Monthly Archives: February 2013

Originally posted on PILEUS:
Matt Zwolinski of Bleeding Heart Libertarians has written an excellent series of posts on the libertarian justification of property rights. Here‘s the latest. The first and most important thing to note about both Locke and Nozick’s…

Originally posted on Upset Patterns:
NPR’s Planet Money podcast recently exposed one of the strangest yet most important point about college tuition costs today. Although college tuition has increased by gargantuan amounts in the last couple decades, this doesn’t take…

Originally posted on Black Sail Blog:
People often attribute this series of quotes to Abraham Lincoln. Not so. The actual author was William Boetcker (1873–1962), an American religious leader and influential orator.  The following comes from a pamphlet Rev. Boetcker…

Originally posted on Upset Patterns:
Slate recently published a bad article by Stephen Metcalf about Robert Nozick, the libertarian philosopher who wrote that “liberty upsets patterns”, which was the inspiration for the name of this blog. Lots of people have already…

Originally posted on K21st – Essential 21st Century Knowledge:
Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots – the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics…

Originally posted on PTS Books Club:
By Alex Hutchinson From the polio vaccine to the Post-It, the personal computer to Prozac, these are the scientific and technological innovations that have transformed our world. Award-winning author Alex Hutchinson unveils the 100 greatest…

jewish philosophy place Just finished Norbert Wiener’s1954, second edition of The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. The world view is based on probability being introduced into the study of physics, with a focus on incompleteness and contingency … Continue reading →

Originally posted on Onionesque Reality:
There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible.…

Originally posted on What is to be done…:
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, U of Chicago Press, 1962 (1996). In this small but influential book, Kuhn tries to perform two tasks at the same time: writing a…