Reading Buddhist Monastic Traditions of Southern Asia is most interesting for its comparisons: to Chinese Buddhism, of course, but also to Christian, European monastic traditions, and to the tenets, rules, and commandments of other religions.
International Law and Moral Relativism
International law is increasingly twisted by moral relativism to protect dictators, terrorists, and other euphemistically-named “bad actors,” while constraining, censoring, and punishing democratic, law-abiding nations.
Samuel Review
In reading these texts as books, rather than as selected vignettes and parables, we experience a rather different, more historical, more complex story than the excerpts which exist in the popular understanding convey.
A Historically Adjacent “Adaptation”
I was intrigued by how well the riddle’s tone and contents, read through the lens of referring to a travelling minstrel increasingly unneeded by his society, could map into the world of Impressions, and especially the druids’ fate.
The Book of Memory Review
Medieval scholars had a wiser perspective not just on memory, but on what we might today call “knowledge work” as a whole. In their view, simply reading a book was a useless exercise.
Sides of History
Legacy says more about the people doing the remembering than it does about the people or events being remembered, which is also true of things on the right or wrong side of history – such judgements say more about the people doing the judging than about what they are judging.
Worn Review
This is not a history of clothing, of fabric, its manufacturing, its properties, or its evolution. It is an unnuanced screed incoherently stitching together fragments of grievance politics and pet causes into a disjointed fabric that reads like a collection of opinion pieces written for a socialist periodical.
Addendum to “Linguistics, LLMs, and Empiricism’s Dangers”
Fedorenko asserts that the part of the human brain solely responsible for language itself does not actually understand that language.
Japanese Tales of Times Past Review
I did not read all thousand-plus stories, but I was intrigued by the collection, and came across a selection of ninety stories from the Japanese parts of the original anthology recently chosen and translated by Naoshi Koriyama and Bruce Allen.
Comment Opportunity – NASA Technology Shortfalls
NASA is working on updating the shortfalls list, and they’ve changed the format in a way that maintains the detail while eliminating some of the overlaps and providing a higher-level basis for the ranking of shortfalls against each other.
IGC Publishing 