Timewasting notes

Posted on April 10, 2008 by acb

As we were assembling, Presidents Bush and Putin were meeting not too far away in Sochi in Russia. Their squabble about American plans for a missile defence system in Central Europe continues. President Bush is determined to press ahead. But not all of his compatriots are convinced. One conference participant memorably described the scheme as “a system that won’t work, against a threat that doesn’t exist, paid for with money that we don’t have.” Sounds like quite a good epitaph for the entire Bush administration to me.

  • Someone on one of the pharyngular blogs comments that the superiority of science is prroved by the fact that all religions are different, because everyone’s imagination is different, whereas all science is convergent because the facts are the same everywhere you go. Up to a point, I suppose, but so what? Is he proposing to live without imagination? Science is about the search for those facts which are the same everywhere you go. Does that mean these are the only facts in the world, or the only ones we should care about, or the only ones we should enquire into? More deeply, can there be non-propositional knowledge?
  • I haven’t actually gone fishing yet this year, but I have loaded the car boot with everything I might need, and it would seem that this year I need half a dozen rods which looks tremendously extravagant, given that three of them are the same length (nine foot) and there are two in every line weight between four and six. But they don’t represent nearly the extravagance I might, in some moods, reproach myself with. The oldest two were anyway presents for my wife, twenty years ago; each of the others does something unique, even if that is only “fits into carry on luggage”. No — what I should be feeling guilty about is the extreme improbability of arranging the year so that I have a use for all of them. I’m going to try to get a fortnight in Sorsele this summer, or possibly Ammarnäs, but I doubt very much I’ll have time to drive there: it’s three days for lunatics and four if I only drive eight hours at a stretch.
Posted in Blather, God, Net stories, Science without worms, Trouty things | 3 Comments

A distinctive programme

Posted on April 9, 2008 by acb

I maintain in my own usage a distinction between “program” and “programme”. This doesn’t depend on whether I am writing to Americans or not. The distinction is between two referents (I nearly wrote “things”, but neither are tangible). A program is a set of precise instructions for a computer. Useful word; useful thing. A programme is either a much vaguer set of plans and aspirations for a human being or an organisation — what most people nowadays call as strategy — or it is something made for the radio. It occurs to me that it can also be the listing for an evening’s entertainment. Either way, it needs to end in me.

Posted in Literature, nördig | 9 Comments

Readers more fluent in German than I

Posted on April 6, 2008 by acb

Should hurry to this essay on Joseph Weizenbaum (pdf, found through wikipedia). I don’t have any problem with accompanying biography, but the essay on his philosophical position is a bit much when I can’t find the dictionary. But it has a great pull quote: “I’m not a critic of computers. Computers can’t do anything with criticism. I’m a critic of society.”

And now I suppose one of you — Robert, Bodil, Mrs T. — will be along to say I have mistranslated even that.

Posted in Net stories | Comments Off on Readers more fluent in German than I

hymns for public execution

Posted on April 3, 2008 by acb

I note that Bishop Alan Wilson is celebrating an earlier Buckinghamshire Vicar who went mad but not before writing a hymn which was was thought suitable for public executions. What hymns would readers wish to hear at such a moment today? (Whom they would like to see hanged is a question for another day)

Posted in God | Comments Off on hymns for public execution

Quicks and squicks

Posted on April 3, 2008 by acb
  • You know the little children who tug at you to try a different shop when you walk through a bazaar? Amazon just turned your cellphone into one of of these (I write “cellphone” because it seems to be a US only thing, so far). This service lets you text them for a better quote when out shopping, and then buy the thing over the phone — without ever leaving the shop which has just lost your business.
    If it takes off this kind of service is going to be interesting in a depression. It’s a technological way to drive prices down, or to drive them down more quickly, than the underlying economics would suggest. We’re all used to thinking aboutr this as consumers, perhaps because so few people in the modern Western economy produce anything at all. But a world in which all the producers get screwed all the time is one in which politics grows very interesting.
  • From time to time I vent about the price of fly rods on this blog: the point being that every year the manufacturers bring out a new line whose only real novelty is the price; back when graphite rods really were revolutionary, they cost about half of what a top of the range model now does, and I can’t believe that they have not got much cheaper to build. In any case, a friend of mine just got onto the “professional pricing” programme of one of the big rod manufacturers and has bought, through this, two rods whose retail in the states is around $750 (and, of course, £600 here) for $156.00 each. I doubt the manufacturer is making a big loss at the second price.
  • Little-known side-effect of a hernia operation: your scrotum fills with blood. This really upset the person who told me, who had not been warned by the doctors. On the other hand, the anaesthetist did say that after the operation he should abstain for a day from alcohol and cocaine. This is someone who neither looks like a user nor is one; apparently the warning is routine in London now.
Posted in Net stories | 4 Comments

