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“PZ Myers”:http://pharyngula.org/comments/562_0_1_0_C/ has a delightful short story on what scientists do when presented with a ridiculous supernatural hypothesis that has testable empirical consequences.
As a philosopher I’d have been quite happy to dispatch that one from the armchair. That’s (part of) why they don’t teach my stuff in high-school science classes, and rightly so.
As many bloggers have noted over the years, one of the weaknesses of modern journalism is that in a political campaign journalists feel compelled to try and present an even-handed picture when evaluating the claims made by the leading candidates, even when one side is exaggerating while the other side is simply making things up. This “CNN/Money”:http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/12/news/economy/election_incomes/index.htm?cnn=yes article is a classic of the genre.
After watching his team lose three in a row to England, Brian Lara seems to have been inspired to return to his old form. As I write he’s on 361 not out. Now the big question is whether I’ll be able to get any work done today while I see what happens next. The game can be followed “here”:http://www.cricinfo.com/db/NEW/LIVE/frames/ENG_WI_T4_10-14APR2004.html. (“This story”:http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/12/1081621893367.html?from=storyrhs about Brian Lara and Matthew Hayden probably won’t appeal to everyone but I thought it was touching.)
This is turning into a trend. In the past few weeks we’ve seen new group blogs started by philosophy graduate students at Syracuse (“Orange Philosophy”:http://www.orangephilosophy.blogspot.com/), Rochester (“What is the Name of This Blog?”:http://urphilosophy.blogspot.com/) and now Brown (“Fake Barn Country”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/).
I’m sure all the Cool Kids have heard this already, but I only just found out about “Skeewiff’s”:http://skeewiff.com/main.html remix of the Soggy Bottom Boys’ “Man of Constant Sorrow”:http://skeewiff.free.fr/Skeewiffwhereartthou.mp3. That’s a 7.3MB download, but it’s well worth it. It is, at the very least, the best freely available song I’ve heard in a long time. And electronic remixes of bluegrass songs seems like such an obvious idea, I’m surprised it hasn’t been done before. (Or, perhaps more to the point, I’m surprised it hasn’t been brought to _my_ attention before.)
As “Sappho’s Breathing”:http://www.sapphosbreathing.com/archives/000381.html notes, Carlin Romano wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about “two recent collections of autobiographical memoirs by philosophers”:http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i31/31b01301.htm. There’s some interesting, and important points, to be made, so naturally I’d like to start with a cheap joke. Here’s a sample of what we’re likely to see if more philosophers turn their hand to autobiography.
bq. The facility of my pen (I write everything by hand!) has enabled me to produce a system of philosophical thought that is more many-sided, complex, and far-reaching than has been the case with any other living American philosopher. (Nicholas Rescher)
I’d be jealous of Rescher’s philosophical achievement if I wasn’t wittier, more charming, better looking and generally just a more excellent human being than any other living philosopher. “No, really.”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000063.html
I’d be more excited if he had started posting to “Language Log”:http://www.languagelog.net/, but even if we won’t be seeing flashes of linguistic brilliance, it’s still newsworthy that “Noam Chomsky has started a blog”:http://blog.zmag.org/ttt/. The introductory post is a little hard to decipher.
bq. This blog will include brief comments on diverse topics of concern in our time. They will sometimes come from the ZNet sustainer forum system where Noam interacts through a forum of his own, sometimes from direct submissions, sometimes culled from mail and other outlets — always from Noam Chomsky.
bq. Posted by Noam Chomsky
I wouldn’t have guessed that Noam Chomsky calls Noam Chomsky “Noam Chomsky”, but if it’s good enough for Rickey Henderson I guess it’s good enough for the Noam.
Hat tip: “NicoPitney”:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/3/24/223959/120 over at Kos.
Does anyone know if there’s a free electronic copy of Moore’s _Principia Ethica_ online anywhere? It should be out of copyright, so there’d be no legal reason it wouldn’t be posted, but maybe no one thought it important enough to convert to electronic form. I wanted to cut and paste some long sections because I got interested in the role of necessity and a priority in Moore’s meta-ethical views, and it would be more convenient to (a) not have to transcribe things and (b) be able to refer readers immediately to the passages I’m talking about.
