Stuff From This Week

UPDATE: This post has finally been reconstructed. Enjoy!
UPDATE: Somewhere from a third to half of this post disappeared. I’ll rewrite that soon. But not today, as I’m (dramatic flourish) feeling ill!
It’s been a busy lazy week. Since there’s nothing new in Gordland, I thought I’d just dump some links. I don’t do this often, but [...]

Why Diamonds? Evolution, Instinctual Niches, Advertising, and the Killer App…

Some people might be thinking all I ever post about is my writing process. It’s true, I’ve been posting about that a lot recently, since I’ve had my head down and been pushing hard on that front.
But I do have other thoughts bouncing around in my head.
One of Mark’s posts on Scribes & Scoundrels, here:
http://www.markguppy.com/2007/08/bling.html
got [...]

Pre-Enlightenment “Rationality” (So-Called) and Aquinas’ “Five Ways”

Why Aquinas’ Five Ways?
So.
Toward the end of a discussion about whether atheists are angry and unhappy people — by the way, my basic sentiment is that if they are that way, it’s because of all the zealot nutters we have to deal with in life, and that, actually, most atheists I know aren’t all that [...]

Derridian Nonsense, Story Idea

You know, I decided to give Derrida one more try, by perusing a bit from Of Grammatology — the bit collected in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, edited by Peggy Kamuf. The only thing that resonated with me was a bit of a footnote, which I’ll quote here:
Linear writing has therefore indeed ["]constituted, [...]

Decent Derrida?!?!?

Okay, so I was discussing the pathetic understanding of science, and especially our developing scientific understanding of us humans, among the so-called scholars of the humanities, with a co-worker of mine. I was specifically panning Deleuze and Guattari, who have written some total claptrap about science, so bad I remember cheering when I finally found [...]

They Didn’t React As Expected

In this fascinating piece titled Pearls Before Breakfast is discussed an experiment conducted by the Washington post regarding how people perceive music in public spaces. What happens when one of the best classical musicians in America puts on a baseball cap and goes busking in Washington, D.C.?
The article raises some really interesting questions about American [...]

Who’s More Embarrassing, Ted Haggard or Richard Dawkins?

Over at Goth House Comics you’ll find a “a really long essay about the nature of religion” which I think merits some attention, though I disagree with parts of it. It was, apparently, written in response to this interview with the wonderful, terrible, fascinating Richard Dawkins, whose latest book, The God Delusion, is on my [...]

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