notice it most of the time. Most people think, "I've got a slightly bad memory." Then they completely trust what they remember, even when it's completely unreliable.

Maybe all this is good, because it forces us to recognize that the nature of our memory is quite changeable.

The wink that changed the world

The wink that changed the world. - By Michael Meyer - Slate Magazine

This is the way the Warsaw Pact folded, not with a bang but a gesture.

By Michael MeyerPosted Monday, July 6, 2009, at 9:26 AM ET

Nicolae Ceaucescu in Bucharest in 1989

On July 7, 1989, the masters of the Eastern empire gathered in Bucharest for a fateful summit. They were a rogue's gallery of the world's dictators, assembled in the capital of the worst among them: Romania's own Nicolae Ceausescu, Europe's last Stalinist, the dark lord of the old Eastern bloc's most repressive Communist regime.

They were the hunters: Erich Honecker, the murderous boss of the German Democratic Republic, architect of the wall that separated his East Germany from the West. There was Poland's Wojciech Jaruzelski, the man who declared martial law in 1980 and broke the famed trade union Solidarity. Czechoslovak strongman Milos Jakes was there, as well as Bulgaria's Todor Zhivkov, whose secret police stooges once tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II.

This day, however, the hunted was one of their own: reformist Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth, whose determination to bring democracy and free markets to his country threatened them all. And so, in the interests of self-preservation, the satraps of the Warsaw Pact marshaled their forces. The goal: a classically Commie "fraternal intervention" of the sort the world had seen before—Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968. Only one man stood between them and their quarry. His name: Mikhail Gorbachev.

For many, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was a glorious moment, emblematic of the West's victory in the Cold War. It seemed to come out of the blue. But if you watched the Eastern bloc's disintegration from the ground, over the course of that epic year, you know that the process was far longer and more complex than most people realize. Often, it unfolded in melodramatic little chapters, unnoticed by the rest of the world, as on that fine summer day in Bucharest two decades ago.

To grasp the full dimension of that drama, you must remember how Europe was still locked in the old order defined by the Cold War—and glimpse the changes afoot that would, abruptly, transform it. Nemeth arrived on the scene in late November 1988 as a new-generation "reform" Communist in the mold of Gorbachev himself. But if his titular master in Moscow remained a committed socialist, however liberal by contrast to his old-guard predecessors, Nemeth was the real deal.

Moving quickly, he had drafted a new constitution for Hungary—modeled on America's, complete with a Bill of Rights and guarantees of free speech and human rights. Then he allowed new political parties to form and promised free elections. And if the Communist Party should lose, hard-liners asked, what then? Why, said Nemeth, with perfect equanimity, "We step down." Worst, just a few months before, in early May, Nemeth had announced that Hungary would tear down the fence along its frontier with Austria. At the height of the Cold War, he cut a hole in the Iron Curtain.

In the Communist world, this was heresy. It had to be punished. And so it was that the Warsaw Pact's leaders assembled in Bucharest. Seated in a great hall, surrounded by banners and the full pomp of Communist circumstance, they launched their attack. Ceausescu went first, brandishing his fists and shouting an impassioned indictment: "Hungary will destroy socialism." His "dangerous experiments" will destroy the entire Socialist Union! Honecker, Jakes, and Zhivkov followed. Only Jaruzelski of Poland sat quiet, sphinxlike behind his dark sunglasses, betraying no emotion.

Nemeth had been in office for only seven months. This was his first Warsaw Pact summit. He was nervous, but he knew his enemies would act only with Soviet support. The man who could give it sat roughly opposite him, 30 feet away on the other side of a large rectangle of flag-draped conference tables. As Ceausescu and the others ranted on, calling for armed intervention in Hungary, Nemeth glanced across at the Soviet leader. Their eyes met, and Gorbachev … winked.

"This happened at least four or five times," Nemeth later told me. "Strictly speaking, it wasn't really a wink. It was more a look, a bemused twinkle. Each time he smiled at me, with his eyes, it was as if Gorbachev were saying, 'Don't worry. These people are idiots. Pay no attention.' " And so he didn't. As the dogs of the Warsaw Pact brayed for his head, Nemeth went outside to smoke a cigarette.

On this small moment, history turned. Nemeth flew back to Budapest and continued his reforms, dissolving the country's Communist Party and opening Hungary's borders so that tens of thousands of East Germans could famously escape to the West—and causing, four months later, the Berlin Wall to topple. Erich Honecker went home a spent political force who would be ousted in a coup d'état that began taking shape even before he left Bucharest. As for Nicolae Ceausescu, he would die by firing squad during the revolution that convulsed Romania at year's end.

