* Sean Carroll has a very interesting discussion of Szilárd's Engine, which is about the relation between (accessible) information and energy.
* Taylor Marshall on what 1 Clement tells us about the early Pauline canon.
* I'm sure I've linked to it before, but the Logic Museum has Thorburn's "The Myth of Ockham's Razor" up.
* Sam Crane considers whether Confucianism can function as a stand-alone political philosophy.
* It's not the sort of snark I usually like, but I did find this Lama-or-Pope bit mildly amusing. People just don't really appreciate the fact that Buddhists take seriously the idea of eliminating craving.
* Eight songs by Matteo Ricci. (ht)
* A discussion of marbled paper. (ht) One of the more unusual uses of marbled paper is the marbled page of Tristram Shandy: usually marbled paper is used for fly-leaf and the like, but Sterne simply inserts it as an ordinary page. I discussed it briefly a long while back, along with the black page (which is no longer rendering properly in the post) and the blank page.
* Chris Gabbard describes how he changed his views on mental disability. Very much worth reading. (ht)
* Russia is building an orbital space pod to clean up space debris. China is planning to build an orbital interceptor to protect earth from asteroids and such. Of course, there's probably more here than pure altruism: both projects have the convenient feature of being people-friendly projects that can easily be adapted to military use if necessary (the U.S. was at one point the world's Grandmaster in designing such projects, but we seem to have lost our touch recently).
