Here’s the latest Mini-Heap: 10 recent items from the frequently updated Heap of Links, collected and numbered for your convenience. Have at ’em. 

As usual, if you have suggestions for the Heap, please send ’em in.

1. Conflicting aims in end-of-life care — and an argument for assisted suicide, from Frances Kamm at Boston Review
2. How elite are the backgrounds of philosophers, in comparison to other academics? — Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) presents some data
3. “If we want to do democracy right, we need sometimes to do something else entirely” — words of wisdom from Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
4. “There is great reluctance to recognize how much needs to be done to reconstruct ethically adequate standards for communication” — Onora O’Neill on technology and communication, in The Washington Post
5. “If we cannot choose which theory is correct based on the empirical results, what can help us?” — Valia Allori (Northern Illinois) assesses the gravity of the problem
6. If there are “creatures that know what they are doing but do not know why” — the orthodox view in philosophy of action is wrong
7. How to make good use of political polarization — experimentation via contests
8. Philosophers discuss Blade Runner — in Smithsonian Magazine
9. We’re not living in a computer simulation, scientists conclude — “just storing information about a couple of hundred electrons would require a computer memory that would physically require more atoms than exist in the universe.”
10. (Not so fast, scientists ↑ )