Looking for something to watch on HBO and I'm halfway through the pilot of _Boardwalk Empire_. I don't think I'll stick with it, but there's a billboard on the boardwalk advertising tootsie rolls with nuts. That seems much better than the tootsie rolls we ended up with

On the occasion of Melvyn Bragg's retirement

Oh Lord, give me students... But not yet!

To underscore how dangerous this is, it has been well established, probably since at least Keyishian in 1967, that principles of academic freedom required that the speech of public university professors not be considered the speech of the state. Shocking how little currency academic freedom has now.

I had a paper accepted by Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. It's on Hume, the French Enlightenment, atheism, and spontaneous generation philarchive.org/rec/JACHAT-2

The genius of Miles Davis was not fully appreciated outside of the US because of the metric system

Buffy is so old there were only 103 named elements, we’re at 118 now. (Yes I pause every show that has a periodic table to see if its period accurate)

I…worked on that book for five years…and…they just…they TikTok bro’d it out

Nancy By Ernie Bushmiller July 14,1947

In her junior year of college, Elena Gosalvez Blanco took a job as Patricia Highsmith’s assistant. The famed novelist had weeks to live—and a lifetime of menace behind her. yalereview.org/article/work...

Reconstruction of a Hellenistic kitchen. Paphos archeological museum

A simulation of an apology

I'm glad that the guy who wrote 'Hang on Sloopy' graced this earth

This would be a better analogy if the world weren’t kind of a squashed oblong

Particularly annoying for those of us who read JL Austin and thus know that "I vote yea", said by a senator on the floor of the senate is, literally, performative

Remembering Chris Cornell on the anniversary of his passing by remembering maybe the greatest concert photo I’ve ever taken.

I wonder if it was the same guy who forgot to set the parking brake on both fighter jets

I decided to write a piece about what I went through in my "process" of creating and developing the "Merrill Markoe character" who is making intermittent appearances in Season 4 of HACKS. merrillmarkoe.substack.com/p/my-life-as...

Art in life

Me: You can do anything with a history degree! Student: I want to be a history professor. Me: Except that.

Barry Smith, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and Willard van Orman Quine protesting against Jacques Derrida's honorary degree at the University of Cambridge

Angner tells us that happiness scholars would have us call the Finns unhappy but satisfied. I think it might be more apt to call them dour but satisfied, leaving ‘happiness’ for a higher synthesis of subjective state and the satisfaction of reflectively chosen goals

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve

Keeping track of sinister things

Trolley problem song: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mprk...

This is the clearest photo ever taken of Venus. 🔭 🧪

"I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me." - Hagan Scotten www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Since I am usually super down on analytic philosophy I did a quick blog post where I highlighted some cases where I think its fair to say its got some Ws, then tried to draw out three lessons from the cases about when/where the field can succeed. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/02/lear...

This is all so crazy. Tell me where to show up for the protest. I'll walk around uselessly

A short post about one of my pet peeves about history of analytic: Why is there much more attention to which philosophers are analytic, than to which analytics are philosophers? How would history of analytic change if we answered the 2nd question differently? brian.weatherson.org/quarto/blog/...

For anyone wondering, some possible dog names have survived from cuneiform sources. On tiny dog figurines found buried under a palace in Nineveh, Iraq are inscriptions that seem to be names. dan rigiššu “loud is his bark” munaššiku gārîšu “biter of his foe” mušēṣi lemnūti “expeller of evil”

Maybe college is the cure for crime

This is interesting. "Leading AI Models are now very good historians". It's a total clickbait title as I will expand on below. But several of the challenges put to the models, particularly palaeographical transcription and translation, it seems to perform well. Wills @ Exeter is using it for this.1

When regret kicks in. An errata leaf from a collection of poetry of William Wycherley from 1704.

Conference submission deadline approaching Hello everyone. This is just a reminder that submissions for the 2025 conference of the John Locke Society are due by January 31. Details are at

8 Jan 1638: b. Elisabetta Sirani #artist in #Bologna #otd She established a school for female artists before dying young in 1665. Self-Portrait as Allegory of Painting (1658)

This natural color view shows Tethys, the lit side of the rings and Saturn's hazy limb below as seen by Cassini's NAC. A detached haze layer is visible near Saturn's equatorial band. Taken on October 10, 2005. Distance to Tethys: 1.26 million km, phase angle: 40 degrees. North is to the left.

If you're an undergrad or MA student interested in pursuing a PhD in philosophy (or you're mentoring such a student), consider applying to the program at Purdue. www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/phi...

Old Fox's Advent Calendar. The Fifteenth Window. Paris, 15th December, 1930.

Duke Power Company has my favorite PSA of all time. Nothing better than seeing a kid about to get knifed by a smiling electric man.

You see a European artist's worktable from mid seventeenth century. These worktables were places where paper was used, a place where ink, quills, and paper was stored and handy. Let's have a closer look in a short 🧵 for friends of #earlymodern #paperhistory, #artsky #arthist and #skystorians 🗃️

Science says that the Onion ought to own Infowars

A new JWST deep field. All the eight-sided features are local stars in the Milky Way. Everything else is a galaxy. EVERYTHING ELSE IS A GALAXY.

Fantastic kicker on this

Sealing wax is still a really weird thing to give to a dragon

Huzzah!

Problems in pedagogy

Phenomenological research