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My favourite subject as an undergraduate was Historiography, which covered historical method and the nature of history. I was fortunate to be invited to contribute to the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography by the editor, Aviezer Tucker, which is being launched in Prague next week. Unfortunately…

It occurs to me that I don’t have a good list of these, so I invite you all to list and name your favourite science journalism narratives. You know, the sorts of things that journalists must squeeze every science story into, no matter what the actual content. Journalists in general…

Sometimes it’s so cool to know smart people, so you can congratulate them when they win awards. Go Kimbo! Hat tip Leiter.

Kangaroo Island is a largish island off the coast of South Australia, famous for its wildlife and food. It also has some of the best preserved Ediacaran Cambrian fossils, on a par with the famous Burgess Shale. A report on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s TV show Catalyst recently showcased these,…

A chance link to my blog has led me through an ego search to find Will Thomas’ most excellent Ether Wave Propaganda blog. Will is a historian of science post-doc, I think, and he has an engaging style. Coincidentally, John Lynch lists various links to history of science, including a…

Ernst Mach is one of the more interesting of the nineteenth century polymaths. A physicist, he also kicked off positivism, and (I did not previously know) was an evolutionary epistemologist: Mach is part of the empiricist tradition, but he also believed in an a priori. But it is a biologized…

PZ Mydfgsers tried to see Expelled, Ben Stein’s silly film about ID. He was asked to leave by some uniformed guard or policeman, as the producers had him on a Watch List or something. They let his family, and guest in, though. The guest was Richard Dawkins…

This is a field in which I am largely ignorant, so I will just report it and leave the commenters to interpret. Collider blog has a discussion of an idea reported by Charm &c. in a paper at arXiv by Bruce Knudsen, proposing that experiments should be assessed using Shannon…

Brian Leiter is reporting, and the University of Cambridge confirms it, that Peter Lipton, a well known philosopher of science, has died. Leiter will put up an obit later. For now, here is a very good paper of Lipton’s explaining philosophy of science to scientists.