Recently, I made the cast-off observation that Erasmus’ nice-making between the Catholics and the Lutherans was unwelcome on both fronts due in part to Erasmus’ reintroduction of free-will. I sort of swallowed that comment and later realised that that subject deserved a bit more attention. Most people would want to believe that they do have free-agency, free-will in at least some form, since the alternative—or at least the only one we can imagine is fate destiny, determinism or a mixture thereof—and leaves nothing praiseworthy, blameworthy, no reason to be thankful or ungracious. If one’s fate was predetermined before one was born—either by God or gods bounded by Necessity (the Fates, Μοῖραι) or in Sir Isaac Newton’s clockwork universe, bound by natural laws with all actions dependent on some antecedent action going all the way back to the beginning of time (which would apply to our own neuro-chemistry as well), it hardly seems right to consign some to eternal damnation and suffering and too to reward others in they had no choice in the matter. In more mundane terms, there is a tendency to not hold people culpable for their wrongdoings or negligence if there is found to be some pre-existing factor, like insanity or trauma or bad parenting, that absolves them of responsibility for their actions.
Friday 12 June 2015
gadfly or liberté toujours
catagories: ✝️, 🎓, 🧠, philosophy
Thursday 11 June 2015
senescence
A truly inconceivable debt of gratitude is owed to young woman by the name of Henrietta Lacks and to the team of physicians and technicians who tried to care for her at Johns-Hopkins. After a difficult pregnancy brought to term in late 1950, Lacks was tragically found to have a form of cervical cancer. Though afforded the best treatment of the day at the university research hospital (the illustrious Johns Hopkins being the only medical facility in segregated Maryland that would accept African-American patients), she eventually succumbed to the malady. A biopsy was performed on the tumour, unbeknownst to Lacks and her family—though it was not custom to provide consent for medical release at the time, and samples were retained for study.
300 or hoplites and helots
Sparta-worship is nothing new and has gone through numerous and at times—maybe mostly, dangerous revivals. Revolutionaries as varied as those who fought for independence under the British Mandate of Palestine or under colonial Britain in North America based their extolling, exhortation and sometimes lament in failing to live up to that example on a long chain of praise that extended all the way back to times contemporaneous with the Spartan civilisation. This romancing of the austere and disciplined lifestyle practised goes by the name laconophilia (from Laconia where they lived and hence laconic or blunt) and while the course of history may have was neither steered solely by either admirers or detractors (who importantly saw the Spartans’ faults and warned that theirs was not a society to emulate) their battle-cry is heard sometimes in unexpected places. That Nazism was steeped in Nordic traditions and mythology (including fabricated volk-etymologies purely to forward their agenda) is patently well-known but I never knew that the Nazis had cast their maniacal nets further south as well and believed that the Spartans (as part of the larger “race” of Dorians) also embodied their ideal.
Of course it was not their deportment as rational stoics or temperate individuals that held the appeal (then and now, and die neue Dorier did not go unheard) but rather the reputation of these hoplites (citizen-soldiers) on the battlefield, whose glory came at a high price—with most willing to dismiss this fascination as sophomoric, the Spartans excelling only at war through a regiment that left trainees little better than broken and brainwashed, a strict caste-system, peace untenable and dependent on a subjugated population of feudal farmers called the Helots (considered to be natural slaves). The ability to achieve and sustain this proto-fascist state through eugenics (though without the nobles lies of The Republic) was aligned with what Nazi Germany hoped to emulate, but I am not sure what brought about that political syncretism that mingled the Norse gods with Mediterranean traditions, but perhaps it was how just a few decades prior, a German entrepreneur and amateur archaeologist was able to dynamite his way to Priam’s Treasure and significantly prove to the world that there was at least a kernel of historical fact behind the legends. Feats of renown are especially prone to misappropriation.
