Oddments (2) Year-End 2025

 For a definition of "oddments" see "Oddments (1) where you will also learn about the CASTRATI and how pickleball has contributed to noise pollution. 

Local Headline of the Year
   In "Survival of the Weakest" I suggest that there seems to be a surge in psychological issues (and the acronyms required to describe them), and that we are all increasingly mentally unstable. More proof is found in this headline: "LHSC Ending Unlimited Mental Health Benefits Saying Popularity Made It Too Expensive," Matthew Trevithick, CBC News, Dec. 5, 2025.
"London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) is getting rid of unlimited mental health benefits for staff, blaming ballooning costs and former administrators for implementing it without proper due diligence or oversight....Two years on, the man tasked with overhauling LHSC argues it was just one of several bad decisions made by those no longer in charge at southwestern Ontario's largest hospital network."
   Given that most of the headlines this year were depressing ones, here are some that are funny: HEADLINES. 

TV ADS
   

Those who don't believe in MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) are generally only those who have not seen, over and over, the Trivago ad in which that guy appears, or those who have not watched all the ads "ON BETTING."

New Technological Developments
   The year was not a total loss. There was this, whatever it is.

A Quote or Two
 "Nevertheless, a world in which all citizens are free to compete in the marketplace of ideas, even if they hold views accurately deemed absurd and hateful by establishment elites, is better than one in which such elites control who can speak. Although it’s important not to downplay the dangers and harms associated with some of today’s most popular social media pundits—Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Tommy Robinson, Russell Brand, Nick Fuentes, and so on—we should not aim for a world in which they are prevented from advocating those views to audiences who want to hear them....Dan Williams in his cleverly named substack: Conspicuous Cognition. 

   "Reading Searle’s review, though, it struck me that very few of the many contemporary writings on the university concern its revitalization as a place to pursue excellence. We stress instead the avoidance of homogeneity, perhaps precisely because we no longer believe that we can teach people to think hard on their own. By Oliver Traldi, "John Searle's Campus War" in Fusion, Dec. 23, 2025.

    "The idea that in my discipline, philosophy, there are hundreds of fine-grained dogmas (many of them concerning “social justice”) that one must accept is entirely destructive. To do philosophy effectively, you’d better be ready to say what you believe to be true and can somehow substantiate. In my more than 30-year career, I saw many failures of this sort, for understandable reasons. If you did not recite the dogma, your kids could lose their health insurance.
   I think the period of my career (roughly 1990 to 2023) corresponded to a collapse in the quality of research and publication in philosophy and other humanities and social science disciplines. In 1980, there were big, distinctive and idiosyncratic philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, W.V.O. Quine, Arthur Danto and Judith Jarvis Thomson. By 2010, their voices had been muted, and perhaps no one as bold as they were could have survived grad school. My impression is that many practitioners of other disciplines feel roughly the same. Academic production is more homogenous, blander, safer and less sincere."
Fro: "As A Professor, I've Seen Woke and MAGA Censorship. Which Is Worse?", by Crispin Sartwell, The Washington Post, Oct. 13, 2025.

Wikipedia
  Recently I did a post relating to Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, which are two projects to be highly valued. Back in 2019, I did this post about Wikipedia, "Wikipedia - Happy Birthday" which you use daily and which should also be highly valued, even if you think only AI is important. 
  Today in the Globe and Mail, they re-published an article by Simon Garfield, who you are more likely to believe: "An Encyclopedia Like No Other: How Wikipedia Became One of the Greatest Achievements of the Modern Age," July 11, 2025. Here is just a bit from it. Make one of your year-end donations to WIKIPEDIA (I have no relationship to it, but, like you, I use it all the time and do donate when they ask for help, which is fairly rare, unlike most other entities, especially at this time of year.)

   "Wikipedia, which launched Jan. 15, 2001, has remained true to its original intention, the establishment of a volunteer-edited, free, live encyclopedia, a resource able to respond immediately and predominantly accurately to changing events. Exceptionally for such a popular resource, Wikipedia does not track you or sell any of your search information. It does not carry advertisements or monetize itself beyond regular appeals to users for small donations. It is fully accountable, with every keystroke credited and dated to a specific user. It is continually trying to improve its accuracy, reach, diversity of content and contributors. And beyond all this, it is a thing relentlessly and reliably useful.
  Being both intellectually rigorous and shamelessly trivial, it reflects the world as it sees itself. Its anniversary should be a cause for celebration, an overdue confirmation, I think (due perhaps even from its many early critics), that it has become one of the greatest things online, a rare representative of the internet for good. It is also, I suggest, one of the greatest inventions of our modern age."

HAVE A HAPPY NEW YEAR!