As we’re all battered by a storm, huddled up by our stockpiled supplies, our minds return to the most important questions like: Does Hermione love learning for it’s own sake? That became a point of contention in the conversation that followed my jeremiad against Hermione and Ron’s relationship. Hermione is clearly a nerd type. She’s bookish, bossy, has messy hair, and the glasses are silent, I guess. But Hermione is a lot more active and ruthless than we might expect her to... Read more
Writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Kevin Dutton underwent transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to damp down his amygdala and explore the way some brain scientists think psychopaths feel. (It’s the Dark Side version of a moral jump discontinuity). I’ve read some scientific literature on this hypothesis before, but it was really interesting to read his subjective experience. It isn’t long before I start to notice a fuzzier, more pervasive, more existential difference. Before the experiment, I’d been curious about... Read more
— 1 — Since Halloween falls on a Wednesday, I’ll make this week my costume-themed Quick Takes. (But, for the pictures of my costume, you’ll have to wait until Halloween proper — I’ll just say the malarial red blood cells are coming along nicely). If you’re still looking for inspiration, here’s a rundown of the crafting/costuming/inspiration blogs that live in my Google Reader (most of the titles are self explanatory: Cosplaying Children Nerd Babies Cosplay Blog Babes in Armor Women Fighters... Read more
This week, as part of Election Month at Patheos, the prompt for bloggers is: What are the key issues at stake in this election for people of your tradition? Well, I suppose I should start by disclaimering that I am not a canon lawyer, and this is not Official Catholic Advice. But, hey, at least the issue I’m going to talk about is non-partisan. And that’s the worse part; as the last foreign policy debate showed, callousness to human life, provided it’s... Read more
Bob Seidensticker has looked over my recent post on objective morality and hard to get at truths, and he’s got some more questions. Let me pull out a couple quotes from Bob’s post: I’ll agree that there’s nothing absolute for the consensus to be truth about. When we say, “Capital punishment is wrong,” there is no absolute truth (the yardstick) for us to compare our claim against. Is capital punishment wrong? We can wrestle with this issue the only way... Read more
Yvain has been reading Feser’s The Last Superstition, and he has an excellent gloss of one of Feser’s main points: Feser’s argument is that most atheists arguing with Christians are pretty much the equivalent of a Calvinist going up to a Hindu saying “Look! John Calvin’s writings totally oppose abortion! Why can’t you see that?!”. And then when the Hindu isn’t convinced, the Calvinist gets angry and says “Any reasonable person could see that John Calvin opposes abortion. Therefore, you must... Read more
This is the last in-progress Monday update for my Ms. Frizzle costume you’ll get. I’ve got to have the whole thing finished by this Saturday. So, I spent most of Saturday drawing germs, tracing them onto interfacing, ironing the interfacing onto fabric, and then pinning and topstitching the appliques onto the dress. In case that was a little in the weeds, I’m drawing designs onto this kind of fabric: The interfacing gets ironed onto the pretty fabric to make it stronger... Read more
God willing and the creek don’t rise, I’ll be received into the Catholic Church four weeks from today. However, it just so happens that the baptism falls on the same weekend as The Game. That means I’ll be taking a night train from Boston to DC with a group of my college friends to make it back in time. Since we’ll be traveling together, I thought it might be nice to say Evening Office when we board in Boston and Morning Office... Read more
Bob Seidensticker has been checking out C.S. Lewis, and he’s put up a post explaining why he still doesn’t think it makes sense to talk about morality as objective. I’m going to reply over here, but I’d love to have Hemant Mehta of Friendly Atheist step in and backstop me. You see, back when Hemant and I were scrapping on Justin Brierley’s radio show, Hemant agreed with me that the Taliban are flat out wrong about the moral status of... Read more
— 1 — In the midst of the discussion on how to translate “I AM THAT I AM” into languages that don’t have a “to be” verb (like ASL), I found out the following things: The technical term for this kind of linking verb is copula One of my readers knows that Klingon also lacks “to be” and provided a possible translation E-Prime (short for English Prime) is a reimagining of English that cuts “to be” and all conjugations of the... Read more
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