Time Out from English Grammar:12 OBJECTIVE READINGS ON NATURAL CATACLYSMS
AND A WOMAN’S ROLLER-COASTER RIDE IN REAL LIFE
During the first weekend of this month of August 2024, as torrential rains and typhoons lashed Metro Manila and many parts of the Philippine archipelago, I found time to marvel once again at two incredibly absorbing readings posted in Jose Carillo’s English Forum almost 13 years ago—“When We Cannot Predict” in
Edge.com and “The Roller Coaster Ride of My Life” by a pseudonymous Forum contributor.
“When We Cannot Predict” is a cutting-edge symposium in 2011 among 12 leading scientists, academics, and professional thinkers who shared their views about natural cataclysms, the probability of their happening, and the grave risks they bring to our life and well-being.
The symposium contributors were Bruce Parker, physical oceanographer; Kevin Kelly, editor-at-large of the technology magazine
Wired; Mary Catherine Bateson, cultural anthropologist and writer; Douglas Kenrick, psychology professor; Douglas Rushkoff, media analyst and documentary writer; Roger Schank, psychologist and computer scientist; Ed Regis, science writer and book author; Gregory Paul, independent science researcher and author; Eiko Ikegami, sociology professor; Rodney Brooks, emeritus professor of robotics; J. Doyne Farmer, chaos theory pioneer; and James J. O’Donnell, classicist and book author.
John Brockman,
Edge publisher and editor, quotes George Dyson, American nonfiction author and technology historian, speaking about the risks from natural cataclysms: “The question of preference for different kinds of fate—death by drowning vs. death by radiation; death by enemy fire vs. friendly fire, etc.; tolerance for automobile fatalities because they are ‘accidents’—is at the heart of this, and you have a lot of people at hand with something to say about that.”
“The Roller Coaster Ride of My Life,” is a 1,701-word, tell-all personal reminiscence by a Forum member—a career woman writing pseudonymously as Apa.Victory. She admits that until the age of 39, she avoided taking a roller-coaster ride altogether because she was “as scared as a pup to try one out” but, reminiscing at age 62 the ups and downs of her life, she declares: “I [really] didn’t need a roller-coaster ride, at least not an actual one, to experience it.”
Read “When We Cannot Predict” in Edge.com now!Read Apa.Victory’s “The Roller Coaster Ride of My Life” in the Forum now!The first part of this posting, "Coping with our inability to predict cataclysms," first appeared in the Time Out From English Grammar section of the Forum on April 10, 2011, https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=1379.0.
