A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
The US Government are planning to test chelation therapy on children with autism. Chelation therapy? Yes, that chelation therapy. It’ll be interesting to see what the neurodiversity/autism rights people have to say about that.
Interesting: I didn’t know that faith-based initiatives had started with a scholar at Baylor University. Get this - the guy who advocates faith-based initiatives also studies into whether they work and works at a university run by the Baptists, who aren’t exactly doing badly out of the plan. In any other sphere, this would be called a conflict of interest.
I’ve really been enjoying a new blog recently: Kafir Girl. Go read it, it’s great.
My friend Aral Balkan launched his Singularity conference yesterday. It’s a giant, global online conference that - if you decide to attend - you don’t have to go anywhere (although Aral says he is hoping to support people who will put together local events with BarCamp-esque components during the downtime). Tickets start at ninety-nine US dollars. If BarCamp is a local role-play group, then Singularity is World of Warcraft, only less spoddy. (Also of interest: the use of Python-based Google App Engine for the hosting.)
Brian Leiter has a link to a paper showing that the ‘experimental’ shift that is going on in philosophy is also taking place in linguistics. I’m still not sure exactly how experimental methods are going to work in philosophy, but, hey, science is awesome, and it’ll be fun to see how we can test philosophical ideas.
