Two Small Island Nations
With a population of a few million people have had a seriously outsized impact on world culture. Here is a good profile of one of them.
The biggest intellectual nothing burger of the last century?
Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach contained some interesting musings on recursion, computation, self-reference, and so on. But of course is main "oomph" was that it was going to use all of these musings to explain consciousness. And the explanation? "This is it -- this is what consciousness is . Consciousness is that property of a system that arises whenever there exists symbols in the system which obey triggering patterns somewhat like the ones described in the past several sections" (385). Can you imagine someone in a real science, one that makes real discoveries, offering an "explanation" like that? "Planets just are those celestial objects that move in the sky in that funny way." "Atoms just are those things that cause chemicals to form in the patterns they do." "Evolution just is the process of new species coming into being." Such a phony would be laughed right out of the scientific community. In a real s
Okay, I'll bite: what's the other one?
ReplyDeleteIreland, of course.
DeleteThe 20th largest island in the world—larger than Sri Lanka, 7.5 times the size of Jamaica, and, if you prefer a non-island comparison, almost exactly the same size as Austria—is a "small island"? Okay, if you say so.
DeleteShonk, Shonk, Shonk... Yes, I should have written the new title in the first place. But it ought to have been pretty obvious that I meant small relative to their cultural impact, and not small relative to all the world's islands! I mean, Jamaica itself is huge compared to Governor's Island or Jura, so why didn't you complain about me calling it small?
DeleteA famous story from around here tells of a sage who visits an extremely kind and hospitable town, and then wishes that the town would burn down to the ground. "This way, they can leave and spread their kindness to the rest of the world."
ReplyDeleteIt's sort of true for Jamaica in a way. With some of the highest brain drain and external migration rates in the world, great Jamaicans have made their mark across the world.
While it is unfortunate that Jamaica has largely stagnated, with an economy growing at a rate 1/4th of the global average, it certainly has made Jamaica's most distinguished men and women strive harder to leave it and make their mark elsewhere.