We went out to dinner this evening, and by the time we drove home it was twilight and all the cars had their headlights on. And that really sucked: my myopic left eye was overwhelmed with glare from every light source, and it really interfered with the image from my “new” eye. I reduced the…
Read More One quick eye-related updateHerewith an update on the progress of my lens replacement procedures. It’s now six days since the procedure; this time last week I was enjoying a last glass of wine before going “nil by mouth”, knowing that I’d be alcohol-free for a couple of days after the procedure. Things continue to go well. I had…
Read More New eye #1, after one weekYesterday morning I had the first of two operations to replace the cataract-ridden lenses of my eyes with synthetic replacements. Everything went smoothly, and I now have 20/20 distance vision in my right eye. We got to the surgery center at 6:15am,and the worst part of the morning – having an IV inserted less smoothly…
Read More First, the right eye…So I’ve started the countdown to my first cataract surgery. I wasn’t going to blog much about this, but I’ve found that although the web is full of text and video links for cataract surgery (in humans and other animals!), most are commercial or professional pieces. There seem to be relatively few first-person accounts of…
Read More Countdown to cataract surgeryThe amazing thing about this crisis is the extent to which suffering and responsibility are completely out of proportion with one another. If you think about the people who are really suffering in the developed world today, none of them were executives at major banks, none of them were politicians involved in the construction of…
Read More Quote of the day: on proportionalityOne of my colleagues, P.P.S. Narayan (known to all as PPSN) is giving a talk next Thursday (September 22) on NoSQL storage services at Yahoo. It should be very instructive and entertaining. You can find out more here: Scaling Yahoo! – NoSQL in the Cloud – Database- Eventbrite.
Read More NoSQL at Yahoo!Over at Camels with Hammers, Daniel demonstrated that the “Argument from Personal Incredulity” is not restricted to mysterians or theists. I tried to post this as a comment, but for some reason it wasn’t approved, so I’ll repeat it here: Daniel wrote: I share the suspicion that robots could not have an internal, subjective side…
Read More More "Personal Incredulity"Here’s my Amazon review of Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One”: Simple Wonderful (five stars) The 80s were an interesting decade: the first personal computers, the first video games (in arcades and in the home), the first music videos, and a string of wonderful movies that brought together teenage angst, over-the-top technology, exuberant fantasy, and epic…
Read More Review: Ready Player OneI just finished reading the slim account of a debate between Dan Dennett and Alvin Plantinga, entitled “Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?”. Dennett’s conclusion is straightforward: Plantinga wanted to show… that science and religion are not just compatible: Science depends on theism to underwrite its epistemic self-confidence. […] [But] Our capacity to discover the…
Read More What leads to the Argument From Personal Incredulity?