Marc | October 12, 2010
This letter if from Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society. Anthony Watts describes it thus: This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a [...]
Marc | July 13, 2010
In the previous part of this series, I really concentrated on the environment of role expectations and especially, on the boundaries of these. As I was reading the CBC.ca news this morning, I found a story that just illustrated many of the points I made in the last post, especially the points about communications and [...]
Marc | July 11, 2010
In the part 1, I tried to establish certain guidelines for how I am looking at ethics, morality and, to a much lessor degree, group dynamics surrounding these issues. The overarching model I use for this is taken fairly directly from Wm. Calvin’s work on Darwinian bootstrapping (op.cit.) which I have found to be both [...]
Marc | July 10, 2010
This set of posts is a first cut at integrating some ideas I have been working on in one form or another for several years now. While I am really interested in the general case of the evolution of moral and ethical systems within groups, for this specific set of posts, I will only be [...]
Marc | November 13, 2009
One of the things that is often forgotten these days is why people fight – not nations, not governments; people. All to often, especially during long conflicts with not actual “fighting” in a homeland, we forget and dismiss the conflicts and blame those who go to do the fighting as being “war mongers” and “myrmidons” [...]
Marc | July 10, 2009
Q: Since when are university regents “administrative officials performing functions analogous to those of judges and prosecutors” (quoted here)? A: Since July 7th, 2009.
Marc | May 18, 2009
Over the past several months, I have been doing a lot of thinking about how people think. This has led me down some rather odd trails, but I thought I would toss out a few ideas and see what people think.
Marc | February 21, 2009
Last Thursday (Feb. 19th, 2009), Inside Higher Ed published an article by Dr. Adam Silverman called The Why and How of Human Terrain Teams. This piece, which is well worth reading, is one of the few that has come out by an HTT member describing their actions in the field – it also “enjoys” comments [...]
Marc | February 10, 2009
Tom Ricks has a series of posts on the Battle of Wanat last summer over at Foreign Policy that is well worth reading for a number of reasons. First of all, Tom has done some excellent research and, unlike many, offers questions rather than answers (although he has a few of those). Second, his research, [...]
Marc | January 14, 2009
There is a very interesting round-table discussion going on over at Chicago Boyz on Clausewitz (with a big hat tip to SWC colleague and friend Zenpundit). Possibly the most interesting (to me at least) entry so far is on Military Genius by Nathaniel T. Lauterbach. Outside of it being a truly great post, it carries [...]
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