As everyone likely now knows, the US President has a plan to make the Gaza strip into a sort of French Riviera, a high-value vacation destination.  There will surely be lots of Trump properties there in this imagined future. There won't be a lot of Palestinians, though. The displaced people of Gaza will get some other nice place to live, but won't get to go back to Gaza.   They've been displaced before.  They must be used to it by now.  Amirite?  Donald Trump says the United States will "own" Gaza. I put quote marks around that word because he is not the ..read more

 Haven't read it yet but ... it does appear Kane was determined to get in a final word about the free-will controversy: https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-complex-tapestry-of-free-will-a-free-will-odyssey/  For years I've cited his 1990s work as a fine expression of the view with which I associate myself. Kane works from generally secular premises, and reaches a free-willist position that is indeterminist and incompatibilist, the old in-in combo, thereby establishing that certain Jamesian contentions remain in the running.  Daniel Dennett (a determinist and compatibilist) replied ..read more

  Near the southern border of the western Massachusetts town of Longmeadow, near where it borders Connecticut, one finds a very fine and not-at-all expensive Greek restaurant named Grapevine.  Now, suppose you are in downtown Chicopee, somewhere in the neighborhood of John's Pizzeria [nowhere near as classy a place, to be honest] and you want to get to the Grapevine. What is the easiest way to do that?  You'll be starting off near 391. Get onto that highway and continue (westbound) for about 2 miles until you can get onto I-91 (southbound).   You'll then take 91 for ..read more

"As a fact, the mystical tendency in religion is not the last, the mature, result, not yet the last refuge of piety. Mysticism is the always young, it is the childlike, it is the essentially immature aspect of the deeper religious life. Its ardor, its pathos, its illusions, and its genuine illuminations have all the characters of youth about them, characters beautiful but capricious." -- Josiah Royce, THE PROBLEM OF CHRISTIANITY (1913), from chapter viii, "The modern mind and the Christian ideas".  The brief passage, something of an aside in context, reminds me of another work from my p ..read more

  Are black holes philosophically interesting?  And, if so, why?  I submit that they are. They seem to be central to the development of cosmology, the branch of physics that asks the Big Questions: where did the universe come from?  why does it have the laws that it has?  (for example, why does gravity have the force that it has)?  Do the laws of nature themselves have a history? However much impressive and, for many of us, impenetrable the mathematics that may be thrown at such problems, they retain their philosophy-adjacent pull.  Why are black holes cent ..read more

  Since Musk has destroyed twitter, I have been getting most of my social-media fix at Mastodon.  I haven't tried BlueSky yet, though I know some people laud it as the revival of the old pre-Musk twitter. The good thing about Mastodon is that it is NOT the revival of the pre-Musk Twitter.  It is a federated system, the co-operation of distinct servers in such a way that it would be difficult for a billionaire with a huge ego to buy it and ruin it.  One neat development there is a tradition, if you will, called #3GoodThings. Posters regularly exercise this random listing ..read more

   There has been a new discovery of gold in the Indus River valley. Not a huge story, but I will use it to make a point about numbers and ambiguity.  The Indus River originates in Tibet, flows northwest through Kashmir, and eventually takes a sharp left turn before it would have reached Afghanistan in order to flow instead through Pakistan and enter the sea near Karachi.   The main current of the Indus never, then, travels within the present boundaries of the Republic of India -- it almost neatly parallels India's own northern border, to its north. That delta ..read more

  Writing in the mid-20s about the Great War, Winston Churchill wrote that the grotesque casualties of the Battle of the Somme and others might have been avoided "if only the Generals had not been content to fight machine-gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men, and think that that was waging war.” I'm just writing to say I like that line.  General Douglas Haig, who would have been understood by even casual readers of that line on its first publication as among its targets, if not indeed the chief of its targets. is said to have been (understandably) furious over it.  ..read more

Neil Armstrong of course is the first human being ever to have set foot on a celestial body other than earth. It is oddly appropriate, then, that the heteropalindrome (the semordnilap) of his name is: "Gnorts, Mr Alien." A palindrome is a word or phrase spelled the same way backwards and forwards.  Like the reputed book about Theodore Roosevelt: "A man, a plan, a canal -- Panama".  The word "semordnilap" is "palindromes" spelled backwards. It is sometimes used for a different but related concept -- a word or phrase that spells one thing in another direction and another backwards. L ..read more

  The last notes of the Theranos melody have sounded.  The symphony is over and the audience is heading home. That is what it feels like to see this headline: Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes loses fraud appeal.  (BBC). Theranos was a huge story in the business world in the period 2014-2018, in the rise and fall of its claims to revolutionize healthcare tech.  It was a big story in the world of crime and punishment in the period that followed its collapse, ending with the conviction of Theranos founder Holmes and her sentencing in the US district court for northern ..read more