Joy Luck Club --- A Destruction of Phallocentrism

The performance of football club managers: skill or luck?

A Epistemic Luck

There has been a great deal of discussion in the recent literature regarding the supposed phenomenon of “epistemic luck.” This is the putative situation in which an agent gains knowledge even though that knowledge has come about in a way that has, in some sense to be specified, involved luck in some significant measure. Unfortunately, very little of the literature that deals with epistemic luck...

The biology of joy.

Richard Davidson was in a lab observing a Buddhist Monk Sink deep into serene meditation when he noticed something that sent his own pulse racing. Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, hurriedly double-checked the data streaming to his computer from electrodes attached to the monk's skull, but there was no mistake. Electrical activity in the left pre...

The Joy of Sets

A colony of beavers, an unkindness of ravens, a murder of crows, a team of oxen, . . . each is an example of a set of things. Rather than define what a set is, we assume you have the “ordinary, human, intuitive (and frequently erroneous) understanding”1 of what a set is. 1 Paul Halmos, Naive Set Theory, Springer–Verlag, NY 1974. Sets have elements, often called members. The elements of a set ma...

The Joy of Sacs

This paper investigates an idea that was put forward (and hinted at in Fitch, 2000) by Tecumseh Fitch at the Cradle of Language conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The idea is that air sacs may have played an important role in early hominid vocalizations. Many other primates have air sacs, notably chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. It is therefore likely that our latest common ancestor...