* Another reason to think that we live in the calamitous decline of Western civilization: eroticizing Jane Austen novels. One feels that one should be shocked by the impropriety in some way, but one finds that one is simply bored with the bad taste and bad writing of it all. On the plus side, most of us will be able to tell our grandchildren exactly where the modern life became a demented parody of itself, just a long series of juvenile fantasies tastelessly and arbitrarily embedded in the legacy we have been given.
* What would (likely) happen if you pitched a baseball at 90% the speed of light?
* Robert Yanal on Two Gaps in Hume's Essay on Taste
* Talkeetna, Alaska, has a cat for a mayor. He recently reached his fifteenth year in office. The town, while functionally a town of about 900 people, is technically a historical district, and therefore the mayoral office is mostly an honorary and ceremonial position, anyway, but Mayor Stubbs has done excellent in the work in representing the town, since he's considerably increased tourism, bringing quite a bit of money into the little place.
* If I were a rich man, this is the sort of thing I would be tempted to fritter away my money on: Castles for Sale
* Catherine Hundleby is building a web resource for teachers of critical thinking courses.
* An interesting summary of the defense obligations of the US to other countries.
