Journal Entry #1

On Monday 18.09 DDT Pro-Wrestling has organized a half-hour fight between Minoru Suzuki and Sanshiro Takagi on the 180mph Nozomi Shinkansen bullet train between Tokyo and Nagoya. DDT hired out the entire carriage for this match. It's not the first time this wrestling group has picked unusual spot for its bout. The group is famous for its out-of-ring fights: they’ve also organized battles in a bookshop and a campsite. Suzuki won this match on the train.

It’s interesting how nowadays different organizations try to attract public interest. It’s not just a match anymore, it’s a performance. In this case, that’s the point where sports become arts. Therefore, the area of knowledge related to this situation could be arts as well, and that’s the perspective from which I want to explore it.

The second-order knowledge question about this situation: How art should be regulated? In this situation both sportsmen remained unscathed and train undamaged, but the whole event was quite dangerous for all the participants, including onlookers. Usual wrestling fights with ambulance service teams and safe rings regularly end with injuries, how safety was provided in this case? Did the performance worth it? This question is significant, because it is related to human lives and health.

People, whose main values are safety and life would answer that art with such risks has to be banned. Person couldn’t choose being in danger. Less radical position on this question is requiring from the organization that is planning a performance determing all the risks and oblige all the participants sign the documents which states that they’re informed about the danger. The answer from ones, who find artworks more valuable for the society would be that artists can’t be restricted in any way.

how “eco-friendly” straws are dangerous??

I found an interesting article about how “eco-friendly” straws are dangerous in truth😮😮 They could contain toxic chemicals called polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Plant-based straws contain them due to unintentional contamination from soil, whereas plastic straws and straws made by stainless steel don’t contain PFAS. In this article we could find several references to research about hazard of this chemicals and their real content in straws made of paper or bamboo. If you are preoccupied about ecology and your health, but want to drink your iced latte with a straw, try reusable stainless steel straws.

A first-order knowledge question, this article is answering is: Are plant-based products less hazardous for people and environment? Unfortunately, the answer is no😔😔😢 According to the article, plant-based goods could worsen your health.

A second-knowledge question about this article could be: how does our assumptions about something changes after researching it? How does new research affect the previous knowledge? Referencing to the article, I could say that new knowledge could completely contradict previous. It complements our perception of the world.

Are some things unknowable?

Starting to think about unknowable, at first, I assured that there is no limits in getting knowledge for people. Although, after a sober reflection I found that there are some areas where we have some basic knowledge that we just assume. I'm not sure we could call it knowledge, cause its more just an assumption. Furthermore, it's almost impossible to clarify some historical obscurities without time traveling due to lack of remaining resources(( I'm not even mentioning future, which is full of unknown. Therefore, I personally believe that there are some unknowable things.

It's a calculator. I have HL chemistry and maths and SL physics in my curriculum, thus I use calculator every day. Every calculator, that you would try to use to divide any number by 0 will display an error. The number, which we should get dividing by 0 isn't defined. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We just don't know it. Moreover, we couldn't define it. This is just an example of thing, that we couldn't know due to contradictions to basiс laws of math. Basic laws, that are based on human logic and axioms that we just take on trust, because we couldn't explain them better than just accepting them. Undefining 0 corresponds to logic laws on which we rely on. So dividing by 0 becomes not just an example of smth unknowable, but an example of something that has to be unknowable by a definition, its meaning is to be undefined and this unknowability isn't a gap, it becomes a brick in our building of studying math and understanding the world generally.