The comments below address this argument, which is forthcoming in Philosophical Quarterly. They were sent in an email to some people originally, but I thought others might be interested as well. Incidentally, I used to be on a couple of mailing lists where this guy and most of the people he lists in the acknowledgements [...]
“Finally, there is generally some probability that an agent will adopt a random norm [...] We think of this as a “noise” level in society.”
(Joshua M. Epstein, “Learning to be Thoughtless: Social Norms and Individual Computation”, CSED Working Paper No. 6, Economic Studies, The Brookings Institution, September 1999).
I am sick. Which while keeping me in bed has also given me time to design a website for Jonathan’s band Paperhalo.
“Hi davka! It’s been 210 days since you joined Xanga… won’t you support us by going Premium?”
No, I will not. I began using your service because it was free, and I will continue to do so, while it remains free. Seeing as you address me as if you are a person, I feel obliged to [...]
There’s a magazine that I am always on the lookout for because it seems to be very rare in Australia. I love it, and could subscribe I guess, but I also love trying to chase copies down. My last copy I found at the bottom of a sale bin at the MCA. Anyway, here’s a [...]
This is a modified version of a (very) short story from How To Be Happy (Vol. 1, Iss. 1), for the purposes of entering a competition.
Orbit.
Driving out of the city, the buildings shrink, lower, flatten and stretch away from each other in the shimmering heat like kids sprawled around a rippling pool. The people [...]
Symptoms.
Numbness, tingling, changes in sensation; weakness, heavy feeling of extremities; speech difficulty; garbled speech; slurred speech; thick speech; vision changes; loss of vision in one eye; decreased vision; double vision; sensation that the person or the room is moving (vertigo); loss of balance; lack of coordination; gait changes, staggering; falling (caused by weakness in the [...]
New DIAGRAM (2.3) is out, and rocks.
Conductor Andre Previn and violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter have married. “The couple, despite their differences in age—he is 72 and she is 39—have become inseparable over recent months after her performance in Boston of The Previn Violin Concerto, which he composed for her” (The Telegraph, 08/06/02).
Or as Wittgenstein said: Fantasy beats reason every time. (cited by [...]
I once (pre-September 11) tried to enter a basketball team in a local competition under the name “The Shi’ite Fanatics”. A few days after submitting the form, I got a call from the administration asking me to change the name. On asking why this was necessary I was informed that I wasn’t allowed to use [...]
The latest survey of Australian reading habits reports that reading for pleasure is the next highest leisure activity after television, and the total numbers of readers out there surprised me (in the week before the survey, 10 million Australians picked up 33 million books). However as you get down into the survey you discover what [...]
Every now and then a debate flares over the state of contemporary literature, and critics renew the age-old debate over the relationship between literature and the great unwashed masses. [No time like the present; a window into the current debate is here]. Which provides a somewhat amusing context for the Australia Council guidelines for their [...]
If I have ever had a fanatical attachment to artists then they are Radiohead and David Foster Wallace. So I read with a kind of self-important pride the publishers notes for Alex Abramovich’s new critical work Cinderalla Story, which reveal that Abramovich locates the cure for our diseased culture “in the courageous art of David [...]
The following picture accompanied an interview with Jean Baudrillard published as “Entre le cristal et la Fumée”, in Les Humains Associés, Number 7.
Thanks to Luke and Jon for comments on It Is Important To Mourn The Loss Of The Dead. The revised version, submitted to the UC National Short Story Competition, is here.
The following essay will appear in the debut issue of Neo-Industrial Opera, a journal being created to fill the literary/cultural gap between street and academic presses (ie. street press kids can’t write, academics don’t go to raves). It’s being launched on Friday the 27th of September, in Melbourne, so let me know if you want [...]
“The writing process in this band is like trying to shit 50-pound bowling balls. Generally, it works likes this—someone comes up with a simple riff and starts playing it, and then everybody starts playing along at the highest volume imaginable until the original riff is completely lost. Then we stop playing and nobody talks for [...]