bigideas

…who made 2007 such a lot of fun. You know who you are.

There are some questions that ask for a quantitative answer — an amount — even though no precise answer is possible even in principle. The question of the title invites responses such as “a lot”, “somewhat”, “hardly at all” and even “twice as much as my husband” (ahem).

In other news today, a “study” by unicycling Professor Sam Shuster that argues that men are agressive and funny while women are nurturing. It’s about their hormones, you see? Now that’s proper science.

So, yesterday Labour MP Harriet Harman announced she’d like to make paying for sex a criminal act as a way to combat people trafficking. This is of course a fantastic idea.

We ask because Show Me The Argument has recently had a thread about ethically evaluating intentions. Imagine two people could act in exactly the same way, but one with a bad intention and the other a good one; the difficulty is in saying that the former person did wrong while the latter didn’t.

I came across the following quasi-logical puzzle the other day while looking for something else. It’s about identity and, specifically, the rule about the “identity of indiscernibles” known as Leibniz’s Law.

Just a reminder that we’ll be hosting the 2007 Big Ideas Christmas Social at the Wheatsheaf on Tuesday night. All welcome. See here for the details.

Two! Count ‘em!

In the previous instalment we saw how to make surfaces using quotient maps that identify the edges of a square. In this one we’ll expand our repertoire by considering “connected sums” of surfaces, and we’ll see how to manipulate polygonal presentations to prove non-obvious facts about the surfaces they represent.

Peter at On Philosophy recently posted some thoughts on choice-making in a way that might make an interesting and, I think, quite novel argument against the idea of free will.