"Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification." Karl Popper. Quoted in some thriller I picked up off the street. Poverty reigns. Beth, and Delia, and I perform for Mr. Larry Kammerman in the making of his movie yesterday. Now we penninless movie stars. Larry is reticent concerning the plot. I should rather guess that we shall be blown up in a Kiss Me Deadly denouement. (Hopefully Beth and Delia and I will escape harmful radiation by wading in the surf.) If I say that everything is surreally Baudrillardian why then I shall be accused of pretension... Actually I wonder what happens when you hit Baudrillard into Google.
Note: Had Vonnegut any notion of String Theory when he wrote Cat's Cradle?
Beth suggests to me that in Austin my derogatory usage of the term 'suit' causes concern. In Austin? Known to much of the world through the movie 'Slacker'? And C. Wright Mills wrote all his best stuff before I was born? Into this Wasteland, which was demarcated by my idiot Cousin Tom way before that?
I reason my strings must got all the wrong knots and I be in some other dimension which is why everything seems so fucked up and strange.
Ball of Twine Girl might justly criticize me in that I did learn such I know of Karl Popper in skool. George Botteril's Sociology of Science course in Aberystwyth (the University College of Wales), '78 - '80 sometime. Botteril was a chess player and pretty good apparently. He went away one time to play somewhere and he comes back with his neck bruised up ( 'hickeys' was the name for those in Texas when I was coming up, 'love bites' in England). I made mention of them to my classmates in the hall after the tutorial broke up (there were only three of us in the class) and I turned around to find Botteril right behind me. I was embarrassed and I can, interestingly, still feel the embarrassment, though, if it happened today, I wouldn't care at all.
What Popper is trying to do as I remember is offer some kind of strategy to soften the impact Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He wants Science somehow to correspond to 'Truth' in a way more firmly rooted than that in Kuhn's analysis.
It doesn't work out. Science ignores Karl Popper (e.g. string theory) and in doing so strengthens the status of Kuhn's paradigm. Or maybe something else.. I stayed drunk a lot in those days. I didn't do my homework...
2:15:25 PM [Macro error: The file "" wasn't found.]
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