Last weekend’s post, The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, has been lightly edited and re-printed at Inside Higher Ed, where it should be read by a larger audience of humanities types. They allow comments, so it will be interesting to see what gets said about it there. I may have some additional comments on the issue later,… Continue reading What Humanists Think
Category: Pop Culture
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
Every week, the New York Times Magazine features some sort of profile article about a person or group of people who are supposed to represent some sort of trend. Every week, the people they choose to write up come off as vaguely horrible, usually in some sort of entitled-suburbanite fashion. I’m not sure if this… Continue reading Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
Ethics in Science Fiction
A colleague emailed me yesterday with the following question: As I have mentioned the other day, [Prof. Firstname Lastname] of Comp. Sci. is putting together an exciting course “Can Computers Think?” (Intro to Comp. Sci.), and she hopes to use Sci Fi short stories (and movies, and TV series) to bring ethics into the course.… Continue reading Ethics in Science Fiction
Two Cultures Round-Up
Because I am a Bad Person who thinks and types relatively slowly, I have been lax about following up to the many excellent posts that have been written in response to this weekend’s two cultures posts. Let me attempt to address that in a small way by linking a whole bunch of them now: My… Continue reading Two Cultures Round-Up
Reading Is Reading, but Books Are Not Fungible
The New York Times front page yesterday sported an article with the oh-so-hip headline “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?.” This turned out to be impressively stupid even by the standards of articles with clumsy slang in the headlines: Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it… Continue reading Reading Is Reading, but Books Are Not Fungible
Paging Humanities Bloggers…
A question raised in comments to yesterday’s rant about humanities types looking down on people who don’t know the basics of their fields, while casually dismissing math and science: [I]t occurs to me that it would be useful if someone could determine, honestly, whether the humanities professors feel the same sense of condescension among science… Continue reading Paging Humanities Bloggers…
Categories: On the Beauty of Physics
Having admitted that I know noting about fine art, here’s an opportunity to prove it… A week or so ago, I was in the Schenectady library looking for something else, and noticed a book called Categories: On the Beauty of Physics, which is packaged in such a way as to make it difficult to attribute,… Continue reading Categories: On the Beauty of Physics
The Innumeracy of Intellectuals
I know nothing about art or music. OK, that’s not entirely true– I know a little bit here and there. I just have no systematic knowledge of art or music (by which I mean fine art and classical music). I don’t know Beethoven from Bach, Renaissance from Romantics. I’m not even sure those are both… Continue reading The Innumeracy of Intellectuals
Pop Culture Interlude
1) I see that as a SF fan with a blog, I am contractually obligated to say something about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Enh. It’s well-done, but I’m not that much of a Whedon fanboy, and the hapless villain conceit isn’t enough to get past the fact that I don’t really like musicals. 2) The… Continue reading Pop Culture Interlude
Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting With Jesus [Library of Babel]
Yesterday, I had an appointment at the local orthopedic associates to get my dislocated thumb looked at. The receptionist escorted me to a curtained-off corner of a big room, where I got to spend ten or fifteen minutes listening to the physician’s assistant on call dealing with other patients. One of them, a women distressingly… Continue reading Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting With Jesus [Library of Babel]