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3. William Schaw, master of works and general warden

 “Major building projects, in Scotland as elsewhere, were usually under the control of master of works, who was in charge of administrative and financial affairs, while the technical supervion and organisation was in the hand of master mason. The separation of functions was not a rigid one, however, for master of works were often men with particular expertise and interest in architecture and sometime took an active part in designing buildings.”

 History of freemasonry, David Stevenson

UFO si teoria algoritmica a informatiei

Citind  de curand articolul lui Gregory J. Chatin  Information-Theoretic Computational Complexity unul din pargarafe m-a dus cu gandul la comunitatea UFO si efortul acestei comunitati de a construi sau impune o teorie care as fie acceptata de comunitatea stiintifica. Pargaraful respectiv suna astfel:

Solomonoff [7] and the author [9] proposed that the concept of complexity might make it possible to precisely formulate the situation that a scientist faces when he has made observations and wishes to understand them and make predictions. In order to do this the scientist searches for a theory that is in agreement with all his observations. We consider his observations to be represented by a binary string, and a theory to be a program that calculates this string. Scientists consider the simplest theory to be the best one, and that if a theory is too “ad hoc,” it is useless. How can we formulate these intuitions about the scientific method in a precise fashion? The simplicity of a theory is inversely proportional to the length of the program that constitutes it. That is to say, the best program for understanding or predicting observations is the shortest one that reproduces what the scientist has observed up to that moment. Also, if the program has the same number of bits as the observations, then it is useless, because it is too “ad hoc.” If a string of observations only has theories that are programs with the same length as the string of observations, then the observations are random, and can neither be comprehended nor predicted. They are what they are, and that is all; the scientist cannot have a theory in the proper sense of the concept; he can only show someone else what he observed and say “it was this.” 

Din acest punct de vedere, actualele teorii UFO sunt in cateogoria ad hoc. Daca la punctul de vedere al lui Solomonoff si Chatin se adauga si caracteristicile teoriei stiintifice in viziunea lui Karl Popper nu se poate vorbi de o teorie stiintifica in cazul UFO. Chiar si relaxand conditiile lui Karl Popper totusi teoriile UFO nu poate fi testabila, la acest fapt adaugandu-se faptul ca nu se poate vorbi de o metoda stiintifica in studierea fenomenului OZN.

Inginerii si Jihad-ul

Suna a banc a la Radio Erevan dar conform lucrarii “Engineers of Jihad” nu e. Lucrarea publicata in Noiembrie 2007 incearca sa demonstreze ca exista o legatura stransa intre pregatirea inginereasca si implicarea in activitatea diverselor grupuri islamice teroriste, sumarul lucrurii fiind urmatorul.

“We find that graduates from subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world, though not among the extremist Islamic groups which have emerged in Western countries more recently. We also find that engineers alone are strongly over-represented among graduates in violent groups in both realms. This is all the more puzzling for engineers are virtually absent from left-wing violent extremists and only present rather than over-represented among right-wing extremists. We consider four hypotheses that could explain this pattern. Is the engineers’ prominence among violent Islamists an accident of history amplified through network links, or do their technical skills make them attractive recruits? Do engineers have a ‘mindset’ that makes them a particularly good match for Islamism, or is their vigorous radicalization explained by the social conditions they endured in Islamic countries? We argue that the interaction between the last two causes is the most plausible explanation of our findings, casting a new light on the sources of Islamic extremism and grounding macro theories of radicalization in a micro-evelperspective.”