moves blog posts to new position to be consistent with gemlog

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diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/my_feed_and_reading_list.md b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/my_feed_and_reading_list.md
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@@ -1,193 +0,0 @@
----
-title: How I read things on the Internet now (no, of course I don't leave the terminal!)
-description: >-
-  I've been sprucing up how I follow what's happening on the Internet. I can
-  now read all the things I want to read pretty efficiently, and enjoy doing
-  it, which is exciting.
-pubDate: 2025-01-19
----
-
-## The problem
-
-I like to read things on the Internet sometimes. Or listen to things. Or watch
-things.
-
-Some interesting people write blog posts. Some beautiful people make music. Some
-silly people make comedy sketches. Sometimes my friends are sharing stuff with
-their friends, which means me (WIP on that front: I'll get back to that).
-
-I want to know about it. I want to read interesting things that will educate
-me. I want to hear beautiful music. I want to hear about what my friends are up
-to.
-
-I can't read everything as it comes in, it's too much: I'll need to sift a lot
-of it out quickly. I'll need to sift through it regularly to stay on top of it:
-like, several times a week, if not daily. And sometimes, while I'm doing my
-daily sifting, I'll find something I really want to read, but I haven't got
-time right now: I'll save this for the weekend.
-
-For a while, I've been hosting [CommaFeed][commafeed] on [PikaPods][pikapods].
-This has been OK ([OMG, RSS is cool][rss]), but the interface is just clunky
-enough to make it a chore to use. That means I don't sift through stuff
-regularly, and that means my feed piles hundreds of unread posts high.
-
-It also hasn't been any good for distinguishing between stuff I don't want to
-read *ever*, and stuff I don't want to read *right now* but will get round to
-later. I could in theory use the bookmarking feature built-in to my browser,
-but removing things after I've read them is too clunky, so I don't do it.
-
-## The solution
-
-Every morning, I open my terminal and run [newsboat][newsboat].
-
-![newsboat showing how many unread posts I have at a glance in the opening view](./newsboat.webp)
-
-I know the unread count is pretty fresh, because I've set up a systemd service
-to run newsboat at startup to fetch the feeds.
-
-I press `l` twice to open a post. Then I press `n` to navigate to the next
-unread post until I run out of unread posts.
-
-![newsboat displaying a post](./newsboat-post.webp)
-
-If I encounter something I want to read later, but don't have time right now, I
-press `b`, which runs a home-made bookmarking script. Here it is:
-
-```bash
-### readlater.sh ###
-
-# newsboat passes a few arguments:
-# the first one is the post URL
-url="$1"
-
-# I turn the URL into a suitable filename
-filename=$( \
-  echo $url | \
-  sed "s/.*:\/\///" | \
-  sed "s/\//./g" | \
-  sed "s/\.html\$//g" \
-)
-filename="$filename".html
-
-# If I've already got this in my reading list,
-# I don't add it again
-if [[ -a "$HOME/readlist/unread/$filename" ]]
-then
-  exit 0
-fi
-
-# Otherwise, I download the post with curl
-# and pipe it to a file in my reading list
-# folder, ~/readlist/unread
-curl "$url" > "$HOME/readlist/unread/$filename"
-```
-
-I can also run this script manually and pass it a URL of my choice at any time,
-say, if I find an interesting article while browsing the Web.
-
-When I want to read from my reading list, I run `readnow.sh`, which simply
-opens my reading list folder, `~/readlist/unread`, in my terminal file browser
-of choice: namely, [ranger][ranger].
-
-![ranger showing the contents of my reading list with a preview](./ranger.webp)
-
-Although ranger has a preview, I'll typically open the file up in my terminal
-web browser of choice, which is [w3m][w3m] (plus a couple of custom
-key-bindings). I've configured this to be my preferred web browser in ranger by
-shifting it to the top of the list of HTML browsers in
-`~/.config/ranger/rifle.conf`.
-
-```conf
-### ~/.config/ranger/rifle.conf ###
-
-...
-
-ext x?html?, has w3m,               terminal = w3m "$@"
-ext x?html?, ...
-
-...
