(b)logophile

Fair warning: this post will make absolutely no sense to anyone who thinks creationism is as dead as it should be.1 In the US it’s alive and well and trying to get itself into school curricula. PZ Myers writes a lot about it; it’s horrifying but often horribly funny. Yesterday he quoted an Intelligent Design [...]

Growing up in this tiny little country must be weird. Flatmate Ella was shocked this morning to discover that Olga didn’t know Winnie the Pooh. “You know,” she said, “Winne the Pooh from the Seven-Acre Woods!”

A magnificent new Dresden Codak exposes the diabolical true meaning of the “Laplace Transformation.” If you enjoyed that, check out Dungeons and Discourse (featuring Tiny Carl Jung) and Advanced Dungeons and Discourse (“Guys, shut up I found it! The map to Occam’s Razor!”). And really the whole of DC, although you’ll be hopelessly confused by [...]

We get regular mail about conferences, workshops, summer schools and so on in our research area. Today’s crop included an advertisement for a five-day “minicourse on Lambada Calculus“. Who says logicians can’t get jiggy with it, after all?

Theory: We of the jury may wish to ignore [a particular possibility], and wish it had not been mentioned. If we ignored it now, we would bend the rules of cooperative conversation; but we may have good reason to do exactly that. [...] We would ignore the far-fetched possibility if we could—but can we? Perhaps [...]