Obscurity and Poetry

Obscurity on Obesity

Much research is underway on the links between diet and obesity. So too are long-running disputes among nutritionists on core questions about the relationship. This editorial reviews the state-of-play on four issues: what makes people fat, how to lose weight, how much do we eat, and what policies to adopt towards obesity. The practical consequence is that, at present, frontline health professio...

The Obscurity of Internal Reasons

© 2009 Stephen Finlay S ince its publication in 1979, Bernard Williams’ “Internal and External Reasons”1 has been one of the most influential and widely discussed papers in ethics. I suggest here that the paper’s argument has nevertheless been universally misunderstood.2 On the standard interpretations, his argument — which he subsequently elaborated and de...

The Dark Side of Security by Obscurity

MiFare Classic is the most popular contactless smart card with some 200 millions copies in circulation worldwide. At Esorics 2008 Dutch researchers showed that the underlying cipher Crypto-1 can be cracked in as little as 0.1 seconds if the attacker can eavesdrop the RF communications with the (genuine) reader. We discovered that a MiFare classic card can be cloned in a much more practical tota...

Pottery, Poetry, and Prophecy: An Essay on Biblical Poetry

OETRY is not only central in the title, but for the study of the Hebrew Bible. There is no intention here of disvaluing the prose of the Bible, which constitutes the first major literary composition in that medium ever produced, so far as I am aware, whether we speak of the so-called Court History and the J source of the Pentateuch of the 10th century B.C., or the composite whole which we may c...

On Poetry and Mind