Day 96

Snow Job

From a decision issued in February by an appellate court in Illinois. In November 2000, Sharon Irons sued Richard Phillips for child support; in May 2003, Phillips counter-sued, charging Irons with fraud, theft, and intent to cause emotional distress. The court found Irons innocent of fraud and theft but held her liable for causing Phillips emotional distress. Phillips was ordered to pay child support. Both are doctors.

Plaintiff and defendant began dating in January of 1999. Plaintiff informed defendant he did not wish to have children prior to marriage and intended to use a condom if and when they engaged in sexual intercourse. During the entire course of their relationship, the parties engaged in intimate sexual acts three times. Vaginal penetration never occurred. On or around February 19, 1999, and March 19, 1999, defendant ‘intentionally engaged in oral sex with plaintiff so that she could harvest his semen and artificially inseminate herself.’ Plaintiff asserts that defendant took his ‘semen, sperm, and genetic material without his permission, for the purpose of conceiving a child.’

Defendant responds that plaintiff did not loan or lease his sperm, and there was no agreement that the original deposit would be returned upon request. She asserts that when plaintiff ‘delivered’ his sperm to defendant it was a gift—an absolute and irrevocable transfer of title to property from a donor to a donee. Plaintiff's donative intent was clear, she argues. ‘Had he not intended to deliver his sperm to me, he would have used a condom and kept it and its contents.’ Plaintiff cannot show he had the right to unconditional possession of his sperm. Plaintiff presumably intended, and he does not claim otherwise, that defendant discard his semen, not return it to him.

Harpers August 2005, p. 2

Day 95

Nicholson, A.

Francis Bacon, corrupt, brilliant and unlikeable, builder of his own great pair of houses, now disappeared, not far away at St Albans, famous for the pale-faced catamites he kept to warm his bed, the inventor of the English essay, later to be Lord Chancellor, and, later still, accused of corruption, to be thrown to parliament as a sop to their demands, defined in his essay ‘On Truth’ the subtle and shifting Jacobean relationship to light and beauty, to plainness and richness, to clarity and sparkle. ‘This same Truth’, he wrote,

‘is a Naked, and Open day light, that doth not shew the Masques, and Mummeries, and Triumphs of the world, halfe so Stately, and daintily, as candlelights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearle, that sheweth best by day: But it will not rise to the price of a Diamond, or Carbuncle, that shewethbest in varied lights. A mixture of a Lie doth ever adde Pleasure.’

That shifting, layered sensibility is also, in part, the world into which the King James Bible was born.

God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (Harper Collins, New York; 2003) p. 145

Day 94

Aristotle (384—322 B.C.)

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas — Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

Familiar Quotations: John Bartlett 15th and 125th Anniversary Edition, E. M. Beck (editor), (Little, Brown, Boston, 1980) p. 87.

Day 93

Al Hazen (Ibn al-Haytham) (c. 965—1039)

It is not the person who studies the books of his predecessors and gives a free reign to his natural disposition to regard them favourably who is the real seeker after truth, but rather the person who in thinking about them is filled with doubts, who holds back his judgement with respect to what he has understood of what they say, who follows proof and demonstration rather than the assertions of a man whose natural disposition is characterized by all kinds of defects and shortcomings. A person who studies scientific books with a view to knowing the truth ought to turn himself into a hostile critic of everything that he studies ... He should criticize it from every point of view and in all its aspects. And while thus engaged in criticism he should also be suspicious of himself and not allow himself to be easy-going and indulgent with regard to the object of his criticism.

Critique of Ptolemy, translated by S. Pines in Actes X Congrès internationale d’historie des Sciences I (Ithaca, 1962) and cited by S. Sambursky in Physical Thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists (Hutchinson, London) 1974 p. 139.

Day 92

Bunuel, L.

I would give my life for a man who is looking for truth. But I would gladly kill a man who thinks he has found truth.

Attributed by C. Fuentes in the Guardian Weekly March 5, 1989, p. 8 in an article discussing The Satanic Verses by S. Rushdie and by S. Rushdie in the Herbert Read Lecture, delivered by H. Pinter and reprinted in the Guardian Weekly February 18, 1990, p. 4.

Day 91

Crowfoot (1821—1890)

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Dying words of Crowfoot, Orator for the Blackfoot Confederacy. Recorded in Monture, E.B. Canadian Portraits, Brant, Crowfoot, Oronhyatekha, Famous Indians (Clark, Irwin & Co.; Toronto 1960) p. 120; cited by T. C. McLuhan in Touch The Earth (Promontory Press, New York, 1971) p. 12.

Day 90

Frankenburg, R.J.

... the only really effective way of changing health patterns is to change the cultural norms of behaviour. The reaction of health promoters to this difficulty is saturation with oversimplified messages which distort academic epidemiological findings by converting statistical risks into individual possibilities stated as qualitative probabilities and interpreted as certainties, even null hypotheses. The result is that the more widespread the awareness of risk factors, the more they are seen as being daily refuted by the anomalous life of ‘Uncle Norman’ and others.

The impact of HIV/AIDS on concepts relating to risk and culture within British community epidemiology: candidates or targets for prevention Social Science in Medicine 38 (1994) 1325–1335.

Day 89

Forster, E.M. (1879—1970)

Information is true if it is accurate. A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. Information is relative. A poem is absolute.

In Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing edited by Hoffman.

Day 88

Márquez, G. G. (1928—)

We not only believed in poetry, and would have died for it, but we also knew with certainty—as Luids Cardoza y Aragon wrote—that “poetry is the only concrete proof of the existence of man”.

Living to Tell the Tale (Vintage Books, Ransom House, New York, 2004) p. 277.

Day 87

Hanley, G.

True solitude is when the most restless part of a human being, his longing to forget where he is, born on earth in order to die, comes to rest and listens in a kind of agreed peace. In solitude, once the taste has settled, a man can think upon death with as much pleasure as upon life, and it is in solitude that one can best understand that there is no solution, except to try and do as little harm as possible while we are here, and that there is no losing and no winning, no real end to greed or lust, because the human appetite for novelty can only be fully satisfied by death.

Thousands of days and nights spent in the wilderness taught me that a person can never truly know another, or be known by another, and that the pleasure of life is in the trying. A man can never convey fully what it is that so strangely disturbs him, the uneasy unrest in him that nothing material can properly satisfy. It is a fear of accepting this which makes a man most fear what he thinks to be loneliness, a being alone, without other people…

Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis (Eland, London, 1993)

Day 86

Einstein, A.

