Hugo Holbling

I am in the process of upgrading the site software. This will cause some broken links and the theme will revert to the default. In particular, avatars will break and need to be fixed individually by clicking on the drop-down menu at the top-right, going to "My Settings" and selecting "Change your photo".

I'm not sure how many of you are aware of what is happening in Spain at the moment, particularly with events being spectacularly under-reported or not reported at all by much of the mainstream British media, so I wanted to share a summary: It's the real democracy, stupid.

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The Guardian has some limited coverage so far.

If you follow football (or soccer), you probably know that El Clásico will be played four times over the next few weeks between Barcelona and Real Madrid. It's no exaggeration to say that these fixtures are the most important (aside from maybe the World Cup and Champions League finals, although I would dispute this for both) and most watched. Barcelona won the game earlier this season 5-0, which was so comprehensive and embarrassing a demolition that the gods would have taken notice and will no doubt be watching these games. There is a lot of talk about whether the teams will try to target specific legs, with Cruijff arguing that the second (the Copa del Rey final) and fourth (Barcelona's home leg of the Champions League semi-final) are most important, whereas others say Madrid will try to win the first at the Bernebeu for a psychological advantage, as well as to kick the hell out of Piqué because Barcelona are already without Abidal and Puyol and hence are weak defensively. However, it's increasingly apparent that Messi may well be the best player of all time, with a lot of commentators remarking on this as though it's become a commonplace.

Since Barcelona are the embodiment of Cruijff's vision, albeit significantly influenced by van Gaal and now Guardiola, my straightforwardly biased view before the series begins is that Barcelona will win or draw all four games. While it's true that Abidal and Puyol leave great holes, Madrid need a radically different approach to even get the ball, which they singularly failed to achieve last time. If Iniesta and Xavi remain fit, and since Mourinho's strategy with Inter last year won't work with this Madrid team, this event is Barcelona's to lose.

The site has had some DNS problems over the past few days and disappeared from the web for a while. This post explains what happened, if you are interested.

The domain name galilean-library.org was registered at the same time as the hosting (part of a package). When the site was moved to better hosting, the old service was cancelled but the domain retained and renewed; in fact, the domain was renewed until December 2011. However, it turns out that the company put the cancelled hosting "on ice", so to speak, and finally ended the package formally yesterday. The old host has a policy, apparently, of not renewing domains unless hosting is purchased, so they cancelled the domain without warning. In order to renew it, they required me to pay roughly 7 times the usual rate and then transfer it elsewhere, which process is currently underway. I therefore paid for the domain until December 2011 (lost), the absurd rate to renew it and now have to pay again to transfer it. Since no warning was given, there was no way to stop the domain disappearing and taking the site with it. However, the fees are paid and the end result is that hopefully the domain will now be fine for another year.

Those of you with an interest in the demarcation problem or the battles surrounding the status of Intelligent Design might be interested in a recent issue of Synthese called Evolution and its rivals. (You should be able to access some of the papers.) It includes an awful piece by Robert Pennock entitled Can't philosophers tell the difference between science and religion?: Demarcation revisited. Brad Monton, who is criticised by Pennock, called this issue "disappointing"; Brian Leiter described Pennock's argument as a "purported defense of the demarcation problem against Laudan's famous critique". Still, there may be some aspects of the papers we could discuss here.