Stanley Fish has an interesting take on the Larry Summers matter. (You don’t mind if I call him Larry do you? Everyone else does. I’m not pretending I know him, it’s just that it’s easier than trying to remember whether he spells it Laurence or Lawrence. Plus it sounds so much more friendly, and knowing, and American, and as if I might be important enough to know him, which I’m not.)

It is only if Summers’ performance at the January 14th conference (where he wondered if the underrepresentation of women in the sciences and math might have a genetic basis) was intentional — it is only if he knew what he was doing — that he can be absolved of

The Fifth Carnival of the Godless is posted. And I’ve been meaning to point out this post at Normblog for days. He points out what seem (from the available evidence, e.g. what the article reports) like rather dubious bits of reasoning in an article about the possible evolutionary basis for religion.

There is one quite convincing comment in the article though. It gestures at something I often think.

Childish belief is one thing, but religious belief is embraced by people of all ages and is by no means the preserve of the uneducated. According to Boyer, the persistence of belief into adulthood is at least in part down to a presumption. “When you’re in a belief system, it’s not that

No comment department. Speaks for itself department. Christian Voice.

“It was a bad day when they let homosexuals in the Armed Forces. People there do not want to be objects of sexual attention from blokes they are sharing a trench or tent with.” He added: “It was an even worse day when they let women on the front line. They should be in the home. The man should be the leader in the family and the woman should be the daughter or wife under the authority of her father and then her husband.”

Yup. Men like you – they should be the authority. Yup.

“We would like to reach out to Muslims and tell them they cannot find salvation

And a little humour. Philip Stott tells us about a seminal new paper on climate change.

Abstract: the much-studied ‘Forest Period’ (Fp) persisted in southern England for only the briefest of geological time, being conservatively-dated to between October 14th, 1926 and October 11th, 1928, although some scholars argue that ‘Forest’ remnants may have survived on, and around, tumuli, or small mounds [see: Margot Mythenmaker, 1958. “The utopia of ‘enchanted places’ revisited.” The Panenic Review, Vol. 56(2), [1958] 1959, pp. 3-9]…

Despite the undoubted geological brevity of the ‘Forest Period’, Kaninchen postulates that it is possible to recognise no fewer than seven (7) different climatic phases (Phases FpI to FpVII) for the ‘Forest Period’ (Fp):

(a) Phase

And speaking of self-fulfilling prophecies…We were speaking of them the other day in High Tension and ever since I keep bumping into them. You know how that goes, when you mention something or learn a new word and immediately afterward it’s everywhere. It’s been happening to me with that word ‘quotidian’ which I was told is a very rare, peculiar word – I keep hearing and reading it. It doesn’t seem to be all that rare. And self-fulfilling prophecy is everywhere too. There was that Robert Frank article in the NY Times a few days ago (which unfortunately has now gone into the archive and which the link generator never generated a link for, so I can’t quote from … Read the rest