2015 — 1 May: Friday — rabbits!
At some point1 I'm hoping my immune system will finish finishing off the last remnants of the biological warfare that's been taking place in my nose and throat. It will be nice to wake up once more at a more normal time, and once more able to breathe clearly. And some people wonder why I regard the Intelligent Design folk as raving idiots.
On a related...
... battlefront, I've learned one vital lesson: never try to wash out the wax-like residue from a Vicks inhaler merely by use of hot water. Yep, once again I had to remove and clean out my domestic (kitchen sink U-bend) nemesis. There's not much dignity (though there is potential for amusement) in the sight of a sleepy, elderly pensioner grappling with this plastic beast under his kitchen sink. There were only about a million things I would have preferred to be doing just a few hours ago: sleeping, for one.
What must...
... it be like to be a contemporary philosopher and/or to have the mind of an epistemologist? I hadn't seen "valenced" in quite this context and it derailed me to the point where I dressed and made a second cuppa before resuming battle with the essay. Source and snippet:
The second exciting element of Brogaard's view is that emotions — like beliefs, I would argue — and especially love as an emotion, are not crudely valenced. They are not true/false, on/off, but admit of degrees. (This view, anathema to epistemologists as recently as 15 or 20 years ago, is now widely accepted by many contemporary philosophers who work on belief. Many epistemologists are also talking about beliefs and forms of knowledge that are not strictly conscious.)
My emphasis, not Professor Martin's. Better not dig deeper into how "not strictly conscious beliefs and forms of knowledge work"... It occurs to me that we (or, more accurately, I) lack a language for unambiguous analysis of "such stuff as dreams are made on". Still, it's a wry thought that many contemporary philosophers now think alike. All that group think... so comforting.
I shall avoid this rabbit hole. (Hehe.)
I no longer bank with these blighters:
I don't remember ever having been rich enough to feel I could get away with, well, anything really.
If, by the way, our...
... upcoming election throws up (as it were) a "hung" parliament could we not simply hold another one, but with none of the previous candidates being allowed to re-stand? (I'm getting very tired of hearing about all these "who will get into bed with whom" stories in such an event.) Seems to me, the longer we let our loathsome politicians jabber on at each other while the rest of the UK carries on without parliament in session, the longer our crappy media barons and our blessed Civil Service overlords and City advisors and para-military enforcers will have to help make an ever-stronger case for emigration.
Wonder how many acres Big Bro can spare "down on the farm"?
This was me...
... seven years ago, to the day. It amused me to re-read it this morning:
Back in 1969, as my school career wound down and I was casting around for something interesting to "do" that would both deliver a tertiary level education and also render me less financially dependent on my parents, I briefly considered electrical engineering, and life as a student sponsored by what was then called the Central Electricity Generating Board. I made the final shortlist of forty applicants, but not the top 12, alas, so at fairly short notice I opted to follow Big Bro's trail into aeronautical engineering instead. (Actually, I opted for production engineering, but the Apprentice Training Officer wasn't having any of that, bless him.) And, of course, my exposure to computing during that engineering education took me into the data processing world in February 1974, to the initial alarm of my parents. Computers were still fairly esoteric things, but that was changing even as I joined the industry, of course. By 1977, you could read about PCs in (for random example) Lucifer's Hammer as a commonplace artefact of life... that's science fiction for you, I guess, dear Mama!
Golly!
Personally, I loved the Aero 'skin'. But the forced fit of aspects of it back into the, erm, illegitimate new offspring of Win 7 and Win 8?
I don't think so.
Note to self
Next time UltraEdit releases an update... download the Ubuntu package, not the .tar file (idiot!) Makes it a lot easier to install.