A hint from the Northern Echo:

Philippa to aim for university

A BEAUTY queen has vowed to knuckle down to her studies after receiving her AS-level results.

Miss Sunderland Philippa Attle, 17, earned C grades in English and history and a D in product design.

Philippa, who studies at Park View School, in her home town of Chester-le- Street, said: “I did a bit better than I thought and the main thing is that I passed so I can go on to next year.

“Although I did put work in, I will have to knuckle down next year.”

She hopes to study design and is considering which universities to apply to.

She said: “I want to go somewhere that is chilled out with a good nightlife.”

Because, of course, that is the only reason to want to go to university, even if you are a “beauty queen”.

Pah!

Posted just now on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s website:

Prizes for:

a) what it might mean, and

b) the most imaginative way that the Daily Mail will turn this into “an excoriating attack on David Cameron’s government by an out-of-touch hairy lefty”.

…I have learned that different disciplines use particular words to describe good work done in that discipline. For example, in physics the best work is described as ‘‘elegant’’ which seems to mean the implications of the work may not be understood or the work itself may not be understood, but the mathematics has an undeniable beauty. Work in mathematics is sometimes described as elegant, but mathematicians usually describe the best work as ‘‘deep.’’ Deep mathematics usually indicates math not well understood in the community of mathematics. Once what was ‘‘deep’’ is generally understood, it becomes applied mathematics. Work in biology is usually described as ‘‘interesting’’ which means the work helps me understand or ‘‘see’’ what I had not understood. The primary words used in the social sciences are ‘‘robust,’’‘‘powerful,’’ ‘‘important,’’ and ‘‘useful.’’ ‘‘Robust’’ usually means work that helps the social scientist explain wider implications other than the ones the work was initially designed to accomplish. In the humanities the work is described as ‘‘influential’’ which seems to indicate that the work has changed the minds of other scholars who know something about that subject. In some fields in the humanities, such as philosophy, the work can be described as representing a powerful argument. I often reflect that the word that should best describe theology is ‘‘faithful’’ which may well make theology closer to mathematics and physics than the social sciences. At least in mathematics and physics it is still assumed that such work is committed to truth.

From Stanley Hauerwas, The State of the University: academic knowledges and the knowledge of God (Oxford?; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), p. 20, note 19].

Carmen Callil has resigned as a judge on the Man Booker International prize panel. She disagreed with its decision to award a special prize to Philip Roth.

Speaking of Roth’s writing, which includes Portnoy’s Complaint and The Human Stain, Callil said he “goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe”.

I thought Roth’s obsession was slightly different from that…

According to Harold Camping and his Family Radio flavour of Millenarianism, this and his assertion that this Saturday evening will mark the end of the world (again in a particularly Family Radio flavour of Millenarianism).

When the world doesn’t end this Saturday (and it won’t), may I be the first person to book Sunday morning’s Blog Entry?

Yep, for your Harold, and your people, this Sunday will be…

Carry on Camping.

How we celebrate Pentecost in St Stephen’s, Canterbury (!)

Suggestion from, and hat tip to, Scott Gunn

In this month’s Atlantic there is a fascinating article on the Turing Test and what it says about being human. In it, the writer, Brian Christian, gives an interesting piece of background to the perennial popular anthropology question:

Philosophers, psychologists, and scientists have been puzzling over the essential definition of human uniqueness since the beginning of recorded history. The Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says that every psychologist must, at some point in his or her career, write a version of what he calls “The Sentence.” Specifically, The Sentence reads like this:

The human being is the only animal that ______.

The story of humans’ sense of self is, you might say, the story of failed, debunked versions of The Sentence.

Surely “The Sentence” is easily answered, if you are willing to go all meta- on it?

The human being is the only animal that discourses on “The Sentence”.

There! Simple!

What’s next?

A suggestion from the new Team Rector of most of Essex:

1. Go to Wikipedia & hit random. The first article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to quotationspage.com & hit random quotes. The last 4 or 5 words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your album.
3. Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”. The 3rd picture no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use photoshop or similar (picnik.com is a free online photo editor) to put it all together.

And this is my random band and its random album (I like to think it will  be our “difficult” third album)

Today an email from Amazon, noting my purchasing pattern, and based upon the purchasing patterns of other discerning consumers, suggesting a book I might like to buy.

Rowan Williams and careers advice? There’s a neat combination!

Pope prays for peace at Christmas Eve Mass in Vatican

Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society said:

It’s typical of the oppressive religious powers that they attempt to usurp every secular person’s right to a peaceful Christmas. Oops!

Richard Dawkins said:

This disgusting, barbaric, predatory, paedophiliac obsession with a Bronze-Age concept such as peace!

Readers on The Guardian’s Comment is Free Religion blog said:

Sky fairy!

In short, nothing to see here, move along.