Ethics and Moral Philosophy Philosophy hand signals 20 Mar 201122 Jun 2018 Courtesy of Brian Leiter, the APA Philosophy Referee Handsignals. I now want someone to make these into semaphore format. And for Sam Harris: Read More
General Science Nice genetics quip 4 Jan 2008 Microsoft Word’s “Track Changes” and Endnote are synthetic lethals. From The Futile Cycle. “A synthetic pair of genes are two gene variants that alone are fine, but when combined into the same organism, cause it to die.” Why? When you have Endnoted a paper and send it to a friend… Read More
Humor Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must sing, badly 12 Dec 2009 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57PWqFowq-4] Read More
That joke was old when done there. The best ones are really old. I think that goes back to “1066 and all that”.
I’m reminded of a panel in the comic “The wizard of Id” where the king, on being informed that the peasants are revolting retorts “You can say that again”
It’s that old, is it? I first encountered it in Robert Manson Myers’s From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf (1951), in which we learn “…when Wycliff [of Dover] translated the Old Testament into the New, he was condemned as hereditary and burned as a steak. Following his death several “University Wits” instigated the so-called Pedant’s Revolt, upon which occasion Henry VI Part III made his astute observation: “The pedants are revolting.” An excellent book if you like that sort of thing. Still in print the last time I looked. Oh, BTW: “Chief among medevil dramatists was Mahatma Dante, whose Divine Comedy has become the favorite farce of all time. … He stood with one foot in the Muddle Ages, while with the other he hailed the dawn of a new day.”
Where were all these excellent texts when I was an undergraduate? Or are they the texts that undergraduate essayists write?