What a sad day it is when someone high up in the government makes illiberal pronouncements about technology policy without even knowing a hash from a hashtag, provoking jaded sighs from the better informed.

To the fashion for seeking to employ ‘rockstars’ and ‘ninja’ and ‘Jedi’ and so on we can apparently add ‘ethicists’. Riot Games (of League of Legends fame) is advertising for an Executive Assistant (North America). In the ‘you are’ section, right after ‘a communications black belt’, we have the following novel definition:

Despite our both having links to Durham’s Philosophy Dept. I’ve never met Thom Brooks, who I think came to Durham shortly before I stopped being physically there. Occasionally he makes waves I notice: once some students contacted me hoping I could advise on getting a critical response published to something he’d written (they were into polyamory …

Apparently the in thing for Americans of about my age, neither quite Gen. X nor what people have in mind when they stereotype Millennials, is to style themselves the Oregon Trail Generation (after the educational computer game, not the 19th Century pioneers, who are conveniently no longer around to complain). So what does that make Brits …

While I’m in sympathy with the conclusion I’m not sure about the reasoning:

Until recently I thought the trickiest thing about long-term intergenerational ethics was the need to peer into distant, largely unpredictable futures. I have changed my mind. After pondering sentences like ‘Unborn generations depend on us’ (will depend? are going to depend? will be already depending? are yet going to have used to depend? will have been …

As I understand it (from some distance), the story so far goes something like this: (1) The students’ union at the School of Oriental and African Studies urges that its philosophy-related courses should teach mostly African and Asian thinkers (not in itself startling given the name of the institution), and insofar as white philosophers must be …

Historic England has commenced a series of what it calls online debates ‘where conservation and heritage experts debate the topics uppermost in their minds’, beginning with: ‘Why is a diverse and inclusive workplace essential for the heritage sector?’

This week I learnt that my work has been plagiarised in a heritage/UNESCO-themed document apparently issued to school pupils by the Nanking Model United Nations. Setting a great example there...

Various online thesaurus sites have in their databases the word duskheap, as a synonym for e.g. midden. This looks very likely to be a typo for dustheap; no duskheap seems to be known even (no pun intended) to the O.E.D. What a beautiful error though: imagine digging on a duskheap, through the layered remnants of countless …