Academia

Yesterday Columbia University gave in to blackmail by President Trump (see here the letter [HT: NYT]) in order to allow to begin negotiations over the recovery of $400 million in research funding. Its unsigned letter (here HT: Leiterreports) leaves ambiguous which potentially sensible elements they were planning to do anyway (“parts of our comprehensive strategy”) […]

It’s been evident since Trump’s inauguration that the US, as we knew it, is over. I’ve been looking at some of the US-centred organisations and economic dependencies that will need to be rebuilt. But I hadn’t given much thought to the university sector, where I work, until I got an urgent email asking everyone at […]

Here are two groups of Western philosophers. We’ll call them Group A and Group B. Here’s Group A: Plato, Epicurus, Plotinus, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, David Hume, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Schopenhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Jeremy Bentham, Alan Turing, Saul Kripke. […]

At the cutting edge of world history and industrial progress back when it was built in 1799, but now Ironbridge and nearby Coalbrookdale are bucolic backwaters where you struggle to get a decent phone signal.

A while ago, ALLEA (the alliance of European science academies) published a statement on ethical problems in collaborations between academia and commercial parties.* With this post, I want to draw attention to this topic (my impression was that it got a bit overshadowed by all the horrible attacks on academic freedom and academic institutions that […]

Every time I start writing something about The Situation, it seems pointless. Both the media environment and the world itself seem to be spinning out of control. The bubble of Boomer Realism has been popped. The weirdness which has been bubbling since 2008 has flooded the territory; old maps seem worse than useless. I’ve got nothing […]

I’ve not been out taking pictures, so here’s another cormorant from the sequence I shot a few days ago.

As I type this, Trump is threatening tariffs on anyone who challenges the interests of America’s technology oligarchs, all of whom are now paying obeisance at this court. Technology is the US biggest weapon against the free world of which it was formerly part, and the right place to fight back. But what can be done? I’ll […]