Wait, you can represent a shape with an equation?!?! But equations look nothing like shapes!!!

Ah shite, the Pringles cans are talking to me again

Doing some philosophy of science

I just remembered that this is pretty much exactly what Quine says in 'On What There Is' (except he adds a rather 😬 line about slums). Anyway, I can't help read this now in the voice of a smarmy playground bully.

In Hegel's childhood home, they have an escape room where you have to steal the Phenomenology of Spirit by lamplight. It's for a very niche audience, but 10/10

Spent this morning reading Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism by Richard Rorty and feeling very much that he's right, we need a second enlightenment grounded in the American pragmatist tradition that rejects nonsense about joint-carving.

It’s quite simple. I want everyone else’s conference talks to be recorded and available online so I can watch in my free time. I just don’t want this to happen to any of mine.

Both UMAP and t-SNE combine forces of attraction and repulsion between data points to generate their results. This is called dialectics...

I think this article is worth reading. It gives a detailed account of a remarkable top-down campaign of hate against a minority group.

Mel Brooks took part in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and is currently working on a sequel to Spaceballs.

Happy to add Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Taylor's Version) to this.

All is Lost is a wonderful film about a man on a boat screwing up as much as humanly possible and Redford (the only actor) really sells it. Well worth a watch.

Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, says UN inquiry

I’m suspending my campaign for the Irish Presidency on account of forgetting to tell anyone I was running for the Irish presidency. I will not be taking questions on this as I dislike answering questions.

I think good science communication often involves good philosophy of science communication and there’s a lot of that in here. This is really impressive: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWuF...

Finally a technology to relieve us of the burden of reading and appreciating great literature!

Chilean bloke said to me yesterday he was going to 'Irlanda Normal' after leaving Belfast. It's catching on, guys.

🚨 BREAKING | 1,339 people have now been arrested on "terrorism" charges in 2025, with almost all of them busted for holding signs at pro-Palestine protests. This is more than any year on record, by far. (Source: Home Office)

The Ezra-Klein-Good-Ezra-Klein-Bad merry-go-round gets faster and faster until Klein himself disappears into an new image in the flickering of the light. Then suddenly a break. All stops. We're outside of time. He has achieved complete dialectical synthesis. A new age of the Geist begins.

It’s Arvo Pärt’s 90th birthday. I was lucky enough to meet the auld lad himself right after the premier of his piece The Deer’s Cry in 2008. He was remarkably humble and polite.

"If a cow had tools, we could not understand them" Wittgenstein

Don't forget to add this white text to all your publications.

I think all the candidates for the Irish presidency should be asked if they side with Plato or Aristotle here

That's only 1 paper for me to try to access, realise it's held by The Philosophy Documentation Center, and then ignore.

This frontispiece in my book just made me laugh a lot. Is this Buddhist reincarnation, or some other form of afterlife?

Hold on, so some philosophers think the function of modal vocabulary is to describe some special deep metaphysical facts about the nature of reality and not just to make explicit the semantic relations between our empirical commitments?!? That’s wild.

Essay writing mills provided students with important skills they’d need for the job market; they had to specify what they wanted, negotiate a fee, proofread the final work. Universities that didn’t teach students how to do this would fall behind.

People on Bluesky: The purpose of a system is what it does. Me, wise, my copy of Millikan open: well ackshually…

Nonesuch records have their own version of the Criterion Closet. Here’s Steve Reich enthusing about some albums: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dIw...

To work out what a state of an organism represents, all you have to do is build a time machine and observe the conditions under which all the ancestors of that organism produced that state (and what effect it had). It's pretty straightforward.

A liar paradox in the wild!

Nagel discusses the size of the universe in his essay on the Absurd and I suppose I'm just completely contented with the size of the universe. 93 billion light-years in diameter is good with me.

The universe is unimaginably large and I think that’s great. That’s about the size it should be.

Rereading Kant's third critique and I had forgotten about the bit where he says that if you saw a hexagon just sitting by the sea, the reasonable conclusion would be that it was made by a rational being.

Well, that cleared that up.

This term will involve teaching from both Nagarjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and Ruth Millikan’s Language, Thought and other Biological Categories and I don’t know which one is intimidating me more.

"It's quite narrow-minded to call these shadows on the wall. You just need a less anthropocentric notion of living things"

I'll give babies this, porridge with a mushed banana is a top tier meal.

It looks like the patriots have been out.

This is a good paper about a common phenomenon that has tips for how we can be better people: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Occasionally I see some online discourse and I feel grateful for all the opinions I don’t have (like being upset about sourdough bread). I wonder if this is what Sextus Empiricus was talking about.

The new intake of undergraduates will have be born around 2007 (just before the financial crisis began), the Brexit vote happened when they were 9, and Covid started when they were 13. So avoid making cultural references to The Simpsons, The Matrix, or optimism about the future.

The use of 'beeswax' as a substitute for 'business' should be more generally applied: beeswaxman/woman, beeswax casual, beeswax cycle…

Fun Tip: Let's Plays are pretty useful tool for learning a new language as they normally involve people speaking naturally about what's on the screen in front of them.

There has been an outbreak of Morris dancing on the main bridge in Durham. The situation is being monitored.

With famous brothers, one will be known for writing, the other for science stuff; Wilhelm & Alexander von Humboldt, Henry & William James, John & Hank Green. Famous sisters are known for their serve or their backhand slices; Mary & Elizabeth Tudor, Emily & Charlotte Brontë, Serena & Venus Williams.

It still blows my mind that we can detect mergers of black holes and huge balls of neutrons across the cosmos by measuring how the resultant gravitational waves deform spacetime around us via mirrors that are displaced by mere fractions of a proton width. Some of the coolest science imaginable. 🧪