Who Cooks The Best Red Beans And Rice In New Orleans? Someone should enter Pops and Lucille’s recipe. Then send in the cavalry :)
Twenty minutes later — Bisma Rex and Swiss Kriss
The Clash of Civilizations
Samuel P. Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is freely available in different formats here.
Global Patterns of Synchronization in Human Communications
The very excellent Yaneer Bar-Yam et al have a new paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface and freely available as a preprint here.
Muay Thai
A dream of mine was finally realized when I made it to the headquarters of Muay Thai in Bangkok. As someone who has a longstanding interest in the martial arts and other combat styles (also via work on embodied and situated cognition), this was a treat indeed. With a ringside seat, I could witness all the action in close-grained detail. What I especially appreciated was the pre-fight ritual but moreover the palpable respect and affection the fighters had for their opponents. Even in the heat of combat, there was no anger at all to be detected — and some really severe blows did not affect the countenance and composure of the recipient. There were two fully-fledged knock-downs that then and there decided the bout. But in the spirit of seeing things through, both participants saw out the time out by not engaging but by doing an Ali, dancing around each other without striking a blow. The bill had some 5 bouts beginning with 2 bouts by what must have been guys not older than 17 years of age. Muay Thai is the one style I’d say has a chance against Wing Chun but what could be very interesting is to see a fighter in MMA who is well versed in both. From my knowledge of both Karate and Muay Thai, 9 times out of 10, I’d wager on the latter coming out top for the reasons outlined here.
Islamist Terrorism: Analysis of Offences and Attacks in the UK (1998-2015)
Islamist Terrorism: Analysis of Offences and Attacks in the UK (1998-2015), a new research project from The Henry Jackson Society, presents the most comprehensive ever overview of the threat from Islamism-inspired terrorism in the United Kingdom.
Stigmergy in the design of social environments
A recently published paper in the EPJ: ST
Walker Percy Weekend Lineup
Here is the WP/WE announcement. One of the speakers, Patrick Connelly, is contributing to the forthcoming Walker Percy, Philosopher.
Why Social Scientists Should Not Participate in the March for Science
Clay Routledge in Quillette.
Professors in postmodern fields such as gender studies are actively teaching ideas that are more conspiracy theory than scholarly research. If you want to laugh or perhaps cry from seeing what postmodernists are up to in the social sciences, follow the New Real Peer Review @RealPeerReview on Twitter. Many academics focus on attacks on science from politicians and the general public without realizing they are being flanked by postmodernists from within the academy.
See Red: New Deltaphonic
Having spent the day previewing Deltaphonic’s forthcoming release See Red I’m pleased to report that they are very much on form. Given that their last album Texas, Texas set the bar so high, one had to wonder if they could ever approximate that again (this was the bind that Television found themselves in after Marquee Moon). See Red is still growing on me: I’ll report in more detail once the album has been officially released and I’ve “test driven” the album both sober and “under the influence” :) Speaking of which, I’d urge you to catch them at DBA for the launch — with some 17 gigs leading up to DBA they are going to be blindingly good. One of the greatest, if not THE greatest live musical night of my life, was seeing them absolutely shred the audience at the Apple Barrel last summer.
Life is precious because it is precarious: Individuality, mortality, and the problem of meaning
The very excellent Tom Froese has a preprint of his latest available here for free download.
