On behalf of Pascal: A Reply to Le Poidevin

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 189
Author(s):  
Sebastian Gäb
Keyword(s):  
Christian Spirituality ◽  
Potential Candidate ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Real Possibility ◽  
Doctrine Of God ◽  
The Future ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
As If

When we were on the subway back from his lecture, I said to Robin: “I’m not sure there actually are any religious fictionalists.” We keep talking about them in papers and lectures, acting as if fictionalism in religion is a real possibility, but to be honest, I haven’t been able to spot one in the wild so far. The only potential candidate who comes to mind is Don Cupitt, who wrote things like: “I still pray and love God, even though I fully acknowledge that no God actually exists.”[1] Perhaps this is as fictionalist as it gets. But then again, Cupitt never explicitly declared himself a fictionalist (at least to my knowledge). Moreover, on other occasions he sounds more like an expressivist than a fictionalist, e.g. when he says: “The Christian doctrine of God just is Christian spirituality in coded form.”[2] So, if there are any actual fictionalists out there, please step forward.[1] Don Cupitt, After God: The Future of Religion (Basic Books, 1997), 85.[2] Don Cupitt, Taking leave of God (SCM Press, 1980), 14.

scholarly journals Methods in field chronobiology

2017 ◽  
Vol 372 (1734) ◽  
pp. 20160247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide M. Dominoni ◽  
Susanne Åkesson ◽  
Raymond Klaassen ◽  
Kamiel Spoelstra ◽  
Martin Bulla
Keyword(s):  
Technological Development ◽  
Monitoring Systems ◽  
Migratory Restlessness ◽  
Biological Organization ◽  
Rapid Improvement ◽  
Free Living ◽  
The Future ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Temporal Aspect ◽  
Different Levels

Chronobiological research has seen a continuous development of novel approaches and techniques to measure rhythmicity at different levels of biological organization from locomotor activity (e.g. migratory restlessness) to physiology (e.g. temperature and hormone rhythms, and relatively recently also in genes, proteins and metabolites). However, the methodological advancements in this field have been mostly and sometimes exclusively used only in indoor laboratory settings. In parallel, there has been an unprecedented and rapid improvement in our ability to track animals and their behaviour in the wild. However, while the spatial analysis of tracking data is widespread, its temporal aspect is largely unexplored. Here, we review the tools that are available or have potential to record rhythms in the wild animals with emphasis on currently overlooked approaches and monitoring systems. We then demonstrate, in three question-driven case studies, how the integration of traditional and newer approaches can help answer novel chronobiological questions in free-living animals. Finally, we highlight unresolved issues in field chronobiology that may benefit from technological development in the future. As most of the studies in the field are descriptive, the future challenge lies in applying the diverse technologies to experimental set-ups in the wild. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Wild clocks: integrating chronobiology and ecology to understand timekeeping in free-living animals’.

scholarly journals Some Remarks on the Report by the Commissioners appointed to investigate into the Recent Changes in the Relative Values of the Precious Metals

1891 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 190-204
Author(s):  
A. Gillies Smith
Keyword(s):  
Precious Metals ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
The Future ◽  
Value Of Money ◽  
As If

Some years have now elapsed since I had the honour of addressing you from this chair. In the paper which I then read to you I urged on our younger members the necessity of studying finance, and especially of endeavouring to form a just estimate of the value of money, and of the rate of interest which will obtain in the future, so far as that future forms an element in our calculations. Without this knowledge we shall build with insufficient materials, and in the absence of its thoughtful application to our daily work, and to our periodical investigations and valuations, we shall rear a fabric which, although it may last during our lives, and look to all appearance as if it were carefully and substantially built, will certainly, before its time, show symptoms of decay, and finally fall about the ears of too confiding policy-holders.

CAN JULIEN D’HUY’S COSMOGONIES SAVE US FROM YUVAL NOAH HARARI?