M.I.A.

"Paper Planes"

I fly like paper, get high like planes
If you catch me at the border I got visas in my name
If you come around here, I make 'em all day
I get one down in a second if you wait

Sometimes I think sitting on trains
Every stop I get to I'm clocking that game
Everyone's a winner, we're making our fame
Bonafide hustler making my name

All I wanna do is (BANG BANG BANG BANG!)
And (KKKAAAA CHING!)
And take your money

Pirate skulls and bones
Sticks and stones and weed and bongs
Running when we hit 'em
Lethal poison through their system

No one on the corner has swagger like us
Hit me on my Burner prepaid wireless
We pack and deliver like UPS trucks
Already going hell just pumping that gas

All I wanna do is (BANG BANG BANG BANG!)
And (KKKAAAA CHING!)
And take your money

M.I.A.
Third world democracy
Yeah, I got more records than the K.G.B.
So, uh, no funny business

Some some some I some I murder
Some I some I let go
Some some some I some I murder
Some I some I let go

The Hugger Mugger of Leicester Square

Hugger Mugger police warning, Odeon Cinema, Leicester Square, London, UK no Flickr – Compartilhamento de fotos!

Recession times

When the toilet in Carol Taddei’s master bathroom began to break down a few months ago, she decided it would be cheaper to buy a new one than pay for repairs. Ever frugal in this dismal economy, Ms. Taddei, a retired paralegal, then took her economizing a step further, figuring she could save even more by installing the new toilet herself.

Initially, things looked good with the flushing and the swishing. That is, until the ceiling collapsed in the room below the new (leaky) toilet. Rushing to get supplies for a repair, Ms. Taddei clipped a pole in her garage. It ripped the bumper off her car, and later, several shelves holding flower pots and garden tools collapsed over her head.

“It just kept getting worse,” Ms. Taddei said, ruefully describing what came out to be a $3,000, three-day renovation at her suburban Minneapolis home, finished by a professional from Mr. Handyman, a home repair service that takes emergency calls.

ACUMEN

Etymology

Latin acumen, sharp point

n.

acumen (plural acumens)

1. quickness of discernment or perception; penetration of mind; the faculty of nice discrimination

Quotations

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter

  No, no, my dear Watson! With all respect for your natural acumen, I do not think that you are quite a match for the worthy doctor.

  
  

• 1991, Silence Of The Lambs

  Hannibal Lecter: Why do you think he removes their skins, Agent Starling? Enthrall me with your acumen.

Synonyms

Sharpness; penetration; keenness; shrewdness; acuteness; acuity.

NOUS

Origin:
1670–80; Gk. noûs, contracted var. of nóos mind

n.

1. Philosophy
   1. Reason and knowledge as opposed to sense perception.
   2. The rational part of the individual human soul.
   3. The principle of the cosmic mind or soul responsible for the rational order of the cosmos.
   4. In Neo-Platonism, the image of the absolute good, containing the cosmos of intelligible beings.
   
   
2. Chiefly British Good sense; shrewdness."She has great social nous"

[Greek.]

Spanish: nos,

German: uns selbst,

Japanese: 私たち自身を

The Grid, Our Cars and the Net: One Idea to Link Them All

The Grid, Our Cars and the Net: One Idea to Link Them All | Autopia

Autopia Planes, Trains, Automobiles and the Future of Transportation

By David Weinberger
May 8, 2009
11:57 am

Editor's note: Robin Chase thinks a lot about transportation and the internet, and how to link them. She connected them when she founded Zipcar, and she wants to do it again by making our electric grid and our cars smarter. Time magazine recently named her one of the 100 most influential people of the year. David Weinberger sat down with Chase to discuss her idea.

Robin Chase considers the future of electricity, the future of cars and the internet three terms in a single equation, even if most of us don't yet realize they're on the same chalkboard. Solve the equation correctly, she says, and we create a greener future where innovation thrives. Get it wrong, and our grandchildren will curse our names.

Chase thinks big, and she's got the cred to back it up. She created an improbable network of automobiles called Zipcar. Getting it off the ground required not only buying a fleet of cars, but convincing cities to dedicate precious parking spaces to them. It was a crazy idea, and it worked. Zipcar now has 6,000 cars and 250,000 users in 50 towns.

Now she's moving on to the bigger challenge of integrating a smart grid with our cars – and then everything else. The kicker is how they come together. You can sum it up as a Tweet: The intelligent network we need for electricity can also turn cars into nodes. Interoperability is a multiplier. Get it right!

