Thought for the day:
“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.”
David Hume, 1739
Tempo
It feels as if I’ve been blogging less recently; one of my friends/readers in England said that “I can fully understand why your blog is no longer a mainly daily occurrence.” (He also recommended that I go out and get a copy of the new CD by Spock’s Beard, Octane. I did try, Paul, but Tower didn’t have it. Neither does iTunes. sigh…)
In any case, there are three things that have slowed my blogging. First is the Philosopy of Mind course I’m taking at Tufts. I’ve already talked about that; suffice it to say that I’m having a blast, and spending a lot of time reading. I guess I could post book reviews here, but then people would know how much dosh I’ve forked over to Amazon.com.
The second thing is seasonal. Maybe it was the flu that clobbered me at the beginning of January, but this winter has really been a physically draining experience. One big snowstorm after another… and we have another one heading our way on Thursday. Enough – I’m ready for spring, stupid rodents notwithstanding. *
The third thing that is taking up my time is my new laptop, an Acer Ferrari 3400. It’s got an AMD Athlon 64 CPU, so that it can run Sun’s new OS, Solaris 10 in 64-bit mode. It’s a great way to get hands-on experience with the features of Solaris 10, expecially Dtrace and Zones Containers, but right now I’m spending most of my time on installation and configuration issues. I’d originally planned to set up a triple-boot configuration, with Solaris, JDS/Linux, and Windows XP, but I soon realized that (1) I was going to need plenty of disk space for the stuff I wanted to do, and (2) I didn’t really need any OS other than Solaris. So I’ve been (re) learning more about disk partitioning than I ever wanted to know…
Regular readers will know that I’m a hard-core Mac user, and that’s not changing in the foreseeable future. I believe in using the right tool for the right job, and at this point my little 12″ PowerBook is the right tool for much of what I do. There’s a really smart bunch of people in Sun (including a great team in Beijing) working to prove me wrong, and I’m backing them 110%. And I’ll stay on the bleeding edge with them, and do as much as I can to test, test, test.
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* In case you haven’t seen it, this joke is making the rounds:
“Today is Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address. As Air America Radio pointed out, it is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication and the other involves a groundhog.”
If you want to be an historian…
In Salon today, Charles Taylor reviews Deborah Lipstadt’s new book History on Trial, her account of the libel case brought against her by the Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer David Irving. Taylor is particularly interested in the way that some historians continued to support Irving even after his fraud and mendacity had been laid bare for all to see. Money quote:
What seems to bother Irving’s defenders is the very notion of professional and intellectual accountability. Running into Lipstadt after the trial, [British historian, Donald Cameron Watt] said to her, ‘None of us could have withstood that kind of scrutiny.’ In a column for the Evening Standard, he said, ‘Show me one historian who has not broken out into a cold sweat at the thought of undergoing similar treatment.’ What Lipstadt was perhaps too polite to say to Watt was that any historian who wishes to be worthy of the title had damn well better be able to withstand that kind of scrutiny.
Dissonance
There’s science: a method of learning about the physical universe by applying the principles of the scientific method, which includes making empirical observations, proposing hypotheses to explain those observations, and testing those hypotheses in valid and reliable ways; also refers to the organized body of knowledge that results from scientific study.
And then there’s Kansas, as reported in the Guardian today: But the largest applause of the evening was reserved for a silver-haired gentleman in a navy blue blazer. “I have a question: if man comes from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? Why do you waste time teaching something in science class that is not scientific?” he thundered.
(Woodrow Wilson had it right, a mere 83 years ago: “…of course, like every other man of intelligence and education, I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should still be raised.)
The Cuddly Menace
Take one saccharine-sweet children’s book entitled “My Little Golden Book About God.” Replace bland text with the horrifying truth. The result: The Cuddly Menace. Please keep beverages away from your keyboard while reading. (This means you, Alec.)
(Via Boing Boing.)
Word of the day: resile
I was reading a story in the Guardian about the British government’s reaction to the latest IRA announcement*, and I read: “No 10 has never resiled from its view that the IRA was involved in the bank robbery”
resiled?! What’s this? Is the Grauniad** up to its old tricks? Apparently not: to resile is, inter alia, “to abjure: formally reject or disavow a formerly held belief, usually under pressure”. Dates back to 1520-1530, from the French resilir and before that the Latin resilire, to spring back. Same root as resilient. And I’d never seen it before. Neat.
