Blogging on and off since 2003
From TPM:
As if the dynamic of the conflict wasn’t complex enough, U.S. troops are now interceding in a gunfight between Iraqi Interior Ministry forces and employees of U.S. private security firm.
Great.
Words like “incompetence” and “quagmire” seem pathetically inadequate.
Mark Vernon has posted an excellent piece on the state of philosophy today. I won’t try to summarize it, because he covers a lot of ground, and I couldn’t do him justice. Moreover the picture is, at times, downright paradoxical. For example, Martha Nussbaum believes that philosophers are doing good, relevant, accessible work, but it isn’t being communicated:
The problem she believes is not philosophy’s: it is the media. ‘Entities such as the New York Times Book Review and other major newspapers are becoming less and less interested in the work of philosophers,’ she says, noting too that the reverse is true in continental Europe and countries like India.
Well, OK. But on the other hand…
… popular philosophy is a growth area in publishing. It is hard to supply precise figures, since many books with philosophical content fall into other categories, but in the UK at least the overall trend for the past 5 years is up. ‘There is something of a backlash against celebrity non-fiction at the moment,’ explains Giles Elliot, charts and media editor at The Bookseller. ‘The book industry is very interested in intellectual non-fiction.’
And I think I’d agree: the amount of space in the biggest bookstores that is devoted to philosophy seems to have grown significantly over the last 20 years.
Anyway, it’s an excellent article which I highly recommend, as well as his interviews with Dan Dennett and others. And like so many thought-provoking pieces, I found it via the RSS feed from Butterflies and Wheels.
Charlie Rose interviews Christopher Hitchens about Iraq, religion, and Jefferson.
Herewith a handful of pics taken when I was back in Massachusetts last weekend. They show Tommy at Children’s Hospital, visiting the Franklin Park Zoo, and playing in the local park (when the sun finally came out on Sunday).
Monty Python underestimated the Finns. I think that at some point in our lives, each of us has hummed a private song just like this….
P.S. Save yourself a minute or so: when the video fades to black, about 90 seconds before the end, that’s it: it’s over. Perhaps the uninterrupted darkness is meant to evoke the Finnish winter…
You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule. I’m not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future.
Scientific Atheist
92% Militant Atheist
75% Spiritual Atheist
58% Apathetic Atheist
50% Angry Atheist
33% Agnostic
25% Theist
17% What kind of atheist are you?
created with QuizFarm.com
Sue Weber reports that “PAL01 is finally coming down.” Boy, that takes me back…..
The staff at Beliefnet emailed me (and, presumably, a bunch of other bloggers) to invite us to link to an interview with Christopher Hitchens. ((Do others bloggers get spammed with suggestions as to what they should blog about?)) I read it, and I’m happy to do so: he’s in good form. They also suggested that “my readers” (hello out there!) might enjoy their “Atheist or Believer” quiz. Hmmm… didn’t I take this one a couple of years ago? Let’s see… yep, same questions, including the ridiculously equivocal ones. Anyway, my result was unchanged: Adamant Atheist. What a surprise.
I just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.2. The only issue that I ran into was that the Category Cloud widget didn’t work until I upgraded from 1.1.1 to 1.3. Otherwise, it was completely painless: deactivate plugins, unpack the distro zip on top of the existing files, run the upgrade.php script, and reactivate plugins. ((Remembering to jot down which plugins I was running before the upgrade…)) No, I didn’t make a backup, although perhaps a zfs snapshot would have been prudent….
As to the new features: having sidebar widgets built-in is nice, and the drag-and-drop widget editor now works properly in Safari. On the other hand, I’m not sure about the new preview mode: it’s more accurate, but I miss having the HTML and output on the same page. We’ll see. Having full ATOM support is most welcome, and overall I think that 2.2 is a clear step forward.
From sfgate:
Based on current spending trends, California’s prison budget will overtake spending on the state’s universities in five years. No other big state ((The article notes that several small states already spend about the same on prisons and state colleges – including Massachusetts!)) in the country spends close to as much on its prisons compared with universities.