I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: ‘If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight’. I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation.

Kyoto Lecture reported by J. Ishiwara in Einstein Koen-Roku, (Tokyo-Tosho, Tokyo, 1977) cited by A. Pais in Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (OUP, 1982) p. 179.

Day 85

Fisher, R.A.

Each generation, perhaps, found in Mendel’s paper only what it expected to find; in the first period a repetition of the hybridization results commonly reported, in the second a discovery in inheritance supposedly difficult to reconcile with continuous evolution. Each generation, therefore, ignored what did not confirm its own expectations. Only a succession of publications, the progressive building up of a corpus of scientific work, and the continuous iteration of all new opinions seem sufficient to bring a new discovery into general recognition.

‘Has Mendel’s work been rediscovered?’ reprinted from Annals of Science 1 (1936) 115—137 in Experiments in Plant Hybridization by G. Mendel, English translation of Mendel’s original paper, edited by J.H. Bennett (Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1965) p. 86.

Day 84

Mendeleev, D.I. (1834—1907)

One can regard the law of conservation of weight as a special case of the law of conservation of force or of movement. Surely weight depends on a special kind of movement of matter, and there is no reason to deny the possibility of a transmutation of these movements into chemical energy or some other form of movement during the formation of elementary atoms. ... Thus in case a known element would be decomposed or a new one would be formed, these phenomena could well be accompanied by a decrease or increase in weight.

Die periodische Gesetzmässigkeit der chemischen Elemente (1869) Ostwalds Klassiker der exakten Wissenschaften No. 68 translated by Y. Elkana and cited by S. Sambursky in Physical Thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists (Hutchinson, London, 1974) p. 451.

Day 83

Carpenter, E. (1844–)

I used to go and sit on the beach at Brighton and dream, and now I sit on the shore of human life and dream practically the same dreams. I remember about the time that I mention—or it may have been a trifle later—coming to the distinct conclusion that there were only two things worth living for—the glory and beauty of Nature, and the glory and beauty of human love and friendship. And to-day I still feel the same. What else is there? All the nonsense about riches, fame, distinction, ease, luxury and so forth—how little does it amount to! It really is not worth wasting time over. These things are so obviously second-hand affairs, useful only in so far as they may lead us to the first two, and short of their doing that liable to become odious and harmful. To become united and in line with the beauty and vitality of Nature (but, Lord help us! we are far enough off from that at present), and to become united with those we love—what other ultimate object in life is there? Surely all these other things, these games and examinations, these churches and chapels, these district councils and money markets, these top-hats and telephones and even the general necessity of earning one’s living—if they are not ultimately for that, what are they for?

My Days and Dreams (George Allen and Unwin, 1916). Quoted in Alan Turing: the Enigma (Vintage, London, 1988) p. 308.

Day 82

Feynman, R.

Yes, you told us what happens, but what is gravity? Where does it come from? Do you mean to tell me that a planet looks at the sun, sees how far it is, calculates the inverse square of the distance and then decides to move in accordance with that law?

The Character of a Physical Law (MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980) p. 33.

Day 81

Copernicus, N. (1473—1543)

And as a matter of fact, I found first in Cicero that Hicetas thought that the Earth moved. And afterwards I found in Plutarch that there were some others of the same opinion ... Therefore I also, having found occasion, began to meditate upon the mobility of the Earth. And although the opinion seemed absurd ... I knew that others before me had been granted the liberty of constructing whatever circles they pleased in order to demonstrate astral phenomena. And so ... I finally discovered ... that if the movements of the other wandering stars are correlated with the circular movement of the Earth, and if the movements are computed in accordance with the revolution of each planet, not only do all their phenomena follow from that but also this correlation binds together so closely the order and magnitudes of all the planets and of their spheres ... and the heavens themselves that nothing can be shifted around in any part of them without disrupting the remaining parts and the universe as a whole.

Introduction to De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) translated by C. G. Wallis in Great Books of the Western World edited by R. M. Hutchins and cited in Encyclopedia Britannica 16 (Chicago,1939) and then by S. Sambursky in Physical Thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists (Hutchinson, London, 1974) p. 178. Parts cited by E.A. Burtt in The Metaphysical Founda¬tions of Modern Science (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1932, reprinted 1980) p. 49.

Day 80

Desowitz, R. S.

The British make no apology for their imperial period. They speak with pride of their high purpose as colonial custodians in freeing the peasantry from the excesses of despotic native rulers; in endowing their colonies with a judiciary, a sense of fair play, cricket, and a democratic government. The French, on the other hand, endowed their colonies with the ability to bake wonderful loaves of bread. Making a current comparison between the former colonies of those two powers it would often seem that good bread has proved to be more sustaining and enduring than hand-me-down parliaments. Less often mentioned, and of equal importance to the ultimate character of these colonies-become-nations, was the fervour with which the British built the avenues of communication-roads, railways, and waterways. This was particularly true in India where, in the first half of the nineteenth century, they built the Bombay-Agra Road, the Bombay--Calcutta Road, and the Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Peshawar. Three thousand miles of new roads--all paved. They also built a canal-irrigation system for the Ganges and its tributaries that when finished was the most extensive in the world. ... Unfortunately, what was good for the business of colonial rule was also good for the pathogens. The new corridors that brought cloth and cooking pots, were also passageways for the dissemination of infectious disease.

Kala azar was a stowaway traveller to Assam, carried there in 1895 by the British steamers that began to ply the upper Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. When the infection broke out in Assam, the inhabitants recognized it as something new to their experience and somehow associated the disease with the activities of their new masters, the British. With remarkable epidemiological insight, they called their new affliction sakari bemari, the ‘government disease’. Now Assam was ignited, and during the next twenty-five years kala azar in some districts killed 25 percent of the population. Some villages lost two thirds, or more, of their people. From Assam to Tamil Nadu, kala azar had established a permanent residency in India.

The Malaria Capers: More Tales of Parasites and People, Research and Reality (W. W. Norton, New York, 1991) p. 38.

Day 79

Broca, P. (1824—1880)

We might ask if the small size of the female brain depends exclusively on the small size of her body. ... But we must not forget that women are, on the average, a little less intelligent than men, a difference which is, nonetheless real. We are therefore permitted to suppose that the relatively small size of the female brain depends in part upon her physical inferiority and in part upon her intellectual inferiority.

