Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
Via a friend who is on Twitter, I learned that Julian Sanchez suffered an attempted mugging last week.  He managed to fight them off, however, and is fine.  In light of his martial prowess, I’d like to offer a few facts about everybody’s favorite libertarian philosophy major whiz kid:
Philosophers recognize four categories of just [...]

By Thoreau
We haven’t had any of this for a while, so let’s get to it.
To whatever extent I might be classified as falling in some region of the libertarian camp on economics, I’d say that the core idea of libertarian economics is a negative idea:  Opposition to coercive interference in economic transactions between individuals.  However, [...]

By Thoreau
Female Science Professor, a venerable fixture of the academic science blogosphere, and one of the few non-biomed folks to rise to prominent in the science blogosphere, is reflecting on her five years of blogging and debating whether she wants to continue her current pace of blogging.  I, for one, would hate to see her [...]

By Thoreau
Cells that respond to chemotactic signals can get near-optimal solutions to the Traveling Salesman Problem. In other words, if they simply follow their nose and sniff out high concentrations of whatever they’re looking for, they can find the most efficient way to get from one place to another while visiting a lot of targets [...]

By Thoreau
One thing that fascinates me in physics is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics can be used to derive some important results in physics.  Some of them are rather technical (e.g. the relationship between the Einstein A and B coefficients, the Abbe Sine condition), but one is quite simple:  The impossibility of a one-way [...]

By Thoreau
I am currently watching my favorite movie, and I have decided that in our do-over of 2001-2011 we should still have an attempt to gin up a case for war.  However, it should be foiled by a dim-witted giant, a revenge-obsessed Spaniard, a pirate fighting for true love, and a princess.
It is inconceivable to [...]

By Thoreau
I find almost nothing to disagree with in this interview and the lyrics of this song.

By Thoreau
In certain corners of the internet, one often sees the term “privilege” invoked.  The problem I have with the way in which this term is often used is that it conflates several concepts:
1)  Things that everybody really ought to be able to enjoy (e.g. basic respect) but some people are denied.  For instance, not [...]

By Thoreau
Greenwald wants to know why Ratko Mladic can be tried in a court of law, while Bin Laden gets shot in the head and dumped in the ocean. I will cite the precedent of Justice Scalia, who established the “What would Jack Bauer do?” test as an important element of jurisprudence. Jack [...]

By Thoreau
Two years ago, my department chair asked me if I’d teach our 2 quarter advanced classical mechanics course.  Nobody else had requested it, so, there you go.  At the time I was not terribly enthusiastic, because advanced undergraduate classical mechanics at the level of, say, Taylor, is basically a review of Newtonian mechanics at [...]