It was Monday morning when Coco noticed it.
Continue readingTwo Old Men
Tolstoy appeared on my listening list this week, which was somewhat intriguing. Why would Tolstoy appear? But I had been listening to John Lennox, and Tolstoy’s short story illustrated one of Lennox’s brief characterisations of the distinction between true and false religion, between true and false love. The resurrection of the Lord Jesus, which is celebrated by many in the West, but in the East, and so not also for these two old men, for another five weeks, is the evidence of this distinction. The tomb in which he was lain is emptied, and despite attempts to cover up the resurrection it is well attested in history.
Continue readingExtremist?
Given the changes to the definition of extremism, Coco thought he should examine his own position to check whether or not his views fall under the censorship of any part of the definition now put forward. According to the BBC report:
Under the new definition, which comes into force on Thursday, extremism is “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance, that aims to:
Continue readingSchrödinger
If you have have not read Schrödinger, read this first. As this is a disturbing and not an easy read, perhaps the BBC would be a little easier to grasp.
Schrödinger, The Elusive Intellectual Cat – An Oration
If you prefer to listen than read, you may do so here.
Anti-science
When you speak with a man like Professor Angus George Dalgleish you quickly recognise the incisive mind of the man. If you wish to disagree with him you really must be sure of your ground. He is an eminent scientist, being a fellow of organisations of which an ordinary mortals like Coco could not even aspire to associateship, let alone membership.
So in this interview Death of Science where he speaks of the death of science if we disagree with him, we must be careful in what we say. It is patently true that science can have no forbidden views. All views are permitted and must be examined until they can be irrefragably shown to be false. Newton’s thoughts and propositions about motion were once thought to be so certain that the became the Laws of Motion. No-one had succeeded in devising any test that could disprove them. They stood firm for two hundred years, until someone noticed that they seemed to break down at relatively high velocities. It took an Einstein to find the correction to Newton’s Laws and, as yet, no-one has dared to elevate the theory of relativity to the status of Law. We are wary that it too may suffer the same fate as Newton’s Laws.
Continue readingAnti-scientific?
It was a recommendation of and a listening to Professor Angus Dalgleish, physician, oncologist, pathologist, medical researcher and author that prompted the thoughts.
The Professor makes a good point. There is a lack of consensus in many areas of science, and perhaps especially true in the context of cosmological and the design of bio-chemical machines, where radically contrary views may be held by main-stream scientists, but who rise up together when anything approaching a Biblical perspective on the known facts is introduced to silence the proponents of what is an alternative and more credible explanation than their own. Even Coco’s use of the word design in the preceding sentence will provoke the ire of such opponents of the scientific method to which they pretend to adhere but abandon when it does not suit their ideology or philosophy.
Continue readingCompression
It took more than ten years; Heather Ferguson reports on what spurred her to action and its results.
International Lymphoedema Framework – https://lympho.org
American Lymphedema Framework Project – https://alfp.org
Coloured
South Africa’s Tyla sparks culture war over racial identity
English is a very difficult language as we who were born to speak it know from the moment we meet someone from the other side of the railway track (Coco would have said over the border but English speakers from other parts of the world may misunderstand what that means). It is not merely the orthography that confuses. Every English reader, who has read the preface of the OED, knows how to pronounce ghotti and what also it means.
Continue readingA dangerous work(around)
You may have heard the expression: Rubbish in, rubbish out.
Forty years ago Coco used a early version of SuperCalc (SC2 – a spreadsheet like Excel for those who cannot remember) for the preparation of monthly reports under the operating system C/PM. It was ‘cutting’ edge at the time using simple lists of transactions which were converted into a report showing monthly, cumulative and projected figures against a flexible budget. Coco shall not go into the technical details of this. It was not many months before Coco noticed that the report sometimes did not balance.
Continue readingTranslation
We use the word translation in many different ways, accountants and theologians having quite specialised uses of the term which may befuddle, without a translation, the poor man on the Clapham omnibus.
When you try to translate Do you feel special? and Do you feel different? into certain Romance languages the distinction found in Germanic languages may be lost. Difficulties abound when seeking to give the correct and proper meaning of words in one language in a second. But have you noticed that there is as much difficulty when translating from even very closely related languages?
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