<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<opml version="2.0">
<head>
<title>15.opml</title>
<dateCreated>Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:38:49 GMT</dateCreated>
<dateModified>Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:50:41 GMT</dateModified>
<ownerName>Tom Morris</ownerName>
</head>
<body><outline text="&lt;a href=&quot;http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/12/billy_dembski_pious_and_delude.php&quot;&gt;PZ&lt;/a&gt; is worth reading primarily for the Comic Sans he slathers all over creationists. But he also says of &lt;em&gt;The Design of Life&lt;/em&gt; (which I'm not reading, by the way): &lt;q&gt;I've got the book he's talking about, and I'm partway through it. It ain't convincing. It's the same old bluster that Wells and Dembski have been pounding their fists over for the last decade; there's absolutely nothing new in it, just more rehashed chest-thumping from failed religious revolutionaries; I predict it will die a rapid death, simply because the IDers haven't been able to come up with anything we haven't already heard multiple times, and that has failed every time to convince anyone in the biology community with a scrap of sense.&lt;/q&gt;" created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 04:35:43 GMT"/><outline text="&lt;a href=&quot;http://nigelwarburton.typepad.com/virtualphilosopher/2007/12/tom-hurka-on-be.html&quot;&gt;Nigel Warburton&lt;/a&gt; has an interesting blog post on Bernard Suit, author of &lt;em&gt;The Grasshopper&lt;/em&gt; which is a defense of essentialism against Wittgenstein, specifically picking up on the analogy of games and play. Yet another book to put on my list of twentieth-century analytic philosophy texts. Budge up, Saul and Mikey D." created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 02:49:02 GMT"/><outline text="&lt;a href=&quot;http://austringer.net/wp/index.php/2007/12/14/dog-bites-man-dembski-says-designer-is-god/&quot;&gt;Dembski has admitted&lt;/a&gt; the blatantly obvious. Well, there's no point pussy-footing with pretences, airs and graces, since the whole darn thing is pretty much dead. I feel rather silly (but vindicated in my conclusions) having written my undergraduate dissertation on something so obviously nail-in-the-coffin stupid." created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 02:43:54 GMT"/><outline text="Though the purists may not like it, YouTube has some great archive footage (that's a bit of an anachronism - despite the Beeb and other's insistence that they own their archives, the Internet will end up as &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; archive to end allarchives) of a 1980 interview with Ayn Rand in five parts - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzGFytGBDN8&quot;&gt;Part 1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUwTHn-9hhU&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N4KbLbGYgk&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7cje1I3VM&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfqq4VKh1xM&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;. The comments are no doubt idiotic, as YouTube comments almost universally are." created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 01:14:27 GMT"/><outline text="If you picture the idealised life of a professional philosopher, what does one think of? Groups of middle-aged dons politely arguing about metaphysics over afternoon tea? Well, it that's your conception of it, then I have to burst your bubble with a nice little link - &lt;a href=&quot;http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/10/colin-mcginn-di.html&quot;&gt;Brian Leiter&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2007/12/mcginnhonderich-spat.html&quot;&gt;Stephen Law&lt;/a&gt; have both covered a rather large bit of what the 4chan types would call &quot;drama&quot; - or maybe simply scholarly disagreement - between Professors Colin McGinn of the University of Miami and Ted Honderich of &lt;acronym title=&quot;University College London&quot;&gt;UCL&lt;/acronym&gt;. The spat is over Professor McGinn's review of Professor Honderich's book &lt;em&gt;On Consciousness&lt;/em&gt;. As for the substance of the discourse, I cannot comment - it is outside of my rather narrow areas of expertise - but the rhetoric is pretty fiery for a bunch of pipe-smoking dons. Har har etc." created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:53:27 GMT"/><outline text="&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,2226283,00.html&quot;&gt;Keeping us safe from turrrrists?&lt;/a&gt; What a load of balls. More like rampant abuse of power. Good to know that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/12/defeating_the_s.html&quot;&gt;shoe screening process at Heathrow Terminal 3 is easily exploitable&lt;/a&gt; - not that it's doing anything except keeping a brainless bureaucrat in charge feeling satisfied." created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:38:49 GMT"/>
