Monday, July 20, 2009

Links of Note

* Carnivalesque 52 is up at "Gilbert Mabbott"

* Remembering the Body and Blood of Christ on the moon (ht)

* Speaking of which, We Choose the Moon, put up by the Kennedy Presidential Library, has pictures, video, and audio to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing.

* And lest we be too impressed with NASA's most significant achievement, they managed to record over their original footage of the event.

* A confrontation between moderate Muslims and extremist Muslims in Luton. It's actually not uncommon, although usually things don't get quite so public.

* Too often true. Like "you can't prove a negative," this claim shows just how superficial much of the philosophical folklore about reasoning that floats around is. As I put it once:

What 'extraordinary' claims require is what 'ordinary' claims require: evidence of a kind relevant to the relevant kind of inference. When you look at the uses of the cliché, you find that it just serves intellectual laziness: instead of doing the serious critical work required to dismiss some claims and support others, people try to define themselves into rightness by throwing slogans. And to that extent it doesn't matter if the claim they are rejecting is wrong: the response to the claim is even worse, because it is mumbo-jumbo of the most insidious sort, the most insidious sort being the kind that passes as sagacity among people who, when confronted with the claim, can't be bothered even to raise the simplest and most basic kinds of questions suggested by perfectly ordinary habits of critical thought. Questions like: "How do we non-arbitrarily determine extraordinariness? Is there a link between extraordinary claim and extraordinary evidence that is more than the purely verbal fact that we can use 'extraordinary' of both? What substantive evidential basis is there for thinking that the resulting principle applies to all kinds of claims and all kinds of evidence?"


* The difficulty of transcribing the Nixon tapes.

* Sherry's Hundred Hymns list continues:

#68 Children of the Heavenly Father
#67 Jesus Loves Me
#66 Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent
#65 What Wondrous Love Is This
#64 To God Be the Glory
#63 I'll Fly Away
#62 Take My Life and Let It Be
#61 Jesus, I am Resting, Resting
#60 Love Divine, All Loves Excelling
#59 Leaning on the Everlasting Arms
#58 Alas and Did My Saviour Bleed
#57 Jesus Lover of My Soul