A Wise Man's Life

By -
"The latter part of a wise man's life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former." -- Jonathan Swift

And the same goes for my life!

Comments

  1. gcallah8:28 PM

    Wow, rob, you have learned nothing in your time away, huh?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. rob11:15 PM

      It just seemed such an obvious joke I couldn't resist.

      You don't think this post was the least bit pompous ?

      Delete
    2. gcallah11:24 PM

      Rob, your animosity caused you to miss my joke: "And the same goes for my life!"

      In other words, this happens with wise men, and ALSO WITH ME.

      Delete
    3. rob12:43 AM

      Oops. Yes, I totally missed the joke.

      BTW: My initial comment wasn't driven by animosity just by a (mistaken) attempt to be humorous.

      Delete
    4. gcallah1:04 AM

      Ok, cool. Welcome back.

      Delete
    5. rob1:08 AM

      Thanks.

      Delete
  2. Keshav Srinivasan9:53 PM

    That's an interesting counterpart to the beginning of the famous poem Rabbi Ben Ezra:

    "Grow old along with me!
    The best is yet to be,
    The last of life, for which the first was made:
    Our times are in His hand
    Who saith "A whole I planned,
    Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!''"

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ken B9:04 PM

    So Gene, does that mean in the third half you'll embrace atheism? ��

    Merry Christmas!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more