Reports bring the sad news that Marty Perl died. Here’s a look back a decade and a half. This is the beginning of Lila Guterman’s 1998 article in the Stanford Report about one of Marty’s smallest improbable adventures: A paper airplane whizzed through the air and hit Stanford Nobel laureate Martin Perl in the head before […]
Year: 2014
Philosophy? Tedious?
In his Presidential Address at the 53nd [sic] Annual Meeting of the Florida Philosophical Association, professor David McNaughton, of Florida State University, US, revealed that he had been inspired by a 2007 Guardian article by Jonathan Wolff (head of philosophy at University College London) which began: “Why is academic writing so boring?” Professor McNaughton refined […]
A wide-ranging look at the number 3 in reality
The number 3 draws much of the focus in this study: “The intriguing human preference for a ternary patterned reality,” Lionello Pogliani, Douglas J. Klein [pictured here], and Alexandra T. Balaban, Kragujevac Journal of Science, 27 (2005): 75-114. The authors, at Università della Calabria, Italy and Texas A&M University at Galveston, USA, explain: “Number three […]
Words That, Taken Together Possibly Mean Something
The scholarly journal called Social Text has again published a paper that may seem to be a jumble of big words but may, conceivably be full of deep, clear, important meaning. The new study is: “S’More Inequality — The Neoliberal Marshmallow and the Corporate Reform of Education,” Bethany Moreton [pictured here], Social Text, 2014, Volume 32, Number 3 […]