May 2012
19 posts
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Rafael Nadal is trending at Roland Garros
Just in case you were wondering who will win the French Open, Tennis.com’s pantheon of soothsaying leafreaders have spoken.
Amazingly, despite the leverage Novak Djokovic has as being the best player by far over the last year, there is unanimity that Rafael Nadal will win. Well, until you consider Nadal’s recent resurgence. Nadal’s confidence is sky-high, having won at 3 of...
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Has President Obama led the country on a spending...
Umm, despite what Mitt Romney and the GOP would have you think, it is the Republicans that have been far more promiscuous with their spending, as this chart shows:
That’s right, under President Obama, national spending has grown at a rate more than five times less than Bush’s rate of spending relative to his predecessor, Bill Clinton, in his more restrained term.
But of course,...
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Novak Djokovic has left Sergio Tacchini
I’m not at all surprised. As Chris Chase of Busted Racquet wryly observes,
The world No. 1 being dressed in Sergio Tacchini was the equivalent of 2001 Britney Spears signing a deal with RC Cola. It never felt right.
But who was the worthy successor? Apparently, a Japanese equivalent of the rising affordable fashion brand, H&M, called “Uniqlo.”
I’m still puzzled by...
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“I knew I wouldn’t win both [Madrid and Rome]. I actually expected this...”
– Roger Federer, in a rare display of modesty, and talking about the incidental virtues of losing when you’re a parent. But Roger, everyone expected Djokovic versus Nadal.
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This is how a president's views can (positively)...
So the NAACP has now endorsed same-sex marriage. See an article here: http://news.yahoo.com/naacp-backs-same-sex-marriage-civil-214635990.html
Now, this is significant because African-Americans are, by a larger margin than Caucasians, opposed to same-sex marriage. Something like more than 60%, I think, was the most recent figure. This comes only two weeks after President Obama made an historic...
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In this third final of the year between Nadal and...
…It’ll be interesting to see if Nadal continues serving to Djokovic’s forehand side today like he did at Monte-Carlo. Nadal is a creature of habit, so I’m sure he’ll be interested in seeing whether that drubbing he gave Djokovic just a couple of weeks ago was due to that tactical change, or more a product of Djokovic’s emotional depletion.
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Rafa Fans: Rafael Nadal - Birthday Project →
rafaelnadalfans:
On June 3rd, 2012, world-famous tennis player Rafael Nadal will turn 26. We are trying to make the biggest Rafael Nadal’s birthday video ever! So we need fans from all the world, no matter if you aren’t from Spain, everyone can participate in our project!
El 3 de Junio, el mundialmente…
I’m sooo going to whip out my Rafa get-up for this (which incidentally is my...
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I'm such a germaphobe
I hate dropping clothes in general, even on my bedroom floor. And I have probably the most antiseptic bedroom floor in the world. So you can imagine that for me, nothing disgusts the germaphobe that is me more than my dropping underwear turned inside-out on a communal laundry room floor while transferring my clothes from a washer to a drying machine.
This evening I managed to do just that. And to...
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Say hi to Rafa's new site
nadalnews:
Early this morning (well, USA time), the new official Rafael Nadal site launched. Go check it out.
[caption id=”attachment_33532” align=”alignnone” width=”450” caption=”The new official site”][/caption]
Original Article
Interestingly, the timeline forgets to mention Nadal’s 2010 US Open victory.
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To greener pastures (of the tennis sort)
Here’s an admission. I have progressed mightily beyond where my skills were initially when I started playing tennis two years ago. Here’s a rationalization. This justifies my splurging on easily the most expensive sporting equipment I have ever dropped a credit card on. Let’s look at the admission first.
Here’s how my repertoire has improved since I invested in my first...
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A look at some teaching evaluations from my intro...
So, as I have many a time tooted before here on my blog, this semester I became a TA for the first time in my grad school career. My first assignment in that regard, like most other debuting TAs in the philosophy department, was as a discussion section leader for Introduction to Philosophy, a required class for all Notre Dame freshmen. I was put in charge of a total of 21 students, tasked with...
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“Torrey,
I never got the chance to properly thank you since you were not at the...”
– After my students took their final exam for Intro to Philosophy, which was held this past Monday, many of them sent me very thoughtful messages expressing their appreciation for my guidance as a TA. This was a favorite of mine. I can just see it reminding me in darker days that this is why I went...
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April 2012
11 posts
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Nadal HAS beaten Djokovic at Monte Carlo
…By a ridiculously lopsided score of 6-3, 6-1 (in 2 sets, just as I predicted in my previous blogpost!) as well. Appropriately, he punctuated his first victory in 8 tries (all in finals) versus his nemesis with his third ace of the match, followed by the release of a primal “Vamossss,” really his only celebratory gesture the entire match.
To put things in perspective,...
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Nadal's already won the upcoming Monte Carlo final...
So says the infallible haruspex at Yahoo! Tennis. This despite notching 0 wins on every surface listed. The Monte Carlo Masters must be played over some kind of ersatz clay then, I’m guessing.
Silliness aside—and in case you haven’t noticed, Yahoo! Tennis for some reason this year has decided to become the Huffington Post of tennis, and become a dump for random tennis articles...