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-34
Author(s):  
Prof. Ph.D. Jacques COULARDEAU ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Circuit ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Intelligent Machines ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
Present World ◽  
As If

Over the last two decades, we seem to have been confronted with a tremendous number of books, films, TV shows, or series that deal with the past and the present, not to mention the future, as if it were all out of time, timeless, even when it is history. We have to consider our present world as the continuation and the result of the long evolution our species has gone through since we emerged from our ancestors 300,000 years ago. Julien d’Huy is a mythologist who tries to capture the phylogeny of myths, and popular or folkloric stories that have deep roots in our past and have been produced, changed and refined over many millennia. Can he answer the question about how we have become what we are by studying the products of our past and present imagination? But confronted to the prediction of Y.N. Harari that our species will simply disappear as soon as the intelligent machines we are inventing and producing take over our bodies, brains, and minds in just a few decades, Julien d’Huy sure sounds like the antidote because at every turn in our long history we have been able, collectively, to seize the day, and evolve into a new stage in our life, both biological and mental, not to mention spirituality. Let’s enter Julien d’Huy’s book and find out the power and the energy that will enable us to short-circuit and avoid Yuval’s nightmare.

scholarly journals Effect of Step Gate Work Function on InGaAs p-TFET for Low Power Switching Applications

Nanomaterials ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 3166
Author(s):  
Sayed Md Tariful Azam ◽  
Abu Saleh Md Bakibillah ◽  
Md Tanvir Hasan ◽  
Md Abdus Samad Kamal
Keyword(s):  
Low Power ◽  
Work Function ◽  
Potential Candidate ◽  
Gate Electrodes ◽  
The Future ◽  
Work Function Difference ◽  
High Transconductance ◽  
Dual Material ◽  
Gate Work Function ◽  
Function Difference

In this study, we theoretically investigated the effect of step gate work function on the InGaAs p-TFET device, which is formed by dual material gate (DMG). We analyzed the performance parameters of the device for low power digital and analog applications based on the gate work function difference (∆ϕS-D) of the source (ϕS) and drain (ϕD) side gate electrodes. In particular, the work function of the drain (ϕD) side gate electrodes was varied with respect to the high work function of the source side gate electrode (Pt, ϕS = 5.65 eV) to produce the step gate work function. It was found that the device performance varies with the variation of gate work function difference (∆ϕS-D) due to a change in the electric field distribution, which also changes the carrier (hole) distribution of the device. We achieved low subthreshold slope (SS) and off-state current (Ioff) of 30.89 mV/dec and 0.39 pA/µm, respectively, as well as low power dissipation, when the gate work function difference (∆ϕS-D = 1.02 eV) was high. Therefore, the device can be a potential candidate for the future low power digital applications. On the other hand, high transconductance (gm), high cut-off frequency (fT), and low output conductance (gd) of the device at low gate work function difference (∆ϕS-D = 0.61 eV) make it a viable candidate for the future low power analog applications.

scholarly journals NIKOLAI OSTROVSKY: «A PLACE IN THE IRON BATTLE FOR POWER». RUSSIA ON THE EVE AND AFTER OCTOBER. ARTICLE TWO

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 161-168
Author(s):  
Sergei A. Nikolsky ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Class Struggle ◽  
Constant Intensity ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
The Real ◽  
Short Course ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Party Members ◽  
As If

To reveal the theme of Russia after October, 1917, Nickolai Ostrovsky's book «How steel was tempered» is one of the most significant. In it, in its purest form, there is a portrait of an ideal revolutionary – a Bolshevik, merciless not only to the enemy, but to himself and others as well, a man, from whom, according to the poet's figurative expression, there could be made the strongest nails in the world. The book was enthusiastically received by the thirteen million army of party members and Komsomol members. For some, Pavel Korchagin was an ideal to emulate, for others – an image that reinforced their own myths about past heroic deeds, allowing them to settle warmly in the present. For the authorities, the story, cleared by censorship from the Bolshevik democracy of the first years, was an artistic forerunner of the future Stalinist «Short course of the AUCP history». One of the most thoughtful Soviet literary critics, Leo Anninsky, considered the story to be a story about people «engaged to an idea». In a sense, this is true. However, the engagement prevented both Ostrovsky and his Soviet interpreter from seeing the real historical process in its tragic depth and contradictions. For the hero Pavel Korchagin, there are neither the beginnings of Stalinist totalitarianism, nor the tragedy of a collectivized, starving village. Living as if out of time, he preaches the same thing – a class struggle that never fades for a moment. It seems that the fire of struggle will be extinguished and the hero's life will be interrupted. In fact, this is not allowed to happen: the constant intensity of the class struggle, which, as Stalin said, will grow more and more as we move towards socialism, is the secret of Soviet totalitarianism, represented and justified in an artistic form by Nikolai Ostrovsky.

