There’s a great piece in the Boston Globe on the relationship between the African slave trade and current global inequalities: Shackled to the Past.
One thing that’s always irritated me about broadly materialist historical explanations is the tendency to miss the importance of contingent historical events. Geography is not destiny, as Jared Diamond suggests, but rather [...]
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Monday, December 10, 2007
Kwame Anthony Appiah has an article in the New York Times Magazine on experimental philosophy.
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Thursday, August 23, 2007
That’s right: the German government has declared that it will fund experts to ensure the accuracy of Wikipedia articles. This has been going on for some time: with funding, a position as a newsmaker, and specialized knowledge, an expert or partisan can create the primary resources wikipedia requires, and then alter the content to correspond [...]
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Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Today’s Suggestion: Try out Google Earth. Then, check out the new Sky extension, a starmap that rivals Celestia.
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There is a deeply interesting discussion of energy policy going on at ask.metafilter. It hits on some of the best thinking in environmentalism right now, and takes that long-range speculative view that may not satisfy the average policy wonk but gives me the philosophical shiver that lets me know that some deep thinking is occurring.
DarkForest [...]
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A month without internet? He writes like it’s an addiction, and it probably is: constant stimulation, freedom from reflection, instantaneous access to the opinions of others. Why think yourself? Why bother to formulate a position that’s anything other than a reaction to the latest rant?
During weeks two and three, I watched the first three seasons [...]
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Necessity is the mother of invention, but ingenuity is its own reward. This site gives me joy.
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For a little more than ten years, from 1994 to 2005, Phil Agre produced the Red Rock Eater News Service, a collection links and commentaries (”notes and recommendations,” he called it) that he distributed via e-mail. Agre is a professor of information studies at UCLA, and my intellectual identity was partially formed while reading his [...]
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Tuesday, November 21, 2006
“A few weeks ago” is beginning to be the expected delay in these posts.
Still, a few weeks ago, I got into a dust-up on metafilter about white supremacy. It started here, where I noticed that a character by the name of Milliken was engaging in some heavy-handed, long-winded, over-broad generalizations about black people. In response, [...]
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Friday, November 17, 2006
Stun guns and tasers are less-than-lethal tools for controlling violent suspects. They serve to demobilize the target and cause serious, but not excruciating, pain. When a police officer uses a stun gun or taser on a suspect, they can usually count on that suspect going and staying limp. Because of this, it’s an extremely stupid [...]
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