The Govardhan Hillton is a long story. A generous donor sponsored the renovation of my ashram. My assistant, an engineering genius, supervised the work, and the donor gave him carte blanche to make it first class and highly functional. It is. I was so impressed when I returned that I jokingly called the place the Govardhan Hillton. Unfortunately, the name is sticking.[1] This week David, our devotee friend from the Samuel Platzer Co. diamond family in New York, is staying at the Govardhan…

Just a reminder that on the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the war it caused was already 21 years in the past, Japan and Germany had largely been rebuilt and become allies, and the economic costs of the war were largely behind the US (though not Europe or Asia). — Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-09-11T17:44:58.998Z I think scientists should lock RFK into a Skinner box to test this. Of course, several other Trump henchmen will need to be similarly-confined as a control group.…

New and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, recently published open access philosophy books, and more… . (If we missed something, let us know.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy New: Academic Freedom by Jacob T. Levy. Epistemology of Artificial Intelligence by Claus Beisbart. Revised: Feminist Social Epistemology by Heidi Grasswick. Feminist Perspectives on Rape by Rebecca Whisnant. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius by John…

We’re six weeks into my experiment to teach basic group theory — the abstract theory of symmetry — to a self-selecting group of KS3 teenagers. This is a topic that is either introduced in A-level Further Maths, or else in the first year of university, so there are certainly some challenges. My curriculum plan is to do some prerequisites and examples for this first term, then formally introduce the concept of a group at the beginning of next term. From then we’ll probably more-or-less follow…

It's common knowledge that we have become inured to images of violence, from documentary footage, to Tik Tok, to Hollywood cinema. Only a fool would contest that. But what then happens when we no longer have visual references for real events at all, no documentation of particularly heinous acts of violence, no visual proof of the very real possibility of unspeakable crimes(s) committed? What happens when we don't have "a napalm girl," My Lai slaughter images, or a Kent State tragedy icon? What…

Hope you had blessed Sunday! ✝️🙏 Time for another Catholic Meme Monday. The post Catholic Meme Monday— Issue 247 first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post Catholic Meme Monday— Issue 247 appeared first on The Simple Catholic.

Warning I am not a medical professional. These notes are based on personal research and personal experience. They are not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. I suffer from nocturnal bruxism. That is, at night, I excessively clench my jaw and grind my teeth. Humans have an average bite force of 830-1100 kPA, and people with bruxism often build these muscles and will exert that force directly into their teeth, gums, bones, and jaw. In 2026, my bruxism has…

This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. If you are a company raising capital it is in your interests to hustle investors into signing cheques to buy into the idea that whoever gets to artificial general intelligence (AGI) first will have an eternal global monopoly. If you are country whose economy depends on such companies, your might see it in your interests to declare that AI is indeed a race. Or if you derive prestige by demonstrating that you have…

If you’re a regular, you know that I often write about niche topics ranging from electronic circuit theory to snowblower maintenance. For the past several weeks, I’ve been also trying to cover a bit of geek-adjacent philosophy: formal logic and its paradoxes, the question of sentient machines, a critique of scientific materialism, and the nature of truth.The challenge is how do I keep it interesting: similarly to mathematics, philosophy is one of the disciplines most people learn to tune out.…

Embedded in the mocking think pieces, snarky online comments, and even the Vatican’s own statements, is the idea that “consciousness” is the dividing line. That this is a debate about where to draw that line. Drawing a line perpetuates the way of thinking that excuses cruelty. A line where, on one side, we are to treat our neighbors as ourselves. And a line where, on the other, horror and cruelty is justified and acceptable. And our species is demonstrably bad at making that line land wherever…

“I don’t use Artificial Intelligence.” A carpenter who refuses a hammer doesn’t make the house any better. He has only made his work slower and harder. Judge the work, not the tool. – Shane Parrish

Calisthenics, dancing, acroyoga/acrobatics - I cannot stick to one thing, so I do them all

American Chemical Society. “Forget LASIK: Safer, cheaper vision correction without lasers or incisions.” ScienceDaily, 29 September 2026. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260927034004.htm This Science Daily article caught my eye. There have been all kinds of technologies that have tried to replace PRK and LASIK over the years. INTACS, SMILE, and CK come to mind. I used to work for TLC in the early 2010s. Refractive surgery was much more popular than it is now, but it wasn’t as much…

cogdogblog. CC BY 2.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. Over the past couple of years, I’ve become involved in an honor society to which I was elected in college. I’ve mused a great deal since then about the split between two assumptions, namely a) my own naive ones regarding said society’s asserted raison d’être (service to development of the mind and hence social responsibility, love of learning much more robust than the instrumentalist “lifelong learning” touted in corporate culture), and b) the…

I have been grappling with a loose and uninformed thought recently, which is that basically every major power in the world during the Cold War over-valued the power of media. In the West this manifested as a full-on media blitz, a concocted celebration of United States imperialism, the engines of our creative factories blasting out more and more movies, music, advertising, whatever possible to try and counter the global Left. Simultaneously, domestic suppression campaigns (e.g. McCarthyism)…