Robin Chase

Chase starts by explaining the smart grid. There's broad consensus that our electrical system should do more than carry electricity. It should carry information. That would allow a more intelligent, and efficient, use of power.

"Our electric infrastructure is designed for the rare peak of usage," Chase says. "That's expensive and wasteful."

Changing that requires a smart grid. What we have is a dumb one. We ask for electricity and the grid provides it, no questions asked. A smart grid asks questions and answers them. It makes the meter on your wall a sensor that links you to a network that knows how much power you're using, when you're using it and how to reduce your energy needs – and costs.

Such a system will grow more important as we become energy producers, not just consumers. Electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids will return power to the grid. Rooftop solar panels and backyard wind turbines will, at times, produce more energy than we can store. A smart grid generates what we need and lets us use what we generate. That's why the Obama Administration allocated $4.5 billion in the stimulus bill for smart grid R&D.

This pleases Chase, but it also makes her nervous. The smart grid must be an information network, but we have a tradition of getting such things wrong. Chase is among those trying to convince the government that the safest and most robust network will use open internet protocols and standards. For once the government seems inclined to listen.

Chase switches gears to talk about how cars fit into the equation. She sees automobiles as just another network device, one that, like the smart grid, should be open and net-based.

"Cars are network nodes," she says. "They have GPS and Bluetooth and toll-both transponders, and we're all on our cell phones and lots of cars have OnStar support services."

That's five networks. Automakers and academics will bring us more. They're working on smart cars that will communicate with us, with one another and with the road. How will those cars connect to the network? That's the third part of Chase's equation: Mesh networking.

In a typical Wi-Fi network, there's one router and a relatively small number of devices using it as a gateway to the internet. In a mesh network, every device is also a router. Bring in a new mesh device and it automatically links to any other mesh devices within radio range. It is an example of what internet architect David Reed calls "cooperative gain" - the more devices, the more bandwidth across the network. Chase offers an analogy to explain it.

"Wi-Fi is like a bridge that connects the highways on either side of the stream," she says. "You build it wide enough to handle the maximum traffic you expect. If too much comes, it gets congested. When not enough arrives, you've got excess capacity. Mesh takes a different approach: Each person who wants to cross throws in a flat rock that's above the water line. The more people who do that, the more ways there are to get across the river."

Cooperative gain means more users bring more capacity, not less. It's always right-sized. Of course, Chase points out, if you're trying to go a long distance, you're ultimately forced back onto the broadband bridge where the capacity is limited. But for local intra-mesh access, it's a brilliant and counter-intuitive strategy.

Mesh networking as a broad-based approach to networking is growing. A mesh network with 240 nodes covers Vienna. Similar projects are underway in Barcelona, Athens, the Czech Republic and, before long, in two areas of Boston not far from the cafe we're sitting in. But the most dramatic examples are the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and tanks and airplanes are running around using mesh networks," said Chase. "It works, it's secure, it's robust. If a node or device disappears, the network just reroutes the data."

And, perhaps most important, it's in motion. That's what allows Chase's plural visions to go singular. Build a smart electrical grid that uses Internet protocols and puts a mesh network device in every structure that has an electric meter. Sweep out the half dozen networks in our cars and replace them with an open, Internet-based platform. Add a mesh router. A nationwide mesh cloud will form, linking vehicles that can connect with one another and with the rest of the network. It's cooperative gain gone national, gone mobile, gone open.

Chase's mesh vision draws some skepticism. Some say it won't scale up. The fact it's is being used in places like Afghanistan and Vienna indicates it could. Others say moving vehicles may not be able to hook into and out of mesh networks quickly enough. Chase argues it's already possible to do so in less than a second, and that time will only come down. But even if every car and every electric meter were meshed, there's still a lot of highway out there that wouldn't be served, right? Chase has an answer for that, too.

"Cars would have cellular and Wi-Fi as backups," she said.

The economics are right, she argues. Rather than over-building to handle peak demand and letting capacity go unused, we would right-size our infrastructure to provide exactly what we need, when we need it, with minimum waste and maximum efficiency.

"There's an economy of network scale here," she says. "The traffic-light guys should be interested in this for their own purposes, and so should the power-grid folks and the emergency responders and the Homeland Security folks and, well, everyone. Mesh networks based on open standards are economically justifiable for any one of these things. Put them together - network the networks – and for the same exact infrastructure spend, you get a ubiquitous, robust, resilient, open communication platform — ripe for innovation — without spending a dollar more."

