Thursday, June 26, 2014

Notable Links

* D. G. Myers on the mercy of sickness before death, with a follow-up here.

* Volume 1 of the Whewell's Gazette collects links on the history of science.

* Jonathan Wolff argues that higher education is creating conditions favorable to sophistry.

* Ashok Karra at "Rethink" discusses David Foster Wallace and Alcibiades.

* The life of a North Korean poet.

* Ian Bogost discusses communication and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, "Darmok", which, while not the strongest story, is one of the most interesting concept-episodes of the series.

* You can see reconstructions of ancient athens at Ancient Athens 3D.

* Historians might be on the verge of rediscovering David Hume's wine cellar.

* Carson Holloway on polygamy and human dignity.

* Paul Raymont considers the question of why Berkeley seems to strike the imaginations of poets more than Hume.

* Marilyn Adams, What's Wrong with the Ontotheological Error?

* R. C. Sproul on Thomas Aquinas.

* The Environmental Protection Agency has been plagued by scandals recently. The most famous recent example was the man who managed to embezzle nearly a million dollars of federal money by pretending that he was a CIA agent. That's hard to top. But recently the Denver branch of the agency had to send out a memo asking people to stop defecating in the hallways.

* Matt Strassler discusses the notion of 'vacuum' in modern physics.