catagories: 🇩🇪, 🇹🇷, 🎓, 🎬, 📚, 🧠, myth and monsters, philosophy, religion
Wednesday 10 June 2015
5x5
posture pals: one sufferer’s quest to alleviate her own pain caused her to notice that many indigenous peoples never get back pain
rotunda: Cupolone lamp shades feature local architectural attractions
fish-eye lens: Dutch company’s floating dome affords fish a view of the world above the surface
taste buds: cute illustrations of food super best friends, including Chicken and Waffle
catagories: ⚕️, 🇮🇹, 🇯🇵, 🧠, food and drink
Tuesday 9 June 2015
jacob’s ladder
Previously on PfRC, we set out to experience what’s called a Paternoster, a cyclical elevator, and upon learning that there were two housed in buildings I knew, spent the lunch-hour investigating. First I tried the Federal Office of Statistics (Statistisches Bundesamt oder Destatis), which I always regarded as a curious institution to begin with. It’s sort of like the Harper’s Index for the state of Germany—whenever rarefied, detached facts and figures, the numbers of bean-counters, are cited in the news (employment, traffic accidents, annual litres of beer per capita, the price of eggs in China), it’s often given the dateline of Wiesbaden—and I suppose it’s doubly curious that this bureau would hold on to its relic of a Paternoster as I could just imagine the report being compiled in those corridors about how x-number of Germans were maimed by this contraption in the past quarter. The staff at the reception area were bemused with my request and friendly enough but said it was too dangerous and reserved only for employees of the bureau. Maybe in keeping track of statistics, they somehow avoided becoming one. The staff at the reception also recommended that I try another place, an insurance building just two blocks away. I was skeptical about there being another so close and in such a modern (and squat) building but I asked at the front desk.
Replying that this had been their third inquiry for the day, I was again told that it was too great a liability (being an insurance company) that I could not ride in it but was allowed through the lobby to look. The conveyor-belt of narrow coffin-like wooden compartments going up and down at a really brisk pace was really keen to behold and I wasn’t sure that I would have stepped into this Jacob’s Ladder willingly myself under other circumstances. H, who was unaware that any still remained, had ridden a Paternoster before and admitted it was a little scary but exhilarating. The construction reminded me of the wooden escalator H and I rode on in the original Macy’s department store in New York City. Undeterred if not now a bit obsessed with the idea, I plan to look a bit further afield. Next time I find myself in Frankfurt, I will make it a priority (or make a special trip) to visit the campus of Goethe University, whose iconic administration building (originally the ensemble of the IG Farben company with intervening incarnations as the command-and-control of the Allied powers, the headquarters of the US Army and the seat of US Army Corps of Engineers) where there is a bank of eight functioning Paternosters—beloved by the student-body and probably won’t be gutted any time soon in the name of safety.
catagories: 🇩🇪, Hessen, transportation
theogony or keep a lid on it
I had forgotten that even with not counting Bobo, the Olympian blacksmith Hephæstus was also the original robotic engineer, as the always interesting BLDGBlog points out in an excellent gloss reflecting on advances in the discipline and navigation that has many leads to follow.
Looking a little deeper into these Homeric references to automata, like the roving, tireless tripods and mechanical guard dogs that served on an unending security detail, I realised that Hephæstus’ other masterwork, in collaboration with sister Athena and under instruction of his father, Zeus, was the first mortal Woman, as company for the lowly creature called Man. Pandora was her name but she was not some clumsy fembot that bumbled into some pithos and released all evils into the world. Rather, according to Zeus’ instructions, Pandora (meaning “all gifts”) was meant to be Man’s punishment for having accepted the stolen goods from Prometheus (technology, for the flame was taken from Hephæstus’ own forge), fashioned of the clay of the earth but imbued with charms from each of the gods, beauty, wisdom, craftiness as well as long-suffering guile and unquenchable curiosity. Accounts vary, it seems, but somehow it was arranged to have Pandora and that infamous vessel in the same room, and all hell broke loose, except for Hope, which Pandora managed to trap before it too escaped into the now less than pristine ecology.