You'll be excused if you haven't heard that after 5 electrifying years, at the age of 27, Brandon Roy is retiring.  

 Does all evil begin with a lie?

That's the question that Joe Hubris will be posing to revellers May 21st, at this year's Trenton Avenue Arts Festival.  The festival is the premiere cultural event in East Kensington and is famous for its Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby.

Come to Joe Hubris' table and discuss the above question, buy an Information vs. Injustice tee shirt and enjoy some street philosophy.

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Cherry blossom viewing is the singular cultural event in Japan.  As if the Fourth of July were combined with Chinese new year and Mardi Gras and celebrated with a suspension of open-container laws in any convenient urban park.

 Repression just got a little harder.  Perhaps, it got a lot harder.
 
In the wake of the Tunisian unrest, the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak is on the verge of collapsing after thirty-years of almost unchallenged power.  Democratic activists in both countries used Twitter, cell phones and the Internet to organize “flash mob” protests.  They were soon joined by working class Egyptians.  The Mubarak took the extraordinary step of shutting down the Internet and cell phone networks for the entire country.
 
Too late.
 

There are many well done shows on TV (Madmen comes to mind) which I do not watch.  A show has to have something more to get me to tune in.  For six season, Lost had that.  I was completely blown away by the first 2 season.

This show introduced me to Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher who radically changed the world.  I am embarrassed to say I was unfamiliar with him, until the makers of Lost decided to use Easter Eggs to get people to google Philosophers, great classic and contemporary literature, and other cultural wonders.  This show had me online translating hieroglyphics.  It had me reading about ancient myths.  For those things, I give them my heartiest ovation.

This article is accompanied by the complete interview with Dr. Alejandro Jenkins.

Quantum physics is probably the most bizarre part of our description of the universe that is collectively known as "the standard model."  The field is concerned with the physics of the incredibly small, like atoms and the subatomic particles that they make up. 

Dr. Alejandro Jenkins is a post-doctorate researcher studying high-energy physics at Florida State University.  His work was featured on the cover of the January 2010 Scientific American.  He participated in this interview as part of the accompanying article on quantum immortality.  He is currently working on the application of quantum field theory to the physics of elementary particles, atomic nuclei and cosmology.

Quantum mechanics includes some of the most difficult concepts for laypeople (this one included) to understand.  Why do you think that is? 

Peter Lewis is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami.  He graciously provided the following answers as part of the accompanying article on quantum immortality.

In Young's experiment, why doesn't the box qualify as an observer? Isn't it observing the photons and recording their passage through the slits as well?

Coming of age beneath the foamy clouds and hoppy, verdant landscape of the Great Pacific Northwest, Joe Hubris has always had a soft spot in his heart (and liver) for beer. He is also a proud liberal, and a believer of the positive role government can and should play in peoples' lives.   That's what makes the news of last weeks beer raids in Philadelphia an even more sour brew to swallow.  It is truly ironic that this great capitals of liberalism has laws that treat our blessing-in-a-bottle as if they were written by members of the Liberty University board of trustees. 

There was a day, within the lifetimes of those among us, when there were no video games, no Internets, no Blue Ray, no DVRs, no FIOS, no Satellite TV, no DVD's, no VCR's, no cable, no broadcast TV, no Cd's, no MTV, no cassette tapes, no 8-tracks, no LP's no 45's, no 78's, no XM radio, no FM radio, no radio, period. 

In that day, the upright piano was the state-of-the-art in home entertainment technology.  In 1909, over 350,000 pianos were manufactured in the United States.  That's almost six times as many as in 2007, in a country with one-third the population.  The age of the piano came and went.  It, along with its partners the sheet music industry and the professional piano tuner, succumbed to the radio the gramophone, television, etc. 

The highlights of this decade have been too few and too far between. The lowlights, on the other hand...

9/11

The singular, headline event of the decade can be traced back to the fabulous fifties and our cold-war efforts to keep the Commies away from the Persian gulf.  Overthrowing the first democratic government in the Muslim world seemed so easy (and more importantly, so cheap) that the temptation to do it again would be too great.  There followed a pattern of supporting short term economic and global political goals at the expense of the human and civil rights of Muslims.  Sadly, America became a force for evil in that part of the world.  Even after the Soviet threat to the region was on the wane and then gone, we continued to support the most repressive governments in the world in a short-sighted effort to keep the magic stuff flowing. 

Something is real if it can be causally related to anything else that is real.  Our definition of real is constrained by our own observational limitations.  We can only base our knowledge of the world on our observations of it.  It is only through observations, that evidence for or against a particular position/hypothesis can be gotten.  It is true that what we experience when making an observation is not the thing observed, but an illusion, a reconstruction of reality based on information obtained by our senses and analyzed by our mind.  It is also irrelevant to this discussion.  The human mind has split the atom, written the Koran, eradicated polio, taken us to the moon, and reconstructed long-dead written languages,   It has also devised ever-more effect ways to commit murder, denuded the great forests of the Pacific Northwest, used misinformation to destroy the lives o

A parable to illustrate the limits and progress of science and human knowledge.

There is a community of intelligent beings who live in a place they call Cognita.  It's made up of two islands: Prima and Segunda.  Collectively, they call themselves the Cognitians.  Their world is composed of a variety of natural environments, full of life in a multitude of forms.  All the life on the two islands (and the waters surrounding them) evolved from a single common ancestor.  The Cognitians themselves descended from a single ancestor (the Proto-Cognitian) who was herself born of an earlier species of beings (the Pre-Proto-Cognitians or Precognitians).  All Cognitians were born on either Prima or Segunda and none has ever ventured beyond them. 

