Friday, 19 September 2008
Alphanumeric Eric was esoteric,
utterly alone, that poor lonesome drone.
Computer chess success was never a distress,
but for social grace, he had no disk space.
People would avoid that lonely, boring android.
Stray electric sheep fled his forlorn beep....
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Wednesday, 11 July 2007
With the thought of making and doing firmly in my mind, I decided to make some soap, some honey and nut soap. It's quite a nice thing to do on a rainy afternoon and not particularly taxing either. Here's the recipe I used, which worked quite well. Other combinations of ingredients are quite possible, but the molecular structures and all varies, so you're best off finding a proper book by an actual chemist if that's your game....
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Sunday, 1 July 2007
I moved house, and my new flatmates were away. There was only one thing for it: to make paper from vegetables. It was surprisingly hard to find instructions for the process on this, and there doesn't seem to be any books on the subject anywhere in Scotland. Pretty much everything you find online just explains how to recycle old newspapers, and doesn't shed any light on how paper is made in the first place. With good local greengrocers, I set out to explore....
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Monday, 7 May 2007
I used to think that David Hume was a big silly goose, but he's not: he's terrifying because he's what's wrong with modern life. Well, not so much him, since he died rather a while ago, but the fact that he's taken seriously....
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Friday, 12 January 2007
"In view of what I already said, that, in regarding sense as determining reference, we are supposing that the contribution of extra-linguistic reality is thereby taken into account, what Frege regarded as one of his fundamental discoveries, that there is a distinction between sense and reference, that is, that the sense of an expression cannot consist just in its having whatever reference it has, should be perfectly obvious: it is therefore at first sight surprising that it remains one of those of his these which is most persistently controverted." Michael Dummett (1978) "Truth and Other Enigmas", London: Duckworth, p. 122....
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Sunday, 7 January 2007
Chloe raises the issue of Captain Birdseye, another long-serving and aged corporate mascot, who was temporarily replaced with a young and rugged adventurer. The mistreatment of Captain Birdseye does seem related to many of the same issues raised by Professor Weeto's retirement, and perhaps to their deeper causes....
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Sunday, 7 January 2007
In boredom, I gave much too serious thought to the semiotics of the front of my box of cereal and its relation to wider social trends. The clearest signal is that Professor Weetos no longer makes an appearance, despite his long association with the product, replaced by a skateboarding child and a promotion for a recent film....
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