The Thinker

It’s been a fun 5+ years here on The Thinker, but both my interest and my available evening hours for blogging have waned considerably in recent months, and it is time for me to focus on other endeavors. I would like to thank all my regular rea...

Aaron James, professor of philosophy at the University of California at Irvine, is the author of a new book, Assholes: A Theory. Evan Goldstein reviews the book in this article on The Chronicle Review. James argues for a three-part definition of as...

Since today is December 21, 2012 (or 12/21/12), it has been dubbed International Rush Day. (See here or here for more.) So here’s the first 8 minutes or so of 2112. Happy Rush day! © 2012 by Jeffrey Ellis / The Thinker. All rights reserved. Us...

The Thinker is currently averaging just under 300 unique visitors per day, plus an additional 425 or so RSS subscribers, for a total daily “readership” of about 725. This is up from 250 + 350 = 600, not quite a year ago. Not too bad, I su...

Here is a fascinating essay (pdf) by Michael Polanyi, titled “The Repubic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory” (HT to Peter Boettke, on Coordination Problem): [T]he community of scientists is organized in a way which resembles...

From The Economist: The economic output in the 21st century already approaches half of that of the 20th, and we’re only 12 years in. I first commented on the exponential upward surge of the state of humanity here. Population, life span, standar...

Vivek Haldar talks about programming and age, specifically on the question of whether one would want to still be programming at age 50. His post was prompted by James Hague, who claims that programming is a “young man’s game”  and...