I had a thought earlier today [medium close-up of Nigel Hawthorne as Sir Humphrey after Hacker has told him he’s just had an idea – expression of delighted surprise: ‘Prime Minister!’]. Yes very funny; anyway, I had this thought.

A bit from Daughters of France, Daughters of Allah:

Amiri was the first Muslim woman I contacted in Paris, and she cried as we spoke on the telephone. That day she had received an e-mail saying, “Do you realize what you are doing to your own people?” It was, she told me, one of many threatening messages she had received, and they were not to be taken lightly.

The thought was just about the meaning of that phrase – ‘your … Read the rest

Here’s a good passage. Not apropos of anything in particular, I just happened to read it and I liked it so thought I would pass it on. It’s from Three Seductive Ideas, by Jerome Kagan, page 44.

Some scientists are uncomfortable with this level of uncertainty because they seek facts that are unlikely to be proven wrong. They resemble hunters who, having trapped a secret of nature, want it to stay fixed on the trophy wall forever. Other scientists are chess players who derive joy from following the many complex rules for doing science – the correct assignment of subjects, the proper balancing of conditions, the most appropriate statistical analyses. Those who are butterfly chasers – a third group

Well this is good. Meera Nanda’s article in the New Humanist is apparently being widely read and discussed. Someone who edited it says so here:

It’s moments like these I like best about my job: getting some recognition, even from total strangers, for a piece I spent hours and hours editing: Meera Nanda’s piece on the intellectual treason of postmodernist scholars from the January 2005 issue of New Humanist is being picked up on various arts&ideas websites and personal blogs, people are reading it, some are even commenting on it. It’s good to see these ideas going beyond the narrow readership of NH – thanks to the internet.

There is another comment on the diffusion of Meera’s New Humanist … Read the rest