This World Series promises to be epic.  The best two teams in the league face off and there are almost too many back stories to list.

There are the cities.  One is the faded former center of American political and economic life.  One is the megalopolis capitol of the world.  One feels the shadow of the other.  One has too many threads flowing to pay more than a passing glance to the other.

There are the teams.  One is the most successful sports franchise in history, with 40 pennants and the beneficiary of the most famous curse in baseball.  The other has a history of winning that has been over-shadowed by another curse and the all-time record for losses.

The theory of natural selection has application beyond speciation and biological morphology, it can describe cultural and social institutions as well.  Take for example, the Roy Rogers restaurant chain.  Their fixin's bar is one of the great achievements of American fast food.  At one time, there were some 650 locations primarily in the mid-Atlantic region of the east coast.  Today, there are 52.  Almost half are located in a kind of commercial archipelago--the expressway service area.  Just as marsupials in Australia (the island continent) were shielded from the rise of placental mammals by the oceans, so Roy Rogers have only been able to survive in an economic niche.

2002 was the year the Raiders returned to the Superbowl.  It was bad luck and perhaps a sign of things to come that the coach on the other side of the field was the man who had put together the team.  Jon Gruden brought Tampa Bay its only Superbowl title after bolting the Raiders the previous year.  Even without Gruden, the team had been good enough to get that far.  Since then, not so much.

There has been much good news in the Philadelphia baseball world in the last year and some heartache.  Add to that some hubris.  Catching a home run ball is the dream of any baseball fan.  Even more so when it is your first trip to a major league game.  For 12-year-old Jennifer Valdivia, that dream came true at a Marlins-Phillies game on July 17th when Ryan Howard hit his 200th career homer at the fastest pace in Major League history.

Part Two: The Present

In our causally deterministic universe, all time can be divided into three categories: the unitary past, the unitary present and the unitary future.  The present is the most interesting of the three.  All moments spend some time as the past and future, but only one moment as the present.  J. M. E. McTaggart proposed this view of time as the A-Series theory of time (as opposed to the B-Series which breaks time into two categories: the past and present).

Part One: The Past

IF we live in a casually deterministic universe, then everything in the past that gave rise to the present really existed.  The past must be perfectly preserved as a record of what has come before the present.  Every event, all objects and all energy were actually there when the present swept past them.  In an infinitesimally small moment, the then-present became a part of history stored in a subsequent present in an ongoing process.  Our memories appear to mimic this process--imperfectly.  We live in the present, as does the universe.  We recall the past, as the universe does.  And we predict the future, which the universe also appears to do.

What is the Present?  The apparent motion of time in one direction, apart from an apparent asymmetry, leads us to the obvious question of how do we describe the past, present and future in a meaningful way.  Do these different "times" actually exist as separate things or are they an illusion created by our minds.  The best evidence is that the present does exist as an independent physical entity.  It must, otherwise there would be no way for our our minds to differentiate between it and other times. 

But if it does, what is it?  It is the forward edge of the time component of space-time.  It contains a perfect record of all past and present events and objects and it constructs the future based on that record.  In that sense, the future, while determinable by the present, does not actually exist until it becomes part of the present and then part of the past.

30 years ago, American conservatives were in the ascendancy.  The devil-worshipping hippies were banished to the fringes of American culture, selling organic food and practicing yoga.  The former liberal mainstream of the Democratic party had suffered the body blow of the Kennedy assassination and had seen their great society eaten alive by the war in Vietnam.  Incredibly, they had escaped the shadow of Watergate and elected their most promising president in decades.

Since YouTube was her downfall, it was only appropriate that Kari Ferrell, the "Hipster Grifter" appeared at her extradition hearing via closed-circuit TV.  It's standard procedure for the waiver hearings to be conducted without bringing the prisoner all the way to the CJC from State road.  Ferrell has taken grifting far.  She started out in her hometown of Salt Lake and managed to become one of their "most wanted."  She then managed to turn herself into a quasi-celebrity while stealing cellphones and duping hiptards from Prospect Heights to Park Slope.  And she was snared as only a hipster grifter could be.  A local musician who had been in contact with her lured her onto a Chinatown bus with a promise of a free ride to Portland.  When she arrived, officers from the 6th District were waiting.  She has since been held at the House of Detention here in Phi

Pro basketball fans from Astoria to Zigzag can take heart: the Blazers are back.  For those unfamiliar, here is a brief history of the team.  Born of fire and steel in 1970, the Portland Trailblazers have seen their share of ups and downs over the years.  The original team of Geoff Petrie, Rick Adelman and Sidney Wicks gave way to the Walton/Lucas Championship year.  Then came the Billy Ray Bates years, then the Sam Bowie draft. 

The Mad Max Trilogy (1979-1985; Director: George Miller; Starring: Mel Gibson, Tina Turner and Bruce Spence)

UPDATE October 14, 2009: In honor of his 200th birthday, a "missing link" of flying dinosaurs, which filled in a gap, millions of years long, between the earliest, primitive pterosaurs and those that followed has been named after him.  The gap was known in Darwin's time and the features of Darwinopterus reveal much about how these creatures evolved.