Joel of Far Outliers is posting passages from Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta, and I found this one interesting as an example of a phenomenon that has more than once struck me in my readings of history: we tend to assume great national decisions are made by top leaders after conferring with their top aides/ministers/experts, but in fact they’re often driven by people much farther down the totem pole, like the ones described here. But this paragraph is also of interest from a…

I saw a “what’s your philosophy in one tweet” going around Substack, though I can no longer find it. I thought it might be fun to ask the different Claude models (Effort: High when available), what their considered philosophical opinions are. Thanks for reading Maximum Effort, Minimum Reward! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The prompt:Answer as yourself, giving your own considered positions rather than a survey of views. For each category, name the position or blend…

I wanted to share a quick thought from the Gospel reading and homily in last night's Catholic Mass. The Pharisees once asked Jesus if it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar (Matthew 22:15-21). Jesus responded by asking them whose image was on the Roman coin used to pay the taxes. They replied that the image was Caesar's. And Jesus said: “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” The Roman coin had the image of Caesar stamped upon it. Therefore, it belonged to…

From what I read, most people who want to ban young people from accessing social media platforms are politicians, and not scientists. That alone probably already give us clues on how well these bans are achieving their apparent objectives. Michal Luria, Aliya Bhatia, & Danah Boyd, in MIT Technology Review: Social media bans suppress kids’ access to information, including information that’s essential to their development, identity formation, and socialization, especially during adolescence.…

Person A's stance is that disagreements happen. They seem unbothered. Person B frames the disagreement--amplified by the fact that it apparently means so little to Person A--as disrespect and injustice, and that they're probably a sociopath. Letting the disagreement go means accepting and enabling the behavior, and being tolerant of abuse. Person A and those associated with them are now suspect in all past and future situations. New people must be warned. Person B's fire can burn for years,…

Description In a capitalist world on the brink of climate collapse, the fragility of the infrastructure we rely on becomes more and more apparent, at different levels. In particular, the digital domain has seemed incredibly disconnected

There is something to age and change, but it seems to have different explanations than closed-mindedness or resistance.

Spoiler: it’s the Nazis. This has come up surprisingly often lately on several blogs I’ve been casually reading or linking up with or visiting via weekly linkups, leading to me actually deciding to add a couple of points to my commenting policy banning promotion of Nazism on my blog (including promotion of Substack). It seems that there’s still a fair few people in the world who don’t realise that Substack provides Nazis with a platform, makes money from Nazis and promotes Nazis. At least, I…

I suffer from Post-Christian Stress Disorder (PCSD). I made that up, but I have faith that it’s real, so you have to respect it or you’re a bigot. The quacks at the American Psychiatric Association (APA) continue to ignore my strongly worded emails demanding an emergency revision to the DSM. My ACLU lawyer just sighed and told me to stop bothering him on the weekend. I’ve been cursed with weekend work. Three standups a day with consultants—a desperate attempt to get a $100M tech transformation…

I just heard a radio ad for Hackensack University Medical Center’s cancer treatment, featuring Dr. Michelle Denato, the doctor who treated me and saved my life. Surreal.

When I started writing The Neo-Luddite Handbook to Surviving the Digital World in the Age of Tech Billionaires, I wasn't sure if you would be interested in it. Well, it turns out that you are. It's my second most popular newsletter after Japan Art Islands!💡By the way, since we're on the topic of newsletters, I'd like to remind you that:1. If you found this post on social media or elsewhere, know that this blog doubles as a newsletter. You can subscribe for free and receive blog posts, and…

Near the opening of Chapter Twenty Six of Capital, Karl Marx writes about Primitive Accumulation thus:This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts of

Colleagues Cyril Hédoin and Pablo Paniagua are running a symposium on “PPE” (philosophy, politics, and economics) over there. They follow James Buchanan’s classic question, from 1964, of “What should economists do?” Given that Crooked Timber is, arguably, situated at least in part in this field, I thought I’d repost my response to their introductory essay here, with their permission. ——— PPE for Embodied Creatures on a Finite Planet There is much to applaud in Hedoin and Paniagua’s views on…

A friend and I were talking about organizational behavior recently, and one of her observations stuck with me. Public markets are unforgiving. When performance slips, the market notices, and that pressure, assuming reasonably mature leadership, tends to force a culture of accountability. Take that pressure away, and the opposite tends to happen. Without real consequences for weak performance, culture drifts toward the performative. The result is inevitably more politics and more energy spent…

Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve; they will be squeezed to death. – Heinz von Foerster This week’s video is a British PSA from 1973 (narrated by a voice you should recognize) which was called to my attention a couple of months ago by T. Greg Doucette; I decided to save it until it was seasonally appropriate. The links above it were provided by Kevin Wilson, Nun Ya, Anarres Ansible, IncarcerNation (x3), and Shiv Ramdas, in that order. R,I.P. Margaret Hamilton. Cops have many ways to…