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And now for something completely different, The Guardian on what six to eight year olds think of classic rock. Here are some sample responses, but the whole thing is very amusing.
Smells Like Teen Spirit
It’s making me think about doing bad things like putting snowballs down my sister’s back.
Anarchy in the U.K.
He sounds like the baddie in Scooby Doo at the end.
As Daniel noted a while back on CT, the election markets that have opened so far aren’t efficient enough to prevent arbitrage opportunities. This point now seems to have been noticed by more mainstream commentators.
But whatever the reason, there is a significant pricing difference between these two markets [Tradesports and the IEM] — an arbitrage opportunity that you’d expect some savvy trader to take advantage of. Yes, the contracts are constructed a bit differently, but surely there’s a way to go long Bush on Iowa, short him on Tradesports, and make some surefire coin.
The pinko Money magazine attributes the inefficiency to sheer irrationality on the part of the traders in each market. If that’s right then the added evidential value of these markets is roughly the same as star charts.
Via Mark Kleiman, Rasmussen Reports has the following poll out:
Bush vs Generic Democrat
Bush 42%
Democrat 49%
Other 3%
Unsure 6%
There’s two big questions about this before we draw any conclusions. First, are Rasmussen any good? Second, are these polls (incumbent vs generic) more or less reliable than head to head polls, e.g. Bush vs Kerry? For what it’s worth Rasmussen has Kerry winning that one 46-44 right now, though obviously 49-42 would be a much better position to be in.
Via CNN.
The state’s school superintendent has proposed striking the word evolution from Georgia’s science curriculum and replacing it with the phrase “biological changes over time.”
From the details it looks like this is repeating the Kansan tragedy as farce, and since the proposal has bipartisan opposition this farce probably won’t go far. But don’t you just love a country where scientific theories that are accepted universally within the relevant scientific community are the subject of partisan disagreements? If this were happening in a tiny unimportant country it would be the stuff of late-night comedy. Instead, well it probably is a little tragic.
This is a fairly rambling post on the syntax and semantics of ‘want to’ and ‘wanna’, so it’s almost all going below the fold. I would be interested to hear back if people agree or not with some of my judgments about the various cases.
Kaye Trammell and James Russell have noted that Blogger now has an inbuilt RSS feed – details here. Third-party RSS feeds for Blogger blogs have been pretty bad in the past, so hopefully this will be better. If you don’t know why RSS is good for you, read Kaye and Dave Winer. Let me add another reason – I (and I think many others) don’t read blogs without RSS feeds. Anyone who is running a Blogger blog should turn on this feature and display the feed link prominently.
This will mostly be of interest to philosophers and fellow travellers. The APA Pacific Divivision conference program is now online. This is worth noting for a couple of reasons. First, the conference is absolutely packed with good papers. Every session has, IMNSHO, multiple papers that are worth travelling to see. If you are undecided about whether to go to the conference, seeing the program should tip the balance. Second, there is a mini-conference on global justice running during and after the APA, organised by (among others) our own Harry Brighouse. This will be of interest to many CT readers I think. Since this does not entirely overlap the APA, those interested in it should make sure their travel plans allow them to attend. I imagine many attendees will have already booked their travel to the conference, but for those that have not, it is worth checking to see whether you want to stay around for the mini-conference after the main show.
Katherine at Obsidian Wings has several more excellent posts on the Maher Arar case. Here’s the editorial
We don’t know all the details or explanations, but we know that something terrible happened. Our government took a man from an airport in New York City and handed him over to Syria, where he was tortured for 10 months. I think I’ve made a decent case that he was probably innocent; that this was done with the knowledge and approval of fairly important government officials; and that this was not some freak accident or isolated occurrence. …
As Ted Barlow said last November, “I support the vigorous investigation and prosecution of terrorists and terrorist suspects. But if this isn’t over the line, then there is no line.” It is not acceptable to me for my country to send people to be tortured on scant evidence, or on evidence gained from other torture sessions.
Since whatever happens to Canadians can happen to Australians, and whatever can happen to Australians can happen to me, I have a selfish interest in taking this a bit seriously. (On that note, I saw in yesterday’s Washington Post that David Hicks has finally got to have one meeting with a lawyer. (Actually it’s three meetings with a military appointed lawyer according to this story.) After two years in custody. Hooray for due process!) Of course hideous behaviour by governments is hideous behaviour by governments whether the victims are people like me or not, but when they are it’s a little easier to feel appalled by it all.
Back on Arar, today it seems that Juliet O’Neill has (or perhaps will be) arrested over this story she wrote on Arar’s case. In more ficticious news the Feds have arrested Robert Novak for his role in leaking Valerie Plame’s name.
I was thinking of leaving my little rant about Colin McGinn somewhere where other Timberites might not get any blame for it, but since Chris mentioned it, I figure it’s worth reposting here. McGinn is a relatively famous British philosopher, now at Rutgers, who in the 1980s produced some influential material on the mind-body problem, although his more recent work has not attracted as much attention. For various reasons (including his meteoric rise through the profession, the accessibility of his theories, his wide ranging interests, and his willingness to produce harsh verdicts on other philosophers) he became fairly well-known in broader intellectual circles. And now he’s written an autobiography. This led to an interview in the Times of London. (Note this is now subscriber-only, but I’ve put most of the text on my site.) The most notable passage is:
“I won’t talk to my colleagues about philosophy. It is too boring to me,” he says.
But why?
“They are too stupid.”
I’m not sure if anyone reads updates at the bottom of the page, so I thought I’d link to Katherine’s three latest posts on Maher Arar (seven eight nine). Three quick points about these.
Every spring my main hobby is working out my travel plans for the summer. Right now I’m seriously considering a travel plan that involves, among other things, the following.
I don’t want to say The Age, my daily newspaper of choice, is sex-obsessed, but four of the five featured story on the sidebar this morning are:
Okey-Blokey, a story about drag kings.
Condoms ‘not sinful’ says a Belgian Cardinal.
Girls Say No to Sex
The return of the Bunny? on the rerise of the Playboy icon.
Pretty soon my hometown newspaper will be getting blocked by anti-porn filters.
From the NY Times:
Tim Hurd, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a branch of the Transportation Department, said a vehicle either met the specific technical requirements of being a light truck, or it did not.
There’s been much hand-wringing over Chris’s post and related links about the role having a blog might have when it comes to getting an academic job. I think it’s all much ado about nothing, but since I’ve done very well professionally out of blogging I suppose I might think that.