Sorry, been gone for a while. When I checked in today, I found that a spammer had infiltrated akismet and left a bunch of porn links in my comments. I block all comments with four or more links, but this spammer had left 15 comments, each with one link in them. And all of the comments appeared under an article I had written on the Sophia Copola movie Marie Antoinette. Interesting. Anyone have any ideas about how to filter these? I am reluctant to blacklist any “real” words (by which I mean words that make sense) or any IP address.

Anyway, feels like weeding the garden. Good to see that there’s still some life in there, I guess.

I recently got a comment on an old post of mine from Thorin (is there a name for this kind of thing?). This post was shortly after starting my blog. I feel like I’ve gone through so many phases in my view of my blog that it was interesting to see an old post. What I had to say related to my thoughts on education.

I had quoted from an small piece, written by a Professor John Dolan and published with his obituary in the proceedings of the APA. I did not know and still don’t know anything about John Dolan or his philosophical leanings, running across the article by chance. Anyway, Thorin provides some really interesting insight into Dolan as a teacher. It seems that sometimes the thought can be enlightened while the disposition may sometimes be otherwise.

He also got me thinking about Douglas Hofstadter, which was cool. I remember that discovering Gödel, Escher, Bach in college felt like the opening sequence of The Never Ending Story: as if I walked into a kind of esoteric fairy tale. The argument is interesting and the book is written extremely well. At the time I was an undergraduate obsessed with Derrida and I remember becoming bored with Hofstadter’s focus on was foundations; and I just didn’t buy the AI suggestions.

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