Online courses, media outreach, more great columnists – lots of good stuff happening at your friendly neighbourhood market anarchist think tank. If you can, please give ten dollars to C4SS for May expenses.
Archive | June, 2010
A Problem
The problem with elections is that the incumbents always win.
If not the present incumbents, then the future incumbents.
What About Smothered and Covered?
Ever wonder what the difference is between “isolated” and “scattered” thunderstorms in a weather forecast?
Well, it depends who you ask. The most popular answer, purportedly endorsed by the National Weather Service, is that it’s a matter of the probability of the thunderstorms’ occurrence. (See here and here.) But the WGN Weather Center says instead that it’s a matter of the likely geographical extent of such storms.
In either case, “isolated” apparently portends less soakage than “scattered.”
Roundup on BP
The next time someone tells you that the BP oil spill shows the dangers of a free market and/or the necessity of government intervention, send them to:
- Darian Worden here,
- Sheldon Richman here,
- Gary Chartier here,
- Alex Knight here, and
- Kevin Carson here, here, and here.
Please let me know in the comments section about other good commentaries I may have missed!
On a related note, this sign from an actual BP station is priceless. (The pic below is just a detail; click to see the whole thing.)
Ayncyclopedia
The entry on Ayn Rand that Neera Badhwar and I co-authored for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is now online.
While we each wrote a bit of everything, Neera was the principal author for the sections on ethics and social-political philosophy, as well as for the biographical section, while I was the principal author for the sections on metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics.
Looking the piece over I see that we devoted something like 35 paragraphs to metaphysics and epistemology, 34 paragraphs to ethics, and only 11 to social-political. That seems about right to me, but will probably surprise many readers who are accustomed to thinking of Rand as primarily a political thinker.
Anarchist Heads, Talking
Check out the latest on C4SS’s media outreach plans.