Of the three Mistborn books, this one is the most intellectually and philosophically interesting.
Six Great Dialogues Review
As my wife and I noted while I was reading this, it's a good thing that my voice has a magical ability to put people to sleep, because otherwise my tendency to engage in Socratic-style arguments would probably have people force-feeding me hemlock.
First Review
Sandra Day O’Connor’s life is a thought-provoking story in its own right, and takes place in the context of fascinating decisions and occurrences that have shaped and continue to shape the world in which we live. I’m glad that I made an exception to my twenty five year rule for First.
The Golden Verses of Pythagoras Review
An unusual two star rating might be another example of the importance of managing readers' expectations, because this text was definitely not what I was expecting, and my appreciation of it was consequently diminished. That being said, even if I had known what I was getting into, I'm not certain that I would have found very much to appreciate about Pyhtagoras' and his fellow cultists' "golden" verses, sentences, sentimets, statements, and so forth.
Logical Fallacies
A logical fallacy is a systemic flaw in the sequential process of deriving conclusions that can occur in any application of that method of deliberation, and can result in achieving erroneous end states. Significantly, it does not include cases of failure to implement logical processes in the first place, nor does it apply in most cases to innate traits of neurophysiology.
Definition, Connotation, and the Function of Language
A long time ago, there were no dictionaries, no modern language associations, no Oxford standards. Language is a fundamentally organic system that has been evolving for thousands of years, as complex and intricate as something like the economy, and for most of its existence its rules have not been explicit.
The Fallacy of Regret
Queue swirling lights and rushing sound effects as we go back in time to stop regretting things and make our lives go how we wish they could have gone, with all of the wisdom and hindsight of our later years. After an arbitrary passage through time and space, we find our former self, and we say something like “hey, don’t invest your money there, use it to start the business you’ve always dreamt of.” Then, ignoring all considerations of paradox, physics, entropy, and causality, we zip back to the present time to see how much better our life us now that we made the choice we always wished we had.
Origins of Language Article
This is just a quick post to share an article across which I recently came. It was published in the Wall Street Journal, and since we often discuss linguistics in our posts it seemed worth sharing.
Conservation and Cycles
In any closed system, quantities must be conserved. Thermodynamics inform us that energy is conserved. Linear and angular momentum are both conserved, whether we’re looking at billiard balls in a Newtonian paradigm, or photons in a quantum system. Special relativity expands conservation even further to the equivalence between matter and energy. In a closed system, where nothing can escape, quantities are inevitably conserved.
Art of Rhetoric Review
I was a little worried, going into my reading of Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric, and subsequently The Poetics, that these classic texts might also fall into that category, where they are lauded for their continued relevance mostly because they are so general that they can hardly fail to be relevant.
IGC Publishing 