Year in review, bullet point meme edition

Wed 20 Dec 2006 08:00 AM

I try to resist picking up too many blog memes, because none of you really care about my favorite color or what kind of salsa I might be. Today, I succumb.

The rule (via Janet) is to list the first sentence of your first blog post from each month of the preceding year. Then write a two sentence summary of the year that generalizes from these.

I: Writing about parapsychology, Paul Churchland argues that parapsychologists do nothing more than point to anecdotal results that are anomalous for materialism.

II: A few random remarks about forall x...

III: A propos of Owen Chamberlain's death, the New York Times describes his work in the 50s to experimentally demonstrate the existence of the anti-proton.

IV: I managed to do a good bit of writing in Budapest. I wrote this in a cafe just off Batthyany Square.

V: Dorothy uses the phrase 'pink collar worker' in today's Cat&Girl.

VI: Thanks to a kind invitation from Matt, I've been sitting in on a reading group here in San Diego.

VII: Aaron Schiller used forall x for a course he taught in the Spring.

VIII: In his TV show Good Eats and in his books, Alton Brown explains the physics and chemistry behind various recipes: what flour does at a molecular level, how butter makes biscuits fluffy, and so on.

IX: I am teaching Peirce's "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" in a course on American philosophy.

X: It has been about a year since I launched Footnotes on Epicycles; the one year mark is Wednesday.

XI: Three items of forall x news...

XII: I am sometimes envious of philosophers of language, since any interesting turn of phrase can become a datum.

To review: I seem to be concerned with logic, pragmatism, random bits of pop culture, my blog, and myself. Maybe I should start the first post in January with a sentence about how we should all work to end world hunger, so that next year I will seem less self-absorbed.