Punting to another blogger

Yes, I know, the way I have been neglecting this blog is shocking. And my intention had been that, within the beginning of summer break from home schooling, I would blog more. That has perhaps been somewhat true at What's Wrong With the World but has not worked out here. By the way, faithful readers, just a housekeeping note about W4: We have persistent display error problems there with our main page, and Tech Support has had a frustrating time trying to resolve them, so for the moment we have to live with them. Just hit refresh. Except on rare occasions, "refresh" should bring the page up for you just fine. 

Instead of blogging in my additional free time, I've been enjoying myself immensely working on some philosophical literature in the sub-field known as "Bayesian coherentism." Actually, I don't think it's really a form of coherentism as opposed to foundationalism at all, but the majority of its advocates think so. It's a truly enjoyable literature for the probability theory geek-inclined, and I'm getting into it this summer for the first time. At the moment I'm breaking my skull over a great article by probability theorist Timoji Shogenji on coherence and the transmission of evidential support. One thing that slows one down in this work is that nearly everyone uses his own notation, so one needs to learn a new notation almost every time. Now I know what "weight vectors" are, but that doesn't mean I have to like them.

Anyway, my on-line friend Kristor has a put up good post recently at the Orthosphere. It's called "The Eye of Sauron," and in light of recent depressing revelations, you can guess what that's about. The ending is my fave. Kristor hopes that the Enemy has just overlooked us little folk and that this is why we're still allowed to talk among ourselves, even though Big Brother is watching. He says,

I hope further that the reason we here are not factors material to the project of Leviathan is that we represent a salient in human affairs orthogonal thereto, that might – like hobbits – be too odd and humble to warrant his notice, yet spell his bane. God send it may be so, and grant us courage in the hour of darkness at the end of all things.

Some eagles would be good, too.

I second that.