‘Sur le volume et la forme du cerveau suivant les individus et suivant les races’ Bulletin Société d’Anthropologie Paris 2 (1861) p. 153. Cited by S.J. Gould in The Mismeasure of Man (Pelican Books 1984) p. 104.

Day 78

Marriott, E.

In 1971, as a young psychologist at California’s Stanford University [Professor Philip Zimbardo] had conducted an experiment into the psychology of imprisonment, dividing a group of undergraduate students into ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’. That August he witnessed levels of cruelty that he would never have predicted or imagined. Within no time, liberal undergraduates became sadists, tormenting prisoners, even forcing them, in an uncanny premonition of George W. Bush’s Iraq, to simulate sodomy with one another….After six days Zimbardo called a halt to the experiment….
…
The story of Abu Ghraib, the focus of this book, is told with precision, in detail and with narrative skill. After the publication of the photographs, seven guards were charged with ‘maltreating detainees’. Among them was Ivan ‘Chip’ Frederic, 37, at whose trial Zimbardo appeared as an expert witness. Frederick was the archetypal ordinary American Joe: god-fearing, basket-ball playing, a disciplined soldier, super-patriotic. At Abu Ghraib he became ground down and dehumanized. He worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, 40 days without rest, and slept in a prison cell when off duty. In his words: “shit was backed up in the porta-potties. There were human body parts in the facility…there was a pack of wild dogs running around.’ Prisoners regularly attacked guards; on one occasion a gun was smuggled in and a shoot-out with guards followed.

Such an environment, Zimbardo writes, “was as extreme a setting for creating deindividuation as I can imagine’. Cruelty became sexualized: one guard sodomised a prisoner with a chemical light; another raped a female detainee. Bush vowed that “wrong-doers will be brought to justice”. But to date only the lowly guards have been tried. Frederick, who pleaded guilty, was given eight years.

‘Evil at the centre of the human heart’. Review of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by P. Zimbardo, Rider Books. In The Guardian Weekly 11.05.07 p.36.

Day 77

Borger, J.

During last years election campaign a senior aide to President Bush… explained “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality, And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, if you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

‘Bush wages war on the enemy within’ Guardian Weekly, March 18-24, 2005, p. 6.

Day 76

Anonymous

If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them we’d be so simple we couldn’t.

Day 75

Feyerabend, P.

My criticism of modern science is that it inhibits freedom of thought. If the reason is that it has found the truth and now follows it then I would say that there are better things than first finding, and then following, such a monster.

‘How To Defend Society Against Science’ in The Rationality of Scientific Revolutions edited by I. Hacking (OUP, Oxford) p. 158. Reprinted from Radical Philosophy, 2, Summer 175 p. 4—8.

Day 74

Hardin, G.

It is arguable whether being a king in the old days was preferable to being a commoner, most of the time; but when it came to dying there is no doubt that the king had the worst of it. Consider what Charles II was subjected to, as he lay dying in 1685. ‘A pint of blood was extracted from his right arm; then eight ounces from his left shoulder; next an emetic, two physics, and an enema consisting of fifteen substances. Then his head was shaved and a blister raised on his scalp. To purge the brain a sneezing powder was given, then cowslip powder to strengthen it. Meanwhile more emetics, soothing drinks, and more bleeding; also a plaster of pitch and pigeon dung applied to the royal feet. Not to leave anything undone the following substances were taken internally: melon seeds, manna, slippery elm, black cherry water, extract of lily of the valley, peony, lavender, pearls dissolved in vinegar, gentian root, nutmeg and finally 40 drops of extract of human skull. As a last resort bezoar stone was employed. But the Royal Patient died.’

Died of what?

In Are Science and Technology Neutral (Butterworths, London 1979) Appendix 2, p. 54.

Day 73

Frazier, I.

This, finally, is the punch line of our two hundred years on the Great Plains: we trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara; call the land a desert and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon; suck up the buffalo, bones and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes and prairie chickens and prairie dogs; dig up the gold and rebury it in vaults someplace else; ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Kiowa and Comanche; kill Crazy Horse, kill Sitting Bull; harvest wave after wave of immigrant’s dreams and send the wised-up dreamers on their way; plow the topsoil until it blows to the ocean; ship out the wheat, ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants and send the power down the line; dismiss the small farmers, empty the little towns; drill the oil and the natural gas and pipe it away; dry up the rivers and the springs, deep-drill for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats. And in return we condense unimaginable amounts of treasure into weapons buried beneath the land that so much treasure came from - weapons for which our best hope might be that we will someday take them apart and throw them away, and for which our next-best hope certainly is that they remain humming away under the prairie, absorbing fear and maintenance, unused, forever.

‘A reporter at large: Great Plains III’ in The New Yorker March 6, 1989, p. 41.

Day 72

Blair, D.

[Alemzuriash’s] tragedy drove home what I found to be Africa’s most haunting quality: the contrast between the dignity, stoicism and goodness of its people and the venal, selfish brutality of those who lead them. … Wherever I travelled, I found good people struggling to lead decent lives in the face of their governments’ egregious cruelty, vindictiveness and paranoia.

‘Brave citizens endure brutal leaders’ Sunday Dispatches in the Sunday Independent. December 31 2006, p. 13.

Day 71

Mandela, N.

It is never my custom to use words lightly. If twenty-seven years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact upon the way people live or die.

Speech at the International AIDS conference, Durban, July 2000.

Day 70

Carey, J.

He [Owen Gingrich] reveals that the famous aristocratic Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe stole his idea of a compromise universe, in which the planets circle the sun and the sun circles the earth, from an obscure Polish stargazer called Paul Wittich. Wittich, who never published anything, should also, it seems, have the credit for inventing logarithms. He worked out the theory of logarithms on a spare page in his copy of Copernicus’s book, and showed it to his Scottish pupil John Craig in 1576. Craig then transcribed the explanation into his own copy, and took it back to Edinburgh where he showed it to fellow Scot John Napier, and Napier’s treatise on logarithms, published in 1614, assured his reputation as their originator.

‘For him, the earth moved’ review of The Book that Nobody Read: in Pursuit of the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (Heinemann, 2004) in The Sunday Times (London), Culture Section, p. 50.

