Hello, party people. This is a blog post explaining how to connect to the University of Chicago VPN using Network Manager and openconnect from an Arch Linux machine with no desktop environment installed. Prerequisites This post assumes an “I run Linux on my computer” level of tech-savviness. If you don’t know what any of those words mean, or if this post employs concepts that you don’t understand but would like to, please feel free to get in touch with me and I’ll be happy to write a follow-up post explaining whatever you’d like to know about....
Transcript: Episode 150 with Shruti Rajagopalan on talent in India
Subscribe to Elucidations: Episode post here. Transcription by Prexie Miranda Abainza Magallanes. Matt Teichman: Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today is Shruti Rajagopalan, Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center, Fellow at the Classical Liberal Institute at New York University School of Law, host of the Ideas of India podcast, which I recommend you check out, and author of the Get Down and Shruti substack, which I also highly recommend you check out....
Episode 151: Witold Więcek discusses statistics and academic research
Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: this episode was recorded in August of 2022. In the latest Elucidation, Matt talks to Witold Więcek about the difficulties that come up for researchers who would like to draw upon statistics. Click here to download episode 151 of Elucidations. Lots of academic fields need to draw heavily on statistics, whether it’s economics, psychology, sociologym, linguistics, computer science, or data science....
Episode 150: Shruti Rajagopalan discusses talent in India
Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: this episode was recorded in April of 2023. Full transcript here. In this episode, Matt sits down with Shruti Rajagopalan (Mercatus Center) to talk about what the future holds for India. Click here to download episode 150 of Elucidations. We often have a tendency to think of the current economic and geopolitical situation as simply the way things are....
Are Philosophers Comedians?
The philosopher Wittgenstein famously said in Culture and Value: “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” My interest in this article is to analyze what Wittgenstein here means. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein described the task of philosophy as being “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” Humor has a certain way of cutting through language, of getting to the truth of whatever game is at hand....
Episode 149: Lainie Ross and Christos Lazaridis talk about defining death
Subscribe to Elucidations: In this episode, we are joined by Lainie Ross (University of Rochester Medical Center) and (once again!) Christos Lazaridis (UChicago Medicine), this time to talk about the different ways of defining death. Click here to download episode 149 of Elucidations. In our previous episode with Christos, we talked about death and the vexed history of attempts to define it....
Are Lawyers Philosophers?
The law is not philosophy. Therefore, lawyers are not philosophers? My interest in this article is to show that lawyers may not produce philosophy but can be philosophers in virtue of engaging in philosophical reasoning some of the time. Of course, this claim is not entirely original. As the philosopher Ronald Dworkin writes: “Lawyers are always philosophers because jurisprudence is part of any lawyer’s account of what the law is, even when the jurisprudence is undistinguished and mechanical....
Episode 148: Christos Lazaridis discusses brain death
Subscribe to Elucidations: In this episode, Matt sits down with Christos Lazaridis (University of Chicago Medicine) to chat about what brain death is and whether brain death should count as death, period. Click here to donwload episode 148 of Elucidations. Modern life support technology really hit its stride in the 1960s, allowing doctors to buy themselves more time to save their patients by connecting them to machines that could assist with breathing, blood oxygenation and/or heart pumping....
Transcript: Episode 146 with Gaurav Venkataraman on memory in RNA and DNA
Subscribe to Elucidations: Episode post here. Transcription by Prexie Miranda Abainza Magallanes. Matt Teichman: Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today is Gaurav Venkataraman—a co-founder of Trisk Bio in London—and he is here to talk about memory and DNA and RNA. Gaurav Venkataraman, welcome....
Episode 147: Gabriella Gonzalez discusses the intersection of algebra and programming
Subscribe to Elucidations: In this episode, Matt talks to Gabriella Gonzalez about how basic concepts from the branch of math known as abstract algebra can help us simplify our computer programs and organize our thoughts. Click here to download episode 147 of Elucidations. Algebra. That thing they make us do in school. What was that again?...