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Weather: Mostly sunny. A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 80s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 20 percent. Saturday Night: Partly cloudy. A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening. Lows in the mid 60s. Chance of rain 20 percent. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
Arbor Day in Palm Coast’s Central Park at Town Center from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., free admission. The tree tent opens at 9 a.m. A Master Certified Arborist will be in the tree tent from 9 a.m.-noon, offering free guidance on proper pruning, placement, planting, and root-shaving techniques. To get a free tree, bring a non-perishable, non-expired human or pet food item to trade for the tree while quantities last! City of Palm Coast employees and volunteers will be available to assist with loading the trees into your vehicle. The native Monarch butterfly release will be at 11 a.m. Other fun activities are planned for all ages, including a butterfly tent, free arts and crafts, and goodie bags for the kids. There’ll be an Arbor Day photo contest. More details and events’ schedule here.
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at Wickline Park, 315 South 7th Street, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
The Flagler Beach All Stars hold their monthly beach clean-up starting at 9 a.m. in front of the Flagler Beach pier. All volunteers welcome.
The June 18th, 1964 Arrest of 16 Rabbis in St. Augustine: Palm Coast Historical Society and Museum Presents a Free Speaker Event: “The June 18th, 1964 Arrest of 16 Rabbis in St. Augustine… and Why It Matters” By Speaker Dr. Michael Butler. At the Palm Coast Community Center, 10 a.m. Free refreshments served at 9:30 a.m. Please register at www.parksandrec.fun or call 386-986-2323. Sponsored in part by Florida Humanities, the City of Palm Coast, and Visit Flagler
Sunshine and Sandals Social at Cornerstone: Every first Saturday we invite new residents out to learn everything about Flagler County at Cornerstone Center, 608 E. Moody Blvd, Bunnell, 1 to 2:30 p.m. We have a great time going over dog friendly beaches and parks, local social clubs you can be a part of as well as local favorite restaurants.
‘Hysteria,’ At Palm Coast’s City Repertory Theatre, 160 Cypress Point Parkway (City Marketplace, Suite B207), Palm Coast. Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for students. Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. except on Sundays, at 3 p.m. In this surprisingly touching and hilarious farce, step into the wild world of “Hysteria,” Terry Johnson’s clever and funny play that blends fact and fantasy through the uproarious collision of Salvador Dalí and Sigmund Freud’s brilliant minds. Prepare for unexpected twists, outrageous situations, and a rollercoaster of emotions in this riotous farce set in 1938 London.
The Palm Coast Songwriters Festival is scheduled for May 2-5 at the Daytona State College Amphitheater, 545 Colbert Lane, Palm Coast, and other venues, including JT’s Seafood Shack at 5224 North Oceanshore Boulevard. Check the schedule for details. Starting at 5 p.m. May 2, midday or earlier on May 3, 4 and 5, with nearly 40 HIT Songwriters with over 125 #1 HITS and hundreds of additional charted songs to their credit performing. Single-day tickets start at $25 per day. These great songwriters give the attendees the ability to peek behind the curtain and learn the story behind the songs, along with hearing the writers perform them as well.
‘First Date,’ at St. Augustine’s Limelight Theatre, 11 Old Mission Avenue, St. Augustine. 7:30 p.m., except on Sundays, at 2 p.m. Tickets are $32.50, including fees. Book tickets here. The 2012 musical takes the audience through the first meeting of Casey and Aaron, two 30-ish New York City singles set up by friends and family. The two have nothing in common: Aaron is a conservative banker, Jewish, and looking for a meaningful relationship, while Casey is an artist and a little too funky for Wall Street. With the influences of their friends and family (played out in their imaginations) as well as the effects of social media (Google, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube personified), this first date seems to be doomed. But with the help of a meddling but well-meaning waiter, Casey and Aaron might make a connection after all. With a contemporary rock score, FIRST DATE gleefully pokes fun at the mishaps and mistakes of blind dates and gives hope that there could be that one perfect moment.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
 Keep Their Lights On Over the Holidays: Flagler Cares, the social service non-profit celebrating its 10th anniversary, is marking the occasion with a fund-raiser to "Keep the Holiday Lights On" by encouraging people to sponsor one or more struggling household's electric bill for a month over the Christmas season. Each sponsorship amounts to $100 donation, with every cent going toward payment of a local power bill. See the donation page here. Every time another household is sponsored, a light goes on on top of a house at Flagler Cares' fundraising page. The goal of the fun-raiser, which Flagler Cares would happily exceed, is to support at least 100 families (10 households for each of the 10 years that Flagler Cares has been in existence). Flagler Cares will start taking applications for the utility fund later this month. Because of its existing programs, the organization already has procedures in place to vet people for this type of assistance, ensuring that only the needy qualify. |
Notably: “The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences,” wrote the physicist Eugene Wigner (cited in Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience), “is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it. It is not at all natural that ‘laws of nature’ exist, much less that man is able to discover them. The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.” But if there is to be a god, or something like a god, a creative force, a reason behind the Big Bang, can there be a more impartial, a more perfect god than math? The laws of math are immutable. They have always been and will always be, whether there is a math student applying them or not, whether they are discovered or not. It’s like dark matter: it’s always there (though is dark matter always there? Was it there before the big bang? Apparently not). Leave it to Wilson to throw ice on the concept: “Mathematics, for all its unchallengeable power in framing theory, is tautological. That is, every conclusion follows completely from its own premises, which may or may not have anything to do with the real world. Mathematicians invent and prove lemmas and theorems that lead to other lemmas and theorems, and onward with no end in sight.” But it also makes the infinite tangible. Isn’t that what pi is?
