JR Files

Beautiful iPad app from the National Geographic magazine atlas.

Early in the 20th Century, the British philosopher G. E. Moore noticed that sentences of a certain form have a quite peculiar feature.  Consider:

    >I believe it is Tuesday, but today is Monday.

    >Today is Monday, but I do not believe that.

    >I believe that today is Tuesday, but it’s not true that today is Tuesday.

These statements, when considered as first-personal assessments, instantiate what’s been called Moore’s Paradox.  Taking ‘p’ as a variable standing for any well-formed declarative sentence, we can say that Moore’s Paradox is generated by any statement of the following form,

    >I believe that p, but not-p.

A noteworthy popular intellectual trend in recent years might be called “How Everything Works, In Spite of Itself.” Roughly, the trajectory can be described by James Gleick’s Chaos, which appeared in 1988; M. Mitchell Waldrop’s Complexity in 1992; and Steven Johnson’s Emergence, debuting in 2001. On the even more popular side, one can glance at Gladwell’s Tipping Point and Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds, although more serious readers ought to be referred to Stuart Kauffman’s The Origins of Order. What unites these works – or rather, the trend that these books represent – is a perennial desire to see our world defined in terms of simple rules that, once intuited, reveal themselves as pervasive and universal. What are the consequences of this point of view, as we attempt to better understand societies and urbanism?

Small-scale hand built depictions of artificial environments and alternative realities.

Dutch drivers are taught that when you are about to get out of the car, you reach for the door handle with your right hand — bringing your arm across your body to the door. This forces a driver to swivel shoulders and head, so that before opening the door you can see if there is a bike coming from behind. Likewise, every Dutch child has to pass a bicycle safety exam at school. The coexistence of different modes of travel is hard-wired into the culture.

This in turn relates to lots of other things — such as bread. How? Cyclists can’t carry six bags of groceries; bulk buying is almost nonexistent. Instead of shopping for a week, people stop at the market daily. So the need for processed loaves that will last for days is gone. A result: good bread.

It makes me think that we need a new type of class in schools across the land immediately. Electronic literacy. Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we’re looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing.