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Up With Teleology! Down With Anarchy! Sideways with the Hypothetical Calculus!

By on August 24, 2010 1
Ludwig Boltzmann

Ludwig Boltzmann

Three 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?” (an essay on the spontaneous growth of physical order).

Next, a blast from my statist past: “Financing the Non-Coercive State,” an essay I wrote in (though not for) grad school, in which I decisively refute free-market anarchism!

Mosquerade

By on August 23, 2010 10

The next time you hear someone say, “It’s disrespectful to the victims of 9/11 to build near Ground Zero a monument to the religious ideas that motivated their murder,” tell them: “Darn right, we shouldn’t have any mosques or churches or synagogues in the area – it’s an insult to those victims of monotheist ideology.”

This is Your Brain on Stateless News

By on August 23, 2010 1

Center for a Stateless Society

Some C4SS-related items worth checking out: [Note that this does not mean that other C4SS-related items not listed here are not worth checking out!]

Please support the Center’s work if you can. $5 here and $10 there can be a lifesaver.

Dinner With the Doctor

By on August 23, 2010 0

I know some of my readers regard even idle speculation as spoilerrific, so …

SPOILER WARNING:

Doctor and Amy

Neil Gaiman is writing an episode for next season’s Doctor Who. (Yay!)

He’s had to cut over ten pages out of it. (Boo!)

He’s posted online a bit of dialogue that was cut. (Yay!)

Gaiman says this is spoiler-free, since it “tells you absolutely nothing about the story except that it now doesn’t have a scene with a bowl of food in it.” But of course that’s not quite true. We can infer, at least, that there are non-humanoid aliens in the story (since Amy would be unlikely to exclude humanoid aliens from the category of “people”), and that they are on sufficiently good terms with our protagonists to offer them food. (Of course prisoners get fed, so that doesn’t tell us all that much. The reference to “background radiation” makes me think of Daleks, but I can’t imagine Dalek cuisine being yummy even by Gallifreyan standards, and besides I somehow don’t expect a Dalek episode from Gaiman.)

Insofar As They’re Beings, Yes

By on August 20, 2010 19

The Rock of Eternity

Exchange last night in the elevator:

MY INTERLOCUTOR: What’s your field of study?

ME: Philosophy.

MY INTERLOCUTOR: Does that study, like, rocks and stuff?

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