The novel I’m reading at the moment is full of stuff about multiverses, alternate realities and quantum physics, and maybe I’ll post about it in a few days. It was a shock to put the book down, leave the garden, do some surfing and “almost immediately read this by Tim Burke”:http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/perma72704.html :

bq. If Kerry is elected, and imposes a kind of extremist political vision root and branch upon the Americans who oppose him….

In what bizarre possible world might Kerry impose an “extremist political vision”? Perhaps one in which he’s actually “a reptoid alien disguised as a human?”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke To be fair to Tim, the hypothesis (of extremism rather than reptilism) is one that he dismisses, if only on the grounds that the Republicans have a solid majority! And there are some worthy sentiments in his post. But the very idea that Kerry, who, in European terms is a moderate conservative — and who won’t even “impose” such sensible ideas as “socialized medicine” — might seek to advance an “extremist vision”, shows how disconnected from reality American political discourse is becoming.

[UPDATE: I seem to have read Tim’s post rather too hastily. See comments for details]

Over at the Volokh conspiracy, Randy Barnett poses the question of what Libertarianism as a political philosophy tells us about foreign policy, and comes up with the conclusion “not much”, particularly in relation to war. He says his views are tentative and invites others to contribute to the debate. I’ll accept, partly because it’s intellectually interesting, partly because Jim Henley (who could, I think have done a much better job) has gone into hiatus, and partly because I think internationalism (at least my version of it) shares some points in common with libertarianism, while being opposed on others.

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Since things seem to be pretty low-key around here, you’ll excuse me if I vent a little. Last night I got a call from a kind neighbor letting me know that it seemed as though one of my windows had shattered. I was in the office finishing a paper to meet a deadline so the timing wasn’t perfect, but really, is there ever a good time for that kind of a call? I decided to head home and check things out. To my dismay I found this (or for a bit more artistic version, this). It is completely unclear what may have caused it. My best guess is a bird although there are no traces anywhere (the neighbors were on their balcony when all this happened and didn’t see anything except for the window starting to break up into pieces after a loud bang). This is definitely one downside of home ownership.. and a clear example of why one must always have some money on hand in a checking account. In addition to the lost $$ a really annoying part is the logistics of sitting around waiting for the glass company and the anxiety produced by not having any idea about the costs. Any upsides? I got to meet some nice neighbors and also learned that I have double-pane windows (a very good thing in such a situation, indeed).

So now I’m left wondering whether I should cut back on some of the fun stuff I was going to do in Princeton and NYC in the next few weeks.. to balance out the costs.. or just accept the fact that trying to save on any of what I was going to do would make not a dent in this additional expense so I should just deal with it and move on. Uhm, yeah, probably the latter.

Congratulations to Norman Geras, who “has now been blogging for a year”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/first_anniversa.html .

“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/archives/001738.html passes on the sad news that John Passmore has died. “Here”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10266391%255E30417,00.html is _The Australian’s_ obituary. If any others appear I’ll try to update this post with links to them.

Hello from a motel in “Little Rock, Arkansas”:http://www.littlerock.com/, which turns out to have free ethernet. (The motel, not the city.) Today’s route ran from near “Salem, SC”:http://www.sciway.net/city/salem.html, up “I-85”:http://www.ncroads.com/interst/ih085.htm to “Spartanburg, SC”:http://www.cityofspartanburg.org/ where I picked up “I-26”:http://www.ncdot.org/projects/I26Connector/ to “Asheville, NC”:http://www.asheville.com/, where you hit “I-40”:http://www.interstate-guide.com/i-040.html. The drive across the “Smokies”:http://www.nps.gov/grsm/ was beautiful, though there were some brutally heavy rainstorms. Then I drove across the whole of Tennessee, lengthways. The first city was “Knoxville”:http://www.knoxville.org/. I swear the smug looking guy in the fancy sportscar who cut me off around there “looked familiar”:http://www.instapundit.com. The longer it went on, the flatter and less interesting Tennessee became, and the more I was forced to resort to strategies like singing in the car in order to keep myself awake. Well, to be honest maybe I didn’t need that much provocation. Here’s “forty seconds’ worth of video”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/trip/day1.mov from a day’s worth of driving. Tomorrow: On to “Amarillo”:http://www.amarillonet.com/! I wonder if we have any readers in Amarillo.

