Imagine a world where language is dying. In this world, everyone you know is afflicted with a strange malady. Every day, each person forgets a random handful of words. One by one, once-familiar nouns, verbs and adjectives simply slip away. At first the effect is barely noticeable. Though the English language has around 200,000 words, only a few thousand …
[This is #4 in a series of posts exploring information: what is it, where does it come from, and what does it teach us about ourselves and the reality in which we live. – #1 can be found here] When encoding information using symbols, it doesn’t fundamentally matter what physical carriers are used to display …
[This is #3 in a series of posts exploring information: what is it, where does it come from, and what does it teach us about ourselves and the reality in which we live. – #1 can be found here] As we have seen, not all information is equal in character. Particularly, it seems that the …
[This is #2 in a series of posts exploring information: what is it, where does it come from, and what does it teach us about ourselves and the reality in which we live. – #1 can be found here] When Bach sat to write his great works, he encoded sequences of tones in time, he …
[This is #1 in a series of posts exploring information: what is it, where does it come from, and what does it teach us about ourselves and the reality in which we live.] You may want to listen to the above while you read this post! The year is 1720. Johann Sebastien Bach sits in …
The way we understand reality usually develops incrementally. We build slowly on what we know, using methods we have reasons to trust. This is as true of our personal relationships as it is of our approach to the physical world. Most people are naturally wary, changing their opinions of people and things only gradually. Yet, …
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Hamlet Act 1 Scene 5 Problems of perspective As children mature into adulthood, tension often develops with their parents. The struggle tells of the complexity in reconciling two unique perspectives bound up in the parent-child bond. The child, …
[This is an extended version of a review of James K A Smith’s book “How (Not) to be Secular”, which is published over at UCCF’s BeThinking website] “I want so badly to believe, that there is truth, that love is real. And I want life in every word, to the extent that it’s absurd.” – Clark …
