Biography, Philosophy, Technology

Roots to remember

When I was growing up in the 1950s and spending summers on my grandparents’ farm in North Carolina, I became strangely aware that we were living in truly radical times.  I say radical because that word comes from Latin radix, meaning “root.”  I could sense that the roots of our civilization were shaking beneath us, even though the civilizational tree still seemed strong and healthy.  Problems with the roots implies problems with the tree.  Dealing with that requires some “radical” thinking, that is, thinking directed to the root of things.  This Word and Fire web site hopes to take some constructive steps in that direction.

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News, Philosophy, Physics

Black holes and all that

Picture from cited Nature article

I intend to start some posting to this site, and science news is a good place to start. For science entangles the ordinary everyday course of our lives with inconceivably exotic and almost unimaginable events of our vast yet comprehensible universe. The collision of two supermassive black holes recently detected by the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration of gravitational wave astronomy made news articles in both Nature and Science and, additionally, had two NewYork Times articles( 1 and 2) about it.

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