by Brian on June 14, 2006
The LA Times reports on the Philadelphia cheesesteak place that refuses to serve customers who don’t order in English. The message to customers is This is America. When Ordering “Speak English”. Just a few observations.
- I’m not sure what rule of English requires, or even permits, quote marks around the last two words in that sentence. I’m no prescriptivist, so I’m happy to be shown that this falls under some generally followed pattern, but it’s no pattern I’m familiar with.
- I’m very pleased that no place had a similar sign when I was trying to get fed in Paris using what could, charitably, be described as schoolboy French, as long as the schoolboy in question spent every class watching football rather than, say, studying French. And that pleasure is not just because if I had seen such a sign I’d have been like, Holy Cow, the Americans have captured Paris.
- This being the LA Times, they have to describe what a cheesesteak is: “a cholesterol-delivery device consisting of grilled strips of beef, melted cheese, onions and peppers on an Italian roll.” They also misquote the sign by removing the errant quote marks and adding a ‘please’. Those polite Southern Californians!
The BBC currently has a discussion of famous thought experiments in ethics, including Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist case, and a few variants on runaway trolley cars. As of this writing, over 12000 people had sent in their votes on the moral status of actions in the examples, and it is interesting to see what this (self-selected, non-random) sample of the folk think. I’ve got some comments on the results below the fold, but I’d rather everyone here went and voted before seeing the votes, so I’ve put them below the fold.
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by Brian on April 19, 2006
Language Log is having a book published of their best posts for the last few years. Although there won’t be anything new in this, it should be a fun record of what has long been to my mind one of the best academic blogs around.
I’m sure there are other examples of blogs turning into books, though I think this is the first time it’s happened to a blog that I read regularly. To be honest, it’s hard to think of many other blogs I read that would be even suitable for this treatment. (Perhaps CT is the only one, though not for my contributions!) Most political blogs are too focussed on the day to day aspects for there to be much value in a print publication. And most philosophy blogs tend to publish snippets, thoughts in progress and the like, which need a lot of polishing before they are ready for print. When I started blogging it was with the hope that it would genuinely be an alternative publishing source. That is, it would be a place where I put things that were finished pieces, but which wouldn’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t end up in traditional print journals. But in fact it has turned into a repository for transient thoughts, not a publishing place. Language Log has, to a large extent, gone the other way.
Which other blogs do people think are worthy of commemoration in dead-tree format?
by Brian on April 3, 2006
by Brian on March 14, 2006
“Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/03/income_inequali.html quotes “Paul Krugman”:http://krugman.page.nytimes.com/b/a/251584.htm on income inequality in America. (Note the Krugman link is behind the TimesSelect firewall.)
One of the truly strange features about discussions of inequality is the way people shy away from talking about the extent to which the gains from rising inequality have gone to a tiny, wealthy elite … A few days ago Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post — a good guy, and sensible — wrote about income inequality. As I did in my column just a few days earlier, “Feeling No Pain,” he emphasized the “retrospective income” distribution data released by the I.R.S. (Paper at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04asastr.pdf. Tables at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04asastr.xls.) As he pointed out, those data show that the share of income received by the top 10 percent of taxpayers rose from 33 percent in 1979 to 44 percent in 2003 … But Pearlstein stops there, leaving the impression that everyone in the top 10 percent was a big winner. In fact, there was hardly any rise in the share of income going to people between the 90th and 95th percentiles: almost all the gain went to the top 5 percent. And most of the gain went to a very small elite. The income share of the top 1 percent went from 9.6 to 17.5 percent, accounting for more than 70 percent of the top decile’s gain. The income share of the top 0.25 percent went from 4.9 to 10.5, accounting for a bit more than half the total gain.
Today “this story about income inequality in Australia”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/so-it-emisem-the-rich-what-gets-the-pleasure/2006/03/14/1142098463260.html was on the front page of The Age online.
Appearing to contradict claims that Australia is now a more egalitarian society, research by the Australian National University and Oxford University has concluded that the richest 1 per cent of the population has almost doubled its share of national wealth. The report, by ANU economist Andrew Leigh and Oxford’s Sir Anthony Atkinson, found that the wealthiest 1 per cent of Australians now took 9 per cent of national income, compared with a 5 per cent share in 1980.
