A stranger to truth

"Truth" is Stranger than Prediction, More Questionable than Causal Inference

Robert Luskin's article in this issue provides a useful service by appropriately qualifying several points I made in my 1986 American Journal of Political Science article. Whereas I focused on how to avoid common mistakes in quantitative political science, Luskin clarifies ways to extract some useful information from usually problematic statistics: correlation coefficients, standardized coeffic...

Xenon: no stranger to anaesthesia.

Xenon derives its name from the Greek for `stranger' because of its rarity, representing no more than 8.75 3 10% of the atmosphere or 0.0875 ppm. Discovered in 1898, it is manufactured by fractional distillation of air and is used commercially for lasers, high intensity lamps, ̄ash bulbs, jet propellant in the aerospace industry, X-ray tubes, and in medicine. The total amount of xenon in the atm...

Truth is Stranger than Science Fiction: The Quest for Knowledge in Andrei Tarkovskii’s Solaris and Stalker

This article explores Andrei Tarkovskii’s conception of truth in Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979) as part of his wider philosophical project concerning knowledge. The director’s epistemological views form a core dimension of his life and aesthetic as he strives towards what he considers a higher, spiritual ‘idea of knowing’. In his search for this idealised notion of truth, Tarkovskii uses the...

["I came as a stranger, will leave as a stranger." From alienation to hostility to foreigners in the young generation].

After a historical review of the discussion of the concept of strangeness and alienation since the beginning of the 19th century, the question of the background of the current discussion of "the alien" arises. The assumption is that the experience of strangeness and self-alienation took a qualitative and quantitative leap at the point in technological development when the dialectic between huma...

Female-to-female stranger rape: a case report.