Galileo Redux

Socializing and general posts on wide-ranging topics. Remember, it's Poststructural!
jim stone
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Post by jim stone »

Many thanks. Ockam's Razor is, by the way, an ontological
principle. When theorizing don't mulitiply queer entities
beyond necessity. In short, keep wierd entities out
of your theories, unless you really need 'em.
He was especially exercised about Platonic entities,
abstract entities, which are unlocatable in space
and also are atemporal. The world of Forms
is sometimes known as Plato's Beard, and it's
said that Plato's Beard dulls Ockam's Razor.

But it's terribly hard to get rid of all abstracta:
numbers, for instance seem to be Platonic.
Where is the number three? How long has it
endured? Seem to be mistaken questions.

Similarly sets appear to be abstract entities.
Reality appears to containe infinities of
real entities that aren't anywhere and have
no duration. The denial of abstracta is
called 'nominalism,' as most of us know,
and Ockham was a great nominalist.
Best
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Lorenzo
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Post by Lorenzo »

Did anyone watch the 2 hr. PBS special last night about the Renaissance, Galileo, the Medici, the Inquisition, the Church, and Luther? It was good.

http://www.pbs.org/empires/medici/
U2
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Post by U2 »

Part of my work includes mechanical system performance analysis. We've found that the most consistently, singly-indicative, quality successful technicians possess is the ability to consider the simplest causes first.

After pneumatic controls were replaced with solid-state circuitry, we had a particular panel that would frequently, unexplainably, go off-line when technicians were in front of it. They didn't even have to touch it. The perturbed manufacturer's representative made a few cursory observation, then immediately declared the problem was not in their product and attributed the occurrence to RF frequencies generated by portable radio transmissions between technicians standing at the panel. Although we could not associate cause with effect empirically, I observed that over the next months some technicians, now believing in radio frequency ghosts, began attributing other potentially-serious problems to radio frequency generation. All it took was the validation of a ghost and a new, somewhat-validated, ghostly analytical tool was created.

Later we discovered a short in an electrical conductor powering that panel. The conductor was contained in a conduit that was mounted on a railing upon which the technicians leaned when the panel door was opened. It was an eighteen year old student who, at the time of his discovery, was being "informed" by a senior technician about the mysterious rash of RF ghosts that had plagued the panel.
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Lorenzo
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Post by Lorenzo »

:lol: That remeinds me...during the domcumentary last night, it was pointed out that the pope tried using gold in celebration of the Renaissance. He had a young boy's entire naked body painted gold. Pneumatic controls (the pores) were not in place yet though, and the boy died a few days later, really. When the pope heard of the boy's death, he ignored it, pretending like it had never happened. Perhaps he had a low volt electrical short in his brain!
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glauber
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Post by glauber »

Oh, sorry, wrong thread. I thought it was about the "Galileo Seven" Star Trek episode.
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