Well this is exciting news. My favourite journal has accepted my favourite paper for publication. And their referees made a ton of good suggestions for how to improve the paper.

I was thinking the other day about what lessons we could learn from electronic journals at this stage of their development. But I couldn’t come up with many interesting generalisations. In part that’s because the two leaders, the two publications we’d most naturally look at in order to learn what makes an electronic journal work, Philosophers’ Imprint and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews play such different roles. (And the granddaddy of electronic philosophy, the Stanford Encyclopaedia, plays a very different role again.)

In the short run I’d say NDPR has been the most successful venture to date, because I’m sure there are a lot of people reading it every week, and some of its entries can circulate widely within days, even hours, of posting. But of course that’s not what Philosophers’ Imprint is trying to generate, so it’s no mark against them that they have not matched this impact. The real test for the Imprint is whether people are still referring to work like Kit Fine’s The Question of Realism in ten or twenty years, long after all the NDPR reviews are forgotten. My guess is that they will be, but the empirical confirmation or refutation of that is just going to have to wait.

I don’t want to say The Age, my daily newspaper of choice, is sex-obsessed, but four of the five featured story on the sidebar this morning are:

Okey-Blokey, a story about drag kings.
Condoms ‘not sinful’ says a Belgian Cardinal.
Girls Say No to Sex
The return of the Bunny? on the rerise of the Playboy icon.

Pretty soon my hometown newspaper will be getting blocked by anti-porn filters.

I don’t want to say The Age, my daily newspaper of choice, is sex-obsessed, but four of the five featured story on the sidebar this morning are:

Okey-Blokey, a story about drag kings.
Condoms ‘not sinful’ says a Belgian Cardinal.
Girls Say No to Sex
The return of the Bunny? on the rerise of the Playboy icon.

Pretty soon my hometown newspaper will be getting blocked by anti-porn filters.

It’s time for my frequent “The AAP this year will be really really fun and everyone who’s reading this should go – assuming they can afford the truly exorbitant cost” post. In case you missed the previous posts in this series, here is the conference webpage, and here is the accommodation details. For all you outdoorsy types, note that the standard accommodations include free golf, tennis, windsurfers, catamarans, paddle skis, “organised daily activities” and “nightly entertainment”. For more indoorsy types, note that expensive accomodation option includes in-room spas, which seem like an excellent idea to me.

I want a paper session held on the ocean with the speaker and all the audience members on paddle skis. I also want it to be not my session.

UPDATE: The nightly activities include coconut throwing and toad racing. Woo Hoo!

UPDATE²: Qantas flights from Melbourne on the first and last days of the conference are already booked out. I’ve been too successful in plugging this thing. (Or someone has.) Looks like I’ll be spending some nights at the Airlie Beach backpackers waiting for planes.

From the NY Times:

Tim Hurd, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a branch of the Transportation Department, said a vehicle either met the specific technical requirements of being a light truck, or it did not.

My initial entry for lamest pun of the year – pun you actually use in a paper division. I was pretty chuffed to come up with this actually. A quick Google search reveals no one else has used it, at least in English.

Philosophy Talk, the philosophy radio program featuring Ken Taylor and John Perry, will be debuting its first regular season on KALW at 12 o’clock tomorrow San Francisco time (that’s 3pm in New York, 8pm in London and 7am Wednsday in Melbourne, if I’ve done the math correctly) and you can listen over the internet via the KALW link. The trial run program they did last year was very good I thought, so it should be worth a listen. Tomorrow’s show is on Bush’s doctrine of Preemptive Self-Defence.

Here, in glorious Microsoft Word format, is the result of today’s tinkering with the truer paper.

True, Truer, Truest

In response to referee requests to make it more focussed and less technical, I’ve made it more focussed and more technical. I’ve cut most of the negative parts out, so I now just mention objections to rival theories and hope the reader will be familiar enough with them in order to take my new theory seriously. And I play up the comparisons with the simple fuzzy theory of vagueness, noting that I keep most of the benefits with none of the costs. After that, there’s some reasonably technical work designed to show that most of the promises I make can be fulfilled. There’s still a few big spots where I say, “The proof of this can be found in any textbook on the relevant area,” but I think I say enough to make it clear how to work out the technical details.

I do hope this works. Right now I seem to be getting a lot more attention than any of my papers do. That’s better than the converse, but I want both me and my papers to get lots of attention. (OK, I’m a little attention-seeking at times.) In this case at least I do think I’ve come up with a new theory that should at least be put in the mix when the best theories of vagueness are being compared.

Here, in glorious Microsoft Word format, is the result of today’s tinkering with the truer paper.

True, Truer, Truest

In response to referee requests to make it more focussed and less technical, I’ve made it more focussed and more technical. I’ve cut most of the negative parts out, so I now just mention objections to rival theories and hope the reader will be familiar enough with them in order to take my new theory seriously. And I play up the comparisons with the simple fuzzy theory of vagueness, noting that I keep most of the benefits with none of the costs. After that, there’s some reasonably technical work designed to show that most of the promises I make can be fulfilled. There’s still a few big spots where I say, “The proof of this can be found in any textbook on the relevant area,” but I think I say enough to make it clear how to work out the technical details.

I do hope this works. Right now I seem to be getting a lot more attention than any of my papers do. That’s better than the converse, but I want both me and my papers to get lots of attention. (OK, I’m a little attention-seeking at times.) In this case at least I do think I’ve come up with a new theory that should at least be put in the mix when the best theories of vagueness are being compared.

I just decided to rewrite the Truer paper with 4 days until its deadline, so posting might be light until this is done. So I’ll revert to the oldest trick in the blog-book – a bunch of links.

Val Plumwood on surviving a crocodile attack. I like the ending. As Dylan said, death is not the end. You’re still someone else’s food.

Brian Leiter quotes a long letter from a very observant soldier in Fallujah. Lots of telling analogies, as well as a sense of just how dangerous it must be for the people on the ground right now. (Hint: It’s slightly less bad than being in a crocodile’s death roll. Slightly.)

Brad DeLong on the latest reason why Bush, Cheney (and one supposes Ashcroft) should be impeached. I’m obviously biased, but I find the way this administration has treated citizens of allied countries (esp Britain, Australia and Canada) to be their most disturbing characteristic. For this bunch, that’s saying a lot.

And two stories about travelling in the South. A scary story about driving from Atlanta to Baton Rouge (via Sappho’s Breathing) and a much more enjoyable story about holidays in New Orleans. As I might have mentioned before, I’m going to Baton Rouge and New Orleans next month, so I’m lapping up these stories right now.