Following up on yesterday’s great “spiritual plane debate,” I see via Atrios and Carl Zimmer that Gregg Easterbrook may subscribe to the theory of Intelligent Design. Best known in the version presented by William Paley, this is the view that, as Easterbrook puts it, “organic biology [sic] is so phenomenally complex that it is illogical to assume that life created itself. There must have been some force providing guidance.”
Sorry to lower the tone, but Terry Wogan proimised that today he would have a world exclusive of the first radio play of ‘Let It Be’ from the ‘new’ Beatles album on Wake Up To Wogan. You have to listen on the Listen Again feature you’ll find on the page. It is about 38 minutes into the show. My guess is that it’ll be available today only.
It’ll take a better ear than mine to identify precisely how it is superior to the Phil Spector version, but it is only the title track.
Bush Says Attacks Are A Sign of U.S. Progress.
Criteria for identifying a lack of progress to follow. Presumably will not include “fewer attacks.” (Via Billmon.)
Fresh from that thing about them greedy, violence-lovin’ jews (for which he paid a big price), Gregg Easterbrook posts something about God. We all know that bloggers say posts from people they like are “characteristically insightful.” Here we have Gregg Easterbrook being atypically sophomoric. Again.
bq. Cosmologists talk rather casually of alternate dimensions during the Big Bang or of the “many worlds” hypothesis in which there are billions of parallel universes, perhaps an infinite number, occupying an infinity of different dimensions. … Speculation about other dimensions is interesting, but there isn’t the slightest evidence–not a scintilla, as lawyers say–that other dimensions are genuine. Nor is it clear what, exactly, other dimensions could be like on a physical basis. The whole idea of other dimensions is mushy, to say the least.
Hang on, did you just say the legal department will be arbitrating this issue? And where is this line of thought going, anyway?
Jacob Levy asks an interesting question about group blogs staffed by academics:
bq. For purposes of academic conflict-of-interest norms, what sort of relationship do co-bloggers have to one another?
He wonders whether people who post on the same blog should do things like review one another’s papers or write tenure letters and so on. I have a mental picture of a rapidly branching tree of hypothetical cases that needs to be pruned near the base. Things like tenure letters seem like an easy case: you’re supposed to disclose your relationship to the person you’re evaluating anyway. (“Prof. Healy’s ill-informed pot-shots have been a constant irritant in my comments threads for years, despite my numerous attempts to ban him.”) You’d just need to get over the hump of embarrassment about admitting you know someone through a blog.