-```
-
-Having configured my default web browser in my ranger config, all
-I need to do is press `l`.
-
-![A post displaying in w3m](./w3m.webp)
-
-No ads, no cookie popups, no giant banner images taking 2 seconds to load and
-shifting the content all over the place: just the text I want to read. Isn't it
-beautiful?
-
-Once I'm finished reading the post, I'll press `q` to quit w3m and return to
-ranger. Assuming I don't need to read it again, I'll press `dm` to move the
-post to `~/readlist/read` - my way of marking a post as 'read'.
-
-I've done this by writing a super simple script, `markread.sh`:
-
-```bash
-### markread.sh ###
-
-filename="$(basename $1)"
-
-if [[ -a "$HOME/readlist/unread/$filename" ]]
-then
-  mv "$HOME/readlist/unread/$filename" "$HOME/readlist/read/$filename"
-  echo "Marked $filename as read."
-else
-  echo "I couldn't find a file in ~/readlist/unread with the name: $filename"
-fi
-```
-
-...and hooking it onto the custom keybinding, `dm`, in ranger:
-
-```conf
-### ~/.config/ranger/rc.conf ###
-
-...
-
-# map `dm` to run markread.sh in the shell, providing the active filename
-# as the first and only argument
-map dm shell markread.sh %f
-
-...
-```
-
-## The result
-
-I can now keep up to date, and I enjoy doing it.
-
-I get not everyone likes to live in the terminal. I think the key takeaways
-are:
-
-- Make it really easy to sift through new posts
-- When you sift, sift through every post, and for each one, either read it
-  straight away, or add it to your reading list
-- Sift daily
-- Make it really easy to add things to your reading list
-- Make it really easy to browse, read things, and mark things read in your
-  reading list
-- Set aside time to catch up on your reading list
-- Make the whole thing joyful (both because joy is good, and because you won't
-  do it otherwise)
-
-## Next steps
-
-I still haven't really figured out social media. I'd like to stay up to date
-with what my friends are doing, especially the ones I don't see very often. If
-my friends are posting stuff on the Internet, I'd love to see it.
-
-I still need to know:
-
-- Are my friends posting stuff on the Internet?
-- If so, where?
-- What's the best way of subscribing to their posts - even if they live on
-  different websites and in different formats?
-- What's the best way of sending and receiving comments/replies/reactions?
-
-TBC. Answers on a postcard please.
-
-[commafeed]: https://www.commafeed.com
-[pikapods]: https://www.pikapods.com
-[newsboat]: https://newsboat.org
-[ranger]: https://ranger.github.io
-[rss]: /blog/2024/05/02/no_more_youtube
-[w3m]: https://w3m.sourceforge.net
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diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/24/science_and_philosophy.md b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/24/science_and_philosophy.md
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----
-title: Why scientists need philosophers
-description: This is a practice essay, OK? Don't shoot me if it's no good.
-pubDate: 2025-01-24
----
-
-I've recently been working at a
-[Philosophy of Science MOOC]([phil-sci-coursera]) on Coursera, the online
-courses website. Later on, they set you an exercise to write a short essay
-addressing how philosophy can contribute to science.
-
-So this is my punt. Life is too short to revise or, hell, even research this, so
-don't take any of this as my settled opinion or as my best work. Whatever. With
-that caveat in mind, it might still be entertaining at least, or maybe even
-spark some thoughts.
-
----
-
-Walk into a particular room in the Science Museum in Kensington, and you will
-find yourself enveloped in a cavern of ironmongery and miscellanea. The shelves
-droop under the weight of bolts, files, screws, bits, grinders, saws,
-protractors, clamps and pins. The inventory scrolls endlessly past you, voices
-reciting the lists of trinkets like an incantation.
-
-This is the workshop of James Watt, meticulously reconstructed from the
-original as it was left in his home in Birmingham after his death. This
-entrancing space invites you to imagine a tireless creative, endlessly
-tinkering away at his next contraption.
-
-And yet for all that - and for all his immense valorisation as the lynchpin of
-Britain's industrial revolution - Watt was reluctant to think of himself as the
-engineer everyone else loved. He aspired to be remembered not as an engineer
-but as a scientist.
