Monthly Archives: January 2011

Baseball Teams as Early-Modern States

Posted on January 28, 2011 by

We are in the doldrums of the baseball year. We are eagerly awaiting the day pitchers and catchers report, even though nothing interesting happens for weeks thereafter. That’s just how bad it is for baseball fans right now. Almost all … Continue reading →

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Pets, mind

Posted on January 27, 2011 by

Over at A Bit More Detail, I have 94 separate posts with the tag “cat”. I have 37 posts tagged “shakespeare”, all but one relating to my wonderful cat of a bit more than two years. I’ve managed to vex … Continue reading →

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One note on the decline of homophobia

Posted on January 15, 2011 by

One little-known feature of Canadian life is that, because of the communal (religious, ethnic) hostilities which tore apart the Province of Canada, several Canadian provinces still possess separate schools, publically funded Roman Catholic school boards guaranteed by the British North … Continue reading →

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Hockey: Canada’s national game?

Posted on January 8, 2011 by

The Oberamtnmann has written here extensively about the American national sport of baseball. As the lone Canadian here, I suppose it’s incumbent upon me to write about hockey–ice hockey, specifically–and the way it relates to Canada. Briefly? Modern hockey took … Continue reading →

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In Defense of Vacation

Posted on January 3, 2011 by

Americans work too hard. A simple check over at Wikipedia shows that while France and Germany require four or more weeks of paid vacation, the United States does not have any such requirements. Every real job I’ve had in America … Continue reading →

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On the singularity, the real one (2)

Posted on January 2, 2011 by

My post yesterday about real singularities got nice response, here and in my link post at my own blog. I agree with The Oberamtmann’s suggestion here that the 19th and early 20th centuries saw a sort of singularity, a qualitative … Continue reading →

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On the singularity, the real one (1)

Posted on January 2, 2011 by

The singularity, originally developed by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, is–forgive the pun–a singular concept. [A] hypothetical event, [it occurs] when technological progress becomes so rapid that it makes the future after the singularity qualitatively different and harder to predict. … Continue reading →

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