… und die Ordnung der Natur ist ein Buch über die Fundstücke in Naturaliensammlungen des späten Mittelalters und während der Aufklärung. In der taz rezensiert von Rebekka Habermas. Das englische Original erschien 1998 bei Zone Books und ist für etwa EUR 40 noch im Handel. (via Perlentaucher, nämlich hier)

I realize that nothing I say matters to anyone else on the entire planet. My opinions are useless and unfocused. I am an expert in nothing. I know nothing. I am confused about almost everything. I cannot, as an individual, ever possibly know everything, or even enough to make editorial commentary on the vast vast majority of things that exist in my world. This is a stupid document; it is meaningless drivel that I do not expect any of the several billion people on my planet to actually read. People who do read my rambling, incoherent dumbfuckery are probably just as confused as I am, if not moreso, as they are looking to my sorry ass for an opinion when they should be outside playing Frisbee with their dog or screwing their life partner or getting a dog or getting a life partner. Anyone who actually takes the time to read my bullshit probably deserves to ingest my fucked up and obviously mistaken opinions on whatever it is that I have written about.

Signed: -noctua-


I am indebted to “Why I Fucking Hate Weblogs!” for this wonderful formulation. (via smi)

Telepolis berichtet über den “Plan for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program”. Die Kongressbibliothek will also digitale Daten retten und bewahren. James H. Billington: “Vieles, was geschaffen worden ist, ist nicht mehr zugänglich […] Und viel von dem, was verschwindet, ist wichtiges einmaliges Material, das niemals wieder reproduziert werden kann, sondern nach dem man verzweifelt suchen wird.” Mag gut sein. Aber da wäre ich doch neugierig auf die Selektionskriterien. Bislang wurden schon einmal Websites vom Präsidentschaftswahlkampf im Jahr 2000 gespeichert. Die Menschheit wird dir auf ewig dankbar sein, Kongressbibliothek!

I just found out (via some pages about Daniel Dennet's new book on the same matter) about a book from Derk Pereboom: Living Without Free Will. There is a review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Richard Holloway tells us about Richard Dawkins new book in the Guardian. A Devil's Chaplain & Other Selected Essays. “The goal of life is life itself. There is no final purpose, no end other than entropy and the end of all endings.” Yes, O. K. “But there is deep refreshment to be had ‘from standing up full-face into the keen wind of understanding’.” Mh, maybe, sometimes. Dawkin's earlier book River out of Eden was of the boring kind though. (via Arts & Letters Daily)

p. s.: There's a read-worthy portrait of “the devil's chaplain” in the Guardian by Simon Hattenstone. Two quotes: “In one of the letters that he [Dawkins] regularly fires off to newspapers, he suggested that child sex abuse in the Church ‘unpleasant as it is, may do less permanent damage to the children than bringing them up Catholic in the first place’.” This is not so far away from the truth, I think. — “I see religion, however, as a kind of organised misconception.” Here he is wrong because religion is not about conception, or is it? (via SciTech Daily)

p. s. Gould and God, a review of A Devil's Chaplain in Nature.

p. s. Through a Glass, Darkly. A thoughtfully written review by Michael Ruse in the American Scientist.

p. s. The concept of cultural items such as tunes or games, beliefs or fashions, as themselves “memes” with a kind of life of their own, making use of human beings as vehicles in their pitiless Darwinian struggle with competitors, has similar problems. First it sounds perverse, but then it seems dazzling and exciting. Yes! A gunman is a bullet's way of making another bullet, and a librarian is a library's way of making another library! Like Samuel Butler, who instructed that “even a potato in a dark cellar has a low cunning that stands it in excellent stead,” we suddenly think of tunes and games and accents and treatments as pursuing their own projects, plotting to invade us, making use of us to pursue their own competitive existences. Again, though, there is the sobering up. Get rid of any image of a tune or a treatment cunningly squirreling away, invading people and bringing about changes. A tune does not literally make use of people, since it is not the kind of thing that has purposes and designs. What is true is that when one lodges in people's heads, they are prone to spread it. And then we feel let down, since this is all that is apparently left when the rhetorical flourishes are cleaned off.
From a review by Simon Blackburn in The New Republic online. I feel alike.

Buch gelesen: Epsilon von David Ambrose. Mehr in meiner Liste B

Ich habe soeben zum ersten mal im Leben einen DSL-Anschluss in Betrieb genommen. 1und1 brauchte mehr als eine Woche um die Unterlagen zu schicken. Aber dann ging es flott und schmerzlos: mit dem PPP-übers-Ethernetz-Treiber pppoe (unter Debian GNU/Linux) keine Probleme. Mit pppoeconf geht es sogar noch bequemer.

“Der kreative Kosmos” heißt ein Buch von Brigitte (Tierärztin) und Thomas (Physiker) Görnitz über “Geist und Materie aus Information”. Klappentext: “Eine kosmologisch begründete abstrakte Quanteninformation liefert die Basis für Materie und Geist.” So ein Quack. Fragt sich nur, warum sich Spektrum Akademischer Verlag dafür hergibt? (via Perlentaucher, nämlich hier)

Gestern abend im Kino gewesen. Es ist schon ein paar Jahre her, das ich Harry Mulischs Roman gelesen habe. Deshalb hat mir der Film vielleicht doch noch ganz gut gefallen. Onno und Ada sind wiederzuerkennen. Onno hat auch im Film Klasse. Der Film-Max dagegen ist ein Hampelmann. Die Leindwandversion hat die gleiche Schwäche wie das Buch: Der metaphysische und mystische Anteil wird zum Schluss viel zu konkret und damit reizlos.

There is an interview with physicist João Magueijo in the New Scientist, who suggests that light speed may vary.

“I don't think there's any future for journals. They're just a waste of time. I haven't read a journal in years. The future is the Web: the Web archive doesn't filter out the good stuff, and the bad stuff is there just as much as it is in the journals. I think in the future people will just publish in the Web archives.”
And more like this e. g. on peer review. Refreshing. (via SciTech Daily)

Humberto Maturana und der Kommunikationswissenschaftler Bernhard Pörksen führen ein Gespräch über “die Ursprünge der Biologie des Erkennens”. Das Gespräch erscheint als Buch im Carl Auer Verlag. Es scheint sich um eine deutsche Originalausgabe zu handeln. Ich glaub, das werde ich mal lesen. (via Perlentaucher, nämlich hier)