Comments on: Your Vocabulary Lesson

By: Jonathan Vos Post

Jonathan Vos Post — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:30:46 +0000

I agree with Bill Lee. However, I am not sure whether I am agreeing with the Bill Lee fictional character in the television series Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis (where math is used in ways never made clear for the non-standard topology of astronomical space); or some other Bill Lee; such as William Francis Lee III (born December 28, 1946), (nicknamed “Spaceman”), whom, as wikipedia reminds me, is an American athlete and retired Major League Baseball pitcher. Baseball being tied with Cricket as the most mathematical of major sports.

That Bill Lee played for the Boston Red Sox from 1969-1978 and the Montreal Expos from 1979-1982. On November 7, 2008, Lee was inducted into the Red Sox Hall of Fame as the team’s record-holder for most games pitched by a left-hander (321) and the third-highest win total (94) by a Red Sox southpaw.

In addition to his baseball success, Lee is known for his adherence to counterculture behavior, his antics both on and off the field, and his use of the Leephus pitch, a personalized variation of the eephus pitch.

Lee has written four books: The Wrong Stuff; Have Glove, Will Travel; The Little Red (Sox) Book: A Revisionist Red Sox History; and Baseball Eccentrics: the Most Entertaining, Outrageous, and Unforgettable Characters in the Game. In 2006, the documentary film Spaceman in Cuba featured Lee.

I heard him interviewed recently on NPR as to the pitching for of Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi when he threw his shoes at President George W. Bush during a news conference in Iraq on December 14, 2008. Bill Lee gave a good analysis of the motion, commenting on speed, going from low and inside to high and outside, and having “good pronation.”

In the latter case, pronation is a rotational movement of the forearm (at the radioulnar joint). But I could not shake the sense that Bill Lee had just made a great pun on pro-Nation.

By: Bill Lee

Bill Lee — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:06:47 +0000

I agree with Estraven above. Look at Wikis in entries other than English as they are often better (or lesser) than your target English entry by one author.

If you can’t read, e.g. Italian or French, other languages, then that is what the Mozilla Firefox attachment add-ons like FoxLingo and qtl are for–rough translations to another language.

By: Jonathan Vos Post

Jonathan Vos Post — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:15:59 +0000

See also: Husserl on the Apodictic Evidence of Ideal Laws, in The Selected Works of Arne Naess, Springer Netherlands
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4020-4519-6
Copyright 2005
ISBN 978-1-4020-3727-6 (Print)
978-1-4020-4519-6 (Online)

By: notedscholar

notedscholar — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:17:15 +0000

Mmm now this is interesting.

I think I would agree. But I would also point out the inherent subjectivity in apodicity.

That’s all. A much shorter comment for this one!

NS
http://sciencedefeated.wordpress.com/

By: Todd Trimble

Todd Trimble — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:11:39 +0000

I was familiar with the word in this sense: “The expression ‘apodictic’ is also sometimes applied to a style of argumentation in which a person presents his reasoning as being categorically true, even if it is not necessarily so.”

By: estraven

estraven — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:49:21 +0000

A suggestion: read the Wikipedia page in the other languages (if you can). The italian version is the more detailed one, and the french one has a fantastic example :-).