Category: Ways Of Knowing

  • Everyday Chaos – A Book Review

    Our existing processes and structures are not explicable, and… it is (perhaps?) unfair to demand that AI be more transparent than what we already have. But I still find myself wondering how complex we can allow systems to get and still expect people to be able to function in them.

  • Taming the Ego

    Religion is not Spirituality. Might be considered a companion piece to Science is not Technology. People talk about their “lizard brains” and “monkey minds” as though those are the same things, namely these unasked for voices that draw us into behaviours that make us feel that we “weren’t ourselves”. In a very real way, though,…

  • Perceiving Deep Order, or “Does God Exist?”

    In which I consider the existence and/or non-existence of God/gods through a number of different lenses.

  • Identity: Math and Myth

    What does it mean to have an identity? If you don’t look too closely, you might think that you can simply adopt a set of labels, slap them on yourself, and go forth into the world as a sequence of nouns. But that’s not how it works in practice. And socially constructed reality is all about…

  • Problems of Translation

    Physicists speak math. When they want to communicate clearly with one another, it looks a lot like this: It’s tight. It’s clear. It’s unambiguous (as long as you know how to read the symbols). It’s also completely unlike how most people communicate. Much of the coursework in physics education programs involves simply learning to read…

  • The Problem of Naming

    The Problem of Naming

    “This is a Blarg,” said my partner, placing his glass of wine in the middle of the table. We were at a friend’s house late in the evening, on a rare vacation without our children. The conversation had taken a turn, as they frequently do in my world, for the philosophical. We had a moment…

  • “Position Yourself,” He Said

    (This blog has a glossary. Or it will, someday.) When I was in grad school the second time, I signed up for a course taught by a radical queer theorist/anthropologist. Because that’s what all physics teachers need, you know? My very first assignment in this course was to summarize the readings (three full length academic…

  • Giving Up on Truth Will Set You Free

    If you get nothing else from this website, please take away the possibility of this: The pursuit of Truth is a fool’s errand. Fool’s Errand 1: The Impossible Task We grow up in a world of competing stories. Call them culture, call them religion, call them beliefs; at heart, they are stories about the world,…

  • The Wonder of the Heavens

    My entire life would have been different if it weren’t for the constellation of Orion. It was the signpost that arose in my life saying, “Astronomy! Over here!” I don’t remember much in the years before I saw Orion (I was about 10 at the time), but from that point on, every birthday and Christmas…

  • Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner

    On Writing is a wonderful book. It is a fine piece of storytelling from a fine storyteller, and full of concrete and useful advice. But I think it steered me wrong in one respect. “Don’t,” Stephen King said, “put your desk in the middle of the room. Place it in the corner to remind yourself…