et cetera

“I can beat most Americans with my shoe” (Barney Reed, self-proclaimed bad boy of ping pong).

“This paper models love-making as a signaling game”.

Hugo M. Mialon, “The Economics of Ecstasy”, submitted to European Economic Review. (See the Slate article).

3. Voluntarism and relativism (or: we have ways of making you an empiricist)

From Anjan Chakravartty, “Stance relativism: empiricism versus metaphysics”, in Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A, Vol. 35, Iss. 1, March 2004, pp. 173-184.

Just discovered: Sedna, the largest object found in solar orbit since Pluto in 1930. There have been a few similar-sized objects found over the last couple of years in the Kuiper Belt, always igniting tedious debate over whether it really is a planet. I wonder, though, how long it will be until children learning elementary [...]

“This suggestion is corroborated by the fact that we were not able to successfully test an adequate number of [Maya] 3-year olds due to their shyness, which does not usually pose problems to American experimenters”.

Knight, Nicola; Sousa, Paulo; Barrett, Justin L; and Atran, Scott. 2004. “Children’s attributions of beliefs to humans and God: cross-cultural evidence”, [...]

Interesting. The authors of a recent journal article cite a junk email which merely purports to reference a scientific study, and then reflect on what changes to current theories might be needed to deal with what it reports. (The email contained text which was scrambled but easily readable). See:

Jonathan Grainger and Carol Whitney, “Does the [...]

Stephen Hawking seems to have recently changed his mind on the prospect of a theory of everything, as witnessed by his Dirac Centennial lecture “Gödel and the end of physics”, given in 2002 but only just posted online. Most interesting is his discussion of the relationship between Gödel’s Theorem and a theory of everything—unless we [...]