Day 69

Camus, A. (1913-)

And here are the trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes - how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that the world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanisms and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multi-coloured universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.

The Myth of Sisyphus (Hamish Hamilton, London 1965) p. 22. Translated by J O’Brien.

Day 68

Monod, J.

The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

Chance and Necessity: An essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology translated by A. Wainhouse(Collins, Fontana Books, 1974) p. 167. Checked: The actual title is `National Philosophy'; surely a mistake?

Day 67

A—

Sometimes we almost wanted to tell them that if they had a bit of consideration for us they’d speak out without forcing us to spend hours tearing information word by word out of them. But you might as well talk to the wall. To all the questions we asked them they’d only say ‘I don’t know’. ... So of course, we have to go through with it. But they scream too much. At the beginning that made me laugh. But afterwards I was a bit shaken. Nowadays as soon as I hear someone shouting I can tell you exactly at what stage of the questioning we’ve got to. The chap who’s had two blows of the fist and a belt of the baton behind his ear has a certain way of speaking, of shouting and of saying that he’s innocent. After he’s been left two hours strung up by the wrists he has another kind of voice. After the bath still another. And so on. But above all it’s after the electricity that it becomes really too much. You’d say that the chap was going to die any minute. Of course there are some that don’t scream; those are the tough ones. ... with those tough ones, the first thing we do is to make them squeal; and sooner or later we manage it. That’s already a victory. ... But they don’t make things easy for us. Now I’ve come so as I hear their screams even when I’m at home. ... Doctor, I’m fed up with this job. And if you manage to cure me, I’ll ask to be transferred back to France. If they refuse, I’ll resign.

Psychiatric case study of a French policeman in Algiers, reported by F. Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin Books, 1963) p. 213—214.

Day 66

Miller, R.B.

Michel Foucalt opens his study of the human sciences by citing a taxonomy that Borges found in an old Chinese encyclopaedia, which divided all animals into the following categories: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) those that from a long way off look like flies.

All taxonomies have an inherent and self-evident validity to those who subscribe to them, and the Chinese encyclopaedist is no exception.

‘Social Science and the challenge of global environmental change’ International Social Science Journal: Global Environmental Change 130 November 1991 p. 609—617.

Day 65

Denning, Lord

If the [Birmingham Six] win [their appeal against conviction] it will mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they were guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were involuntary and were improperly admitted in evidence and that the convictions were erroneous. That would mean that the home secretary would either have to recommend they be pardoned or he would have to remit the case to the Court of Appeal. This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say: it cannot be right that these actions should go further.

Lord Denning in his capacity as Master of the Roles. Cited by R. Bennett in ‘Criminal Justice’ London Review of Books 24 June 1993 p. 3.

Day 64

Chomsky, N.

What can one say about a country where a museum of science in a great city can feature an exhibit in which people fire machine guns from a helicopter at Vietnamese huts, with a light flashing when a hit is scored? What can one say about a country where such an idea can even be considered?

American Power and the New Mandarins (Pelican Books, London 1969) p. 17.

Day 63

Gurdjieff, G.

[Man] is attached to everything in his life; attached to his imagination, attached to his stupidity, attached even to his suffering - possibly to his suffering more than anything else.

Quoted by Ouspensky In Search of the Miraculous.

Day 62

Agassiz, J. L. R. (1807—1873)

It has been charged upon the views here advanced that they tend to the support of slavery. ... Is that a fair objection to a philosophical investigation?

‘The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races’ Christian Examiner (1850) 49 113. Cited by S.J. Gould in The Mismeasure of Man (Pelican Books 1984) p. 45 and in ‘Flaws in a Victorian Veil’ in The Panda’s Thumb (WW Norton, New York, 1980) p. 171.

Day 61

Adams, D.

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars and so on...whilst all the dolphins had done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reasons.

The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (Pan Books, London 1979) p. 119.

Day 60

Klein, N.

Ever since the large corporations such as Nike, Shell and Monsanto began facing increased scrutiny from civil society—mostly for putting short term profits far ahead of environmental responsibility and job security—an industry has ballooned to help these companies respond. But it seems clear that many in the corporate world remain convinced that all they have is a ‘messaging problem’ that can be neatly solved by settling on the right, socially minded brand identity.

As evidence of the state of corporate confusion, I am frequently asked to give presentations to individual corporations. Fearing that my words will end up in some gooey ad campaign, I always refuse. But this advice I can offer without reservation: nothing will change until corporations realise that they don’t have a communications problem. They have a reality problem.

Guardian Weekly, June 14-20, 2001 p. 21

Day 59

Carroll, L.

When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more or less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean different things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master-that's all.'

Alice in Wonderland

Day 58

Harper, J.L.

Some seeds are born dormant, some achieve dormancy and some have dormancy thrust upon them.

‘The ecological significance of dormancy and its importance in weed control’ Proceedings of the 4th International Congress on Crop Protection, Hamburg, 1950, p. 415—420. Cited by J. W. Silvertown Introduction to Plant Ecology (Longmans, London, 1982) p. 31. Checked

Day 57

Martin, P.S.

Evidently under the destabilizing circumstances of colonization, those who discover new lands ignore accompanying extinctions. Damage control, if any, comes later. The first few hundred years of pre­historic colonization on a pristine continent or island may be not unlike the last few hundred years in America in terms of increasingly destructive economic practices, as viewed by a prudent resource manager.

From the perspective of radiocarbon dating, we glimpse 40,000 years of prehistoric global extinctions with mounting unease bordering on horror. Half of the global megafauna was lost, a rich assemblage of large and beautiful mammals, never to ‘bear the burden of our thoughts’, as Thoreau imagined. Per­haps as many as one quarter of the birds of the world vanished. Not all the wreckage necessarily reflects prehistoric human activity. But the closer we come to the present, the stronger the case for human involvement, and the future only portends vastly more of the same at rapidly accelerating rates of loss.

Given the present global condition of a seemingly insatiable appetite for goods fueled by a runaway technology and its accompanying pollution, it is hard not to imagine that the Cenozoic can overtake the late Cretaceous as a time of sudden and sever extinction, this time triggered by the ‘human bolide’ rather than one from outer space. It is by no means clear that post-Cenozoic recovery will occur as rapidly as post-Cretaceous recovery, which in some cases required millions of years. It is by no means clear whether the survivors will include our species, or even the type of global ecology we have belat­edly come to value. Like the islands of doom in the Central Pacific, once inhabited and later aban­doned after heavy extinctions of their native biota, we could become the ‘Planet of Doom.’ The bio­geographic pathologies of the last 40,000 years, a mere moment in earth history, bear hallmarks of impending mass extinction.

