I have several posts to write up about my turn at the NYU Mind and Language symposium last week. But first one relatively unfortunate story from the end of the trip. On the drive back I stopped at the Citgo gas station in Liberty. I made the bad mistake of filling up the tank. This was a mistake insofar as I got, as my mechanic later put it, a little bit of gas and a lot of something else. Probably water. So my poor car tried to run on impure gas for a while. And while this worked a little, it didn’t work a lot. I managed to nurse the car to Vestal, where it currently is at the Honda dealers getting the bad gas drained out, at least one new fuel injector put in, and new gas put in. I hope to get the car back, at not too great an expense, in the next couple of days. Not good times. Never using that gas station again…

On better news, “The Cat Empire”:http://www.myspace.com/thecatempire are touring the US and Europe. Hopefully a few people reading this will have seen them play on the west coast last week. They are in the Midwest this week, then Boston and New York over the weekend and into next week. The link takes you to a MySpace page where you can hear several of their songs, and they’re a really fun band to see live, and if you can get tickets to see them in your neck of the woods, I’d highly recommend doing so.

Via Europa Malynicz, “these”:http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/rotsnakee.html are some of the most disturbing illusions I’ve seen. Be warned, the images in that link do have the capacity to produce at least mild dizziness, so don’t click the link if you are prone to dizziness. I should also add that not everyone seems to see the illusion, but I at least am extremely misled by it.

Via “Richard Zach”:http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/logblog/2007/02/mexican-multiplier-trounces-dr-evil-in.html, this is “a very cute story”:http://www-tech.mit.edu/V126/N64/64largenumber.html about the recent Rayo-Elga duel at MIT.

Philosophy Compass now has an RSS feed. If you want to be alerted any time a new article is published, you can follow “this feed”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/action/showFeed?ui=1aeto&mi=3d0z4&ai=ni7&jc=phco&type=etoc&feed=rss.

A paper that Tyler Doggett and I have been working on for a while, which is now (we hope) more or less ready for prime time:

Wanting Things You Don’t Want
We argue (with folks like Kendall Walton, Gregory Currie, Ian Ravenscroft, and David Velleman, and against folks like Stephen Stich, Shaun Nichols, Jonathan Weinberg, and Aaron Meskin) that in order to give a happy account of our engagement with and responses to fictions and games of make-believe, we need to postulate not just an imaginative analogue of belief (that is, imagination), but also an imaginative analogue of desire (which we call i-desire – other people call it other things).

Ned Block links to these two additions to _Philosophical Investigations_ on the subject of ‘fog’. Both of them are quite old, the Frayn apparently from the 1960s, and Fodor’s perhaps from around 1970. Anyway, for weekend amusement.

* “Michael Frayn’s additions”:http://stevepetersen.net/personal/wittgenstein-fog.html
* “Fodor after Frayn”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/miscellaneous/Fodor_Wittgenstein.png

The Fodor page is a graphic, and it might be easier to read zoomed in.

Happy Australia Day, everyone.

John Heil just came by my office (in St Louis, Missouri) and presented me with two frozen pies that he picked up in an Australian shop in Florida. They’re vegetarian.

(respectful silence in which to consider this state of affairs)

In many respects I have a moderate carbon footprint. I drive a very fuel-efficient car, and I don’t drive it much. Despite all my electronic toys, my power bills are always fairly low. And my heating bills aren’t as bad as they could be. But there’s one respect in which I use a lot of fuel, and it overwhelms the rest. That’s air travel. Now part of that travel is for fun, but much of it is for conferencing. So I’ve been wondering how much of the benefits of conferencing could be obtained without the travel. Some of the benefits, getting to see wonderful parts of the world, go drinking with friends from around the world etc, could not be had. But some benefits, arguably, could.

It should be possible, that is, to run virtual conferences. I don’t mean conferences done through emails or blogs, which have their benefits but don’t provide the same level of interactivity as actual conferences do. I mean something where the participants, from around the world, get to all be talking just about a single paper for an extended period of time.

The main point of this post is to ask whether anyone has any experiences with such conferences, and if so how they have worked. Below the fold I have some thoughts for a few models for how to run such a conference.
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