* The 91st Philosophers' Carnival is up at "sevenlayercake". None of the posts were particularly striking this time around, at least to my taste, but the host blog is a fairly interesting philosophy blog I hadn't come across before.
* Scott Gilbreath has a nice post on St. Bede, patron saint of historians.
* Very cool: the mathematics of language change:
Lieberman, Michel, and colleagues built upon previous study of seven competing rules for verb conjugation in Old English, six of which have gradually faded from use over time. They found that the one surviving rule, which adds an "-ed" suffix to simple past and past participle forms, contributes to the evolutionary decay of irregular English verbs according to a specific mathematical function: It regularizes them at a rate that is inversely proportional to the square root of their usage frequency.
In other words, a verb used 100 times less frequently will evolve 10 times as fast.
* Also cool: the Espresso Book Machine. It will probably make less of a change than one might think, but it's still an awesome bit of technology.
* I've never been much of a reader of graphic novels, but I've read a few onlines recently. Girl Genius I've already recommended; another good one is The Phoenix Requiem, by Sarah Ellerton; it's a much quieter and slower story than GG, although it makes up for the latter by having a much tighter story and shorter arcs of plot. It's a fantasy with broadly Victorian inspirations -- in effect, it's a sort of modern Victorian ghost story, although the events don't actually take place in Victorian Britain. Some of the artwork is exquisite.
* Harvet Ismuth's 42 Essential 3rd-Act Twists.
* I think much of the hubbub over Sotomayor has been blown out of proportion, for reasons I won't go into here. However, I haven't seen any discussion of the fact that Sotomayor, if her nomination gets approved, would bring the Catholics on the Supreme Court to six out of nine. (All the evidence is that Sotomayor is a pretty minimal Catholic, but still attends Catholic church on major holidays and when visiting family.) That will leave Stevens as the only Justice who is neither Catholic nor Jewish. This strikes me as an odd situation; do Catholics really so overwhelmingly dominate high-level judicial circles? Even as recently as Alito's nomination there were concerns about the Court tipping Catholic; given the political lay of the land, I doubt that this will be a major concern this time around, but it's curious that Catholics are so massively overrepresented on the Court in comparison to the general population. Steven Waldman notes that on the big political issue that always comes up we don't actually know anything about Sotomayor: that is, her record does not give any indication of whether she is pro-choice or pro-life.
* Here and there over the past few years I've seen a great many Christians who are of the opinion that argument with the so-called New Atheists should be a major priority among Christians, and I recently saw another instance of this. They don't generally ask my advice, but whenever people do, I always suggest that this is exactly the wrong way to go. The fact of the matter is, however important they may seem to themselves, and however visible they may be, they are of extraordinarily minute importance in the vast concerns of the Church. Our relations with Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists are all vastly more important, and our relations with our fellow Christians more important still. And of all the foes we fight in our fight against the World, the darkness of the Zeitgeist, the New Atheists are puppy dogs; it is foolish to spend our time focusing so much on the little pups that we ignore the wolves. And of all the problems we face, we ourselves are more of a problem for us than they are; particularly the absurd ease with which we all are distracted from what is truly important by the fact of who happens to have made it to the bestseller list recently, or by some other utterly frivolous thing. And what is truly important, of course, is clear: Love God and neighbor, and when we somehow fail to do so, set out again and again until with God's grace we succeed. Everything else is hobby.
