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npub1m4lyzm0mgjs5rdacg7vtskwypzfsyl385w0dmmls9rzjv9fz9c7q3j5yvk

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Last Notes

2026-05-12 18:41:38 CEST

I just got an email from a journalist who works for the quarterly journal of the main Dutch scientific grant organisation. They want to interview me for the upcoming issue of their journal.
The theme of that issue is: Failure.
Especially, the email helpfully clarifies, *personal* failure.

2026-05-11 15:21:33 CEST

In his book Aboutness, Stephen Yablo gives a definition of 'being true about'. A sentence can be false, but sill be true about part of its subject matter, and Yablo tries to capture this using a possible worlds analysis.
I wrote a small post about why I think his construction fails: https://lilith.cc/~victor/dagboek/index.php/2026/05/11/yablo-on-being-true-about/
#philosophy #philosophyoflanguage

2026-04-14 14:35:47 CEST

Want to study #philosophy? We're nearing the enrollment deadlines in Leiden, where there's a Dutch BA, but also an English BA in global and comparative philosophy, and several English philosophy MAs (including the new 2-year programma Philosophy of the Arts)! And a lot of great teachers, such as my colleagues. 😎

2026-03-14 18:40:35 CET

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"That one man expressing his mind by speech or words to an other, doth not declare by it his excellency and supremacy above all other Creatures, but for the most part more folly, for a talking man is not so wise as a contemplating man. But by reason other Creatures cannot speak or discourse with each other as men, or make certain signs, whereby to express themselves as dumb and deaf men do, should we conclude, they have neither knowledge, sense, reason, or intelligence?"

2026-03-14 18:39:04 CET

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We read a selection from the part of the Philosophical Letters that criticises Descartes. A little about the physics (e.g., his account of density in terms of pores), but most of all the letters in which Cavendish defends her own theory of matter as always a mixture of inanimate, animate and rational; which she then uses to criticise, among other things, Descartes' claim that animals have no feelings.

2026-03-14 17:20:57 CET

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I teach her in my History of Modern Philosophy class, but haven't read her SF yet!

2026-02-15 16:04:59 CET

"From the biological point of view Saint Paul was a failure, because he was beheaded."
-- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

2026-01-20 18:18:05 CET

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I've heard from insider sources that this technology will need to be adopted a lot for there to be widespread adoption.

2026-01-07 18:56:08 CET

Texas A&M bans philosophy professor from teaching Plato because Plato is, I guess, too woke.
https://dailynous.com/2026/01/06/texas-am-bans-plato/#comment-484059

2025-11-20 09:13:51 CET

Question for people working in analytic #philosophy. Do you think that analysing concepts in terms of distances between possible worlds adds clarity?
It seems to me that our grasp of the geometry of modal space is significantly more tenuous than our pre-analytic grasp of concepts like counterfactual, luck, sensitivity, and so on. But it's a completely accepted, even expected, move in a lot of subdisciplines!

2025-09-28 11:12:35 CEST

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You write: "But by the same rule, the negative mass star will accelerate *toward* the positive mass star, by the same amount!"
That's only true if inertial and gravitational mass are identical, I assume, which in Newton's physics seems optional? Couldn't a Newtonian postulate that inertial mass is the absolute value of gravitational mass? (I've never delved into negative mass, so perhaps this is all naive!)

2025-07-10 12:09:21 CEST

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But that's biomass. I suspect that the *number* of mice, rats, and other small rodents might equal or surpass that of humans and livestock? Not sure, but it doesn't seem unlikely.

2025-07-09 21:42:02 CEST

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Mechanical keyboards with which to play online collectible card games. Win-win.

2025-07-01 22:59:20 CEST

I always hated over-the-board blitz/rapid #chess, because I was really bad at it and would blunder pieces left and right. But I recently started playing online chess with Lichess. And blitz/rapid works really well online. So I started playing a lot of fast games.
A month ago, I had a Lichess Blitz rating of 1600 and decided that it would be cool to try to get to 1700. Today, I got to 1700! Apparently I set my goal too low. 😄 Maybe try 1800?

2025-06-26 15:44:32 CEST

I'm really enjoying @npub1t2q…n4vh as an app with unlimited OpenStreetMap usage and great GPX import of hiking routes. But I can't find a manual! So just in case there are any users here who can help me out:
1. When you are recording a route, is there a way to show how many kilometers you have already walked? This would be very useful.
2. Does anybody understand how to order tracks into lists? Every imported route becomes a list, but I don't know how to order several of them in a single list.

2025-03-25 19:34:31 CET

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Yeah, but surely Rubio and Vance and so on are not watching Andrew Tate? Surely? 😅

2025-03-25 19:14:45 CET

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What media are those? I never run into this kind of thing!

