Who Were the Sea Peoples?

(While scanning this, the HP photo software offered me the option to "Smoothen Textures." Smoothen ? What, did HP contract with the author of Beowulf to write their dialogue boxes?

How many of you learned in school that the living world is divided into two kingdoms, the plants and animals? Or three, plants, animals, and protists? I did. Well, you may be suprised to learn that the first scheme was antiquated by 1866, and the second by 1956? Here's the current six-kingdom list, from Wikipedia : Eubacteria, Archaebacteria, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, Animalia. Or how about basic tastes? Four? (Salty, sour, bitter, sweet.) That's what I was taught in the sixties and seventies. Well the fifth basic taste has been known since 1908. Why does it take a century or so for these things to get into textbooks?

This is not going to be an angst-filled, exisential post. Rather I'm puzzling over the use of the verb 'to be,' or, more precisely, why it puzzled twentieth-century philosophers so much. I've been re-reading Brand Blanchard's Reason & Analysis , and cannot really understand how analytical philosophers got their knickers so in a twist over this issue. As Blanshard describes the problem, the worry these analytical philosophers had was that, if someone says, "The Loch Ness monster is a sea serpent," they seem to be granting "existence" to the monster, whereas, as they see it, the monster doesn't exist at all. In their view, this is the results of a linguistic confusion, the cure for which is to say things like, "The realm of real things does not contain a living creature such that that creature is reptlian, very long, aquatic, and lives in Loch Ness." As I see it, when someone says, "The Loch Ness monster is a sea serpent,...

This clip of Doug Casey is a riot. (If you want to see the whole debate they're compiled here .)

On reflection, I think I prefer this version of the “theorem”: Theorem: Any twice differentiable function of one variable has a second derivative vanishing everywhere. Proof: y''/y'2 = (d2y/dx2)/(dy/dx)2 = (d2y/dx2) (dx/dy)2 ... etc. Issa bottle a wine.

I'm getting sick and tired of making billion dollar bets against the European stock market, and then having the *#)!$#$ paparazzi following me at every turn.

Make your plans, guys and gals, I'm going to be speaking at the mysterious Victor Niederhoffer's " Junto " on Thursday, October 4 in glamorous New York City. Autographed copies of my Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism will be distributed to all attendees (who hand over a $20 bill). (In all seriousness, those who are going to attend should read the description at the hyperlink above. It's a little unusual. They discuss Junto stuff first, then the speaker talks very briefly, and then the gloves come off.)