You haven’t seen it reported elsewhere, but on the Iowa Electronic Markets”, Kerry overtook Bush a couple of days ago. I don’t know if this is a “convention pop”; needless to say it would be pretty bad news for market efficiency if it were. In related news, the Kerry vote-share contract I bought a while ago is now back into profit, and I am still long. If/when I can be bothered reproducing the files, I will update my system’s equity curve – to be honest it doesn’t look that great, although one might argue that the system did the right thing in keeping me long.

The (London) Times “is running a series on Muslims in the UK”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1192019,00.html . Not profound stuff, but a useful antidote to the demonization that prevails in parts of the blogosphere. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that young Muslims have views about sex and alcohol (among other things) that resemble in important respects the views that many young Catholics have about contraception.[1]

fn1. The article is freely accessible from within the UK, but may require registration from elsewhere. My information about whether those attempting to access from elsewhere need to subscribe varies.

Ever since I learned to read, there’s been nothing better than to find a new author with a shelf full of books that I haven’t read[1]. Inevitably, though the day arrives when she (or he) becomes an old favourite with a shelf full of books I have read. The first I can remember was Rosemary Sutcliff; the most recent has been Patrick O’Brian. I’ve just reached the end of the Aubrey-Maturin series, though there are still a couple I’ve missed. I’ve always found finishing a series an ambiguous experience, and the following exchange from my blog has finally clarified the mixture of feelings.

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It’s been a great pleasure having Ross Silverman of The Bloviator as a guest poster this week. Ross is a genuine expert, and The Bloviator is an excellent addition to anyone’s blog diet. Many thanks to Ross.

This is sort of a follow up to “Brian Leiter’s post”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/archives/001665.html on philosophy blogs in Newsweek. And equally belated.

Last week the Sydney Morning Herald ran an article by Paul Davies about “the possibility that our universe is a simulation”:http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/21/1090089219062.html. What was interesting, to me at least, was that the article cited Nick Bostrom’s argument to this effect in _The Philosophical Quarterly_. (An online version of Bostrom’s paper is “here”:http://www.simulation-argument.com/.) It isn’t every day you see a philosophy journal cited in the morning newspaper. Sadly Davies didn’t cite, or even talk about, my “refutation of Bostrom’s argument”:http://brian.weatherson.net/sims.pdf also in _The Philosophical Quarterly_. So I thought I may as well take the chance to revisit that debate and say what I thought was most important about it. Anyone who wants to write to the SMH making either of the points below is much more than welcome!

(Blog history note: I first found out about Bostrom’s paper through a chain of links starting with “Instapundit”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/003465.php, which probably makes my paper the first philosophy paper to be the result of a blog entry.)

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I half-assume that most of you listen to BBC7 all the time, but that can’t be right. In its infancy The Economist very kindly referred to it as middle-brow, but I know that’s not true because my tastes are firmly lower-middle-brow, and it could have been programmed just for me. So for those of you who missed it, I have to belatedly alert you to a collection of the funniest sketches of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (sroll down the page), both, alas, no longer with us. Americans, in particular, who might be forgiven for believing that Dudley Moore was a talentless moron, will find conclusive evidence to the contrary. The rest of us can just wonder what on earth happened.

On Friday, George Lakoff of the Rockridge Instutute appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers to discuss the need for Progressives to improve their ability to get their message out to the American people. Specifically, he says they must develop the ability to counter Conservatives’ ruthless efficiency and almost fanatical devotion to Staying On Message. In spite of the fact that the message may use terms which define something completely contrary to what they propose to do, Conservatives’ ability to claim the language in which the debate will take place both puts Progressives on the defensive and diminishes how the left’s position looks in the eyes of the public. Lakoff, who has written about this issue in The American Prospect, calls this “framing,”

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I thought I’d indulge my fantasy of joining the hard-core techie kids (like Kieran) by installing Linux on my home PC at the weekend. Bravely ignoring the concerns of my family — who feared for their own future access to the computer — I downloaded a disk image for Suse 9.1 (Personal edition) and rebooted from the CD-ROM. I even managed successfully to repartition my hard disk (and Windows still works). But under Linux I have no mouse (mine’s a Logitech Optical USB creature) and no network (despite faithfully copying down and reproducing details of DNS servers, gateways etc.). Much googling and initialization of modules later, I’m no further forward. The problem isn’t Linux as such, since Knoppix works fine direct from the CD, recognizing the rodent, happily working with other USB devices, and auto-configuring the network. But I’d like a “proper” version, nicely installed on my new partition, so that I can escape the “told you sos” and “what did you expects” of partner and children. All advice gratefully received.