2025-03-25 17:58:08 CET

What I find fascinating about Signal gate is that it shows how obsessed these guys are, even in private, with the possibility that somebody is taking advantage of them.
For Trumpists, if you're helping someone without getting paid for it, you're a sucker. It is physically repulsive to them.
This is the immature attitude of people who are incapable of love and friendship.
And it's time for me to reread Erich Fromm, because this totally fits his analysis of the authoritarian personality.

2025-03-23 19:02:20 CET

My newest #philosophy video is about a short story by #borges, 'The Immortal'.
https://youtu.be/y3eqsCQZkCU?si=8v5hvrrfpQMYDWpM

2025-03-20 20:53:23 CET

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Ah, turns out that John Carlos Baez, who wrote that blog post, is also on Mastodon:
@npub1nf4…nqe4
Mastodon is for people who like infinite ordinals, that's clear.

2025-03-20 20:48:33 CET

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So we're looking for an introduction to transfinite ordinals. I'll be assuming that you don't want hardcore maths books!
The closest things to a classic is probably "Infinity and the Mind" by Rudy Rucker, @npub1dsw…7akd . Chapter 2 is especially relevant.
Eugenia Cheng's recent "Beyond Infinity" is extremely accessible and fun, but it doesn't go as far beyond infinity as my whiteboard (or Rucker).
This blog (and the two posts that follow it) is also good:
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2016/06/29/large-countable-ordinals-part-1/

2025-03-20 18:17:07 CET

Today, I taught my students to count. Turns out there are a lot of numbers. We didn't quite get to the end of 'em.
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/114/195/887/890/075/010/original/f6484003ed7a7603.jpg

2025-03-02 19:41:28 CET

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I was hoping that the Dutch PM would come out strongly in favour of Dutch participation in a possible future Ukraine peacekeeping mission.
Those were a nice, hopeful 30 minutes. (His eventual press conference was mostly a nothing burger with few specifics.)

2025-03-02 19:32:41 CET

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Het waren een mooie dertig minuten.

2025-03-02 18:48:25 CET

Ik leef nu nog heel even in de hoop dat Schoof straks voor de camera's staat en zegt: "Wij gaan ook militairen naar Oekraïne sturen om de vrede te bewaken." Dat hij gewoon lef toont en Geert uitdaagt om het kabinet daarop te laten vallen. Dat hij op het cruciale moment tóch moed blijkt te hebben.

2025-02-23 20:43:55 CET

When all is said and done, left-wing parties in Germany are still taking almost half the seats (assuming FDP doesn't crack the 5%).

2024-12-06 16:18:42 CET

Idealism in #metaphysics often sounds crazy to people.
But what would be really crazy is if the world were completely independent of the structures of human thought, and nevertheless contained facts, which stand in logical and evidential relations to each other. Lucky beings, we, that our world comes ready-made with the exact normative structure that we need for thought to be possible!

2024-11-30 17:16:32 CET

Colleague in group chat: "What exactly is gaslighting?"
Me: "Come on, we spent almost half an hour explaining this to you during our last staff meeting. Don't you remember?"

2024-11-19 13:07:13 CET

I wrote a long blog post on Kant's sentence: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." There's a lot more going on there than is apparent at first sight!
http://lilith.cc/~victor/dagboek/index.php/2024/11/19/empty-thoughts-blind-intuitions/
#philosophy #Kant

2024-11-05 10:06:03 CET

I was in the train just now with a group of young women studying to be apothecary assistants. They were confused about their exam on calculating medicine doses. What did they use to inform themselves about the right calculations? ChatGPT. 🤐
Forget about AGI. *This* is how AI is gonna kill you: in small, stupid, absurd ways.

2024-10-30 19:57:38 CET

In high school I read a spy novel, probably short and possibly bad, about a guy who gets mistaken for the greatest spy in the world. Not only do the bad guys capture him, but then their boss is like: "I know you have studied all weapons, and I have really been looking forward to finally duel someone who is proficient with the two handed axe." And then he gets rescued, but the rescuer assumes that *he* can fly a helicopter. Does this ring any bells?

2024-09-02 23:39:39 CEST

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After some googling, it seems that 'malard' is the *French* word for a male duck. Somehow this must be the root of my confusion.

2024-09-02 23:14:57 CEST

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Now I'm thoroughly confused. I thought that 'mallard' was the word for a male duck, but that is not the case?

2024-08-20 13:25:53 CEST

When I was on holiday in France, my daughter had a nasty fall with a big head wound. Six medics arrived, she was taken to the hospital a 30 minute drive away, got several tests and scans (luckily, everything was fine), saw several doctors, and got nine stitches.
Today, the bill arrived in the post. It was 19 euros and 61 cents.