Jun 24
Ok, in case you thought that last post from Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice was too metaphysical, here is the physical prequel: four Our Platonic heritage prompts us to view means and medians as the hard ‘realities,’ and the variation that permits their calculation as a set of transient and imperfect measurements of this …
Jun 21
[five] Now let us suppose that … a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes the hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature …
Jun 10
There’s been a lot of cynicism expressed over the past week or two, pointing out the potential for hypocrisy when you ‘take a knee’. Images from the Black Lives Matter protests, which show law enforcement folks taking this posture, have naturally stirred up the lack of trust in the police that people of colour feel …
Apr 16
Please understand this as coming from a friend who shares with you the dis-ease of remaining fully human in a divided world. I am just a humble student of population evo-ecology and of zazen, and I don’t mean to present myself as a shining example of one who has perfected Rumi’s “marriage of form and …
Apr 05
There are still a few cars coming and going on my street. I don’t know where they’re coming from or where they’re going to; maybe they’re just neighbours with cabin fever who want to get away from the TV news, which is all about Covid-19 anyway. Maybe they just want to come down to the …
Mar 13
Climate Change is an existential threat, and many of us don’t know what to hope for any more, or even whether we should ‘hope’ at all. My feeling is that if hope means anything at all in this case, its roots must run very, very, deep indeed. Here is Essay FORTY-ONE from the book, Darwin, …
Jan 20
Sir Francis Bacon: “The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called “sciences as one would.” For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow …
Jan 11
Thought you might like to see the text of the reading we did at the end of our new year, new decade, walk in Parry Sound. It is not, in fact, the message seen in the above image, but was condensed from the document: ‘In 2030 we ended the climate emergence. Here’s how’ — by …
Jan 03
We are taught to think of humans first. When we look at this photo we see a human tragedy unfolding due to a ‘climate emergency’ that threatens ‘the world as we know it’. In this New Year, the first of a decade during which the science tells us we have a last chance to mitigate ecological …
Dec 08
…“Believe me,” said Horton. “I tell you sincerely, my eyes are quite open and I see him quite clearly. I know there’s a person who’s out there beyond us, and a person’s a person, no matter how humongous. — apologies to Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who. Excerpts from Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. …
