time enough

Going to have a break from alignment this week. Most of my writing time currently is taken up with editing older posts from the first year of this new attempt at blogging. I have about 15 posts to go at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski. I do not trust platforms, anyone might buy them. Other people put them out on many multiple platforms.

One such is J. N Nielsen, I am a regularly reader of on substack of his Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon, on the history of philosophy as a philosophy of history within a wider remit of what more generally might have previously been called futurism, but the project is more integrative than such a policy wonk version of a science fiction writer might be. See big history. So it's a bit more like science fiction 'without' the fiction, but keeping true to the ideals of both the idea of and the ideas of science fiction. 

I mention all this because he has recommended, and I have tracked down a copy of

Whitrow, G. J. 1961. The Natural Philosophy of Time. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd.

And in it Whitrow mentions, very favourably, a writer from a generation earlier, so I decided to track down that writer as well:

M. F. Cleugh. 1937. Time And Its Importance In Modern Thought. London: Methuen. [ see also URL : http://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.172131]

In any case today I will start on reading them now I have the second title.

This is a slow process because, I do not know much about the cosmology of time, and I have to learn a lot while reading, even these more archaic books. And generally if my head is doing a lot of exciting work like this my mind spins up and comes up with other ideas. I know some people can get very critical when they read new work, but I tend to become quite supportive, if only then to take things too far.

I mention this because I have read and reported on previously a more recent writer on cosmology and as I am coming up to writing on alignment – geometry (probably revisiting ducks in a row) it is worth mentioning the basic 'geometry' I am 'using' or 'aligning' will have the idea that a “point-of-view” is a basic feature of our 'world' (no not consciousness exactly), and that I get this from my reading of:

Barbour, Julian B. 2020. The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time New York: Basic Books. [This has an online appendix ‘A History of Thermodynamics’. (PDF) ]

My earlier pieces on this are: Reaction review of The Janus Point and Minimum viable product and similar.

ex library books

I would also like to mention that the copies of books I have bought and brought to Tasmania, tend to be ex-library books.

Now I work in a library and I catalogue books. I deal with rare and important books, signed books, which we lock away in safes. It’s all back of house while a new library is being built to house them, as well as much more ordinary books, if not many Reader’s Digests tomes, the TL;DR of its day.

When booklovers buy books they often try to get the mint copy, i.e copies which only show the history of their production, and with the dustjacket. They are aligning best with brand new, untouched by life.

The joys of second hand books are very different, but even then, ex-library books are not a first choice, they show too many signs of too much history: library marks and stamps, spine labels and reader’s mis-use. But they have become a first choice for me.

The Whitrow above, is ex-library from Universität Bern’s Institut für theoretische Physik. But post-dates Einstein’s time there. While the Cleugh is from St Andrew’s University in Fife, and I learned it is the third oldest university in anglophone world.

It becomes a type of virtual or vicarious tourism, but in my hands.

Because people disdain ex-library books they are also cheap. So they 'tick' or 'check' two boxes on my collection development policy.