* Everyone knows Natalie Portman as an actress. But did you also know that she's done collaborative work in cognitive neuroscience? (ht) This means she has an Erdos-Bacon number. There are, I believe, less than 20 in the world who have been identified; she's in the company of people like Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Bertrand Russell, and Carl Sagan.
* Perhaps the only full-time actress besides Portman to have such a number is Danica McKellar, best known for her role on The Wonder Years. McKellar co-authored a paper (PDF) in mathematical physics and has written a book, due out in August, called Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail, directed a middle-school girls. It looks decent, so you might consider getting it for any middle-school girls you know. On her official web site, she also regularly answers questions about mathematics. They range from practical questions to quirky trivia to advice on how to handle math in general.
* There seems to have been an outbreak of Francis Schaeffer misinterpretation recently.
* PZ Myers has a few choice excerpts from Ken Miller's review of Behe's recent book.
* At "Holy Heroes" Gabriel McKee looks at the "utopian problem" in superhero ethics. I think the problem boils down to this: superpowers are technology, or equivalent to it. You can do with superpowers what you can do with exceptionally advanced technology, and these superpowers can deal with the problem to the extent that it is a technological problem. But this doesn't resolve the matter. Yes, a superhero might be able to overcome the technological problem in (say) growing enough food to feed all the world's hungry, and seeing to it that it is distributed to them. But in so doing he runs the danger of glutting the market and putting out of work all those who do their own hard labor in growing food and distributing it, and other things like that. (The result, of course, is snowball effect: you get the problem of having to swallow the dog to catch the cat you swallowed to catch the mouse you swallowed to catch the spider you swallowed to catch the fly; and at some point, we'd just have to say, "I guess you'd die." A technical fix isn't always a genuine remedy; sometimes it just trades your old problems for new problems.) What would be needed is the ability to find the perfect balance. But this requires superwisdom, not superpower. And that's a harder thing even to imagine.
* Daniel Mitsui has a post on iconoclasm and perversion. It includes, among other things, a link to this essay by Frederica Matthewes-Green, on the horrible Pitesti Experiment, a Communist attempt to break religious men in order to make them good Communists. It also discusses the case of Eric Gill, sculptor, engraver, printer, typographer, Catholic intellectual, and also psychopathic practitioner of adultery, rape, incest, bestiality, and the like. Part of the issue with Gill, I think, is that iconography is not like art in the secular world; its purpose is to be not merely art but pictorial prayer and preaching of the Word made flesh. You cannot take this seriously and put a sharp divide between the artist and his artistic work. You cannot be a genuine iconographer in your art and an iconoclast blaspheming the image of God in your life. It is true that human failure to measure up to Christ, the Icon of the Father, is universal, that we all to some extent fall to that iconoclasm called sin; but the inconsistency can only be tolerated so far, and only where it is healed and overcome by a penitent heart. Beyond that it ceases to be iconic and becomes perverted. It might pass for secular art, only surface-deep and for pleasing the eye according to one's tastes; but it is not an icon, which is supposed to be something much, much more.
* Brevard Childs died on June 23 at age 83. His The New Testament as Canon and Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context are in many ways lovely works; I read them with great benefit in my undergraduate days.
* Advice, from philosophy Ph.D.'s, for philosophy students considering graduate study in philosophy (ht). It is generally quite good. I would add four things, all of which fit into categories already there.
(1) It is one thing to warn students that getting a job after a graduate study can be difficult; people do that quite a bit. I think, however, that people rarely remember to warn entering students of how expensive the job search can be. And it certainly can be, particularly in philosophy.
(2) Also, every experience in the job search is different, so you can rarely trust anyone's advice about it. What you can do is listen to it, act according to your best judgment, and learn from your mistakes.
(3) When choosing a graduate program, remember that you aren't just choosing the program, but your living conditions for the next several years. If you're dedicated, you can power through under almost any conditions; but things like vacancy rate and rent and public transportation and crime rate in the place you'll be living can make an immense difference to your study. No matter how good it will look on your CV, or how easy it is to get into, or how nice the financial aid package, we all prefer not to study in hell. So think through not only the program but the place; it's not the most important thing by any means, but it shouldn't be ignored, either.
(4) It's true in most fields, but especially true in philosophy, that you don't have to be an academic to do good philosophical work, to interact with people in academia doing philosophical work, or to reap some of the benefits of academic institutions. Academic philosophy is not philosophy as such; it is an infrastructure for it, and it can serve that function whether you are in it or not. That's what it's there for, to provide an infrastructure for philosophy in the world. Academics themselves sometimes forget that, and talk and act as if the purpose of academic philosophy were to propagate their own form of academic life rather than to support philosophy as a fundamental aspect of human civilization. But (and to everyone's credit, it is very widely recognized in principle among academic philosophers) academic life does not subserve academic life, but everyone's enrichment. And you can be part of that even if you can't get an academic position.
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ADDED LATER
* Chris has begun the first of a series on the basics of statistics, with a particular view to its use in cognitive psychology: normal distribution.
* An interesting discussion of dualism at "Philosophy, et cetera".
* A Turkish court has ruled that the Patriarch of Constantinople has no legal standing as Ecumenical Patriarch. The reasoning is a little puzzling; besides being the Patriarch for the local Orthodox community in Istanbul, the Patriarch Bartholomew is surely the Patriarch for the Greek Orthodox Church abroad. What it really is, of course, is yet one more way in which Turkey can impose arbitrary legal restrictions on the Orthodox in Turkey on the grounds that, as they have been "allowed to remain on Turkish soil" (the court's own words), they are subject to whatever stupid laws Turkey wishes to place them under. It's Turkey's newest bit of the legal chain it has been using to choke out the Orthodox in the country.
* What Aquinas means by saying truth is adaequatio intellectus et rei, at "Just Thomism".
