It’s one of those peculiarly gorgeous days here, when it’s difficult to stay at the desk tap-tapping. You know the kind of thing. After several days of rain, an interval, of scrubbed translucent dazzling blue sky and white clouds. So I gave up the struggle and went out for a walk along The Wall overlooking the water, islands, mountains, all that. And got a bonus. I was half-aware (my mind was elsewhere – probably musing on Richard Rorty) of hearing bird calls overhead, but I paid no heed – but then I noticed a couple of people ahead of me gazing upwards, so I looked, in plenty of time to see two large Vs of snow geese flying north. The … Read the rest

[Mopping streaming eyes] This is very amusing. Over at Panda’s Thumb.

Prof. Steve Steve holds the B. Amboo Chair in Creatoinformatics at the University of Ediacara. He has been nominated five times (only twice by himself) for the Nobel Prize and has received six Barnes and Noble gift certificates.

Read the whole thing. Admire Steve’s picture, too. And there’s the one on Scientific American’s surrender to the creationists. About time – elitist bastards!

Oh just read the whole site – there’s one good item after another. What do they think, that I’ve got all day to read their posts?!

And there is the NY Times article on the Imax theatres rejecting evolooshun movies.

People who follow trends at commercial

A bit from an essay of Susan Haack’s in Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, page 8.

And to inquire is to try to discover the truth of some question. But pseudo-inquiry is a phenomenon no less common than pseudo-belief…Peirce identifies one kind of pseudo-inquiry when he writes of ‘sham reasoning’ [Collected Papers, I. 57-58]: making a case for the truth of some proposition your commitment to which is already evidence- and argument-proof.

Yes. A neat summing-up. Also a neat expression of the basic, the as it were foundational principle of B&W – which could be called identification of and opposition to sham inquiry.

Also a neat, succint description of how Margaret Mead went wrong. I’ve just been … Read the rest