Tag: Filler

Crooked Timber has me thinking a lot at the moment. This recent post on, basically, the etiquette of Philosophers, is not just nicely played but, it occurs to me, should be something I give to any potential friend or partner. I’m very guilty of the ‘sin’ of attacking the first premise in causal conversation and it’s a habit that is hard to break.

Filler. This is an article well-worth your reading time. It’s on Pop Philosophy and the difficulty of expressing deep philosophical concepts to the laity.

I wish I had read it. I also wish I easily remembered enough Philosophy of Mind to make reading the first part of the article less traumatic.

I’ve just spent a few unproductive minutes trying to coax interesting search results out of WolframAlpha about ‘Conspiracy Theory,’ with the only results being the films ‘Conspiracy’ and ‘Conspiracy Theory’ ((According to the WolframAlpha ‘Terms and Conditions’ I must now give you the citations: http://www60.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=conspiracy+theories http://www60.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+are+conspiracy+theories%3F http://www60.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+a+conspiracy+theory%3F http://www60.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=conspiracy+theory)). This hardly seems useful, although it does remind me that I haven’t seen those films…

The world must know:

The Most Exciting (and not really appropriate) Website Intro Ever ((Not really. But today, yes.))

It turns out that if you do an image search for me on the rarely used Altavista.com search engine you get me, Tame Iti and something else.

Conspiracy? Probably…

Stuart McCutcheon, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Auckland, `brief CV’ on the University of Auckland’s website gives his qualifications as:

Professor McCutcheon completed his Bachelors degree with first class honours at Massey University in 1976, and was then appointed to the position of lecturer while undertaking a PhD in metabolic physiology.

Metabolic physiology? I had been told it was a PhD on the actual freezing to death of new-born lambs. Luckily, the rumour, such as it was, seems like it might well be right; witness the Massey University library’s catalogue:

A study of some factors affecting the resistance of newborn lambs to cold-stress with particular reference to starvation and exposure mortality : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Animal Science at Massey University / Stuart Norman McCutcheon

I pass this one because I’ve been telling people that the rumour was that the Vice-Chancellor had the makings of ‘evil’ genius and it seems that, in our agriculturally-inclined country, that he does, in fact, have the makings.