Tom Morris: 2006-04-27

2006.04.27

Tony Long doesn't get that blogging is a literary hybrid between numerous differnt genres - it is a cross between the email, the links page and the diary. Not to mention the many early newspapers which were as humourous, ranty and polemical as blogs are today. As for the "unsavory writing practices", I'd say that I see about as many 'SPAG' errors (to use the examination board's words for spelling, punctuation and grammar) in the blogs I read as in the transplanted print publications. 2006-04-27T15:07:10Z

To be honest, every time I read the writings of a blog skeptic, I picture up the sort of person who would have objected to the printing press, but now that has been rationalised and commercialised, is just about fine with it. But the blogger is much the same. Their computer is the printing press, their internet access and power is their supply of paper and ink. What's so difficult to understand? Now, go and read W. Caleb McDaniel's "Blogging in the Early Republic". 2006-04-27T15:27:54Z

My Mac didn't make a sound on startup when I had to restart it a few minutes ago. Perhaps it has learnt a lesson. 2006-04-27T14:53:44Z

Sounds like the conference for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws was fun. 2006-04-27T09:24:35Z

Amy Bryant: "From its inception, the abstinence-only education initiative has promoted a biased moralistic agenda instead of a public health agenda, withholding vital information and promoting misinformation... In December 2004, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) released a report that exposed many of the factual inaccuracies presented in abstinence-only curricula, such as the erroneous claims that condoms don't work 30 percent of the time and that HIV could be transmitted through tears and sweat... No research has proven that abstinence-only programs actually work. What the research does show is that Americans, by and large, are not abstinent people." 2006-04-27T09:20:31Z

Yesterday was Tax Freedom Day. 2006-04-27T09:16:05Z

Talking of ID, there's some craziness with Dembski and Ann Coulter. A worldview indeed. I guess, they've got nothing left to lose. 2006-04-27T09:04:52Z

Science and Theology News has an article on how ID is being discussed where it should be - by philosophers in college, rather than by biologists in schools. I like this fluff-up though: "The course delves into the history of the intelligent design movement, beginning with Plato, the first Western philosopher to make an argument for the existence of God based upon the design of this world." Theological teleology and the IDM differ, y'know. The IDM is a sociologically defined group of academics and 'culture warriors', who happen to fit in to the historical trend of teleology. 2006-04-27T09:00:33Z

Bennet Kelley at the Huffington Post: "The Christian nation movement is part of an escalating assault on the separation of church and state by the Republican right, so that the real question today is not whether we are a Christian nation but whether we are still a First Amendment nation." 2006-04-27T08:59:52Z

Publishers Weekly are saying that anti-religion books are gonna be big. Dennett said that the worst reaction he has had comes from "misguided multi-culturalists - literary types who are afraid of science". 2006-04-27T08:57:09Z

Laurie Taylor reviews Melvyn Bragg's "12 Books". 2006-04-27T08:55:59Z

Darn it, I wanted to try this, but I won't be able to - it will take hours to download on my GPRS connection. 2006-04-27T08:47:17Z

Tom Coates: "Shock revelation! A new set of technologies has started to displace older technologies and will continue to do so at a fairly slow rate over the next ten to thirty years!" Tom is right - the BBC are really acting completely surprised. What's actually happened is that the techies who work there (and you only have to go to a geek dinner or something like that to meet more than a handful of BBC techs, and an even bigger handful of ex-BBC techs) have been right for the last five years, and the executives have finally gotten around to realising the fact. Perhaps it was the fact that it's not news until the Media Guardian report it, even though people in the Corporation and people outside have been saying this both IRL and online, and presumably inside the Beeb, for years. 2006-04-27T08:44:17Z

Richard Horton says that Britain has had a failure in philosophy. My reaction? Russell, Ayer, G. E. Moore, Locke, Hume, Mill, Hobbes, Richard Dawkins, Swinburne, Don Cupitt and many, many others. Of course, I may be biased. I'm on the train going up to London to spend a day working on my naff little essays (that said: nobody I'm currently writing about is British, they are mostly French and German, plus a certain existential Dane). 2006-04-27T08:30:53Z

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