Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

I stumbled across an article in Forbes via GeekPress today called " Eight Ways Goofing Off Can Make You More Productive ". Now this sounds like the kinda management theory I could buy into. The author, Susan Adams, refers to James A. Levine of the Mayo Clinic saying: '... you work in concentrated 15-minute periods, divided up by breaks. “The thought process is not designed to be continuous,” he tells the  Times . He points out that efficient, productive work is much more valuable than long hours of wasted or partially productive time. ..' That is pretty much my take on my own productivity during a work day, with the exception of those rare longer periods of white hot intensity, when you are "in the zone" working on a creation that is attempting to pull together diverse threads of thought and that can't be let go off lest the whole thing collapses losing shape and coherence. Read the whole thing . It's not long. And there are only 8 ite...

If the judicial system of a major Western European nation can convict and imprison seismological scientists for not accurately predicting the severity and timing of an unpredictable earthquake ( this really happened this week in Italy ), is it any wonder that climate scientists have felt the need to constantly predict imminent climate catastrophe as a means of self preservation against the inevitable happening of natural catastrophes, which are certain to occur at some unpredictable time in the future. But it does somewhat undermine our confidence in the impartiality of the scientific reporting process if they have such a substantial and real incentive to overestimate catastrophe.

 Justice trumps Freedom. Freedom trumps Truth. Truth trumps Justice. I am prompted to revisit the above hubristically concocted heuristic from the early days of this blog, by an interesting paper I stumbled across recently by John P. Anderson of the Mississippi College of Law, Trading Truth for Legitimacy in the Liberal State: Defending John Rawl's Pragmatism . Anderson states: "Philosophers have challenged the idea of justice without truth as incoherent; and social critics have attacked it as naive. This paper defends Rawl's pragmatism against such critics and argues that the future of liberal constitutionalism may depend on its success". That's a pretty high burden to place on the success of a defence of pragmatism. If it's any assistance I am prepared to suggest that my heuristic might, if someone could only explain it half competently, partially lend support to Anderson's case. The case and the h...