montecarlo's New Writeups

Djurgården (place)

2009-09-22T18:50:51Z

A park afloat

Djurgården (= "Animal Garden" in Swedish, approximate Swedish pronunciation "yeur-gaur-dehn") is one of the many islands that the city of Stockholm actually consists of. It can be seen as a large city park, floating on the Baltic Sea. Officially Djurgården is called Kungliga Djurgården (= Royal Djurgården). In this case the official epithet "Royal" is not just a quaint reminder of bygone days, like the "Royal" in the institutional names of the "Royal Dramatic Theatre" or the "Royal Opera". Djurgården is in fact directly owned by the King of Sweden and is managed in the same manner as the King's Royal Palaces, by a special Royal Office (Kungliga Djurgårdens Förvaltning).

The King's official ownership of Djurgården is hardly noticeable to the inhabitants of Stockholm – you are as free to stroll among the ancient oaks (some are over a thousand years

…

September 17, 2009 (event)

2009-09-17T11:58:50Z

September 17 1939 – 70 years ago – is a fateful day to remember. Because this was the September day in 1939 when the beginning of the Second World War was finalised. The two totalitarian allies, who were responsible for the start of the war, Hitler's Nazis and Stalin's Communists, now joined forces on the battlefield, as previously agreed in their Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Poland, already buckling under heavy attack from the West by Nazi Germany, was now additionally invaded by a huge Soviet Russian army from the East.

Not long after, Russian and German troops were able to hold a joint and joyous victory parade. Poland was partitioned between two gangster regimes. Innocent blood was soon to flow in torrents, on both sides of the demarcation line. And the two totalitarian gangsters continued fighting on the same side in WWII for two years, pitted against the democratic West.

All of this would of course just be old history, not much to worry about, were it not for…

Ritual truth (idea)

2009-08-25T15:48:38Z

According to some polls, 60% of the American population regards the Biblical account of the creation of the world – and that it occurred about 10 000 years ago – as the literal truth. Now, 'truth' is a slippery concept, as philosophers have been saying for millennia. There is normally no problem with analytical truth, the one you may come across in mathematics or logic. 'All spinsters are single' is truly the truth and nothing but.

But the sort of truth that witnesses promise to tell in courts of law is a muddier affair. Memory is infamously unreliable. We can be almost certain that a witness account of 'what really happened' is not 'the whole truth and nothing but the truth'. But it might not be entirely false either. If cross-referenced by other witness accounts, it may even turn out to be legally useful, in spite of its lack of 'literal truth'.

Literally refuted

What about maintaining that the biblical creation myth is 'literal truth'? The 'literal' part…

Theology saves (idea)

2008-12-18T13:20:27Z

Theology vs. superstition

Theology is a speculative tradition of thought. Its intellectual starting point is a number of unprovable assumptions. Isn't this close to superstition -- accepting unprovable assumptions? Not necessarily. We actually have another speculative tradition (almost as old as theology), where people also start out with unprovable assumptions, and arrive at highly interesting conclusions. That tradition of thought is called mathematics, and it enjoys a great deal of prestige.

So by analogy, theology, in spite of its unprovable assumptions, may possibly also be regarded as a reasonably respectable undertaking.

What then is superstition? How does it differ from theology? As we have noted, theology emerges from unprovable assumptions and may thus get it into trouble, but not necessarily. Superstition on the other hand emerges from solidly disproved ideas, like believing…

Vatican + Science = True (idea)

2008-09-30T12:13:36Z

A declaration of sanity

The Vatican recently declared that Catholic faith and modern science (including the theory of evolution) are compatible and not in conflict. The declaration is undoubtedly a promising sign of religious sanity. Whether all official Catholic standpoints (e.g. the Vatican's anti-condom stance) can really be reconciled with scientific findings may yet remain doubtful. Nevertheless, the declaration shows that not all religious movements are on the level of stone-age superstition, the regrettable plane where G. W. Bush's American Christian fundamentalists and Tehran's Muslim fundamentalists have squarely positioned themselves.

Metaphorically does it

The actual text of the Bible (or Quran) and modern science are in fact often in conflict. This is of course readily predictable with mythological texts written millennia ago. So the Vatican declaration states that…

Military economics: an equivocal song (idea)

2008-09-03T14:57:30Z

Military economics: an equivocal song

The colonel was a friendly-looking man in his mid-40's. He had made himself comfortable on the pretty glass veranda protruding from the temporary HQ building. This was where he received me, sitting behind a small table pretending to be a desk. Our Estonian unit was housed in three buildings of a middle-sized farm that had been made available for this exercise, whatever it was -- I had just arrived and was only vaguely informed. But it seemed all quite cozy and pleasant, considering that it was supposed to be some sort of a military maneuvers.

"The Finnish boys in the bunker, the one behind the birch grove, probably have to be reinforced by our guys," he said slowly, without any sign of urgency. "They must be bored to death by now, alone and without anything happening. Could you take care of it? Seven men or so will probably be enough."

I…