| | Just a quick note that anyone who wishes to drop round this weekend to drink our wine and eat our food is more than welcome to do so. But please knock before breaking in. | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment   |
| To mark the planet having flung itself around the sun twenty-three times without launching me off into space to die cold and alone in the desolate nothing between the uncaring stars (or perhaps to be eaten by the dread elder beasts that lurk there), there will be a gathering in Cambridge on the 26th of August. There may be a barbecue of some sort: I gather that's what the young people are doing nowadays.
Those who wish to stay between the Friday night and the Sunday are of course welcome, with floor space and sofas available, as well as two beds if you seduce their current inhabitants. How hard can it be?
Meantime, for those in Cambridge, I'm going to the pub tonight, and thence to eat funny foreign foods. I'll be in the Vine from 5:30 for at least an hour. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| As Tim rightly points out, in order to know when your birthday is you have to depend on other people, and other people are idiots. But, on the spurious pretext of maintaining the likely fiction that I was born on August 1st, 1983 - and, more importantly apparently, to provide Hester with cover for her crazy Who-a-thon - some sort of party in August has been suggested.
Unfortunately I only have the weekends of the 11th-12th and 25th-26th free that month. H has already tested the waters for the 11th: what's the latter like? (Adam and Oli especially.) | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| I think that, if anyone hasn't seen it yet, this is worth a look.
I am personally of the view that Porter looks like the bigger idiot here: he deploys very vague hyperbole and only comes down to earth in so far as Tony Blair (Tony Blair!) forces him. On most of these issues Labour policy breaches liberal tradition only in a highly specific way. This in itself is clearly damaging enough without claiming that Blair is a "threat to democracy" when he obviously isn't - and in any case all the points raised (with the possible exception of the protest law) concern principles of just law-based constitutional government and have nothing to do with democracy.
The most extreme case is probably that of the jury trial, which has somehow become a totem of liberalism. I've got no idea on what theoretical or data-based argument one supposes that a handful of pseudo-random people deliberating in a closed room are better guardians of (just) liberty than trained legal professionals.
It also cannot be stressed often enough that this government has introduced judicial review of both legislature and executive against a standard of human rights. (While suspension is possible, the grounds for suspension are themselves subject to judicial review.) | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | Has anyone since the metaphysical poets (Donne etc.) written poetry on the subject of sex with the requisite mix of wit, passion and tenderness? Because at this point we can't do better than Leonard Cohen. No, seriously. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| Apropos my last post, Tim was complaining that I've been reading interesting books lately, while he is doing a literature degree and therefore isn't allowed to. So I thought I'd post a couple of short reviews that might cheer him up a bit.
Perdido Street Station. Hackneyed plotting, inept characterisation, stupid metaphors, cod-philosophy and pseudo-scientific bullshit in spades - a big block of wasted potential. 900 pages of pretty cool stuff in search of a decent novel to be in.
Vellum. Almost totally unmitigated drivel. I eagerly await the sequel. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| A Fistful of Euros offers some context on why the Austrian state still feels it needs to vigorously pursue holocaust deniers like David Irvine.
(I read afoe in lieu of being able to work out an easy way of keeping up with news from the continent - the British media not being much use on the this score.) | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Another installment of "Kurzweil-watch". http://theinquirer.net/?article=29595. It's like he's living in 1995 or something. A "map" of the brain in the sense of the genomic data that go into its development would be interesting, but it would not constitute anything like complete understanding. Also, calling the genomic analysis of development "simple" is stretching credulity a little bit. Why does anyone pay attention to this crank? | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| This is only in v0.1 preview release at the moment, and it doesn't work very well. But it's got to be worth keeping an eye on.
EDIT: Songbird works much better if you install it in the default directory, it appears.
This post has attracted remarkably little comment from the Standard Nerds who read my LJ, so I'm going to claim that IE7 is going to be better than Firefox and WinXP is better than Linux. That's right, even Debian. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
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