40,000 years of extinctions on the ‘Planet of Doom’ Palaeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (Global and Planetary Change Section) 82 (1990) 187—201. Checked

Day 56

Darwin, C. (1809-1882)

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and depen­dent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth and Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natu­ral Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the extinction of the less-improved forms. Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of con­ceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Origin of Species (6th Edition, John Murray, London, 1906) p. 669.

Day 55

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

Traditional Rhyme quoted in ‘Enclosure in Britain’ The Ecologist 22 (1992) 132 edited by E. Goldsmith, N. Hildyard, P. Bunyard and P. McCully

Day 54

Hersh, R.

Spinoza took up lens-grinding. The rest of his life he maintained himself in poverty by that trade. He was offered a philosophy chair at Heidelberg, a pension from Louis XIV of France, and annuities by friends in the Netherlands. He always declined, valuing intellectual independence above physical comfort.

What is Mathematics Really? (Vintage, London, 1998) p. 120.

Day 53

Grothendieck, A.

Now in the past two decades, the ethics of the scientific profession (at least among mathematicians) have become so degraded that wholesale plundering of ideas (and particularly at the expense of those in no position to defend themselves) has become almost the general rule among scientists. It is at any rate tolerated by all, including in the most glaring and ubiquitous of cases.

Under the circumstances, agreeing to play along with the practice of granting prizes and rewards would also be endorsing a spirit and a development in the scientific world that I see as unhealthy and bound to disappear in the near future, for it is so suicidal spiritually as well as intellectually and mate­rially.

‘The mathematician who turned down a $150,000 prize’ in the ‘Le Monde’ section of The Guardian Weekly, May 15 1988 p. 17.

Day 52

Hardy, G.H.

I still say to myself when I am depressed, and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people, ‘Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms’.

A Mathematicians Apology (Cambridge University Press; 149, reprinted 1967) p. 148

Day 51

Hardy, G.H.

… I will state my own position dogmatically in order to avoid minor misapprehensions. I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our 'creations', are simply our notes of our observations.

A Mathematicians Apology (Cambridge University Press; 149, reprinted 1967) p. 123.

Day 50

Russell, B. (1872-1970)

One effect of [the First World War] was to make it impossible for me to go on living in a world of abstraction. I used to watch young men embarking in troop trains to be slaughtered on the Somme because generals were stupid. I felt an aching compassion for these young men, and found myself united to the actual world in a strange marriage of pain. All the high-flown thoughts that I had had about the abstract world of ideas seemed to me thin and rather trivial in view of the vast suffering that surrounded me. The non-human world remained as an occasional refuge, but not as a country in which to build one’s permanent habitation.

In this change of mood, something was lost, though something also was gained. What was lost was the hope of finding perfection and finality and certainty. What was gained was a new submission to some truths which were to me repugnant. My abandonment of former beliefs was, however, never complete. Some things remained with me, and still remain: I still think that truth depends upon a rela­tion to fact, and that facts in general are non-human; I still think that man is cosmically unimportant, and that a Being, if there were one, who could view the universe impartially, without the bias of here and now, would hardly mention man, except perhaps in a footnote near the end of the volume; but I no longer have the wish to thrust out human elements from regions where they belong; I have no longer the feeling that intellect is superior to sense, and that only Plato’s world of ideas gives access to the ‘real’ world. I used to think of sense, and of thought which is built on sense, as a prison from which we can be freed by thought which is emancipated from sense. I now have no such feelings. I think of sense, and of thoughts built on sense, as windows, not as prison bars. I think that we can, however imperfectly, mirror the world, like Leibnitz’s monads; and I think it is the duty of the philosopher to make himself as undistorting a mirror as he can. But it is also his duty to recognize such distortions as are inevitable from our very nature. Of these, the most fundamental is that we view the world from the point of view of the here and now, not with that large impartiality which theists attribute to the Deity. To achieve such impartiality is impossible for us, but we can travel a certain distance towards it. To show the road to this end is the supreme duty of the philosopher.

‘The Study of Mathematics’ The New Quarterly (1907) reprinted in Philosophical Essays (1910) and in ‘The Retreat from Pythagoras’ in My Philosophical Development (George, Alan and Unwin Books, London, 1975) p. 158.

Day 49

Russell, B. (1872-1970)

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and aus­tere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement. Real life is, to most men a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possi­ble; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the cre­ative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect form from which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.

‘The Study of Mathematics’ The New Quarterly (1907) reprinted in Philosophical Essays (1910) and in ‘The Retreat from Pythagoras’ in My Philosophical Development (George, Alan and Unwin Books, London, 1975) p. 155.

Day 48

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

Philosophy is written in that great book which lies before our gaze ... I mean the universe ... but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without the help of which it is impossible to conceive a single word of it, and without which, one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.

Le Opera di Galileo Galilei by G. Barbera, Florence, 1890 4, p. 171 and cited by J. Needham ‘Mathematics and Science in China and the West’ in Sociology of Science edited by B. Barnes p. 32 (Penguin, 1972).

Day 47

Einstein, A.

How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Is human reason, then, without expe­rience, merely by taking thought, able to fathom the properties of real things?

In my opinion the answer to this question is, briefly, this: as far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

From ‘Geometry and Experience’ Lecture before the Prussian Academy of Sciences, January 27, 1921. Reprinted in Ideas and Opinions (Bonanza Books, New York, MCMLIV) p. 233.

Day 46

Al Hazen (Ibn al-Haytham) (c. 965—1039)

Thus the question what it means that bodies are transparent, so that light shines through them, is a part of physics. But the discussion of how light travels in them is part of mathematics. Hence the discus­sion of light rays and transparent matter, must consist of both physics and mathematics.

From ‘Abhandlung uber das Licht’ edited by J. Baarmann, Zeitschr. d. deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft 36 1882, translated by M. Schwarz and cited by S. Sambursky in Physical Thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists (Hutchinson, London 1974) p. 135.

