Quarantine

Sometimes we find that familiar words have surprising backgrounds.  Today was one of those times.

I know the word 'quarantine' in English, and the word 'quarante' (forty) in French.  Somehow I had never made the link.

Apparently the term quarantine comes from an old Venetian dialect word 'quaranta', which obviously comes from the same roots. 

It all started off with trying to avoid the consequences of the plague (or 'Black Death') in the 14th century.  The earliest quarantines were only for 30 days, but later they adopted 40 days as standard.

Hence quarantine!

Teaching the other controversy

People preach about 'teaching the controversy' in the debate about evolution, as if Intelligent Design were science.  Maybe there are questions about evolution by natural selection, but it is certain that Intelligent Design is not an alternative answer.

They like to teach the controversy and claim that the arguments of 'neo-darwinists' don't hold up to scrutiny.

Well does that matter or not?  ID's proponents claim that it is a science but does that hold up to scrutiny?  They claim that they start from the data.  That's nice, but science starts from the hypothesis and uses data from the real world to see whether it supports the science - not the other way round.

And although they deny it, Intelligent Design requires an Intelligent Designer, and we are being impolite if we ask Christians who that designer might have been.

So let's start from the data again - and ask what data shows that God (obviously the pseudonymous intelligent being who designed everything) exists.  Is there any data?  I doubt it.  After all, faith is more powerful than data.

Then we can move on to the real science again.

Dennett's Tools for Thinking

I find it very interesting and informative and in fact generally pleasurable to listen to philosopher, 'horseman of the apocalypse', and grand-fatherly gentleman Daniel C Dennett. 

He has a new book to sell, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, so we might have the enjoyment of hearing a lot of interviews.  This week I heard a good one, on the podacst Point of Inquiry.

It is a wide ranging discussion with host, Indre Viskontas, (direct link here) they mull over a wide range of interesting topics, including consciousness, the 'intentional stance' (which others call 'theory of mind'), the role of philosophy in today's world, and that old favourite, free-will.  The book gets a few mentions, but not in any sense is the interview a hard-sell.

If you have 45 minutes to spare, or can load it onto your MP3 to enjoy while you are doing something that doesn't need concentration, I recommend it highly.

Will I buy the book?  That is a different question entirely.  I would love to have time to understand Dennett's writings and have read a couple of his earlier books.  However, I have also failed to reach the end of a couple of others due to my own ability to concentrate and my preference for being active.  

Maybe I should wait for the paperback - or maybe that is where I went wrong previously as the writing gets too small.

Born of a woman

One small phrase from the bible has been the source of rumblings among scholars for nearly two milliennia.  Galatians 4:4, which refers to the birth of Jesus, is the problem.

"... born of woman, born under the Law"

Which phrase bothers you most?  Being born under the law doesn't have an immediately obvious meaning.  Apparently it means that Jesus was a Jew, but theologians get into all sorts of tangles about that.  Who can tell what the implications might be - and few of us would care anyway.  Theologians make their living by arguing about these things.

For me the first phrase was the interesting one.  Why would anyone bother to tell us how someone was born?  The involvement of his mother (when her virginity is not the point of interest) could hardly be a subject that anyone would ever wonder about. 

Or could it?

Perhaps this is a sign that some others believed that he had not been born in the usual way.  You might doubt this, but there is a potential culprit available in the person of Marcion.  (See Who was the Marcion that Hitch referred to so often)  Marcion taught that Jesus did not get born like the rest of us but that he was sent down from heaven.  Jesus still became human flesh, but he had nothing to do with the God of the Old Testament.  Given the unbelievability of the rest of the Jesus story I find that a perfectly consistent point of view, for what that is worth.

Marcionite thinking sheds a lot of light on the text of the bible (see Christianity's Albatross), as early Christians had to spend a lot of effort and time suppressing that particular heresy (along with all the others). 

The world would be very different if they had failed.

Swimming the Thames

Boating on the canals is quite different from boating on the River Thames.

The protocols for the locks are different.  Finding a free mooring on the river is much more difficult.  And the river is much wider and deeper.

But after nearly a week on the Thames the biggest surprise is to find people swimming.  You spot a couple of things bobbing about in the water, not far from the bank and you might wonder whether they are ducks or geese, even though they don't look quite right.

They turn out to be swimmers - and these swimmers are not unusual.  Apparently people swim the whole length of the river as a badge of honour.

People don't swim in the canals.