Quotations

I collect quotations. My Website has a whole page of them. The quotes on that page were arranged (somewhat) deliberately, but I have a whole bunch more which haven't been added yet, since that would take some thought as to the proper arrangement.

Who knows when I'll ever get around to that....

So in the interim, I'll just post some here as the spirit moves me.

Apropos of my previous comment tonight is this:

There is nothing so ridiculous but some philosopher has said it.
-- Cicero

As a general rule, I don't trust philosophers much.

Bioethics?

Here's something I've been wondering about for awhile... Exactly what is it that makes someone an "expert" on ethics, in general, and "bioethics" in particular? Training in the academic philosophy of ethics, perhaps. But what that amounts to is expertise in understanding and using certain traditional types of argumentation to support one's ethical conclusions. Big deal. If Hitler or Josef Stalin had studied the philosophy of ethics, would that make them ethical authorities? Somehow I don't think so.

Case in point, and what brought this up, is some stuff I came across on Leon Kass, the chairman of the "President's Council on Bioethics". Although (reportedly) trained in medicine and biology, most of his academic career has been teaching "humanistic" subjects. Are any of those subjects sufficient qualifications for an "expert" on bioethics? Or does it all come down, in the end, to opinions that may be grounded in theology as much as in science?

What are Kass's own personal ethics? About this there seems to be controversy, since the guy seems to be actively lobbying Congress in defense of a very conservative agenda (against almost any form of therapeutic cloning, for example, and many other types of scientific research in human embryology). At the same time he leads a Presidential Council chartered to provide "objective" advice on the subject. Is there a conflict of interest here?

For reports about Kass's activities, see here, here, and here.

First entry!

One of my objectives here is to keep a record of the most interesting things I come across on the Web. That's what blogs started out to be "for", no?

As a science writer, I criss-cross the Web constantly, and (naturally) some of the most interesting stuff I find is (perversely) not what I happened to be looking for at the moment in connection with something I'm writing. So, what to do with it?

Put it in a blog, of course.

Since mathematics is one of my games, and the Riemann Hypothesis is a favorite special case, it seems appropriate that Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis from the wonderful Not Even Wrong is entirely appropriate as a first entry. This item has links to a brand new "find" from John Baez and a chatty little piece of lumpensciencewriting about the book in question.