Day 45

The problem of evolution is a problem in statistics ... we must turn to the mathematics of large numbers, to the theory of mass phenomena, to interpret safely our observations ... The characteristic bent of C. Darwin’s mind led him to establish the theory of descent without mathematical conceptions; even so Faraday’s mind worked in the case of electromagnetism. But as every idea of Faraday allows of mathematical definition, and demands mathematical analysis ..., so every idea of Darwin—variation, natural selection... —seems at once to fit itself to mathematical definition and to demand statistical analysis.
Editorial in Biometrika (1901). Quoted by John D. Barrow in ‘Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation’ (Vintage Books, London, 1992) p. 121.

Day 44

One plus one equals three for large values of one.

Day 46

The world is divided into three kinds of people, those who can count and those who can't.

Day 45

Anonymous

The world is divided into two classes of people: those who divide the world into two classes of people and those who don’t.

Day 44

Tennyson, A. (1809—1892)

Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world,
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Ulysses (1833)

Day 43

Maugham, W. S. (1874—1965

What makes old age hard to bear is not a failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one’s memories.

Points of View (1959). Quoted by R. N. Butler in ‘The life review: an interpretation of reminiscence in the aged’ Psychiatry 26 (1963) 65—76.

Checked

Day 42

Einstein, A. (1879-1955)

I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts, the rest are details.

In Einstein: The Life and Times by R.W. Clark (World Publishing, New York, 1971; Hodder & Stoughton, London 1979), cited in Nature 278(1979).

Day 41

Einstein, A (1879-1955)

What I’m really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all.

To Ernst Strauss, quoted in The Scientific Imagination - Case Studies by G. Holton (C.U.P., 1978).

Day 40

Einstein , A. (1879-1955)

Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed it into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics ... indeed the father of modern science altogether.

‘On the method of theoretical physics’ The Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford, June 10, 1933. Published in Mein Weltbild (Amsterdam, Querido Verla, 1934) and in Ideas and Opinions (Bonanza Books, New York, MCMLIV) p. 270.

Day 39

Einstein, A. (1879-1955)

Experiment alone can decide on truth but the axiomatic basis of physics cannot be extracted from experiment.

Herbert Spencer Lecture, June 1933, cited by A. Salam in ‘The nature of the ultimate explanation in physics’ in Scientific Explanation edited by A. F. Heath (O.U.P., 1981) p. 28.

Day 38

Einstein, A. (1879-1955)

The object of all science, whether natural science or psychology, is to co-ordinate our experiences into a logical system.

The Meaning of Relativity (1922) (Chapman & Hall, London, 1978) p. 1

Day 37

Anonymous

A logician was asked why he did not believe in astrology. ‘I am an Aries’, he replied ‘and Aries never believe in astrology.’

Day 36

Einstein, A. (1879-1955)

There is no inductive method which could lead to the fundamental concepts of physics. Failure to understand this fact constituted the basic philosophical error of many investigations of the nineteenth century. It was probably the reason why the molecular theory and Maxwell’s theory were able to establish themselves only at a relatively late date. Logical thinking is necessarily deductive; it is based on hypothetical concepts and axioms. How can we hope to choose the latter in such a manner as to justify us in expecting success as a consequence?

‘Physics and Reality’ Journal of the Franklin Institute 221 (1936) reprinted in Out of my later years (Philosophical Library, New York, 1950) p. 78.

Day 35

Born, M.

I believe that there is no philosophical high-road in science with epistemological sign-posts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. We do not find sign-posts at cross-roads, but our own scouts erect them to help the rest.

Attributed by H. Margenau in The Nature of Physical Reality (McGraw-Hill, 1950) p. 99.

Day 34

Eccles, J.C.

Because of the mystery of our being as unique self-conscious existences, we can have hope as we set our own soft sensitive and fleeting personal experience against the terror and immensity of illimitable space and time. Are we not participants in the meaning where there is else no meaning? Do we not experience and delight in fellowship, joy, harmony, truth, love and beauty where else there is only the mindless universe?

Facing Reality: Philosophical Adventures of a Brain Scientist (Springer-Verlag, New York, 1970) and repeated in The Understanding of the Brain (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1977) p. 228.

Day 33

Einstein, A. (1879-1955)

Of all the communities available to us, there is not one I would want to devote myself to, except for the society of true searchers which has very few living members at any time.

Letter to Max Born, April 29, 1924 cited in The Born-Einstein Letters by M. Born (Walker, New York, 1971) cited in Nature 278 (1979).

Day 32

Russell, B. (1872-1970)

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

Problems of Philosophy Chapter 1 Appearance and Reality

Day 31

Time: The successive states of the universe regarded as a whole whose every part or moment is before or after every other & position in which is defined in answer to the question ‘when?’; ...

Pocket Oxford Dictionary, 1934.

Day 29

Newton, I. (1642-1727)

Absolute true and mathematical time flows equably without relation to anything external ... relative, apparent and common time is some sensible and external measure of duration. Absolute space ... without relation to anything external remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some moveable measure of the absolute spaces.

Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687) translated by F. Cajori, (University of California Press, 1947) cited by S. Sambursky in Physical Thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physi­cists (Hutchinson, London, 1974) p. 300.

Day 28

Rhazes (Abu Bakr al-Razi) (C.864—925)

Absolute time is duration, eternity. It is eternal. It is moving perpetually. Restricted time is that which results from the motion of the spheres and the course of the sun and the stars. ... Absolute place is like a vessel containing bodies. When you eliminate the bodies from thought, the vessel does not vanish. ... but relative place is relative to that which occupies it. And when there is nothing which occupies, there is no place.

Opera philosophica, edited by P. Kraus (Cairo 1939), translated by M. Schwarz and cited by S. Sam­bursky in Physical Thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists (Hutchinson, London, 1974) pp. 128,131.

Day 27

da Vinci, L. (1452—1519)

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes: so with time present.

Practical Cogitator

Day 26

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

Ecclesiastes, Verse 3.

Day 25

Overbeck, C.J.

Time is that great gift of nature that stops everything from happening at once.

American Journal of Physics (1978) 46 323

Day 24

Happy Whatever

Please accept with no obligation, implied or expressed, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect to the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all; and a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2006 but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great, (not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country or is the only "America" in the western hemisphere), and without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical or mental ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform or sexual preference of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for him/herself or others, and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

Have a Happy!

Day 23

Russell, B.