<outline text="School leaving age" created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:50:41 GMT"><outline text="&lt;a href=&quot;http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7145858.stm&quot;&gt;Tony Howell&lt;/a&gt; from the Birmingham City Council &lt;acronym title=&quot;Local Education Authority&quot;&gt;LEA&lt;/acronym&gt; has suggested the unthinkable - &lt;em&gt;lowering&lt;/em&gt; the school leaving age from sixteen to fourteen, desite the government going in the opposite direction of wanting to raise the school leaving age from sixteen to eighteen. Education being something I value (and schooling being an occasionally effective method of distributing the fruits of education), I can feel the paternalist argument for maintaining the school leaving age or even increasing it. I want people to be less ignorant about the world around them, and I want them to become educated citizens. And what I say may be determined by the fact that I've had what I'd consider to be a superb education.&#13;" created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:50:41 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:50:41 GMT"/><outline text="I tend to favour a more paternalistic attitude in education than my usual easy-breezy libertarianism for two reasons. Firstly, for the 'higher pleasures' reason that Mill spelt out. My fourteen year old self would have quite happily left school without a single qualification. That's because my educational transmutation didn't happen until about seventeen (although it stirred a little earlier at about fourteen), when the shackles of a uniform education were removed a little and I could actually use my brain. My attitude to education was that it was pretty much a waste of time, and on the objective measures of schooling, I was at best average, at worst a slacker. I'm in two minds though. I would want to have left school at fourteen to have gone on to do some kind of vocational training course.&#13;" created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:50:41 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:50:41 GMT"/><outline text="I think that, based on my personal experience, of going from being considered by my school to be a middle-of-the-road student to now, graduating from a pretty tough degree at a good university with a higher upper-second (not bragging or anything...) and getting prepared for a Master's, I think that the measures we use for students are not nearly as good as they could be. On the basis of where I was, the idea that I would get to where I am would be considered a near impossibility. Part of it was a realisation that I have to do &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; and part of it was a determination to &lt;em&gt;show the bastards!&lt;/em&gt;&#13;" created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:50:41 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:50:41 GMT"/><outline text="That's the problem I have with this. As much as we all do the politically correct thing of thinking that becoming a doctor and a hairdresser is just &quot;different paths in life&quot;, we all know that there is a hierarchy. It'd be nice if the educational and career hierarchy were flattened a little, or at least if some of the distortion were pulled out of the hierarchy - but the hierarchy does exist. Money is only part of it. Social respectability and the degree of interestingness (are we allowed to use that word in non-Flickr contexts?) are an important part of it too. We don't all want to become City bankers, even though the pay is great. The hierarchy exists, even though it's a multi-dimensional hierarchy - money, power, social respectability, interestingness are all dimensions.&#13;" created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:50:41 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:50:41 GMT"/><outline text="And I feel that there are certain people who have the capacity to climb to a much higher summit on the hierarchy who would be consigned to a much lower station in life by the ability to leave at fourteen, and thus missing opportunities that they might otherwise have if they stayed on in academic study. If you saw the &lt;a href=&quot;http://tommorris.org/blog/2007/12/13#When:03:06:56&quot;&gt;quotes from the LA Times&lt;/a&gt; article the other day, you'll see how empowering getting access to a decent liberal education can be, even if it's via podcasting: &lt;q&gt;I felt like I discovered the Fountain of Youth&lt;/q&gt;.&#13;" created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:50:41 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:50:41 GMT"/><outline text="As I've said, I'm very ambivalent about the whole thing. There's just so much &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; with the education system, that things that should make it better on the face of it may end up making lives worse." created="Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:50:41 GMT"/></outline></body>
</opml>
