Random noticey bits

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.—H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Unfortunately I was never granted that mercy, and I see connections everywhere. That it might be connected to my anxiety disorder, is basically the premise of Monk. But here's a few of the things I noticed.

• Shinto, and indeed all traditional, non-transcendental religions (so, Native American and "animist" religions, folk religions, ancient paganism, but not Christianity, Buddhism, or {probably} Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism), can have their ethics summed up in one sentence:
  

  "All of human society is a Nash equilibrium."

  Think about it. A Nash equilibrium is a state of affairs where no individual will improve his chances of success by acting unilaterally. In Shinto, it's not even good to do nice things unilaterally, since that puts people in your debt, and if they can't pay it off, they'll resent it.


• Karl Popper, the vastly overrated philosopher of science, established falsifiability as the standard of science. It's not without its value as a standard, but it can't be used as an Occam-style "Razor".
  
  Here's why.
  
  So, apparently they managed to disprove one of Michael Behe's chief Intelligent Design arguments, irreducible complexity, by producing something he said was irreducibly complex in random circumstances. Thus, by Popper's standard, ID was science, it was just wrong. So far so good.
  
  Now how exactly would we disprove Darwinism?
  
  Somehow it seems to me that anything that says ID is more science than Darwin is, is probably not a friend to the kind of science-fetishists who think Popper was so brilliant.
  
  I say ditch Popper, keep Darwin, and ignore ID. As theoretical particle physicist Stephen Barr essentially said of ID, "Life is where you're looking for the signs of design? And what about the ten billion years before it showed up?" Course, that also kinda blows those Darwin-fetishizing atheists out of the water, too. See, if Darwin is an adequate explanation of the entire universe, not just one aspect of the tiny part of it that's alive, then LBJ's Great Society is an adequate explanation of America, and we have no need of the hypothesis of the Founding Fathers.


• So, linguistic note. When people pronounce Iran and Iraq as Airann and Airack, they're actually being more correct and consistent, for English.
  
  See, ever since the Great Vowel Shift, long vowels in English, other than E, have become diphthongs (A is ei, I is ai, O is ou, and U is...iu? jü?).
  
  Anyway, there's a rule in English, similar to rules in several other Germanic languages, that vowels before single medial consonants are long. That's the difference between the English pronunciations of "irate" and "irritable". I think it might actually be why final-silent-E makes the preceding vowel long: because it makes the final consonant orthographically medial.