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by Brian on February 5, 2006
by Brian on November 30, 2005
It’s around the time of year when undergraduates start thinking about graduate school, so naturally it’s the time of year for overheated blog posts on why going to grad school is meant to be a Very Bad Idea. The latest of these is from Dean Dad, who wants to Stop the Cycle of Abuse, i.e. stop people going to grad school. The reasons given are all fairly standard factoids – it’s a huge opportunity cost, it takes forever, and the job market is awful. None of these are good reasons, and it would be an awful decision to not apply to graduate schools because of posts like these.
Now it is true that going to grad school does block you off from doing many other things with your 20s, such as being a professional athelete. But for many people grad school days are some of the most enjoyable of their lives, so the fact they last a while is hardly a major cost. And the job market is, at least for a lot of grad students, much better than the horror stories you’ll find on blogs suggest. Here, for instance, are the placement records for recent years of the philosophy departments at Princeton, Rutgers, NYU and MIT, four of the best East Coast philosophy programs. Note that these are the complete records – they include everyone who graduated, not just those who got headline jobs.
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by Brian on November 26, 2005
Next Friday, Singapore plans to hang Van Tuong Nguyen, a 25 year old man from Glen Waverley, the Melbourne suburb where I grew up. Nguyen’s crime against the state of Singapore was to change planes in Singapore while en route from Cambodia to Australia carrying 396 grams of heroin. I can see, dimly, how doing this kind of thing could be a crime against Cambodia, and a crime against Australia, but I can’t see how this kind of action could justifiably be punished by Singapore, when he hadn’t even “passed through passport control into Singapore”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/singapores-deadly-sling/2005/10/24/1130006058340.html and clearly had no intention of doing so.
And of course even if we do think Singapore is justified in punishing Nguyen for his crimes, the idea that hanging is the appropriate punishment for attempting to sell heroin would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high. Either Singapore should hang people for putting together plans to commit murder, or they are implying that drug trading is worse than murder. Either option is nonsensical.
Anyway, at this stage the important thing isn’t to debate just how absurd Singapore’s position is, but to do something. “Amnesty International Australia”:http://www.amnesty.org.au/ has a number of links for writing to the salient Singaporese ministers to beg for them to change their minds. The very least one could expect our government to be doing is not doing more favours for the Singapore government while they plan to murder an Australian, but that seems “too much for John Howard”:http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/11/23/crime.singapore.reut/, even when proposed by one of his own MPs.
by Brian on October 15, 2005
Two stories from the “Sydney Morning Herald”:http://smh.com.au this morning tell us a lot about the Howard government. The “front page story”:http://smh.com.au/news/national/terrorist-laws-to-lock-up-objectors/2005/10/14/1128796712300.html concerns the government’s new anti-terror laws, and “the main feature”:http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the-real-deal/2005/10/14/1128796703087.html is about how to decode the government’s industrial relations policies.
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by Brian on October 11, 2005
Following up on Chris’s post, I thought I’d note an interesting contrast between how religion and politics mix in my home country and the country I work in.
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by Brian on October 5, 2005
Today sees “yet”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4312110.stm “another”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16825259%255E2703,00.html “round”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/unmasked-the-real-shakespeare/2005/10/05/1128191785837.html of stories about a claim to have discovered the real author of Shakespeare’s plays. Today’s candidate is Sir Henry Neville. A book claiming he is the author is about to be released by Brenda James and William Rubinstein.
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by Brian on September 22, 2005
Ted Barlow has just sent along word that he’s gotten out of Houston safely, and is now with his fiancee and dog in Washington, D.C.
I’m very pleased to hear that Ted is OK, and I hope everyone that everyone here knows will be just as safe in the days ahead.
by Brian on September 14, 2005
I agree entirely with Henry that blogging can be extremely useful for an young academic career, although perhaps not for exactly the same reasons.
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by Brian on June 22, 2005
Brad DeLong has “two”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/06/yes_bentham_got.html “posts”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/06/experience_mach.html up defending Richard Layard’s defence of Benthamism against criticism from Fontana Labs and Will Wilkinson. I think Brad is misinterpreting Bentham, so while his defence might be a defence of something interesting (say, preference utilitarianism) it isn’t much of a defence of Bentham.
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by Brian on June 14, 2005
The President of Cornell, Jeffrey Lehman, resigned in somewhat mysterious circumstances at the weekend. Lehman was the first Cornell alum to be President, and it had seemed like he was treating this as a job for life. But after just two years he has jumped off the ship, in his words because the “Board of Trustees and [he] have different approaches to how the university can best realize its long-term vision.” This isn’t maximally plausible. The best story on the background to Lehman’s departure is by “Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/06/13/cornell. I suspect there is still a bit more to this story to come out.