The time is right, too. There's $7.2 billion in the stimulus bill for broadband, $4.5 billion for the smart grid and about $5 billion for transportation technology. The Transportation Reauthorization bill is coming up, too. At $300 billion it is second only to education when it comes to federal discretionary spending. We are about to make a huge investment in a set of networks. It will be difficult to gather the political and economic will to change them once they are deployed.

"We need to get this right, right now," Chase says.

Build each of these infrastructures using open networking standards and we enable cooperative gain at the network level itself. Get it wrong and we will have paved over a generational opportunity.

David Weinberger is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. E-mail him at self@evident.com.

From Positivism to Complexity to Paradoxes

Today's key features of logical positivism (or logical empiricism; see also constructive empiricism), as originally created by A. Comte (19th century) and later adapted and corrected by Karl Popper, are:

1. A focus on science as a product, a linguistic or numerical set of statements;

2. A concern with axiomatization, that is, with demonstrating the logical structure and coherence of these statements (Göedel's 1921 and 1951 demonstrations of the essential insufficiency of many axiomatic systems, have largely reshaped and structured this vision);

3. An insistence on at least some of these statements being testable, that is amenable to being verified, confirmed, or falsified by the empirical observation of reality; statements that would, by their nature, be regarded as untestable included the teleological; (Thus positivism rejects much of classical metaphysics.)

4. The belief that science is markedly cumulative;

5. The belief that science is predominantly transcultural;

6. The belief that science rests on specific results that are dissociated from the personality and social position of the investigator;

7. The belief that science contains theories or research traditions that are largely commensurable;

8. The belief that science sometimes incorporates new ideas that are discontinuous from old ones;

9. The belief that science involves the idea of the unity of science, that there is, underlying the various scientific disciplines, basically one science about one real world;

10. The belief that "all true knowledge is scientific"^[14];

11. The belief that all things are ultimately measurable;

12. The belief that "entities of one kind... are reducible to entities of another,"^[14] such as societies to numbers, or mental events to chemical events (reductionism).

What's new

Major progress over this picture came, at the end of 20th century, from the science (i.e. mathematics) of complexity. It is now clear that the scaling, up or down, of a phenomenum usually produces new laws, that essentially account for new, qualitatively different, phenomena. This essencially challenges the 12th point, above.

In this sense, although macro-processes can, indeed, be "reducible to physiological, physical or chemical events,"^[14] and "social processes are reducible to relationships between and actions of individuals,"^[14] or "biological organisms are reducible to physical systems"^[14] . It is no longer believed that ALL laws of the former phenomena can be tracked back or inferred up, from the later. In a parallel to Goedel's finding, about the incompleteness of most axiomatic mathematical systems, there is now a perception of an essencial insufficiency of micro laws, to explain macro phenomena.

Simple programs, for instance, are capable of a remarkable range of complex behavior. Some have been proven to be universal computers, others exhibit properties familiar from traditional science, such as thermodynamic behavior, continuum behavior, conserved quantities, percolation, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and others. They have been used as models of traffic, material fracture, crystal growth, biological growth, and various sociological, geological, and ecological phenomena.

Stephen Wolfram, in A New Kind of Science argues that, in order to capture the essence of almost any complex system it is necessary to systematically explore these systems and document what they do. He believes this study should become a new branch of science, like physics or chemistry. The basic goal of this field is to understand and characterize the computational universe using experimental methods.

The proposed new branch of scientific exploration admits many different forms of scientific production. For instance, qualitative classifications like those found in biology are often the results of initial forays into the computational jungle. On the other hand, explicit proofs that certain systems compute this or that function are also admissible. There are also some forms of production that are in some ways unique to this field of study. For instance, the discovery of computational mechanisms that emerge in different systems but in bizarrely different forms.

What's wrong

As of the first decade of the 21st century, the main challenge posed to Positivism (by its own ranks; "metaphisical" and teleological claims being, naturally, disqualified a priori) is the emergence of unsolved paradoxes from within seemingly "well-constructed" theories. Namely, Quantum Phisics and Bayesian Statistics result in disturbing, logic-defying results, that have generated a lot of havoc and schism within the positivist community.

Closed River of the Pacience Bridge

That's Venice !

Deeper, longer, tougher

The price of prosperty

“Prosperity has this property - it puffs up narrow souls,
makes them imagine themselves high and mighty
and look down on the world with contempt.”

Plutarch, 46-120 A.D.

The Bull in Winter

Kondratieff Waves