Sorry to go public and all, but does anyone know if I am the fistful of euros guest blogger ? The deal was I guest blogged for 2 weeks, that is until March 1, and I got a reminder that I was expiring (I mean just as a guest blogger).
My name is still [...]

I’m still thinking about Vienna. I didn’t especially like the anti aircraft towers, but I think the toilets were excellent.
I am quite serious. You see this is a problem for transatlantic comprehension. In the USA toilets have a large pool of water. This can cause an unfortunate problem called [...]

Heraclitis said that you can not step in the same river twice.
Wolfgang Pauli said that you can not be an identical fermion twice
that is that there can’t be two identical fermions.
Some Heraclitian said that you can’t step in the same river once.
This is clearly silly.
Similarly, I think that an honest application of the basic assumptions [...]

These are my impressions of a recent trip to Budapest.
My father’s parents grew up in Budapest. The Waldmann family has returned on 5 or so occasions. Caroly, Erzebeth and Thomas (dad) went back in 1937 to tell the folks it was time to bug out of central Europe (they didn’t listen). [...]

A thought on my month in Vienna (in 1987).
A very nice clean safe city full of nice people. However there are two extremely ugly buildings in Vienna. I tried to find a photo googling Vienna skyline but they seem to have been carefully kept off the web. They are huge [...]

What is the value of learning a second language aside from the obvious practical benefits : the fact that you can talk to people who don’t speak your first language, can read things which have not been translated, can politely talk to people who don’t find it easy to speak your first language and can [...]

I would like to comment on an excerpt of a comment by Mike
“We might distinguish questions of fact (e.g. “which way will John vote at the next election?”) from questions of value (e.g. “is Blair’s outlook better than Brown’s?) by noting that the answers to factual questions may be true or false, but that the [...]

Paul Samuelson is very smart but not always polite. When praising John Kenneth Galbraith he wrote something like “it would be wonderful to write his obituary” which only meant that it was enjoyable to write a encominium on Galbraith and any other more literal interpretation would be incorrect, funny and amusing to Prof Galbraith. [...]

I just read that a 4 year long investigation of Silvio Berlusconi was completed and that the investigating magistrates conclude that he missappropriated and did not pay taxes on “276,9 milioni di dollari, 9,4 miliardi di lire, 13,5 milioni di franchi svizzeri, 2 milioni di franchi francesi, 548.000 fiorini olandesi, a cui si aggiungono altre [...]

First I should say, as always, that I use blogs to write about things I know nothing about. So let me try to understand what cultural relativism might be.
Basically it begijns with the idea that should not judge other cultures. I think the origen might be with Herder who I try to [...]