The attached audio, just below, was recorded in 1894 with an ingenious piece of technology invented in 1878, by Thomas Edison. It was conducted by John Philip Sousa himself, who died in 1932. The recording was digitally transcribed and remastered for distribution on CD, in 2005. I have “ripped” the file from CD, converted it to an internet friendly format, and uploaded it to my server. Now, we are all free to listen to it whenever and wherever we like, with the push of a button.
I was born in a tiny southwestern suburb of Chicago, in August of 1967. Lots of people were. There’s really nothing particularly special about that. There are loads of garbage celebrities and politicians born in 1967. Jimmy Kimmel (13 November), Joe Rogan (7 August), and Peter Thiel (11 October), for example. So, if you’re looking for someone interesting and exciting, you’ve come to the wrong place. I’m just an average schmuck from the Chicagoland area, with nearly the same birthdate as Joe Rogan.
Once again, I am inspired to respond to Bryan Lunduke. This time, he posted the following commentary on the inevitability of change in tech, and it inspired the subsequent short editorial response.
Not All Change Is Good
When I was young, I naively and enthusiastically embraced all technological changes. The more ubiquitous the tech, the better. The more connected, the better. The more distributed, the better. The more integrated, the better! Watchable! Drivable! Wearable! Implantable! Let it all hang out! Star Trek, here we come! I no longer think like that. Now, I am very judicious about the presence that tech has in my life, and in my home.
In On Interpretation, Aristotle presents the thought experiment of the sea battle in order to grapple with a logical paradox stemming from his commitment to correspondence in truth and the Law of Excluded Middle on the one hand, and his commitment to potentiality in the future, on the other. Given these commitments, if we are to say that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then two questions (at least) need to be considered. First, is it already true that there will be one? Second, is its occurrence already determined by that? The term “already” is an important key to understanding these questions. It suggests a role for necessity in answering this problem. This essay will briefly summarize the logical problem, outline some possible solutions to the problem, and conclude with shrugging resignation at the fact that there isn’t more extant writing from Aristotle on the question.
Why does causality work? (OR: What is change?) Modern physics offers a powerfully sophisticated description of the behaviour of matter, including extremely complex maths that gives us highly reliable predictive power.
But, when you peel back the layers of that onion, what you find are wispy metaphors and “placeholder” terms at the core. The most popular, of course, are the terms “energy” and “force”. But, what is that? The common example of billiard balls provides a good illustration. Setting aside how the motion came to be in the first place, for discussion’s sake, imagine that one ball strikes another. The other ball, of course, itself begins to move. Physics calls this a transference of kinetic energy, but all this means in plain terms, is that ball A gave ball B the ability to do the work of motion.
