Philosophy Wire: Lake Ellsworth, lake Vostok, “understanding”, coincidences…

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2012-12-24]: The project to drill through the ice-sheet to reach the hidden waters of Lake Ellsworth has been on hold for the past week after a boiler broke down. The scientists are eager to reach the lake which has been in isolation for more than half a million years, to see if life is sustained in extreme pressure conditions under total darkness. [source: BBC News] Like in the case of Lake Vostok again in Antarctica (see here), a small coincidence has halted humans from destroying an ecosystem just because they want to… “understand”. Pure bad luck? Or… Cosmic interference?

Update 27/12/2012: The mission was finally cancelled (see here). Coincidences, part II...

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Philosophy Wire: Bounty ship sunk again. The “curse” of twin sunken ships holding…

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2012-10-29]: An HMS Bounty replica ship was sunk due to hurricane Sandy, taking 2 sailors with it at the bottom of the sea [source: CNN News]. Old sailors new something when they were reluctant to give the name of a sunken ship to a new one… And surely the case of Titanic and Britannic was not an once-off coincidence…

(c) Philosophy WIRES - Commenting world news from philosophy's perspective...

The 100th monkey effect

Glycerine crystals which cannot be formulated in labs. When efforts reach a critical mass, suddently all laboratories in the world can create crystals by heating more than 100g of material! [1] Monkeys in a specific area learned by accident how to clean their food with water. When the 100th monkey learns the trick, suddently that knowledge is transferred to all the monkeys around the world! [2] Could Jung have discovered something more with his collective unconscious? What kind of fields bind the world together?