I learned yesterday via a local newspaper report of the existence of the Vatican Observatory which, surprising as it may seem, is exactly what it sounds like: the astrophysics research division of the Catholic Church. While its headquarters are at Castel Gandolfo (the Pope’s Summer home) in Italy, it’s based here in Arizona at the […]
I missed this over the weekend, but here’s Garrison Keillor tearing a strip off of Bernard-Henri Lévy and his book about America. (The San Francisco Chronicle liked it a bit better, but only a bit.) Based on Keillor’s review, it sounds like BHL has a case of the disease that Bruce McCall brilliantly parodied in […]
Any society that can make both John Tyler Bonner’s The Ideas of Biology and The Evolution of Complexity available to me for two dollars each on sale has to have something going for it. On the other hand, Kevin Trudeau’s Natural Cures ‘They’ don’t want you to now about still cost eighteen bucks, and rather […]
Eugene Volokh is already on this, but I caught a segment on the radio about the UCLAProfs.com, the site founded by some recent political science grad “dedicated to exposing UCLA’s most radical professors,” people who are engaged in “brainwashing” their students, an activity described as “about as hard as shooting fish in a barrel.” […]
I’ve been looking again at data from the Philosophical Gourmet Report, Brian Leiter’s reputational survey of philosophers. Here are a couple of scatterplots showing the relationship between the size of a University’s endowment and the reputation of its philosophy department, as measured by the PGR, broken out by Private and Public universities. The red […]
In her hugely successful memoir, Olivia Saves the Circus, Olivia gives a virtuoso account to her school class of how she single-handedly rescued a circus performance (all the performers were sick with ear infections, she claims) by doing everything herself. The book is replete with astonishing but true accounts of Olivia the Lion Tamer, Olivia […]
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