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Who's this "Ibid" character anyway?
shitmystudentswrite:
Many of the statements in this paper are also noted as coming from a person only identified as ‘Ibid’ in the footnotes. I am not skeptical of Ibid’s view, but I would like to find his/her article and read it for myself.
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Is Some Homophobia Self-Phobia? →
Sigmund Freud’s theorizing often rises to absurd heights, but his theory of reaction formation, according to which individuals rail against those people whose habits or lifestyle they are themselves the most predisposed to, has proven to be most prescient, as this study shows.
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“The love of turgid expressions is gaining ground, and ought to be corrected. One...”
– James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat, 1838
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“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all...”
– Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2008), 51.
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The Court's Innocent People, by Andrew Koppelman →
The moral outrage that the [Affordable Care Act] has provoked is weird. It’s a tyrannical intrusion on your liberty if government makes you pay for health insurance before you get sick and demand treatment! But if millions of people die from preventable diseases, or are bankrupted by medical expenses, no problemo. Libertarians focus obsessively on threats to liberty from the state, but there are...
March 2012
12 posts
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“…[I]t’s a little breathtaking to contemplate that the five robed men...”
– Jonathan Cohn. Cohn’s right again. The law hasn’t even been given a chance to kick in. All the hysteria surrounding it from the Republicans obscure the fact that two conservative federal court of appeals judges—one appointed by George W. Bush, the other by Reagan—have in the...
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Some thoughts on the effort to repeal "Obamacare"
Many of us self-described liberals are watching with eyes peeled the spectacle that has finally descended in Washington in an effectively do-or-die showdown for our hope that healthcare reform can happen: the subjection of Obama’s signature domestic legislative accomplishment—the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—to the opinions of the justices in the nation’s highest court.
The...
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Searle redux, & other news in philosophy
As I noted in my previous post, I was scheduled to have lunch with the philosopher John Searle last Friday. That I did. And boy, was it a most enjoyable experience! (Other news in philosophy rightfully relegated to the bottom third of this post.)
To begin with, the moment I walked to his table and he recognized that I was the last graduate student, owing to TAing duties, who was supposed to be...
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Schmoozing with John R. Searle tomorrow
Tomorrow at lunch, I will be redeeming my graduate student opportunity to cozy up to perhaps the next best thing after Noam Chomsky, when philosopher-god John R. Searle is scheduled to touch down in idyllic South Bend to deliver his graduate student invited talk (of which I was a voter!) called “Language and the Structure of Human Civilization.”
Yes, I’ll be sitting at a large...
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Rachel Maddow's Searing Takedown of Liar Mitt...
Check out this devastating take down by Rachel Maddow of Proteus’ favorite son Mitt Romney and his by now well-documented inability to say anything without fudging the facts about some other thing, even when that other thing is something he previously affirmed (e.g., his opposition to the individual mandate at the national level, his support for reproductive rights and for Planned...
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Hurray for Healthcare Reform - Paul Krugman →
[O]ne indicator of just how good it is comes from the apparent inability of its opponents to make an honest case against it.
To understand the lies, you first have to understand the truth. How would ObamaRomneycare change American health care?
For most people the answer is, not at all. In particular, those receiving good health benefits from employers would keep them. The act is aimed,...
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New gear, but...
…I’m probably never going to wear it. It’s a little too obtrusive!
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Untitled
I need more of this:
Definitely more of this:
And way less of the 18+ hrs a day that I’ve been spending working on my quals for the past 2 weeks.
February 2012
9 posts
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“Is there a compelling reason to draw a connection between Lin and fortune...”
– Asian American Journalists Association, apparently in response to Ben & Jerry’s recently released Jeremy Lin ice cream, an ill-conceived dud of a flavor containing, quite predictably, fortune cookie bits.
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fuckup-to-growup asked: Hi, great blog. I read your post on discovering you had ADD and the need to take medication. I was wondering what your position was on students who take neurostimulants (who don't need them) to study? are they cheating? as a TA, would you consider this academic dishonesty?
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How Descartes found out he exists
For my Intro to Philosophy classes today, I “lectured” on Descartes’ skeptical challenge in his first two Meditations, particularly as it relates to the epistemic Closure principle. Many students wondered if Descartes’ inference from the proposition that he is thinking to the fact that he exists is legitimate. I tried to convince them that it is. In any case, this...
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Maureen Walsh argues for marriage equality
Washington state recently passed a gay marriage equality bill, making the state one step closer to being the seventh state in America to legalize gay marriage. Democratic governor Chris Gregoire has been a vocal proponent of marriage equality, and has vowed to sign the bill as soon as it gets to her desk. Whether the bill ultimately gets enshrined, however, would be contingent on there not being...
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My new obsession is...
Making handouts for my Intro to Philosophy students.
I’ve made two so far. In order of aesthetic pleasingness, i.e., reverse chronological order:
Evaluating Deductive Arguments: An Introduction to the Truth-Table Method
&
Empiricism, Rationalism, and Plato’s Innatism
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Michael Frede on Aristotle's View of Rationality...
Michael Frede is an ardent defender of a distinctive view of Aristotle’s conception of reason, one which many commentators have described as “deflationary” with respect to the role he assigns to it in ordinary human experience. A central argument that he advances in support of his view in his article, “Aristotle’s Rationalism,”[1] is an appeal to II.19 of the Posterior Analytics, which he...