The British are distinguished among the nations of modern Europe, on the one hand by the excellence of their philosophers, and on the other by their contempt for philosophy. In both respects they show their wisdom.

‘Philosophy and Politics’ in Unpopular Essays (Unwin Paperbacks, London 1984) p. 13.

Day 22

Hawking, S.

God not only plays dice, but he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.

Attributed by J. Boslough in Beyond the Black Hole: Stephen Hawking’s Universe (Fontana/Collins, 1984) p. 38.

All the evidence indicates that God is an inveterate gambler and that he throws the dice on every possible occasion.

Einstein’s Dream in Black Holes and Baby Universes and other essays (Bantam Books, Toronto, 1993) p. 63.

Day 21

Einstein, A.

The quantum mechanics is very imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is still not the true Jacob. The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us nearer to the secret of the Old One. In any case I am convinced that he does not throw dice. I am toiling at deriving the equations of motion of material particles regarded as singularities from the differential equations of general relativity.

Letter to M. Born, 4 December, 1926, cited by M. Jammer in The Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (John Wiley, New York, 1974) p.155.

You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I firmly believe, but I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to do. Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice game, although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility.

Letter to Max Born, September 7, 1944 in the Born Letters p. 149. Quoted by R. W. Clark Einstein: The Life and Times (World Publishing Company, New York, 1971) p. 346.

Day 20

Feynman, R.

Nature only uses the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

The Character of a Physical Law (MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980) p. 34.

Day 19

Time flies likes an arrow. Fruit flies like an apple.

Day 18

Zeeman, E.C.

One evening Alexander the Great as a youth comes up to his tutor and says:

Alexander: ‘I have a problem.’

Aristotle (who happened to be his tutor): ‘Yes?’

Alexander: ‘In my plan to conquer the world it is obviously best to use a single well-organized army. But as I capture each country, and then move on to the next, how do I keep control of the previous country?’

Aristotle (after a pause with a far-seeing glint in his eye): ‘Aha! I think I have the solution. You want to found a government research establishment. You could even name it after yourself. Then the soci­ology department could manufacture suitable religions grafted onto the appropriate local beliefs that would keep the natives happy.’

‘As a matter of fact’, and at this juncture Aristotle’s tone of voice becomes noticeably casual, ‘as a matter of fact I have a very good student (Dinocrates) who could do the architecture for you - he’s eager to experiment with white marble - and another senior student (Demetrius Phalerus) who would make a splendid first director of the place.’

Arsitotle’s voice regains its normal timbre: ‘I suppose you’ll have to have an arts man as first librarian - and there is an early Homer scholar (Zenodotus) who would do - and he would have the advantage of being near retiring age so that as soon as he’d done the chore of setting up the catalogue system you could get rid of him and replace him by a proper scientist.’

Aristotle’s voice goes casual again: ‘And as a matter of fact I have just the man (Eratosthenes) for the job, a student who is a brilliant all-rounder, interested in astronomy, geography, literature, the lot, but he needs a few more years of research before he takes on administrative chores. Oh yes - and I have another young student (Sostratus) whose a bit of a crank, but marvellous with his hands. His ambition is to build a giant lighthouse, but he can’t get any funds. But in a government research establishment this would be well worth the cost, just from the prestige point of view alone, besides being actually quite a useful piece of equipment.’

‘I suppose you’ll have to have a philosophy department, although to tell the truth the subject is a bit played out after Plato and myself, and most of my current students are rather second rate. On the other hand biology, psychology and medicine are really up and coming new subjects, and I have a splendid young man (Erasistratus) who has done some fascinating work on the psychology of sex and nervous breakdowns, who would be ideal to head a research group.’

‘And let me see - you’ll need a mathematician of course - and although I don’t have any suitable students of my own available just at this moment, there is a young man (Euclid) in Plato’s academy. Not that he’s very good at research, in fact I doubt he’ll ever make his Ph.D., but he’s quite a good scholar, and quite good at editing things. And although he’s a bit humourless, he would make an excellent administrator, and so I’d recommend hiring him to set up the mathematics department.’

‘Oh - and another point - if I were you I would choose somewhere on the Mediterranean coast, with a nice climate and a sandy beach with good bathing facilities, and not too far from the main shipping lanes. As a matter of fact I had a vacation last year at just such a place, a little island called Ras-el-Tin. For that way you’ll not only be able to attract some decent academics onto the staff, but you’ll also guarantee a good flow of visitors each summer to keep the place academically alive. In fact it might even last a few centuries.’

And that’s exactly what Alexander did, in every detail, when he was 23.

‘Research Ancient and Modern’ I.M.A. Conference on Research in Mathematics, Reading, January 1974. Published in Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. Checked

Day 17

Anonymous

The [Rio] summit, in fact, went according to plan: indeed the outcome was inevitable from the start. ... Its secretariat provided delegates with materials for a convention on bio-diversity but not on free trade; on forests but not on logging; on climate but not on automobiles; ... on enabling the poor to achieve sustainable livelihoods but none on enabling the rich to do so; a section on women but none on men.

‘The earth summit debacle’ The Ecologist 22 (1992) 122 edited by E. Goldsmith, N. Hildyard, P. Bunyard and P. McCully

Day 16

Malthus, T. R. (1766—1834)

The great and unlooked for discoveries that have taken place of late years in natural philosophy, the increasing diffusion of general knowledge from the extension of the art of printing, the ardent and unshackled spirit of inquiry that prevails throughout the lettered and even the unlettered world, the new and extraordinary lights that have been thrown on political subjects which dazzle and astonish the understanding, and particularly that tremendous phenomenon in the political horizon, the French revolution, which like a blazing comet, seems destined either to inspire with fresh life and vigour, or to scorch up and destroy the shrinking inhabitants of the earth, have all concurred to lead many able men into the opinion that we were touching on a period big with the most important changes, changes that would in some measure be decisive of the future fate of mankind.

‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ in On the Principle of Population (Penguin, 1970. First pub¬lished 1798) p. 67.

Day 15

Brandt, A.M.

Another well-known physician, Frederick Hollick, prescribed a measure, no less heroic, for the treatment of a complication of gonorrhoea known as chordee, a curvature of the penis which caused pain upon erection. Hollick recommended that the organ be placed “with the curve upward on a table and struck a violent blow with a book … and so flattening it”.