-
-To understand why James Watt, one of the most admired engineers who ever lived,
-wished he were famed as a scientist instead, is to understand something
-essential about modern Western thought.
-
-In Watt's lifetime, scientists increasingly became the elite of society. In the
-nineteenth and twentieth century, this trend only gathered pace. We constructed
-our modern public health infrastructure on the advice of pathologists and made
-medicine scientific. We funded scientific expeditions to map the world, even to
-its remotest corners (in part to help us conquer it). We adopted radical new
-economic policies in response to scientific economic theories. We built vast
-infrastructure networks to communicate waves of invisible energy discovered by
-pioneering physicists, and built nuclear plants to generate more of the stuff
-by means of nuclear science. We even designed social programmes on the basis of
-scientific anthropology. By the end of the twentieth century, scientists were
-our prophets, priests and kings. Or so we thought.
-
-In the 1990s, at the so-called 'end of history', it was assumed that there
-would be no more need for social upheaval. Humanity had arrived at the ideal
-system of social organisation. And among other ideologies - secularism,
-libertarianism, democracy - an essential part of the package is that science
-was our ultimate and incontestible way of securing knowledge about the world.
-
-Yet now, that certainty is broken. Religious fundamentalism, whether Christian,
-Muslim, Hindu, or else besides, is politically empowered in many places,
-together with its rejection of science.
-
-At the same time, the myth of science is ever more punctured. The supposedly
-scientific West has increasingly come to appreciate that their scientific
-heritage also includes much we would rather ignore - phrenology, race science,
-systematic blindness to female bodies in medicine.
-
-Meanwhile, scientists themselves are noticing that their holy calling has
-turned out to be rather less holy than they had hoped. They find science
-pulled between the competing demands of truth and tenure. Scientific knowledge
-is locked behind the paywalls of exclusive journals, which even many academics
-struggle to access, never mind the general public.
-
-What then for science in the twenty-first century?
-
-Yet there is another story available. It starts with confessing that the old
-stories got things wrong in important ways. When we put ideology aside, science
-has not been on an uncontested march to universal acceptance since Galileo.
-There has been continual change, continual conflict, continual readjustment of
-our ideas to the changing demands of the age.
-
-In Galileo's day, it may have been a fight to establish that there was much to
-be seen by simply looking. As empirical observation started to prove its worth
-in the early modern period, thinkers wrestled with new problems: how to
-reconcile the evidence of Scripture with the evidence of the senses? How to
-understand how sensation can give us knowledge at all, granted that any
-observer may be vulnerable to illusions, tricks and dreams? And if that's how
-sense data work, what then for our mathematical or logical knowledge, which
-seems to already bind the world even before we start experiencing it?
-
-This centuries-long struggle culminated in the work of Kant, who in his 1786
-magnum opus, the _Critique of Pure Reason_, set out a masterful - if infamously
-obscure - system, which enabled thinkers to understand just how empirical
-knowledge might work.
-
-Yet two generations later, Charles Darwin lit the flame under new controversy
-about the relationship between scientific and religious knowledge. His bizarre
-and wildly imaginative theory of evolution by natural selection challenged the
-Genesis Creation accounts, and this was soon to be followed up with the theory
-of tectonic shift.
-
-Some said that where scientists contradicted the authority of Scripture, the
-word of God must always win. Others said that science alone had the keys to
-knowledge, and if what the Bible said couldn't be proven scientifically, then
-it couldn't be accepted. Some said that science and religion were two
-incommensurable attempts to study the same subject matter, while others said
-that they covered completely separate spheres.
-
-Gradually, all of these views moved to the extremes. Now, most people (though
-not all) agree that science and religion have overlapping spheres, and can
-inform one another, but neither the Book of Nature nor the Book of Scripture
-has the decisive final say.
-
-Now, in our post-Christendom Western context, it's more important than ever to
-understand how science and religion can talk to one another. Religious
-minorities - as all religions now are in the West - are vulnerable to the risk
-of becoming epistemic islands, cut off from the knowledge of the rest of the
-community, unless we can find ways that science can talk across creedal
-differences.
