Author: 胡翌霖

Ode to Wind and Sand

Life & Notes2006.04.22
Ode to Wind and Sand
Recently Beijing has been howling with wind, with yellow sand filling the sky; it really is not good weather. When I was little, I liked rainy days and sunny days, and did not like wind. I always felt that fierce winds made people irritable, while a light breeze made them feel airy and insubstantial. Wind seemed to be associated either with violence or with frivolity. But that is just like not liking to eat green vegetables and fish when one is a child: it is merely a matter of childhood. That day, when I got up early and saw dust and sand all over the ground, the words that surged…
philosophy everyday life nature emotion
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2006年4月22日
A Rambling Talk on Science pp

History of Science & Scholarship2006.04.21
A Rambling Talk on Science pp
Preface The following lecture was written out completely before the actual talk. In the real presentation, because there was, first, no PPT to assist me and, second, my on-the-spot performance was not up to par, I ended up saying much less than I had intended, and did not do very well. Looking at this script should make up for some of that. 《Does God Play Dice》 can be read online at http://book.sina.com.cn/nzt/liangzishihua/. Let’s Begin Because I prepared too thoroughly—I had already written out the whole script—when speaking I might be a bit constrained, and since I can’t use PPT, I’ll have to keep glancing at the text, so please forgive…
science science communication quantum mechanics popularization
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2006年4月21日
Natural History and History

Culture & Public Commentary2006.04.18
Natural History and History
Today’s forum on “The Contemporary Significance of Natural History” left me wanting more. It’s my fault that I asked my question too early at the beginning; later, when I wanted to say a few things of my own, there was no further chance. Hearing some classmates ask about natural history and anthropology, others mention history, and others ask what natural history is, I had a few associations. Natural history is not a single discipline, just as “experimental science” is not a specialized discipline, but rather a spirit, a tradition, a method, a way of thinking, an attitude, and so on. Advocating these features of natural history serves as a certain…
history historiography natural history Rickert
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2006年4月18日
Plato’s Café

Life & Notes2006.04.16
Plato’s Café
Lately I’ve been haunting Plato Cafe quite often. It’s a newly opened cafe, next to Wan Sheng Bookstore, on the same floor as Bifengtang. This is a rather unusual coffee shop. To be honest, I’m really worried it won’t be able to stay open. I come here often precisely because of how empty it is—such a sharp contrast to the Bifengtang next door! What does it feel like to walk into Plato Cafe? Hmm… strange… really… it’s almost like a study room in a library! Besides the arrangement of the tables and chairs and the bright lighting, there’s even a whole wall of books here! There’s also…
everyday life culture Plato
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2006年4月16日
Modern Science and Religion (Research Plan)

History of Science & Scholarship2006.04.16
Modern Science and Religion (Research Plan)
No matter what view one takes of the relation between science and religion, examining that relation is unquestionably an important topic in the history of science and in the study of religion. In today’s age of “big science,” and under the demand for dialogue between science and the humanities, discussing the relation between science and religion has a particularly special significance. It must be pointed out that the conflict and harmony between science and religion are not, first of all, something scholars have gone to great lengths to manufacture. Whether conflict or harmony, they are both real-world issues. Even as a purely objective inquiry, one cannot deny that there do…
philosophy science history of science God
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2006年4月16日
The 200th blog post~

Site Matters2006.04.13
The 200th blog post~
2005-07-31 14:45 The first post, “Philosophy of the Starry Sky,” marked the founding of this blog. On 2005-12-29 at 19:48, less than five months later, I posted “My 100th blog post” And again, less than five months later, this is my 200th blog post. (Some posts have been set to hidden by me.) I downloaded Yaku’s “blog export backup,” the size of the compressed package is: 507 KB (519,482 bytes) the text files inside amount to: 2.18 MB (2,294,819 bytes) Here are the word-count statistics (the file contains a lot of English code): Pages 783 Words 599,516 Characters (excluding spaces) 1,704,482 Characters (including spaces) 1,783,475 Paragraphs 6,247 Lines 34,424 Non-Chinese…
blog website
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2006年4月13日
Education, Reform, and Egalitarianism

Culture & Public Commentary2006.04.13
Education, Reform, and Egalitarianism
A while ago, the presidents of Renmin University and other universities raised the issue that the government’s policies toward Peking University and Tsinghua University are too heavily tilted in their favor. The government’s preference for Peking University and Tsinghua is indeed very obvious, showing up not only in financial support but mainly in the enormous tilt of admissions policy. This tilt in admissions is especially evident in Shanghai’s college entrance examination system: in Shanghai, Peking University and Tsinghua are the so-called “zero-choice” option, separate from the other preferences, with applications first processed for the zero-choice option and only afterward allocated among the others. In other words, you might as well…
culture China education mathematics
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2006年4月13日
Philosophy Has Become “Technique”

Philosophy & Thought2006.04.11
Philosophy Has Become “Technique”
Seeing Bohm say that the word philosophy originally meant the love of wisdom, and that now it has become a kind of technique. I also think that our age is deteriorating into reducing everything to various technologies, stripping every thing of its meaning; I believe people have already fallen into technicism…… (The Ghost in the Atom, p. 118) I have long known that Bohm inclines toward postmodernist philosophy, but his words still make sense: do the analytic philosophy and logical positivism of the Anglo-American world not amount to turning philosophy into a “technique”? Although they still retain philosophy’s emphasis on “questioning,” the “pursuit” behind the questioning has been muted, especially…
philosophy analytic philosophy meaning materialism
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2006年4月11日
If you can’t live without it, can’t you rebel against it?

Culture & Public Commentary2006.04.10
If you can’t live without it, can’t you rebel against it?
Many people are very disdainful of the so-called “anti-science cultural figures.” There is a very simple piece of logic: those who are always shouting about opposing science are themselves enjoying technology, using computers to write articles, and in no way can they do without technology—so isn’t opposing technology horribly hypocritical? This logic seems pretty reasonable? In fact, it is ridiculously childish. To use an analogy: we depend on tap water every day, but if there is a problem with water quality, should we not point it out and criticize it? Could a water company use this logic—“You criticize tap water, but can you do without tap water? You’re enjoying our…
culture technology scientism tech ethics
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2006年4月10日
[Eng] Peter Singer: “Fermat’s Last Theorem—A Mystery That Puzzled the Wise of the World for 358 Years,” translated by Xue Mi, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, February 1998

History of Science & Scholarship2006.04.09
[Eng] Peter Singer: “Fermat’s Last Theorem—A Mystery That Puzzled the Wise of the World for 358 Years,” translated by Xue Mi, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, February 1998
[English] Peter Singer: “Fermat’s Last Theorem—A Mystery That Puzzled the Wise of the World for 358 Years,” translated by Xue Mi, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, February 1998 I don’t really have much time to read light books, but just then I happened to be back in Shanghai and saw this book on the bookshelf. I picked it up for a quick look, and then I simply couldn’t put it down; I had to read it straight through in one go. It was absolutely wonderful. Although I had already learned something about the history surrounding Fermat’s Last Theorem through other reading, this book is a thematic treatment. It is very well…
book reading notes history mathematics
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2006年4月9日