- Congratulations to the 2009 MacArthur Foundation Fellows — the recipients of the "genius grants." If there's a theme this year, it seems to be "what the eyes reveal": six of the grantees work in the visual arts. And a lawyer who deals with mental health issues... too bad she's at the Source of All That Is Evil in Los Angeles, but I suppose it's a start.
- An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education decries the rural brain-drain... as if that's a bad thing. Being stuck here in East Central Redneckistan, it's disturbing and astounding that ideas travel more slowly outside of urban Chambanana than do skateboards; and that is not a good thing, and explains more than perhaps it should about "red states" and "flyover country": Whether it's cause, effect, or somewhere in-between, small-town America's hostility to ideas and those who have ideas creates problems both personal and wider. Thus, calling it a "brain drain" implies that there are only outside forces at work, whereas reality indicates that there's at least as much push as there is pull.
- Such as creationism, which Professor Richard Dawkins is doing his best to combat. When even the Telegraph is giving a positive review to a book that brutally and effectively attacks religious doctrine...
- Britain's new Supreme Court prepares to open a "new age of openness and judicial accessibility" with secret hearings. Yeah, it's a bit ironic, but "openness and judicial accessibility" are relative... if this had involved the Law Lords, or the older House of Lords, system, we wouldn't even know about the hearings.
To celebrate today as the first day of fall, here's Mostly Autumn. Any inference one might make concerning the relationship between this selection and the middle two sausages on the platter above is probably related to the intended implication.