-
-We need, too, for scientifically marginalised communities, such as non-white
-people, whom science has ignored, or worse, to be more tightly integrated into
-science, both so that knowledge might increase, and so that the benefits
-knowledge gives might be fairly shared.
-
-In light of these urgent needs, today's philosophers are considering science
-not just as an epistemic problem, but as a social problem. As philosophers once
-established science as the bedrock of modern knowledge, so philosophers today
-have the task of figuring out how science can glue together our societies.
-
-Science has been at its most dangerous when it hasn't been questioned. At all
-times, as long as we practice science, we need to consider what it means, what
-it means to do science well, how it can generate knowledge, and how it ought to
-be used as a powerful instrument of change.
-
-And perhaps that might justify James Watt in his obsession to be seen as a
-scientist: since we can't get by just with practitioners. We need people who
-can see our practices from the outside and shine a mirror back on us. If we
-want science, then we need philosophers.
-
-[phil-sci-coursera]: https://www.coursera.org/learn/philosophy-physical-sciences
diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/28/paradox.md b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/28/paradox.md
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--- a/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/28/paradox.md
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----
-title: A paradox about 'should'
-description: >-
-  I seem to have accidentally proven that drinking wine both is and is not a
-  thing you should do. Let's hope that wine doesn't disappear in a puff of
-  logical smoke.
-pubDate: 2025-01-28
----
-
-We're pretty familiar with the idea that there can be reasons for doing
-something, and reasons against. Drinking wine is bad for your liver, but good
-for your social life.
-
-But look what happens if we express this in this way:
-
-1. Drinking wine is bad for your liver.
-2. You shouldn't do things which are bad for your liver.
-3. All things you shouldn't do aren't things you should do.
-4. Therefore, drinking wine isn't a thing you should do.
-
-In contrast to this:
-
-5. Drinking wine is a good social activity.
-6. You should do things which are good social activities.
-7. Therefore, drinking wine is a thing you should do.
-
-Now both 1-4 and 5-7 seem like logically valid arguments with true premises,
-but 4 and 7 are contradictory!
-
-I don't think there's any use in complaining about premise 3. All that gives us
-is the possibility that wine is both a thing you should do, and a thing you
-shouldn't do. But that's an absurdity. Something can't be both obligatory and
-forbidden at the same time. It's scarcely any better than a contradiction: it
-is inconsistent with any useful concept of obligation.
-
-Remember that we would quite like to know, at the end of all our argument,
-whether we should drink wine or whether we shouldn't. 'Both' is not an adequate
-answer, because it's not a useful guide for action: we can't both drink wine and
-not drink wine. So if 'should' is to function as we need it to, 3 must be true.
-
-I think a more profitable way forward is this. Let's re-write premise 2:
-
-2. All things which are bad for your liver are things such that the fact that
-   that thing is bad for your liver is a reason not to do it.
-
-We can similarly re-write premise 6:
-
-6. All things which are good social activites are things such that the fact that
-   they are good social activities is a reason to do them.
-
-Then premise 3, if it's to play the same logical role in the argument, would
-have to read:
-
-3. All things such that the fact that that thing is bad for your liver is a
-   reason not to do it is not a thing such that the fact that that thing is a
-   good social activity is a reason to do it.
-
-Our re-written 2 and 6 seem to adequately capture the sense of the original,
-but 3 is now obviously false. With our re-written sentences, we can avoid
-generating a contradiction without doing any fatal damage to our concept of
-'should'.
-
-OK. Grant for the sake of argument that that was a good move. What have we
-achieved? Have we actually solved the problem?
-
-We started out with a pair of arguments which generate a contradiction. Our
-move generated a new pair of arguments which don't generate a contradiction. So
-what? Isn't the first contradiction still there?
-
-Perhaps you could say that our re-written version of 2 (and so on) are more
-accurate elaborations of the originals. Fine. But what about those originals,
-then? You've still either got to say that they're true, false, or gibberish.
-Producing your second argument hasn't convinced me to move my opinion about the
-originals. The original premises seem just as true, and the original arguments
-just as valid, as when we began.
-
-What gives? Answers on a postcard as usual please.