No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 with a New Chapter on AIDS (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987) p. 12. where he refers to Frederick Hollick A Popular Treatise on Venereal Disease (New York, 1852)

Day 14

Camus, A.

At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning towards his rock, in that slight pivoting, he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He, too, concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The Myth of Sisyphus (Hamish Hamilton, London 1965) p. 99. Translated by J. O’Brien.

Day 13

Einstein, A.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery-- even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds...it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man.

‘The World as I See It’ Forum and Century 84 pp. 193-194. Included in Living Philosophies (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1931) pp. 3-7 and in Ideas and Opinions (Bonanza Books, New York, MCMLIV) p. 11.

Day 12

We have not succeeded in answering all your problems. The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways we feel that we are as confused as ever but we believe that we are confused on a higher level and about more important things.

Notice at the Cambridge University Computer Centre ‘Surgery’, 1970.

Day 11

Bush, G.W.

That’s part of—that’s part of the advice my New National Economic Council head will be giving me as whether or not we need to—here is the plan, or here is an idea for a plan, or why don’t you just fix it. I suspect given my nature I’ll want to be—the White House will be very much involved with—I have an obligation to lead on this issue—I think this will be an administrative-driven idea—to take it on. And therefore, that that be the case, I have the responsibility to provide the political cover necessary for members, I have the responsibility to make the case if there is a problem, and I have the responsibility to lay out potential solutions. Now to the specificity of which, we’ll find out—you’ll find out with time.

‘Talk of the Town’ The New Yorker January 24 and 31, 2005, p. 31.

Day 10

Kundera, M.

The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.

In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (King Penguin, Harmondsworth, England, 1986) ISBN 0-14-006416-8 p. 8, translated by M. H. Heim.

Day 9

Barua, D. and Greenough, W.B. III

When cholera attacked St. Louis in 1849, over 10% of the population of that city died, as did over half of the individuals who developed acute diarrhoeal illness. When cholera attacked Peru in 1991, over 300,000 people, or 1% of the population, developed clinical manifestations of cholera, but less than 1% of affected individuals died.

The basis for this remarkable development .... is the development of oral rehydration therapy, .... [which] requires only ingredients (sugar and salt) that are available to almost all individuals throughout the world.

Cholera (Plenum; New York, 1992) p. ix.

Day 8

This new display can recognize speech. This nudist play can wreck a nice beach.

Problems in computer recognition of speech. Radio 4 October 1984

Day 7

Empedocles (c. 482—422 B.C)

It was Empedocles who said that light, being a body, is an effluent substance emitted from the lumi­nous body ... but that this movement of light is such that we fail to notice it because of its speed.

Cited by H. Diels in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker 6th edition Berlin 1951, 31 A 57 and cited by S. Sambursky in Physical Thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists (Hutchinson, London, 1974) p. 52.

Day 6

One plus one equals three, for large values of one.

Day 5

Huxley, A. (1894-1963)

… the English Fabians, Beatrice and Sydney Webb … made an historical study of the average time it took for an idea which at its first enunciation seemed revolutionary and revolting to be taken for granted and to be acted upon by the whole population. They concluded that the average time is twenty-eight years--roughly the length of a generation. It is very difficult to persuade adults to change their points of view; they have to die off before a new generation can accept new ideas.

‘The Population Explosion’ in The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959 (Cox and Wyman, Reading, 1977) p. 58.

Day 4

Hume, D. (1711—1776)

Those who have an interest in the fidelity of women, naturally disapprove of their infidelity, and all approaches to it. Those who have no interest are carried along with the stream. Education takes pos­session of the ductile minds of the fair sex in their infancy. And when a general rule of this kind is once established, men are apt to extend it beyond those principles from which it first arose. Thus bachelors, however debauched, cannot choose but be shocked with any instance of lewdness or impu­dence in woman. And though all these maxims have a plain reference to generation, yet women past child-bearing age have no more privilege in this respect than those who are in the flower of their youth and beauty. Men have undoubtedly an implicit notion, that all those ideas of modesty and decency have a regard to generation; since they impose not the same laws, with the same force, on the male sex, where that reason does not take place. The exception is there obvious and extensive, and founded on a remarkable difference, which produces a clear separation and disjunction of ideas. But as the case is not the same with regard to the different ages of women, for this reason, though men know that these notions are founded on the public interest, yet the general rule carries us beyond the original principle, and makes us extend the notions of modesty over the whole sex, from their earliest infancy to their extremest old age and infirmity. ...

As to the obligations which the male sex lie under with regard to chastity, we may observe that, according to the general notions of the world, they bear nearly the same proportion to the obligations of women as the obligations of the law of nations do to those of the law of nature. It is contrary to the interest of civil society, that men should have an entire liberty of indulging their appetites in venereal enjoyment; but as this interest is weaker than in the case of the female sex, the moral obligation aris­ing from it must be proportionably weaker. And to prove this we need only appeal to the practice and sentiments of all nations and ages.

A Treatise on Human Nature, 1739, 2. Everyman’s Library (J.M. Dent and Sons, London, 1940) p. 270.

Day 3

Darwin , C.

It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. It has recently been objected that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging of the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers. The undulatory theory of light has thus been arrived at; and the belief in the revolution of the earth on its own axis was until lately supported by hardly any direct evidence. It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of gravity? No one now objects to following out the results consequent on this unknown element of attraction; not withstanding that Leibniz formerly accused Newton of introducing ‘occult qualities and miracles into philosophy’.

Origin of Species (6th Edition, John Murray, London, 1906) p. 657.

Day 2

Einstein, A.

To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate made me an authority myself.

In Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel by B. Hoffmann p.24 (Viking, New York, 1972; Hart-Davis, McGibbon, London, 1973; Paladin, London, 1977).

Day 1

Research on transmission of HIV should have been a top priority for the past decade. Instead it has become a sideline. The truth is that too many scientists are spending their energies on esoteric aspects of AIDS research, such as snipping up the genome of the virus into tiny bits to see what happens when you substitute one bit with another. This sort of laboratory “tinkertoying”, as one researcher put it, is a lot more elegant than the messy business of looking at genital secretions. It’s also a lot easier to do than complex studies of transmission which include prying into people’s sexual habits and maintaining their co-operation over months and years. But that does not make molecular biology more important.

‘Comment’ New Scientist 5 June 1993 p. 3.