—P.T.
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The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
“The gentleman has had a long innings in philosophical theory, because he is associated with the Greek genius, because the virtue of contemplation acquired theological endorsement, and because the ideal of disinterested truth dignified the academic life. The gentleman is to be defined as one of a society of equals who live on slave labour, or at any rate upon the labour of men whose inferiority is unquestioned. It should be observed that this definition includes the saint and the sage, insofar as these men’s lives are contemplative rather than active Modern definitions of truth, such as those of pragmatism and instrumentalism, which are practical rather than contemplative, are inspired by industrialism as opposed to aristocracy. Whatever may be thought of a social system which tolerates slavery, it is to gentlemen in the above sense that we owe pure mathematics. The contemplative ideal, since it led to the creation of pure mathematics, was the source of a useful activity.”
–From Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (1945).
Deborah Coffey says
Best cartoon of the week.
Pogo says
@The Golden Rule
2+2=4
Except in Florida, where: 2+2=1645
https://www.wusf.org/environment/2024-05-01/climate-change-could-virtually-disappear-in-florida-at-least-according-to-state-law
Pogo says
@What Columbia students used to want
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/04/1249166885/remembering-paul-auster-through-his-time-as-an-npr-contributor
Ray W. says
Thank you, Mr. Tristam.
I have long accepted the idea that Einstein’s life was devoted to his hope of having a conversation with God, as he so eloquently put it. He argued that if he could discover what he termed a “unified field theory”, he could engage in his conversation.
Some physicists argue that Hawking’s String Theory is the closest we have to a unified field theory. Some physicists call it an “elegant unprovable” explanation.
If I understand the debate, without the existence of a unified field theory, theoretical mathematics cannot ever provide one “answer” to the workings of the universe to the exclusion of all possible other answers; the best theoretical mathematics can do is provide the best among many “solutions” to many problems. For example, our understanding of mathematics allows us to plan out with extraordinary precision the parameters necessary for a successful moon mission, within limits. That doesn’t mean that the classical physicists under Einstein are right and the quantum physicists under Bohr are wrong. No one has solved that debate in 100 years of trying.
One definition of answer “implies the satisfying of a question, demand, call, or need.”
One definition of solution is “a means of solving a problem or dealing with a difficult situation.”
To me, thinking that there is no more than one “answer” to a problem is short-sighted. Often, it is impossible to find the one answer to a problem, simply because there cannot be only one answer to certain problems. Sometimes, the only possible option is to accept that there are multiple solutions to a problem and the goal should be to select the best solution or the least bad solution from several or many competing solutions.
This is why I so commonly point out that there is a difference between logic and reason. Logic, both formal and informal, deductive and inductive, is designed to provide one answer to the exclusion of all other possibilities. In mathematics, 5×5 will always equal 25, to the exclusion of all other answers. But reason, which can rely on logic, is designed to permit us to determine the best, or the least bad, of two or more options. Reason is not designed to provide an absolute answer; it is designed to help us find the best, or least bad, solution.
If this is a correct presentation of the difference between an answer and a solution, is it possible to argue that those FlaglerLive commenters who pose overbroad comments such as “all Democrats are communists” as their only possible answer to a complex political problem do not understand that they are not providing an answer at all; they are merely posing but one of the many available solutions to their perceived problem? There has always been a time when some Democrats have self-identified as communists, but never a time when all did.