What we learn from polls

Posted on April 2, 2008 by acb

via Crooked Timber, the purest possible illustration of the thesis that to many Americans “Muslim” means “dark and dangerous“, nothing more:

There is little evidence that the recent news about Obama’s affiliation with the United Church of Christ has dispelled the impression that he is Muslim. While voters who heard “a lot” about Reverend Wright’s controversial sermons are more likely than those who have not to correctly identify Obama as a Christian, they are not substantially less likely to still believe that he is Muslim. Nearly one-in-ten (9%) of those who heard a lot about Wright still believe that Obama is Muslim.

For the record, slightly — very slightly — more than 53% of Americans believe that Obama is a Christian. This should tell us aquite a lot about the so-called persecution of atheists in America.

Posted in USA | Comments Off on What we learn from polls

Kuka Mitä Häh?

Posted on April 1, 2008 by acb

The Leningrad Cowboys perform Sweet Home Alabama, backed by the Red Army Choir. The Leningrad Cowboys are the stars of the greatest film about America and Rock and Roll ever made; there is a clip from that on Youtube, too.

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

Instant bibliographies

Posted on March 31, 2008 by acb

I hate bibliographies, and I suspect that any tool I bought to handle them would consume immense quantities of otherwise productive slightly less unproductive time. On the other hand, I need to have reliable references and footnotes from time to time and I think I have discovered a free and fairly reliable way to get them into Openoffice that requires no more than half a dozen mouse clicks from the moment I find a quote in the book I am reading. It will, of course, work with Word, too.

I get the bibliographic details of whatever I am quoting from Librarything: this requires at most half a dozen passes with the cuecat scanner and often only one. From Librarything, they are dumped into the Zotero firefox extension. That’s one mouse click. Zotero has plugin toolbars for both word and openoffice, so when I need to source a quote, I add one more mouseclick in OOo, and then type in the page number. Instant footnote.

I think it will also produce a bibliography at the end, but I haven’t tested that yet.

Posted in nördig, OOo | Comments Off on Instant bibliographies

Polyglot proficiency

Posted on March 30, 2008 by acb

I belong to a sort of informal walking club which involves a bunch of middle-aged farts shambling around the Essex countryside for a couple of hours on a Sunday before stopping at a pub for lunch. It’s not exactly exercise, but it’s a great way to find new pubs. The members tend to be reasonably cosmopolitan but I hadn’t realised just how much until today when I counted the number of languages spoken on the one walk among thirteen people. I came up with Swedish, Hungarian, German, Italian and French; there is also a Turkish speaker, though I have never heard her do it. These are only the languages spoken fluently by at least one person — the test of fluency being either that the speaker was brought up in it or that they have worked as a translator to or from in adult life. There is a penumbra of holiday languages — Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, at least — that are spoken with varying degrees of fluency; and two people speak Hausa from having lived in Northern Nigeria for a while.

What provoked this was a grumble about Cambridge University dropping the foreign language requirement for entry, the last British university to do so. Not only is this a bad thing in and of itself but the collapse in British linguistic competence comes from what was once a reasonably high standard.

Posted in Blather | 2 Comments

Nowadays you’d get sued as well as kicked

Posted on March 30, 2008 by acb

I happened to be talking to an anthropologist this morning, and the conversation turned to a celebrated academic. “I knew him when I was at New College”, she said. “I was in a lift with him once. There were just the two of us. I was wearing a miniskirt and he put his hand up it.”
“!!??!!” I said: “Did he know you?”
“No. Not at all. We hadn’t spoken or anything. He was well known for it. I kicked him, hard, on the shin … I have never ever read any of his books, because of that.”

Posted in Blather | Comments Off on Nowadays you’d get sued as well as kicked