On this day in 1616, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. But I put it that way because I’m suffering from heartburn and feeling very old today. (It is my little sister’s 51st birthday today!) Anyway, the book in question is Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and it was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.
As I’ve noted before, Copernicus had the right idea, but his theory was a mess. Since he assumed that the planets go around the sun in circles, his predictions weren’t good. It would take Johannes Kepler — who was working this all out just as Copernicus was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books — before we got a proper theory of the solar system.
I was thinking, though, that maybe it’s not wrong to withhold distressful information from people. To me, it is more a matter that the idea would never occur to me. That way of thinking is so foreign to me that I’ve never given it any real thought. Obviously, that’s mostly due to the time and place of my birth. But I know a lot of people who are always jumping to the conclusion less information is better. And I just find it bizarre.
Of course, it doesn’t appear that Copernicus’ book was banned because the Church was concerned that it was going to cause riots. It appears it was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books for the same reason that most government documents are classified: because it was embarrassing. It’s not like the Church had made countless reversals previously without everyone losing faith in the Church.
And note: this all happened over 70 years after the book was published. And the book was published after Copernicus died, because he was a careful man. And the Church didn’t care that much anyway. It was just that Galileo was making a lot of noise, and there are always people, as I said, keen to stop the flow of information.
I didn’t watch much of the Republican debate last night. From what I heard, it was like the one before: basically a street brawl. What I did see showed that the non-Trump candidates really don’t understand their party. They keep hammering away on Trump from the right, as though the Republican base really cares about the ideology of the party. I would think after all these months, everyone would understand: Trump is a conservative to the base because he is a jerk. He struts around like a dictator, and they love it. To them, he is an “every man” because they too would act that way if they had billions of dollars.
On this day in 1857, England and France started the 
As you are probably aware, I’m obsessed with Schopenhauer’s idea of the Will and how it overrides our rational facilities. In it’s most basic form, it comes down to this: we struggle through today so that we can struggle through tomorrow. Now obviously, Schopenhauer’s ideas predated Darwin and we understand why it is that we have this irrational compulsion to keep living: if we didn’t have it, we wouldn’t have survived as a species. Still, we are not hummingbirds. We have rational abilities. Yet we let this primordial instinct carry us on through lives that are very often not worth slogging through. But the universe could surprise us.
Peter Beinart is a liberalish writer who makes me wonder about our country. He was born into his job. He had the right parents, went to the right schools, and then, of course, New Republic hired him because he was liberish writer who could depend upon to be a war cheerleader that Andrew Sullivan so loved. That doesn’t mean he’s stupid. Not at all, in fact. Intelligence is mostly a matter of environment, and Beinart has had a great environment. I’m just saying that he wouldn’t be a contributing editor at The Atlantic and no one would have published his mediocre books. I’m saying that he might be writing for struggling daily if he had been raised by retail clerks from the central valley.
I know from experience that if I use an unusual word once, I will use it several other times. There is something about speaking and writing that is very mysterious. Indeed, as I’ve become a better writer, I’ve lost any sense that any of us know what we are doing. Control is something that only the very best poets exhibit, and in their cases, only because they write so very few words. Mostly, writing is a mess and the best we can hope for is clarity. But over the past few months, I’ve noticed the phrase “hoi polloi” used an excessive amount.
Ah, graduate school! There is much that I miss about it. Most people think that graduate school is hard work, but that’s not really true. Looking back on it, it seems like it was a lot of fooling around. As a physics undergrad, I worked very hard — harder than I ever did in my life. But graduate school was different. At least it was for me. I’m a creative guy. I didn’t have a hard time coming up with things to do. And that left a lot of time to do other stuff. That included things like 
INTERCAL is a real language. It is available on the computer that you are using right now. I guarantee it. And it is designed to annoy. For example, the compiler just ignores anything that it doesn’t understand. Normally, compilers complain. But not INTERCAL! It’s very easy going. As a result, a comment is any line of code that it doesn’t understand. But you have to be really careful, because if it does understand the code it will compile it. And then where will you be?
