21 February 2014
The Hollywood
actor and director Clint Eastwood appeared at the Republican National
Convention 2012 in Tampa on Thursday, 30 August 2012. He spoke ahead
of Mitt Romney who accepted his party's presidential nomination. The
actor's off-script performance, during which he talked with an empty
chair, was quite awkward. Among many strange sentences, the following
one appeared to refer to something familiar to me.
they are always devil's advocating this and bifurcating this and bifurcating that. You know all that stuff.
The transcript of Eastwood remarks can be found here. The keywords from that sentence bring to mind the following review article.
Claude Meunier and Idan Segev, "Playing the Devil's advocate: is the Hodgkin-Huxley model useful? ", Trends in Neurosciences, Vol. 25, No. 11, November 2002, pp. 558-563.
Here is the entire issue of the journal online, and the said article again.
The word "bifurcation" appears in that article three times. What a coincidence of keywords.
The word "bifurcation" appears in that article three times. What a coincidence of keywords.
Eastwood's choice of words, just like the entire rambling performance, was very unusual. I have not seen
any sensible explanation of it yet.