Distortion

Dismantlings ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 93-111
Author(s):  
Matt Tierney
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Transformative Change ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fiction Writer ◽  
As If

This chapter talks about distortion as a form of dismantling. It describes distortion as the historical and theoretical technique by which readers learn to approach political documents as if they were science fiction. When considered as a vehicle of distortion, literature is measured for its potential to alter exploitative conditions, like those of war, patriarchy, and racism. The science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany insists that transformative change takes shape neither in utopian nor in dystopian visions of the future, but rather in efforts toward significant distortion of the present. This attitude, which is also a theory and practice of literature, is one way to describe the inheritance of cyberculture in the works of writers and activists who employed speculative language to repurpose the thought of Alice Mary Hilton and the Ad Hoc Committee. These writers and activists focused not on the machines that would unveil the myth of scarcity, but instead isolate the forms of human life and relation that would follow the act of unveiling.

scholarly journals Cosmopolitan Sophistry: Grounding Politics in Disorder and Uncertainty

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 197-223
Author(s):  
Jon Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Chaos Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Ecology ◽  
The State ◽  
Legitimate Authority ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Death ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Moment ◽  
As If

Conceptions of the State, Nation and politics, which are actually in play in ‘the West’, usually descend from totalitarian models which are primarily Platonic and monotheistic in origin. They aim for unity, harmony, wholeness, legitimate authority and the rejection of conflict, however much they claim to represent multiplicity. By expressing a vision of order, such models drive an idea of planning by prophecy as opposed to divination, as if the future was certain within limits and the trajectory was smooth. Chaos theory and evolutionary ecology shows us that this conception of both society and the future is inaccurate. I will argue that it is useful to look at the pre-socratic philosophers, in particular the so-called sophists Gorgias and Protagoras and Heraclitus with their sense of ongoing flux, the truth of the moment, and the necessary power of rhetoric in the leading forth of temporary functional consensus within the flux. This ongoing oscillation of conflict provides social movement and life rather than social death.

scholarly journals The Interplay between Diabetes and Alzheimer’s Disease—In the Hunt for Biomarkers

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 2744 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriana Kubis-Kubiak ◽  
Aleksandra Dyba ◽  
Agnieszka Piwowar
Keyword(s):  
Alzheimer’S Disease ◽  
Alzheimer's Disease ◽  
Protein Glycation ◽  
S100b Protein ◽  
Potential Candidate ◽  
Glucose Levels ◽  
The Future ◽  
Psychiatric Complications ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Brain

The brain is an organ in which energy metabolism occurs most intensively and glucose is an essential and dominant energy substrate. There have been many studies in recent years suggesting a close relationship between type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as they have many pathophysiological features in common. The condition of hyperglycemia exposes brain cells to the detrimental effects of glucose, increasing protein glycation and is the cause of different non-psychiatric complications. Numerous observational studies show that not only hyperglycemia but also blood glucose levels near lower fasting limits (72 to 99 mg/dL) increase the incidence of AD, regardless of whether T2DM will develop in the future. As the comorbidity of these diseases and earlier development of AD in T2DM sufferers exist, new AD biomarkers are being sought for etiopathogenetic changes associated with early neurodegenerative processes as a result of carbohydrate disorders. The S100B protein seem to be interesting in this respect as it may be a potential candidate, especially important in early diagnostics of these diseases, given that it plays a role in both carbohydrate metabolism disorders and neurodegenerative processes. It is therefore necessary to clarify the relationship between the concentration of the S100B protein and glucose and insulin levels. This paper draws attention to a valuable research objective that may in the future contribute to a better diagnosis of early neurodegenerative changes, in particular in subjects with T2DM and may be a good basis for planning experiments related to this issue as well as a more detailed explanation of the relationship between the neuropathological disturbances and changes of glucose and insulin concentrations in the brain.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document