Weekend Update

Doing lots of chores around the house today. Here are a few things for my blogging break:

• Polyglot Conspiracy asks if French is the new Spanish.
• Philosophy Talk asks what the imagination is for. Excerpt: Philosophy is often an exercise in imagining. A characteristic sort of philosophical question is "how possibly" question. How possibly could a mind embued with rationality, intentionality, consciousness, will, and personhood be just a part of material nature? How possibly could free will subsist in a deterministic universe? How possibly could norms be determined by the facts alone? To answer such questions, philosophers try to construct in imagination more or less richly characterized alternative possible worlds. And then they try to convince you that the constructed possible world is really not so terribly distant from our own.
• Speaking of imagination, have you ever wondered what it would have been like if Quentin Tarantino had written the New Testament?
• One of the many reasons I like Wikipedia is because it has a lot of material organized around abstract topics I would not necessarily have concretized. For instance, I could click on this entry on Knowledge Representation all day! (But I can't because I want to finish more stuff around the house and yard.)