Category: Uncategorized

In recognition of George Carlin’s passing, here’s his 10 Commandments shtick. (Warning: naughty words are used.)

An interesting legal case in Florida, reported by the NYT:

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

It is not clear that the approach will succeed. The Florida state prosecutor in the case, which is scheduled for trial July 1, said the search data may not be relevant because the volume of Internet searches is not necessarily an indication of, or proxy for, a community’s values.

What do you think? Does a community’s googling reflect their values? Or does it only reflect their private values, as opposed to their public values? Is that a viable distinction?

There is an interesting video discussion here about contemporary philosophy of physics. It’s sorta long, but the issues are interesting. One of the participants is David Albert, a big name in philosophy of physics, who appeared in the execrable film “What the (bleep) do we know?” He explains how he came to be interviewed for that film, and how the producers took what he said and edited so that he ended up sounding like a silly new-ager. Moral for philosophers: don’t expect the media to treat you as you would treat others!

An interesting article that reacts to a recent edition of New Criterion that bemoans the rather pathetic state of liberal education at American universities and colleges.  

FirstThings-the-state-of-higher-desperation-matthew-j-milliner1

 

Count me as one who thinks instant replay in baseball is a bad idea.  Call me a ‘luddite purist’ if you must, but I resist the imperialism of technological thinking.  You can read George Will’s (whatever you think of his politics, he is a good baseball writer) recent column on the matter here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/13/AR2008061302637.html

This might seem at best tangentially related to philosophical questions.  But I think there are lots of interesting philosophical/ethical questions concerning umpires.  I friend of mine recently raised a number of them, I will parrot him here:

– How much of the human element do we want in sports?  Would a game (baseball, football, etc) be a better game if we had perfect referee robots instead of humans?  In such a game, let’s imagine, all the calls are right.  The outcome of the game would really be determined by the play on the field, right?  But then players and fans would no longer be able to influence the game by influencing the refs.  Is that influence an essential part of the games?  So would we damage the game?  Or would we just lose someone to yell at and blame things on?  Is there a hard and fast line to be drawn here?

– How important is it to always get it ‘right’?  How do we discern where and how the demand for precision and accuracy should be applied and where a more lax epistemological attitude is not only permissible but preferable?

–  Is it morally permisible to treat refs worse than we’d normally treat humans in other circumstances? 

– Is it permissible to deliberately try to influence them to make bad calls?