Your Tuesday Sort-Of SciAm Moment

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn--from The Gulag Archipelago--as quoted in Michael Shermer's Skeptic column from the latest issue of Scientific American:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Suddenly I understand why my mom had all those Solzhenitsyn books on the shelf when I was growing up.

We Read Books, Too

Having finished Godel, Escher, Bach last week; I decided to take a second attempt at working my way through Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I originally picked it up back in February during my whirlwind tour of college campuses across the country, making it about halfway through before I stopped visiting schools and thus stopped having lots of random chunks of downtime.

I'll hopefully give you a bit of actual discussion later, but for now I offer you this random Quote of the Day:

In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all of the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant.

From Chapter II, p. 15 of the 3rd edition, this is about the closest he gets to me being able to accept some of the basic stipulations he needs to build his thesis off of. On the other hand, it's also a great description of about 2/3 of the work I did this Spring. Feel free to make of that what you will.

Quote of the Day

Via Wonkette commenter Omnilation:

Oh, on the contrary, Ms. Noonan, many of use would give up our right kidneys not to understand a single word you're saying.