I have a new found respect for people who write essays. I haven’t had to write an essay in years. But I have started writing a longish blog post on the awesome amounts of structure you can expect to find in a random real (and hence why numerology based on patterns in well known constants is such epic fail). It’s REALLY hard work.
Linking to other people’s posts is easier. The folks at ScienceBlogs seem to have gone crazy for “two cultures” stuff about what is expected general knowledge in the arts and humanities compared to in the science and maths.
So we have a physicist raising the old complaint that not knowing basic arts and humanities is treated as much more shameful than not knowing basic maths and science.
Then an science ethicist (foot in both camps) giving some thoughts on it and again
Then another philosopher of science discussing some of the post-modernism bashing that came up in the comments.
Epsilonica 