* Sarah Emsley has wrapped up her year of Mansfield Park. There are lots of good posts, worth reading.
* Rudolf Schuessler on Probability in Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy and Chad Hansen on Zhuangzi at the SEP.
* I am very taken with the bluegrass version, by Special Consensus, of John Denver's "Eagles and Horses".
* Why Christmas in Japan calls to mind Kentucky Fried Chicken.
* William Carroll, Thomas Aquinas in China, at "Public Discourse"
* Evelyn Lamb discusses the topology of holes.
* George Ellis and Joe Silk on scientific method at Nature.
* Whewell's Ghost #28, including links to posts on Newton, Babbage, and many others.
* Thony Christie on Babbage's The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment (which is not technically a Bridgewater Treatise, but is full of many interesting things).
* Peter Kwasniewski on the Mass of Catechumens.
* Daniel Gullotta defends the criterion of embarrassment in historical inquiry.
* Christ the Arkenstone at "A Clerk of Oxford"
* An attempted murder case that shows that you should perhaps not eat anything made by someone who has threatened to poison you with a parasitic worm.
* The Value of Ayn Rand in an Introductory Philosophy Course at "milliern".
* Jeannie Suk, The Trouble with Teaching Rape Law. I've noticed something very similar in my classes, where I have a short segment on questions of consent and how rape law might be improved -- every year students get less inclined to participate in discussion of the subject, to such an extent that I am considering replacing it entirely. Every year it gets harder for them to talk about the subject at all, even at the level of considering ways the legal system might handle it better. And the irony is that we are living in an age when I occasionally have to point out to students that talking about their sex lives in essays or to me is not completely appropriate. It says something about us that in our society it is easier to talk about sex than about justice in sexual matters.