* The IRA is throwing a hissy fit because it was caught robbing banks, so it’s withdrawing its commitment to decommission its weapons. Makes perfect sense….?
** I think it was Private Eye that dubbed the Guardian “the Grauniad” on account of its frequent typos.
Trackback blogspam
This morning, starting just after midnight Eastern, somebody started spraying trackback pings at my blog – about 150 so far, still going. A few weeks ago, while tweaking the template for the front page, I’d added a list of the last five trackbacks. I just got rid of that, so now (as far as I can see) there’s no trace of the spammer’s sites or addresses anywhere on geoffarnold.com. Hopefully this will persuade the bots to ignore me as an unprofitable target…..
[UPDATE: 2/3/05] Another burst of 50-60 pings this morning (on top of the 250 in this current plague) provoked me into doing what I should have done all along: install Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist. It was amazingly easy. No excuses…..
Back to basics
After my recent rant about the lamentable state of the US cellphone market, I calmed down. What am I really looking for? I’ve already got a decentadequate digital camera; I’ve got a Bluetooth mouse, so I don’t need to use my phone as a remote control for my PowerBook (plus I won’t always be using my PowerBook – more in a week or two). I need a basic cellphone that has decent battery life, good signal reception, good audio, and an easy UI. I use the WAP! portal! to! My! Yahoo! a lot, so decent GPRS (EDGE) is a plus. Oh, and I’d like a usable hands-free solution, rather than that earbud-on-a-string that always seems to get tangled in my seatbelt.
So today, after my Nokia 3650 spontaneously powered off for the umpteenth time, I picked up a Motorola V551, along with a Motorola Bluetooth headset. Let’s see how it goes. I’ve noted one annoyance already: Motorola and Apple don’t agree about Bluetooth, so to use iSync I’ll have to get a cable. And when I select silent or vibrate mode I’d like a really clear indication of this in the external display. But on balance, I like it. It feels right; menus are mostly clear; the multimedia stuff is ignorable; the screen is dazzling; predictive text entry is a little easier than I’m used to; IM and email is a snap. The battery claims are impressive; we’ll see what reality is like.
Oh, yes, I did have one more criterion: that the price be low enough that if the perfect phone comes along tomorrow I won’t feel like a schmuck.
Busy, busy, busy
Five days without a blog entry… unthinkable! But I’ve actually been very busy, catching up with my reading for the Philosophy of Mind course I’m taking this semester at Tufts.
Now you have to understand that the last time I was in school was back in 1977, when I was at the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne in England. 28 years on and 3,500 miles away, things are a little different! This class meets twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays. Before each session, we go through a selection of readings on the topic for the day and submit our comments (which are assessed as part of the grading). We post the comments by 9pm the day before the class to an on-line Blackboard discussion board, where we can (and do!) all read and comment on each others’ submissions. And finally a streaming video of each class is posted to the Blackboard about a week after the class.
One thing that I’ve been worried about is how occasional business travel might disrupt class work. It looks as if the web-based tools will definitely help. I can see it now: reading the next selections at FL350 BOS-SFO, comments and dialogue via Blackboard from the Holiday Inn in Palo Alto…. Not ideal, but feasible. We’ll see.
Feeling fated…
This semester I’m going back to school. I’ve signed up to take Dan Dennett’s Philosophy of Mind course at Tufts, and the first classes are this week. I knew that it was going to be a challenge to fit classes and work into my schedule; I hadn’t counted on the weather.
The first class was scheduled for Monday, but with the blizzard last weekend everything (including Tufts) was closed. So the next session was this afternoon, Wednesday, 4:00-5:15. Coincidentally, we’re having another winter storm today. We’ve only had about 7 inches so far, but after the blizzard that felt like nothing. (Note the overconfident attitude.) So after finishing up a work (phone) meeting, I set out to drive the 12 miles from Brookline to Medford.
It was a nightmare. Even a major artery like Route 9 was deep in slush. Every time I touched the brakes I felt the ABS chattering to try and get a grip on something, anything. I’d only gone a couple of miles, and it looked like I would be lucky to average 10 MPH.
And then I cautiously stopped at a red light at the bottom of a hill, and looked in my mirror, transfixed, as a car slid down the hill towards me, obviously out of control. Somehow the driver managed to scrub off some speed by steering into the snowbank at the side of the road, and stopped inches behind me.
I pulled off onto a side street, called Tufts to explain that I wouldn’t be at class, and then drove home very carefully. It’s important to keep your priorities straight.