Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference?

Postmodernism Disrobed by Richard Dawkins

Related: Some posts on the Sokal Hoax

The lucky ones

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

Typhoon day / Not a lucid one

Fractal leaf on Flickr

A typhoon came along to save me from Monday. As the news that it would hit filtered out the supermarkets were packed. People were buying carbohydrates - noodles, crackers, cookies, candy, chips. The place near me is a small, low class supermarket, the kind that sells no fresh produce, and if you can find more than two attractive, healthy looking people there then it's a special day. I know, because it's a game I always play there.

To think that with a better diet and some exercise, some curiosity, many of the patrons could be cultivating the ubermensch within instead of paying to do themselves harm. Of course, I lined up and bought instant noodles, crackers, milk with the rest of them, doing my part to keep the day unspectacular.

I slept late and worked on a stack of proofreading, trying to break the back of it so the rest of the week is just classes, fueled by coffee, water, tequila and spicy dried squid. The tequila is good stuff that Yuki picked up at the airport, the kind you sip at room temperature and enjoy.

Part two. I studied film & literature at university, hence my borderline unemployability. It was in the early 90s, so hours spent dealing with modern French philosophers who put me to sleep but also suggested there was another game I could play, putting fine words together in ways that gave the illusion of meaning. But I never became a real academic, just a freelance bottom-feeder in Taiwan, and I never have any regrets about that because of the awful things I'd be stuck teaching. It was great to come across this 1998 book review by Richard Dawkins, Postmodernism disrobed, that ripped the shit out the whole game. It begins:

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.

And continues with much wonderful stuff.