Investigations of a Dog

I’m planning to change web hosts soon, so this site might be down for a while until DNS records get updated. Once that’s out of the way I’ll be making an announcement about the military history carnival thing (but first I have to make some arbitrary decisions).

This weekend there will be an early-modern edition of Carnivalesque at The Long Eighteenth. Submit posts on anything to do with the early-modern period to carrieshanafelt[at]gmail[dot]com or use the submission form. This reminds me that it’s far too long since I posted anything early-modern. From reading my recent posts it would be hard to guess that I’m an English Civil War specialist! That’s partly because the civil war stuff I’m writing at the moment is secret — I don’t like to give away too much about projects that I’m working on for academic publications or conferences.

And Brett at Airminded has tagged me for a meme…

I know I’m usually anti-memetic, but this is a good one. Brett has kindly presented me with a Thinking Blogger Award. The idea of the meme is to link to 5 blogs which make you think, so now it’s my turn to nominate 5 thinking blogs (although the people I’m nominating probably have better things to do than spread memes). Science features very heavily in my picks as I find that scientific blogs tend to make me think the most. I also want to show that not all scientists are a militant Dawkinsian reductionists.

1. Bill Benzon at The Valve. Bill combines interests in music, literature, and cognitive science to give what is probably a unique perspective on human culture. His posts, on topics as diverse as jazz, manga, graffiti, and YouTube, demonstrate a rare degree of curiosity and open-mindedness. Rather than settling down in an entrenched position, Bill is trying to move the study of culture into new territory. And he is also very sceptical about memetics.

2. Edmund Blair Bolles at Babel’s Dawn is blogging on the origins of human speech, a fundamentally important topic which is still not very well understood. His main thesis is that speech is first and foremost a way of directing attention. This blog offers a radically different perspective from the bulk of literary and cultural theory (which focuses mainly on writing, symbols and abstract ideas) but without reducing everything to biological determinism.

3. Gary Smailes at Victoria’s Cross? I had to get at least one historian in. Being one myself, I find that history blogs are less likely to surprise me, but this is a big exception. Like most people, I assumed that awards of the Victoria Cross, the highest award in the British Army, would be subject to the most stringent conditions and the closest scrutiny. Gary blows that assumption out of the water with his investigations of the political influences on VC awards. This isn’t just simplistic iconoclasm. As well as pointing out dubious awards he pays full attention to men who deserved a VC but didn’t get one.

4. Chris at Mixing Memory is a cognitive psychologist with a particular interest in the difference between perception and reality. “Spend a little time in a cognitive science lab, and you will quickly be disabused of any inclinations towards naive realism.” His post on Atheism and Suspicion, pointing out the difference between a Nietzschean atheist and a Dawkinsian atheist (Chris and I are both the former, but he can explain it much better than I can) is required reading. If that all sounds a bit heavy, he also writes about lots of really cool experiments.

5. Andrew Hickey is a genius. When he has time he writes on a bewildering array of subjects, including quantum theory, information theory, Bayesian analysis, cybernetics, comics, the Beach Boys, and curing cancer. Often all at the same time. My obsession with Claude Shannon is entirely his fault. He is also a musician, songwriter, and podcaster, and doesn’t like Richard Dawkins.