The Belated Prelude to Scio'11

So I guess Bora Zivcovic has linked to this site and has said that I blog here in the present tense. Well, he gave willing and maximally... interactive and representative contact information about people, and so here we are. There has not been a post on my site in about a year, and I didn't even mention anything about Science Online 2010. Science Online 2010 was amazing. I don't think I got as involved as I did in the conference before it, but I suppose we all have our slumps. When the sauce leaks onto the foil wrap from food packaged as such it probably carries enough metal with it to kill an elephant, but there are certainly worse things that could befall a visit to SciO. We might have had to fight across a hurricane of sharks every time a visit to the washroom was necessary or something. The conference was a great place to think more deeply about science online in a relaxed and intellectually stimulating atmosphere, so I guess things went as planned.

So I'm going to Science Online 2011! That's something. I've also half-written another thing, this one about the role of faith in science. My response is in essence yes, if you take a sort of watered down... faith of practice, for application to a few things: the reliability of critical thinking, the (strongly related) integrity of scientific method, and logic itself. I'd additionally only talk about this 'faith' if empirical (in this case historical) evidence for success, as well as the support of logic, were not enough evidence to inspire a non-faithful confidence. I ran into a wall here because the whole logic thing was significantly more complicated than I thought it would be. Basically I hit paraconsistent logic and then intuitionist logic and then some combination of lazy/fear of reality took over and I proceeded to leave that stuff alone.

So now I finished the last part of that sentence and it's a few days later, and I hear that SciO this year is centred very strongly on the literary. I guess we should pack lightly.

Written December 24th or so.