Gordon's Notes

A week ago, in a Facebook group for CrossFit physicians, I read a post blaming poor parenting ( i.e. , poor mothering) for childhood obesity...

While recently rereading Banks’ marvelous book The Algebraist I decide I ought to write a post about “The Truth”, which is basically Bostro...

WaPo has a delightfully meta-subversive headline for an article about the failings of 21st century capitalism:  This Kardashian headline sho...

If you're a reasonably healthy middle-class American adult you too can buy happiness. Here's how ... Coding Horror: Buying Happine...

The Atlantic has a sure fire winner online. Kate Bolick's  All the Single Ladies follows the formula - single woman in New York, romant...

After years of making past IOT episodes available only for streaming, the BBC is making the archive of their History of Ideas program availa...

“No story ends happily. The happy ending is only about knowing where to end on a smile, at the very moment where fortune is still on the asc...

There are two racers. Jane is legless. Since the age of two she has excelled. Jill is apathetic. She has trouble getting started. She give...

The weak are inescapable. Live long enough? Probably weak. Child? Weak. Wrong genes? Not so strong. Blacksmith post-horses? Tribe out of po...

As a Catholic schoolboy in 1930s Quebec my father practiced a form of polemics known as Apologetics [1]. He argued through reason for the ...

This is disturbingly close to what I think ... I would say "editing" rather than "self-delusion", but, really, that...

Just west of the Minnesota Saint Paul border is the Catfish Bay water ski park . It's a puddle with a grandstand. Some obsessed maniac ...

I've had only a nodding acquaintance with Calvinism ( TULIP, via Garrison Keillor ), though I picked up a bit more thanks to George W Bu...

Eons ago my peers used to puzzle over the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics . Back in the 1960s an essay on the topic by Merci Coope...

Wow. You know, this really did deserve more than just a small aside on the recently redesigned IOT web site... BBC - Radio 4 Melvyn Bragg...

I'd never heard of John Wooden before I came across this drawing on the wall of an old arena in Northeast Minneapolis (click for full s...

The first I remember hearing of Boethius was this In Our Time programme on The Consolation of Philosophy … In the 6th century AD, a su...

I was 15 when Patricia Hearst "joined" the SLA. I don't remember a lot of public sympathy in Canda for her then, I dimly recal...

Persons with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortext behave more like Mills and less like Kant (emphases mine): Study Finds Brain Inju...

My wife and I were chatting about the genetics of cognition when conversation turned to one of the great emotional touchstones of the conse...