Thursday, June 09, 2011

Links

* John Wilkins has an interesting post at SciAm on the evolution of common sense.

* I liked this post about Turkish Delight. Really fancy lokum has dates and pistachios and the like, so I imagine would be somewhat better, although also somewhat harder to find.

* Kenny discusses Descartes's ontological argument.

* David Auerbach attempts to make sense of Diderot's view of the mind.

* Reindeer apparently can see ultraviolet.

* A movement to have Katharine of Aragon beatified.

* Mike Flynn has a good post on free will and Libet-style experiments.

* Mark T. Mitchell on The Lord of the Rings.

* Ninety jokes of Prince Philip, for his ninetieth birthday. They call them 'gaffes', but the master of 'dontopedalogy' (his coinage) is so consistent and is also so often obviously joking, that that seems a bit unfair, despite the extraordinary outrageousness of many of them. But there's also often a shrewdness to them that's just made more clear by the tactlessness. My favorite:

29. "Young people are the same as they always were. They are just as ignorant." At the 50th anniversary of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards scheme.

* Alex Pruss, Lying and Speaking Your Interlocutor's Language

* Nicholas of Cusa on natural law theory.

* Tony Woodlief asks whether the poor quality of most Christian art might not be due to bad theology rather than poor skill. But the list of faults he gives are really just failures of skill, and are easily found all the way across the board, not just in the niche of Christian art. The real question is whether good theology can make you a better artist.

ADDED LATER

* American foreign policy in a nutshell:


O-SPAN Classic: CIA Accidentally Overthrows Costa Rica