Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"[For Hobbes] the state is charged with maintaining social stability and preventing a return to natural anarchy... Human beings are thus, by nature, nonrelational creatures, separate and autonomous." -- Patrick Deneed, Why Liberalism Failed , 32 Proto-liberals like Locke and Jefferson and modern liberals like Mises and Rawls all start from a similar place: we are first and foremost human atoms, who only need enter into social groups in so far as it suits our interest to do so. Our original state was as free individuals, who "contracted" into social groups because we saw it was to our advantage. As Deneen notes, "Even marriage, Locke holds, is finally to be understood as a contract whose conditions are temporary and subject to revision..." (33). Or, as Mises put it: "The fundamental social phenomenon is the division of labor and its counterpart human cooperation. "Experience teaches man that cooperative action is more efficient and p...

Have some fun Making boiled eggs On the great white theater group mat Have some fun Making soiled legs While you have your little blue spat Don't you say I didn't shout out, "Heads up! That is a six-toed cat!"

Collecting some good quotes from Deneen, along with occasional commentary, in the interest of advancing my review, and your consciousness! "Liberalism has drawn down on a preliberal inheritance and resources that at once sustained liberalism but which he cannot replenish" (29-30). It is no sort of comeback to Deneen's view to point to the great material wealth produced by liberalism, since Patrick is quite aware of this wealth himself, and repeatedly acknowledges its existence. But in his view (and mine too) liberalism is analogous to the guy at the gym that has been popping steroids like mad for 10 years, who, when it is pointed out that he is getting himself into deep trouble, replies, "What?! Don't you see all the weight I can lift?" Why, yes we do, and it is the very thing that has raised your bench press poundage into the stratosphere that has gotten you into this fix. This is not to say we might not be wrong, just that it is foolish to point ...

My nearly finished review is here .

In an essay in Philosophy of Science in Practice , Michael Strevens defines 'fundamentalism' as the notion that "Everything is made up of a single kind of stuff and everything that happens is directed solely by fundamental laws of physics that, depending on the configuration of stuff at one moment, determine its configuration at the next" (69). He goes on to claim that fundamentalism implies that all sciences really should just operate by showing how, say, mate selection in bower birds, or the nature of parliamentary institutions in Medieval Europe, can be derived from the laws of physics alone. The program to make all sciences a branch of physics goes under the name "unity of science." Strevens backs his fundamentalist faith with the claim that "the empirical evidence for fundamentalism has accumulated swiftly" (69). But he presents no such evidence, for, truth be told, there is none: instead, as he admits, "Real science is not only largel...

So last night, tired of writing a new Python function whenever I wanted to write a new recurrence test question, I wrote a recurrence harness. It turns a handful of basic lines of code into two, but more importantly, because I can re-use the harness it is worth spending the time to write proper error checking and to memoize it. Here is the code . Below here are some examples. Note that, because this is memoized, we get the 4000th Fibonacci number essentially instantly, while without memoization, the runtime increases faster than the Fibonacci sequence itself, so, even if we could do one recursive call per nanosecond, we would be looking at roughly 1.2 * 10 819 years for the recursive version to finish... and that's a long time for students to wait for their final to be graded. The 4000th Fibonacci number: fibb = {0: 0, 1: 1} def fibf(n, bases):     return recur(n - 1, bases, fibf) + recur(n - 2, bases, fibf) In [3]: recur(4000, fibb, fibf, True) Out[3...

between UNIX files in different directories: So I had the clever idea of hard-linking some of my init files to a git repo and storing the repo on GitHub so I can grab them for anywhere I have a login. ( Here's the repo .) So, for instance, I hard-link my .bash_profile in my home directory to the one in InitFiles, so whenever I update the script from any of the 6 or 7 machines I might login on, I can just pull it down to every other machine. (And I automate the pull each time I login.) But ... the link keeps "breaking." It works, and then a little later, it doesn't, and I have to delete the file from its "proper" login directory and re-link it to the repo version. Any idea what I could be doing wrong? (OK, rob, I've just left you an opening you could drive a truck through...) UPDATE: Rob Dodson (cover artist for EFRP , PUCK , A Song of the Past , and The Idea of Science , among other things) set me straight: I need symbolic links, not hard lin...