Hume - Of Morals

This is the final book of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, looking at the nature of morality

Back to the past

I had this dream last night

Somehow I traveled through time, back to the middle ages (exact time unspecified). Luckily, as I wandered through a village there was a family who agreed to take me in. They found me curious enough - what with my strange clothes and funny ways and talk of being from the future - to let me stay with them awhile. Now, there were lots and lots of historical anachronisms in this dream, but I'll just glaze over those. What was interesting was the ethical dilemma I felt: I really wanted to tell them all about the future, but if I did that I would forever alter the course of time! The temptation was too much, however, as I whispered in one person's ear, "there is no edge to the world" and told another group how there are devastating world wars in the future where tens of millions of people die. Really my self-control was terrible - I must have left them in quite the tizzy.

The world's funniest joke

I sometimes wonder to myself, is there a joke so funny that it would cause everyone who heard it to die from laughter? The immaculate joke, crafted by the gods themselves. Today that thought came to me again, and this time I queried google. What I found was a project called Laughlab created by Richard Wiseman over ten years ago. He wanted to find the world's funniest joke, and so he compiled, with the help of jokers all over the world, thousands of jokes - forty thousand to be more or less exact. The jokes were then judged on a basic scale of 1 to 5. By the end of the project some 1.5 million ratings were submitted.

So what joke won? I should say, this isn't exactly my idea of the perfect joke, but it received more positive reviews across more different cultures and countries than any other joke. Judge for yourself:

A vaccine against cocaine

This is different. A vaccine has been developed which offers long-lasting immunity against a cocaine high, the idea being that the man or woman on Hastings street (for example) who wants out need only take this vaccination, probably with a couple boosters.

“The vaccine eats up the cocaine in the blood like a little Pac-man before it can reach the brain,” the study’s lead investigator, Dr. Ronald G. Crystal, said in a news release. “We believe this strategy is a win-win for those individuals, among the estimated 1.4 million cocaine users in the United States, who are committed to breaking their addiction to the drug. Even if a person who receives the anti-cocaine vaccine falls off the wagon, cocaine will have no effect.”

You know, I'm kind of tired of the Pac-man analogy. I think that you can pretty much tell it like it is when it comes to antibodies and how they work - people will understand. I'm sure Dr. Crystal has good intentions, but "like a little Pac-man"? Come on. It's one thing to make technical stuff digestible for the public, it's another thing to underestimate just what the public is capable of understanding.

Patton Oswalt's Star Wars Filibuster

Oswalt's amazingly nerdy imagining of Star Wars Episode VII (from Parks and Recreation):

Comaptible

I came across this explanation of compatibilism - the notion that free will and determinism are compatible - written by D.D. Raphael in his book "Moral Philosophy".(If it seems like I obsess a little over this, it's probably because I do!)

Know your enemy - the rhinovirus

The Greek word for nose is 'rhino' - or at least rhino is derived from the Greek - and it is the rhinovirus that is usually responsible for the common cold.

These guys are about 30 nanometers in diameter; one nanometer is one billionth of a meter - so, pretty small.

Is that such a good idea?

Before mechanical and automatic pipettes, and apparently before these,
















folk in the lab would use their mouths to suck up whatever awful thing they were working with.

A survey of 57 labs in 1915 found 47 infections associated with workplace practices, of which 40% were attributed to swallowing a corrosive or toxic substance or infectious lab specimen. A longitudinal study of 921 workplace laboratory infections between 1893 and 1950 found 17% were due to “oral aspiration through pipettes or to splashes of culture fluids into the mouth.”(link) 

...delicious

Hume - Of the Passions

In book 2 of A Treatise of Human Nature Hume attempts to understand the passions. He defines a passion as "a violent and sensible emotion" - sensible here meaning that it has an impression, or is sensed. What causes things like pride and humility; love and hatred? What effect do they have on us and our actions?

How does an archeologist date something?

I mean, as in fossils and rocks and the like.

The trees knees

I saw this Nature program on TV about all that is strange and wonderful about Australia. At one point they mentioned the huge mountain ash 'Ada' that was the tallest tree in the world until lightning took its top off. Even still, I think it is the largest flowering plant on Earth. That got me wondering about the evolution of trees. How do you go from marine plant life, depending on water for support, to huge trees on land reaching over 100 meters in height, supported by a trunk? I'm going to attempt a very brief, very simple, very unplanned accounting of this. And keep in mind, I'm no botanist!