Over at Anggarrgoon, “Claire”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/anggarrgoon/2004/03/23#a63 is worried about losing the hidden benefits of graduate school.
bq. I finished my dissertation today. … What excuse will I use now when I try to eat cereal with a fork? or have no clean clothes? or when I eat porridge for dinner? probably that I’m making the most of it before I stop being a grad student and have to be respectable…
Here’s a true story. When I was reading that a few hours ago, all the talk of food made me kinda hungry. So I headed over to the kitchen, washed a bowl, pulled out the cereal box, and then looked at the clock and realised a bowl of cardboard-flavoured cereal wasn’t what I needed at that time of day. But had I not noticed the clock, I think I’d think that being an academic would have been a pretty good excuse in the circumstances. So provided the job market for Australian linguists is as strong as it should be, Claire will have all the excuses she needs for a long long time.
More seriously, congratulations to Clare on finishing the thesis. I wonder how many people there are so far who have finished a PhD while maintaining an academic blog?
Most politicians have got the memo that says book-burning is a no-no, but it seems that not all of them realised that this was meant to extend to other forms of written expression as well. It seems an Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt with the slogan “It’s all relative in West Virginia” (picture below fold) has upset the West Virginia governor Bob Wise (D).
bq. “I write to you today to demand that you immediately remove this item from your stores and your print and online catalogues,” Wise wrote [to Abercrombie & Fitch]. “In addition, these shirts must be destroyed at once to avoid any possibility of resale and proof be given thereof.”(“link”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040322/ap_on_re_us/t_shirt_tussle)
I can see why some people would find the t-shirt offensive. And to be fair the governor is not advocating a law against it. But government officials campaigning for the destruction of written material because of what is written still makes me worried.
Story via “Jonathan Ichikawa”:http://ichikawa.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_ichikawa_archive.html#108000850987197971[1].
“Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_03_21_atrios_archive.html#107996352207644285 links to this “pretty good Wall Street journal article”:http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB107991342102561383-IJjgoNjlaF3oJ2rZnuIaKeBm4,00.html on the many conflicting accounts about the government’s immediate response to the September 11 attacks. Much of the confusion is probably due to the inevitable difficulty in remembering precise timelines, but I’d bet that at least some of the time some people are deliberately making things up.
One thing I didn’t know was that Cheney’s office is still sticking to the story that there was a credible threat to Air Force One that day. I thought that story had been officially inoperative for years now.
Here’s a semantic construction I hadn’t heard before. (This was on SportsCenter, or some sports show, on the weekend.)
bq. (1) Nevada upset Gonzaga by 19 points on Saturday.
That isn’t, or at least wasn’t, a sentence in my dialect.
“Language Hat”:http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001217.php has an excellent post up about a silly list of ‘mispronunciations’ that’s been apparently doing the rounds.
To get the full effect you really have to read the whole thing, but I will answer one of Mr. Hat’s questions. No, of course the author of the list doesn’t recommend pronouncing the _c_ in _Connecticut_. As every fule nose, the correct pronunciation is ON-NECK-TEA-COO.
Despite having lived my entire life in two of the leading basketball countries of the world, there are many things about basketball I still don’t understand. Like, how can a foul you intended to give not be an intentional foul? I suspect that’s one of those odd quirks of the interpretations like the outside strike that we just have to live with. But here’s a more serious question.
Why is it that players are always taken out of the game when they get into foul trouble?
If they stay in the game, the worst thing that can happen is they foul out. And the cost of fouling out is that you have to spend part of the game on the bench. So to avoid the risk of the player spending a chunk of time on the bench, you make them spend a chunk of time on the bench. This doesn’t obviously make sense.
Chris Sheil has been making lots of excellent points in his running review of “The”:http://backpagesblog.com/weblog/archives/000295.html “Howard”:http://backpagesblog.com/weblog/archives/000309.html “Years”:http://backpagesblog.com/weblog/archives/000341.html. I’m not sure how much interest this will have to our one or two non-Australian readers, but it’s been an excellent series so far and I hope Chris keeps it going. It’s a real pleasure to see someone prepared to use the freedoms of the blog format to spell out all the things they want to say rather than compress them into a soundbite length post.
Gabe Wildau, a (real-life) Brown philosophy grad, and Jai Singh have a smart-looking blog called “Flexible Response”:http://flexibleresponse.blogspot.com/. It’s early days, but so far they look like they’re doing a good job putting into practice the aggressive liberalism “the Gadflyer”:http://gadflyer.com/ is campaigning for.