Seen Elsewhere

Whenever I see a spike in the page views I wonder what ridiculous thing it is that I’ve said. Thanks go to Tim Worstall for mentioning me in the Britblog round-up on one of my better days.

The ARLT blog links through to the Times where you can hear Boris Johnson on What the Romans did for us. Downloading is a bit of a trial. I’ve tried saving the direct link with Firefox, but it’s coming down with a .htm extension instead of .mp3. Opera on the other hand has no such problems. You can also subscribe via iTunes or iPodder.

I have to admit I’m really not a sophisticated art critic. Nonetheless I found Edie’s review of two sculptures thought-provoking. I just saw something tacky, but Edie has more to say:

Spears did not even pose for this “Monument,” which is not a monument to her, or woman, or even the sacrifice of a great deal of a woman’s liberty to motherhood. It is a monument to “pro-life,” the sovereignty of a single male cell within a woman’s body. It is a monument to vessel-hood.

She also has recentposts on atheism which are worth reading through.

Another podcast is a debate with Daniel Dennett and Alistair McGrath found via Nomadic Thoughts. I thought Alistair McGrath came out of this a lot better than he did in his recent book. I don’t think McGrath was arguing against the study of religion, but clearly wasn’t happy about the meme as a method for examining it. Daniel Dennett in constrast seemed unprepared for the debate. I haven’t got round to reading his new book yet, but if it’s another book saying “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if someone did this with memes?” then it’s not going to win any converts. I was planning to write up something on this Greek potsherd for the Journal of Memetics, but perhaps memes are going to flounder as a good idea rather than a good method.

Aydin Örstan continues to fascinate me with excellent photography at Snail’s Tales. Is it a Helix? Is it a Lymnaea? Or is it both? is a mystery involving two very weird snails. Or possibly one. I checked the date, it’s March 29 for the post.

Finally Jeremy Boggs at Clioweb is putting up some new blog themes. The designs at Clioweb and History : Other are one of the reasons I changed the design of this site to the Kiwi Theme. Other reasons include bits of the previous theme being broken. Sitting down and going through the files seemed a bit too dull. Anyhow if I’d seen his Letters theme before installing Kiwi, I probably would have used a tweaked version of that instead.