Monday, December 07, 2009

Idle thought

While sitting at home watching the contractor trash the house, Eli has been making trouble, when he came across this, which is an excellent exposition of the blind alley that the auditors are trying to mug science in
Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.
  • W.S. Anglin, in Mathematics and History, elucidating the symmetry between the creative and logical aspects of mathematics,
Comments?
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3 comments:

  1. Alastair7/12/09 5:31 PM

    Shoudn't that read "Eli had been making trouble, when ..."?

    Now, does that make me an auditor? To whom does that epithet apply?

    However, if you mean it to apply to the sceptics, then I agree. Far too much time has been spent arguing with them about whether global warming is happening and whether it is man made. Burying those dead arguments should have been left to the (brain) dead, and the time should have been spent determining the consequences of what we are doing to the planet so that proper warning of the dangers could be given.

    But don't forget - scientists are men, and as any wife will tell you, when they are lost they will not ask for directions or accept advice. It could be that scientist feel happier going over old territory with the sceptics than wrestling with the uncertainties of tropical lapse rate, ending of Snowball Earth, fast melting Arctic sea ice, Faint Young Sun Paradox, over heated Venus etc. etc.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Truth about AGW8/12/09 9:32 AM

    ...and that's when the truth squad comes in...

    http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/70869-wicker-joins-inhofes-truth-squad-to-copenhagen

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous8/12/09 7:18 PM

    Eli, your RSS feed is rooted. It seems to concatenate paragraphs without any whitespace in between. Makes things read extremely odd.

    ReplyDelete

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