"When the first of August came round, the Professor realized he had pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have taken little more than a week." -Willa Cather (from The Professor's House, 1925)

No professional accomplishment has ever made me happier than this. theonion.com/translator-o...

Translator Of Original ‘Minions’ Epic Poem Slams ‘Sexless, Bloodless’ Film Adaptation

PHILADELPHIA—In a 4,500-word essay published in Harper’s Magazine, Emily Wilson, known for her popular translation of the Minions epic poem, blasted the latest film Thursday as a “sexless, bloodless” ...

theonion.com

The point isn't to produce essays, it's to teach students how to think for fuck's sake. The minute you automate that, it's over. You might as well close the course. Which they're also doing. This is an attack on learning, and everyone is just shrugging.

Genuinely a little horrified that mental fictionalism exists.

I don't think any paper needs to be 10k words... just write a book

gonna start signing off my reviewer reports with the sunglasses emoji 😎

Update: I did the legwork and I'm right, it's going in the paper!

Elmo@tim-elmo.bsky.social · 4mo ago

...clearly speaking out of turn here to some degree [professional philosophers are supposed to be more careful and I haven't done all the legwork yet], but what matters is whether I'm actually wrong about this, and if I'm wrong, I'd be very interested in the counterarguments.

fixed

(from a coffee shop) sorry to miss your panel

the odyssey is a powerful parable about the benefits of working from home

you'd better believe it's 5 o'clock somewhere everywhere

"heat a heavy pan (preferably cast iron or stainless steel) over medium-high heat until it's VERY hot." What does this hyphenated "medium-high" mean?? Wouldn't "VERY hot" mean setting the dial to 10/10? Does "medium-high" mean between 5/10 ("medium") and 10/10 ("high")? My eurodiversity is showing

shots fired in the visual adaptation literature

What's the best paper on what neuroscientists mean by "neural mechanism"? Do they mean something closer to physiology than "neural encoding" or "representational formats"? I suspect that they use the term in a less concrete-parts-that-interact-sense than philosophers of science, but what can I read?

how I contribute to ongoing scholarly conversations:

gonna start talking like this to my boss

“We think Exxon and their allies’ conduct was the most consequential corporate deception of all time”.. This shows how low they'll go to stop accountability for their actions, knowingly destabilizing our climate. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

US trial could reveal who paid hackers to target Exxon climate critics: ‘on the edge of our seats’

Oil giant has denied involvement, but climate activists are closely watching court case against Israeli private investigator for answers

theguardian.com

deeply embarrassing for philosophy as a discipline...

starting a literary magazine where all it says is you’ve read your last free article this month

@diovicen.bsky.social apparently I first posted this seven years ago!! Great times in Spain.

Hi all We are starting to post the videos of the "Beyond Computationalism" event on Youtube. You can find them here www.youtube.com/@faridzahnoun1 #philmind #philsci #philsky #philpsy #neurosky #neuroskyence

Marco Facchin@marcofacchin.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Still two weeks to submit your abstract for our Beyond Neurocomputationalism workshop (Antwerp 4-5 June). Keynote Speakers include Kate Nave, Romain Brette, Vicente Raja, Matteo Mossio, Mazviita Chirimuuta & Alicia Juarrero! Info below! #philmind #philsci #philsky #philpsy #neurosky #neuroskyence

Naive question, but why are there cyberattacks where the trail of the ransom money cannot be followed? Presumably the trail is lost at some point in a foreign country, why are those countries not heavily sanctioned or excluded from banking systems?

In our Viewpoint (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...) we synthesize the gametic definition (outlined by Janicke et al below) and other definitions of sex (e.g., multivariate definition). We contend that is NO consensus on “biological sex” (maybe a consensus isn’t actually necessary…)

There is No Consensus on Biological Sex

At this critical moment when misinformation about sex is being applied to policy globally, scientific clarification on the definition of biological sex is valuable. Here, we evaluate the primary appr...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Tim Janicke@timjanicke.bsky.social · 4w ago

In a new #Viewpoint we argue that the binary definition of #BiologicalSex based on gamete size is a scientifically robust framework that is entirely compatible with the diversity of sexual phenotypes and human gender identities. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...