Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

Charles Bukowski’s Top 10 Tips For Living A Kick-Ass Life
“I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: “Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I’ll be ready.”

Negative Capability: Kerouac's Buddhist Ethic

50 Unexplainable Black & White Photos

Patrick Bateman’s New York: What Happened To The World of American Psycho

Physics & Philosophy

From my weekly comments for Honors Colloquium:

"I like to think the moon is there even if I am not looking at it." ~Albert Einstein

In Newtonian physics, our world is orderly. Everything that happens is pre-ordained and with enough information, intrinsically predictable. Our scientific ideas of the time well-matched our religious ideas at the time, with human beings at the center of the earth, which was at the center of the universe, over which we could, given enough time and effort, completely control. This strikes me as reminiscent of our desire to embrace a fundamental reality in nature, which may or may not be known as God.

In quantum mechanics, our world is uncertain. Everything exists in a cloud of possibilities. Precise definitions are unobtainable, and as Sir Isaac Newton came to show us, even things we thought we understood had an even deeper level. Light is one such example; what we once thought of as particles turned out to be both particles and waves. With a sigh, we have alternately accepted and fought the uncertain duality of the universe ever since.

On Philosophy

From my Honors Colloquium II mid-term exam, part 2:

1.         In his key piece, Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant posits the idea that all human knowledge falls into two categories: a priori, meaning 'from before', and a posteriori, meaning 'from later'. A priori knowledge is gained independently from experience, is obvious, and requires no real effort to discern. A posteriori knowledge, on the contrary, is gained by experience or empirical evidence. Kant then categorizes our ability to know into two categories: noumena, which are things that can be perceived empirically, and phenomena, which can be discerned only through intuition. 'Real' things, or noumena, are merely representations of unknowns, or phenomena, which are interpreted through our a priori or a posteriori knowledge to reach an understanding, inasmuch as we can understand the universe.