Everyone who follows NFL football has surely heard about the Richard Sherman "controversy" by now. After making the game winning defensive play against the 49ers in the NFC championship game, Sherman gave the interview posted below.
I found the following blog post about the media coverage of this "controversy" to be pretty much spot on. Thoughts? What do people think the word "thug" means? Is "thug" the new N word?
A new site was launched: Women of Philosophy, an online database collecting information about women currently working in philosophy and their research. It has lots of nice features, such as divisions per area (although some seem not to be operational yet), main and secondary areas of expertise per person, as well as personal and PhilPapers websites listed – and all this with an extremely user-friendly layout. It is a brand-new project, so there may well be quite a few women philosophers missing in the database (so go submit your entries!). However, in the long run, it is likely that all the numerous lists of women working in different areas of philosophy scattered around the internet will become superfluous thanks to this database (which is great news! There is much to be said about a unified database such as this one).
Other laudable efforts to promote diversity in philosophy – not only along the gender dimension – are underway: the PhilPapers crew seems to be working on a database to contain all professional philosophers (they do not shy away from big projects!), listed under a number of diversity categories. So more and more, there will be little excuse not to engage in promoting diversity in philosophy, now that there is an increasing number of useful resources available to all.
Bob Dylan is often the worst interpreter of his own songs. Not because of the old saw that his voice is bad (it's not). Rather, the songs themselves often combine the angry and the elegiac, but when Dylan does his own songs there's often a kind of sneering quality and so you don't hear the elegiac. More generally, the best covers of his songs are almost in dialogue with Dylan, discovering aspects of them that are not prominent in his versions. The songs themselves are so rich that these facets are waiting there to be uncovered.* Consider for example, Bryan Ferry's cover of "Don't Think Twice," at right.
Unlike Dylan's (or Johnny Cash's version, for that matter)** there's just absolutely nothing sneering about it, and the melody and sentiment*** becomes even more universal, expressing what a drag it is when things have gone so comperehensively bollocks up that a friendship ends, and also what is sometimes the correct response. The narrator starts by simply blaming his friend ("You're the reason"), but (especially in Ferry's performance) can't really sustain this reaction even though he tries throughout. And its clear that the dawning realization of his own complicity doesn't really change anything. All he can do is evict himself from his friend's life, sadness slowly crowding out the anger.
[UPDATE, Sat 18 Jan 2014: 4:00 pm CST: Moving to front to highlight this very important post by Tommy Curry and John Drabinski, with thoughtful comments by Jason Stanley.]
Many people have already read this important piece in NYT's The Stone. I have seen a few online reactions as well, including this one and this one by Eric Schliesser. Here's one by Peter Levine. What I'd like to do here is offer the comments to further reactions and / or to links of other online discussion.
There are two complimentary Gendered Conference Campaigns petitions,* Jennifer Saul's here and Eric Schliesser's here.
Saul's petition and and supporting material (e.g. how to avoid a gendered conference here) focus on helping organizers of conferences and edited anthologies avoid having an all male lineup.
Schliesser's applies more leverage, also focusing on those who might present at (or submit to) a conference (or anthology) with an all male lineup.
What we are calling for is a strong defeasible commitment not to participate in exclusionary conference line-ups.) The aim of this call is not the refusal, but the deployment of leverage, where it resides, so that inclusiveness becomes an integral part of conference-planning. Further, we ask senior male philosophers to carefully consider refusing invitations to conferences and edited volumes in which the line-up is disproportionately male.
We call on all philosophers – male and female, junior and senior – not to organize male-only or male-almost-only conferences,workshops, or edited volumes. (Information on female experts in various areas is available here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Now here is my question. In what manner should the above be thought to apply to summer schools?**
Article in Science Daily here, which claims that a lot of new evidence supports Roger Penrose's old conjectures about the the way that quantum physics is implicated in consciousness. If any philosophers of mind feel like explaining this to the rest of us, that would be very cool.
In the same manner that world history is a struggle between grasses and trees*, the internet is a struggle between producers and consumers of media for control of the way in which media is displayed on the user's screen.
The earliest versions of HTML were specifically designed so that the consumer had maximal control over how the information was presented. The exeption was <table>, which allowed the producer to order the information in rows (<tr>) and columns (<td>). But one of the cool things about <table> is that it allowed nesting. You could do a new table inside the cell of an existing table. Producers of content very quickly begain to use this nesting to control how the information displayed itself on the user's desktop.**
And then along came movable gifs, videos that start automatically, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Things seemed to shift decisively in favor of the producer's colonization of the laptop.
Weirdly, in the early phases of this just about every "Web Design for Dummies" type book warned content producers not to put movable gifs on their web-pages, because they are distracting and a non-trivial percentage of users hate them. But as the web commercialized, "distractability" became a feature, not a bug, and most commercial web pages are like seething mounds of cockroaches, little bits moving here and there all over the place.
New APPS 