For example, a recent commenter wrote that the current administration, in one of its first acts, raised energy prices, to the detriment of us all. I provided a lengthy reply. I argued that OPEC+ has engaged in 38 months of marketplace manipulations starting in February 2021 in an effort to raise crude oil prices in the international crude oil marketplace. I accept that a very minor part of the energy pricing structure in the U.S. might be due to administrative decisions, but the vast majority of the short-term rise in the energy marketplace is due to external actions, not internal ones. Yes, if carbon regulations make it more expensive to burn coal in order to produce electricity, the overall price for energy produced by coal might ever so slightly rise, but since the percentage of electricity derived from coal has dropped from roughly 50% to under 17% in recent decades means that any additional regulation of coal-fired plants will have a smaller and smaller, if not negligible impact on the overall national cost for electricity. Fluctuations in natural gas prices is far more determinative of national energy pricing. Since solar and wind power electricity now costs less than half of what coal costs to produce electricity, anything that increases solar and wind power implementation is better for our national economy than burning coal ever will be. Let’s face it. Even if all regulation were removed from coal-powered plants, they would remain less efficient than today’s utility-grade solar and wind facilities.
Here’s another example. In my youth, I became aware of the theory of “peak oil.” Presented in a paper published in the 50’s, the maxim was widely accepted in the energy industry until new fracking compounds were discovered and patented in the mid-2000’s. EIA figures show the following North Dakota oil production, in annual figures:
1984: 52,652,000 barrels.
1994: 27,575,000 barrels.
2004: 31,152,000 barrels.
2014: 394,623,000 barrels.
2023: 432,735,000 barrels.
Between 2004 and 2023, overall North Dakota crude oil production increased fourteen-fold. Yet, pipeline capacity to transport all that additional extracted oil has not increased enough to handle the additional product. Much of the increased capacity must be transported from the Bakken shale fields by rail tank cars.
National crude oil production is at an all-time high of 13.2 million barrels per day on average for the year.
Just what about this increase in energy production offers any proof that the current administration raised energy prices? How can we have so many gullible Flaglerlive commenters?
Is it possible that they read something without understanding what it means, and they take what they read as an absolute answer to be accepted without question and forwarded it, however flawed, to whomever will listen? Should they read everything as if it is just one possible of many possible solutions and take additional efforts to determine its “truth”?
Does this offer one possible explanation for why I pose so many questions in my comments?
One of the great issues of this election season, as it is in so many prior election seasons, is whether we are better off than we were four years ago. I argue that on a national scale, the best answer is that we are better off. I accept that on a personal scale, there are many who are not better off, for the normal obvious reasons.
Fortune published an article interpreting yesterday’s April jobs report. I selected two quotes from economists for consideration by FlaglerLive readers:
“Today’s employment report was weaker than expected, the first material ‘downside surprise’ in over two years. Yet, the weakness was not so weak to suggest the labor market is rolling over,” [George] Mateyo told Fortune via e-mail. ‘It was a slowdown that the Fed and many market participants have been wanting for some time.”
“‘For those grappling with renewed stagflation fears, this payrolls report supports what Powell (Fed chair) said earlier this week about not seeing the ‘stag’ or the ”-flation’ right now. Solid jobs gains, cooler wage pressures,’ Elyse Ausenbaugh, head of investment strategy at JPMorgan Wealth Management, told Fortune via e-mail.”
Is it possible that we will, as a national economy, still have a “soft landing?” Some economists are beginning to think that there might be a chance of avoiding a even a “soft landing”, that our national economy will simply act as a normal economy without getting close to a recession or close to a soft landing. I am not arguing that these few economists are right. I accept that recent polls of prominent economists place the risk of recession at 30% later this year or next. Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, accepts the polls, so I accept them. But the 30% number is down from nearly 100% several years ago and it has steadily dropped.
Is it reasonable to argue that our national economy is strong right now? Is it reasonable to argue that our national economy is the strongest in the world, even if it is not as strong as it could be? Is it reasonable to argue that we, as a country, are far better off than we were four years ago?
James says
“… I have long accepted the idea that Einstein’s life was devoted to his hope of having a conversation with God…”
From the “I think, therefore I am” department…
And I always thought he was talking to Gauss?
Well, as sad as it might be to one day learn of Knuth’s passing, at least Gauss will have someone to talk to. :-)