“Bizarre views are a hazard endemic to metaphysics. … I believe there is not a single detailed exploration of fundamental issues of metaphysics that does not, by the end, entangle its author in seeming absurdities (sometimes advertised as ‘surprising conclusions’).” Eric Schwitzgebel tries to explain.
Tag: 09.19.11
Royal Ballet Star Turns Into Cockroach
“One day Edward Watson awoke to find that he had been transformed into a giant insect. The Royal Ballet star is at the centre of a new dance version of The Metamorphosis, a commission for ROH2 that brings Kafka’s famous novella to life.”
Harvard Students Asked To Take Kindness Pledge
“What could possibly be wrong with asking Harvard students to be nice to one another? This year, freshmen are being asked to make the following pledge: ‘As we begin at Harvard, we commit to upholding the values of the College and to making the entryway and Yard a place where all can thrive and where the exercise of kindness holds a place on a par with intellectual attainment’.”
The MTV Exec Who’s Bringing Independent TV And Radio To Afghanistan
Tom Freston, who oversaw MTV for 17 years, is now “serving as a board member and adviser to the Moby Group, which owns a burgeoning string of television and radio networks in a country where simply owning a television was illegal not so long ago.”
Here’s The Reason Technology Should Change Education
“We are storing, sorting, and filtering information today in ways that are vastly different than we did even 50 or 25 or maybe even 10 years ago.”
SAT Verbal Scores Are Down Again. Why?
“The decline has led some commentators to embrace demographic determinism — the idea that the verbal scores of disadvantaged students will not significantly rise until we overcome poverty. But that explanation does not account for the huge drop in verbal scores across socioeconomic groups in the 1970s.”
Now-Former Borders Employees Tell Us What They Really Think
“As Borders closed forever this weekend, one patron snapped a photograph of a bitter bookseller’s manifesto an unidentified store: ‘Things We Never Told You: Ode to a Bookstore Death’.”
Philadelphia Orchestra Splits With Philly Pops
“Peter Nero and his orchestra have agreed to split from the Philadelphia Orchestra Association, ending a six-year experiment that was bumpy from the start, stormy at the end, and never fully consummated.”
Conductor Kurt Sanderling, 98
“Kurt Sanderling, who led the Leningrad Philharmonic and the East Berlin Symphony Orchestra under Soviet rule and won admirers in the West later in his career as a guest conductor for orchestras in London, Los Angeles and elsewhere, has died” – two days short of his 99th birthday.
Your Walk Is Like Your Fingerprints
“Airport security may soon have a new way to check your ID: watching the way you walk. It seems footsteps are as unique as fingerprints, and can identify people with 99.8 per cent accuracy.”