I am not a philosopher

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

- Bertrand Russell

Ooh la la!

Mr Darcy

Apparently 8 out of 10 women would prefer to spend the night with Mr Darcy than Brad Pitt, but obviously not with a guy from the Chaser pretending to be Mr Darcy...

Another classic spam name

Irreligi Superignorant

Alas, poor Alex.

This is sad. Alex was a cool parrot. We watched videos of him in philosophy classes on cognitive science. While he might be able to say more words than my darling Mate, he's not nearly as cute. Cool, but not as lovely as my little Matey-bird.

Warning!

The copyright proprietor has licensed this DVD for private home use only... The definition of home use excludes the use of this DVD at locations such as clubs, coaches, hospitals, hotels, oil rigs, prisons and schools.

I know this is a generic message, but I can't imagine Gilmore Girls being first choice for entertainment on an oil rig!

Hmm...

Which Friends Character Are You?
	You are Ross. You're intelligent and adored by your parents. However, your lack of social skills causes you to talk too much and try too hard. While your friends pick on you for your nerdiness, they better watch our for your rage.
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

Note to self

When making cannelloni, first check that you have cannelloni tubes...

Nice photo

I hope Matt doesn't mind this being online...


Much better than Mr Darcy!

I wish I had a spare couple of grand...

Click here.

Hello, my name is spam

I get a huge amount of junk email - sometimes amusing, sometimes incomprehensible. I thought these names were worth recording on here:

• Aquaplane T. Forging
• Eiderdown P. Beret

Am I really supposed to believe that these are real people?!

Awww...

Liz, Lara & Donna

This is me at Donna's 21st. Wasn't I cute when I was 21? I look good. The scary thing is that I probably thought I was overweight back then, but I look a lot better than I do now. I still have that outfit - no way it would fit me at the moment. I want to get back to looking like that, though perhaps without the fringe...

Shut up and drive

Catchy song, but somehow I don't think Rihanna is actually talking about driving...

Brooke Fraser rocks!

I'll write about the concert sometime soon (I hope!) but in the meantime, check out the video of her song Albertine.

Sign on the door

Open up the sky
All gather around
Praise the Lord and
Take a look at what I found
I got love that's as big as raging storm
I got walls coming down that I don't need no more
I got a sign on the door that says
Lonely don't live here anymore

Kasey Chambers

Faust in Copenhagen

This book, Faust in Copenhagen by Gino Segrè, looks very interesting. I read a review from the UK Telegraph written by Kenan Malik, a British lecturer, writer and broadcaster, with a background in neurobiology and history of science.

Malik critiques Segrè for not paying enough attention to the physics of quantum mechanics:

What interests Segrè is the context of scientific discovery, both personal and cultural. This is both the strength and the weakness of his book.

I don't see that this has to be a weakness. I haven't read much about quantum mechanics, but surely there are already books around which deal with the physics in detail. What's wrong with a book that deals more with the personalities involved, and the cultural context? It sounds like Segrè has a fascinating thesis:

Quantum mechanics, he suggests, was part of a broader development in which modernism overthrew classical concepts. Quantum theories resulted from the same kind of 'wild experimenting' that also produced James Joyce's Ulysses, Schoenberg's atonalism and Giorgio de Chirico's landscapes. In all these cases 'the outer world, carefully described for hundreds of years, did not seem to match the inner world that was being uncovered'.

Malik does not agree, however:

The strangeness of quantum mechanics is, however, not a reflection of the cultural context in which the theories developed - it is simply a reflection of the fact that the subatomic world is indeed a strange place... If, as Einstein said, God doesn't play dice with the universe, it's not because he hasn't read Ulysses.

I'm open to sociological treatments of science - not, perhaps, as a replacement for discussing the "science" or the "physics", but as a complementary viewpoint. Obviously, if quantum mechanics is an accurate depiction and explanation of the sub-atomic universe, it wasn't the culture of the early 20th-century that made the universe this way. However, the surrounding culture may have given the scientists involved the conceptual tools with which to understand the sub-atomic world.

I think this book would make a nice addition to my library and I'm looking forward to reading it. Shame about that pesky PhD...

Gwyneth

My "new" laptop (now nearly one year old) does not yet have a name. I refer to my old laptop as "Dell" - partly because she (yes, it's a girl) is a Dell, and partly in honour of Del, the main character in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, one of my favourite books.

I have decided that my current laptop will now be known as "Gwyneth." Since Gwyneth Paltrow named her daughter "Apple", it seems fitting to name my Apple "Gwyneth."

(By the way, this post was written on my other Apple - the computer I use at uni - which shall henceforth be known as... no, that's going a bit too far!)

Tee hee!

I was just writing an email and made a typo in the word "conversation". I have now decided that "coonversation" is a good word to describe talking about cheese!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Ouch, my sides!

(See, this is what doing a PhD can do to a person...)

Animator versus Animation

This is extremely cool. Click here.

Nice. Very nice.

"Don't you have to believe in the 39 articles?

"Only the evangelical ones."

Click here.