Seasonal notes

Wed 30 Dec 2015 04:35 PM

It's late December, which means that it is time to mark the end of the year with silly blog traditions.

Bullet points

My annual tradition has always been to summarize the year's blogging by taking the first sentence from the first post of every month; cf. 2014.

Here's this year:

I: The crypotnymous blogger at Slate Star Codex has posted a long list of a philosopher walks into a coffee shop jokes.

II: 2010 is forever ago in internet time, but Daily Nous recently linked to an old item on reddit...

III: I wrote most of this years ago, and I stumbled across the file recently while working on something else.

IV: There is administrative pressure, for purposes of tenure and promotion, to list the top philosophy journals.

V: I realized today that forall x is almost ten years old.

VI: Janet Stemwedel is now a contributor at Forbes on topics of ethics and the social structure of science.

VII: The New Horizons probe has just passed by Pluto, providing the more detailed pictures of it than we've ever had.

VIII: I just finished teaching my Understanding Science course as a four-week on-line course.

IX: The science news that my friends link to on Facebook is a mixed bag.

X: I am teaching American philosophy again, for the first time in almost a decade.

XI: There's an obvious distinction between representation using a fixed collection of defined symbols (e.g., a word spelled out with letters) and free-form representation (e.g., a sketch on a whiteboard).

XII: I recently read a forthcoming paper by Carl Brusse about conceptual change and the planet category.

This year seems to have been mostly jokes and nostalgia, although philosophy peaked through now and again.

Belated blogiversary

I've traditionally marked the date at which this blog becomes another year older. That's October 4, although I've often posted late. The end of December is especially late, though, even for me.

The corpus on 4oct2015 stood at 397 entries containing 170,824 words. In the tenth year of the blog, I wrote 30 entries which contained 10,432 words. This was more entries but fewer words than the lean seventh year.

Whither FoE?

When I started blogging here, it gave me a chance to work out some ideas and get comments from other people.

Writing blog posts has been a good way of trying out ideas. A little over a year ago, I blogged about a curious jazz album and posed a thought experiment about post apocalyptic music appreciation; the thought experiment ultimately made it into my paper about the album.

This blog, however, is stuck in old and poorly supported software. Most commentary seems (sadly) to now be over on Facebook, but that exodus is abetted by the software here which makes commenting difficult. I've thought several times over the last couple of years that I should move to a different blogging platform. Maybe 2016 will be the year I do it.

In any case, I have this weird conservationism about URLs and their content. Footnotes on Epicycles will remain here as long as internet addresses work roughly like they do now. If new blogging moves elsewhere, there will be a post here with forwarding information.