Programming, the writing of computer code in order to solve a specific problem, is a new intellectual discipline. It has a history going back to logic and mathematics, but it is relatively new as a human endeavour. It is constrained by hardware, by mathematics, by programming languages, and what we might call technical culture: APIs, […]
Another year of the pandemic. I thought I’d wrap up by briefly reviewing some books I’ve read during the year. Friedrich Nietzsche – The Birth of Tragedy. Despite this being probably Nietzsche’s earliest famous book, I somehow never managed to get a foothold in it previously. Here he formulates his early philosophy in terms of […]
I can now conclusively answer the question raised at the end of my blog post from December 2019: the 2020s are not a decade of orderly peace. What a strange year. But weren’t years always strange? Time passes not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. A year spent with Covid-19 seems to have passed differently from […]
It seems clear by now that Covid-19 is one of the great crises of our time, more so than the financial crisis of 2008, judging by the size of the measures announced and already taken by various countries and by the impact on human lives. In Japan I have been following live data from Toyo […]
2019 comes to a close, and with it the 2010s. Below are a few thoughts on these periods of time. The most significant book I’ve read in 2019 is probably Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. The German title, literally “Elements and Origins of Totalitarian Rule” more closely reflects the contents of this monograph. Arendt […]