Herbert Spencer’s Hat Trick
Jun 19A correspondent writes: Saints be praised! Herbert Spencer has received a surprisingly positive and balanced assessment in a ‘popular’ source. 2012 must be the end of time! The article is actually fairly positive (albeit superficial) about Spencer’s ideas, but makes Spencer the person sound a bit of a jerk. But that’s fair, because he was.
What Did You Do Over Summer Break?
May 28Monash undergraduate Amelia Fraser-McKelvie found the universe’s missing mass during hers.
The Lovely Bones
Feb 10I see that Jesse Byock’s 1995 article “Egil’s Bones” is now online. (See also this earlier piece.) The article helps to support the historical reliability of the Icelandic sagas by showing how an aspect of Egil’s Saga once considered fanciful – the protagonist’s skull’s invulnerability to axe-blows – may have a basis in fact. As [...]
Float Time, Part 3
Dec 26It’s not every day that I wake up to find Patri Friedman being quoted in my local newspaper; but this story actually made the Opelika-Auburn News this morning.
Eppur Si Muove
Sep 13The purge mentality at ARI appears to be alive and well; and it seems that the doctrine of Rand’s inerrancy in matters of philosophy has been extended to include an assertion of Peikoff’s inerrancy in matters of history of science. More info here, here, and here. David Kelley said everything that needed to be said [...]
Up With Teleology! Down With Anarchy! Sideways with the Hypothetical Calculus!
Aug 24Three more blasts from the past (all a bit more recent than my blast from Oscarville): First, two papers I wrote for a science course in college: “The Temptation of Ludwig Boltzmann” (a short sf story exploring the implications of Boltzmannian probability theory – though Amazon thinks it’s something else) and “Evolution: Chance or Teleology?” [...]
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