Litnet

Hello CM et al, 

Hello CM et al,

Verskoning vir die oordosis, maar die "nerd" in my is in volle swang en is die volgende 'n artikel wat al voorheen gebruik was teen  Cornelius en is dit so dat ek dit wat ek lees onthou, behalwe vir die idees daarin, vaag soms, maar ook waar die  artikel, opstel ens oorspronklik gevind was en waar dit is.

'n Kindle maak dit nog makliker, aangesien dit al jou dokumente deursoek:  (Daar is 'n horde teks dokumente van opstelle en verwante besprekings oor jare wat my aandag getrek het wat gestoor word).

Hierdie kom van April 2012:

Facts, 360 B.C.-A.D. 2012

In memoriam: After years of health problems, Facts has finally died.

By Rex Huppke, Tribune Newspapers

A quick review of the long and illustrious career of Facts reveals some of the world's most cherished absolutes: Gravity makes things fall down; 2 + 2 = 4; the sky is blue.

Over the centuries, Facts became such a prevalent part of most people's lives that Irish philosopher Edmund Burke once said:

"Facts are to the mind what food is to the body."

Facts was born in ancient Greece, the brainchild of famed philosopher Aristotle.

Poovey said that in its youth, Facts was viewed as "universal principles that everybody agrees on" or "shared assumptions."

But in the late 16th century, English philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon took Facts under his wing and began to develop a new way of thinking.

"There was a shift of the word 'fact' to refer to empirical observations," Poovey said.

Facts became concrete observations based on evidence. It was growing up.

Through the 19th and 20th centuries, Facts reached adulthood as the world underwent a shift toward proving things true through the principles of physics and mathematical modeling. There was respect for scientists as arbiters of the truth, and Facts itself reached the peak of its power.But those halcyon days would not last.

People unable to understand how science works began to question Facts. And at the same time there was a rise in political partisanship and a growth in the number of media outlets that would disseminate information, rarely relying on feedback from Facts.

"There was an erosion of any kind of collective sense of what's true or how you would go about verifying any truth claims," Poovey said.

"Opinion has become the new truth. And many people who already have opinions see in the 'news' an affirmation of the opinion they already had, and that confirms their opinion as fact."

As the world mourned, some are still unwilling to believe Facts was actually gone.

Gary Alan Fine, the John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, said:

"Facts aren't dead. If anything, there are too many of them out there. There has been a population explosion."

Fine pointed to one of Facts' greatest battles, the debate over global warming."There are all kinds of studies out there," he said.

"There is more than enough information to make any case you want to make. There may be a preponderance of evidence and there are communities that decide something is a fact, but there are enough facts that people who are opposed to that claim have their own facts to rely on."

To some, Fine's insistence on Facts' survival may seem reminiscent of the belief that rock stars like Jim Morrison are still alive.

"How do I know if Jim Morrison is dead?" Fine asked.

"How do I know he's dead except that somebody told me that?"

Poovey, however, who knew Facts as well as anyone, said Facts' demise is undoubtedly factual.

"American society has lost confidence that there's a single alternative," she said. "Anybody can express an opinion on a blog or any other outlet and there's no system of verification or double-checking, you just say whatever you want to and it gets magnified. It's just kind of a bizarre world in which one person's opinion counts as much as anybody else's.

"Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion.

Baie dankie

Wouter

Naskrif, hierdie was in debat met Cornelius wat ongelukkig soos klokslag sy eie feite skep geplaas as 'n antwoord. Daarom Cornelius, verskoning vir die herbesoek en ou bokke uit die sloot grawe, maar daar kan ook verwys word na Kobus de Klerk en die mane van Jupiter en die 144 kommentare en teen kommentaar wat dit probeer besleg het.

Redaksionele kommentaar in die New York Times het dit vir my bevestig:

January 18, 2013

The Starry Messenger

This is a month when anyone with a telescope or good binoculars can gaze up at one of the brightest objects in the night sky and revisit a staggering achievement in astronomy: Galileo’s discovery, over several January days in 1610, of Jupiter’s four largest moons.At first, Galileo thought he was seeing stars. But watching them move in relation to Jupiter, he figured out what they really were — an epiphany that began to upend the given view of the universe. Here was a celestial body with other celestial bodies circling it. For a biblical cosmology that placed Earth at the center of all that moved, the implications would prove devastating.

The Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan has a beautifully preserved relic of that scientific triumph: the scrap of an envelope on which Galileo, in 1611, tracked the shifting positions of the Jovian moons. He had published his findings about the moons the year before in “The Starry Messenger,” and he was working, night after night, to better define the periods of the moons’ orbits. In his (literally!) back-of-the-envelope jottings and little pictures, one can sense a great mind puzzling out a perplexing story.Galileo’s achievement was the end of geocentrism, but it was hardly the end of ignorance and magical thinking.

When obstinacy places reason under siege, as it does to this day — when fundamentalism defames biological science in the classroom, or the politics of denial prevent action to deal with a changing climate, it helps to recall our debt to a man who set a different example more than 400 years ago. It took just a wooden tube and some polished lenses, a critical and inquisitive mind, and four points of light that didn’t behave the way they were supposed to.