After a small delay due somewhat to my work habits and somewhat to the lack of material to work with, the papers blog is up today. Adam Morton features two short papers on conditionals.

There’s an interesting discussion going on around the web about whether there is a bias against conservatives in academia. The best piece so far is by Timothy Burke, and the pieces by John Holbo and Belle Waring are well worth reading too. I have a fair bit of sympathy for the line David Velleman was taking in the comments thread on John’s piece, but I don’t know how widespread the issue he discusses is. (This isn’t a snarky “I don’t know” meaning “not”, as I might sometimes use. It really is an “I don’t know” meaning “I don’t know”. The area of specialisation breakdown of US English and History departments is outside even my range of knowledge.)

I don’t know whether this spam fighter that Chris Potts links to could possible work, but maybe it’s worth trying. Since it’s apparently against the law to kill spammers, or even wittily threaten to do so, alternative measures are in order.

Supacrush has some good suggestions for avoiding procrastination. If you want to avoid actually doing work, putting yourself in a position of having to choose between incommensurable values is, I find, very effective. Admittedly this isn’t the only work-avoiding technique that works, but it really is very good.