The last four months have been one of those periods where, every time you think you are going to have a good amount of time to catch up on blogging you want to do, something comes up immediately to reduce it. So I've got something of a backlog of things I want to post, and who knows when I'll manage it. But things will still trickle out.
* Evelyn Brister has a report of the continual failure of philosophy departments to turn out more women with Ph.D.'s in philosophy. In fact, the percentage has hovered around 27% for fifteen years now. She has another good post on possible reasons for this, using an analogy with computer science. (ht)
* As you probably know, Kevin Rudd is the new prime minister of Australia. A little more than a year ago, Rudd wrote a very controversial column for The Monthly called Faith in Politics. Rudd is a formerly Catholic Anglican who is still heavily influenced by Catholic social teaching.
* A simple but fun little simulation of the Battle of Gettysburg, from the Confederate perspective. I fought it to a standstill which, of course, leaves the balance in Union favor. If I had chosen the other way on the choice I was most uncertain about, I would have won. But, then again, I'm good at multiple choice tests; and Lee was certainly not faced with a multiple choice test. (ht)
* John Haldane on the recent Flew controversy.
* There has been a remarkable amount of fuss on various science blogs over this list, and the fact that it contains no science books in its nonfiction section. I find it a bit odd, because the list is explicitly a list of especially notable books that have been reviewed in the Sunday Book Review of the New York Times. The sort of books that are reviewed in the Book Review are heavily narrative in nature, so the best you would find among that selection are (1) biographies about scientists; (2) autobiographies by scientists; (3) historical accounts of scientific events. Thus, for instance, in the past month the Book Review has had reviews on James Watson's latest memoir, on a biography of Wernher von Braun, Venter's autobiography, Lehrer's book on science and art, and a collection about music and the brain. It's that kind of book that will show up on that kind of list; thus, for instance, there is a 'mathematics' book on the list, but it's not a book about mathematics, but a biography of Hardy and Ramanujan. To put it in other words: the closest you will tend to find on the list are science-themed biographies (or, when we are talking about events or ideas rather than people, histories that are biography-like). Thus, you have to medical-themed books on the list, a mathematics-themed book, etc. Here and there you might find an exception, but the thing notable about the books you find in the Review is that they are all very similar (biographies, memoirs, popular histories that have lots of biographical and narrative details, pundit's bloviations), selected for what is probably the most common taste in leisure reading among people who consider themselves to have high-brow tastes. I notice, too, that there are no philosophy books on the list; but you don't see us whining. (I hope.) Being noted by the Sunday Book Review is a lot like being tagged, "To Our Taste for the Moment." It's not a profound honor or a particularly revealing label.
* A Sola Gratia argument for the Immaculate Conception, an Anglican argument for Mary as model, and an argument for blessing Mary at "First Things" (more to come).
* Two interesting new logic-related blogs: Blogicum and (Blog&~Blog). The latter is about dialetheism; I have recently been discussing there whether dialetheists are better advised to reject disjunctive syllogism or disjunction introduction in response to explosion arguments. (Most dialetheists do the former; I think this is probably a mistake -- at least, an additional mistake beyond thinking that contradictions can be true.) The work being done by Tom at "Blogicum" is very interesting, and I hope to comment on it, if I can find the time at any point in the near future.
