Friday, August 29, 2008

Back Home

I’m finally back home and having access to the internet again. At least till September 21, that is, which is when I will start my 10 months abroad in Nottingham


I'm still working on some term papers, for example, I'm just wrapping up a 27-Page Paper on Friedrich Nietzsche's theory of the evolution and function of consciousness.


Apart from that, there were about 550 posts in my RSS newsreader, and I still haven't managed to have a look at all of them.


Some very interesting things happened in the blogosphere while I was away, and I hope I will find the time to compile a small list of my favorite posts.


But for now, here's something funnny:


Richard Dawkins calls the view that evolution had a direction and reached some sort of climax in homo sapiens a "conceit of hindsight." As Steven Pinker observes, if Elephants were the most culturally advanced species on the planet, they would probably search for the evolutionary path that inevitably cumulated in the evolutionary optimum of trunkitude. The same idea could be applied to all other fictional and nonfictional organisms,


such as sea otters (spolier alert),



zombies, or:



[Hat Tip: Evil Under the Sun, PTET, cthulhu.com]