Sound and Fury

‘Your message will appear in Linux Users Group momentarily’

No. It will appear in a moment. Groups whose postings appears only momentarily would be bugger all use to anyone. Take a moment to reflect on the fact that I used Google’s define: feature to define a word Google didn’t know how to use. According to answers.com: ‘many critics hold that the adverb should be reserved for the senses “for a moment,” and the extended usage is unacceptable‘

Incidentally, usenet groups are full of nutjobs claiming that physicists completely misunderstand general relativity or that Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are invalid or undermine the whole of maths. Weird.

I’ve spent most of today working out how bibtex works. I have another aborted essay attempt and a much greater understanding of how to get LaTeX to do what I want. Next thing on my agenda is to get some basic SVGs to display properly where I want them to. But this is a minor concern since I don’t really need pictures most of the time. I hope next week’s post-lecture essays will be longer and better, given that I am getting the hang of writing in LaTeX.

I have written a Draft Essay which isn’t particularly good, since I spent most of the time messing with LaTeX rather than getting anything worthwhile done. But since the essay is ‘experimental’ I thought I’d use it to try out WordPress’ upload features… This essay isn’t intended for submission so I feel I can publish it without fear. If I were planning to use this essay for one of my courses I would never publish it, since that leaves me open to accusations of plagiarism were someone to come across this ‘pre-print’ of the same material. But this is hardly a concern here since I don’t plan on expanding on this enough to submit it for a course and as it stands its pretty much worthless…

Basically, instead of working I have played about with LaTeX and now I’m writing about that. Meta-procrastination… I am now going to go and investigate how to add a Creative Commons license to my TeX files. Like, as metadata or something.

As a counterpart to my thoroughly helpful and informative list of internet resources for students I thought I would compile a list of all the places it’s possible to waste a lot of time on the internet.

• cyrkam airtos: I have no idea why this is quite so addictive, but it is. A flash game based on a way to waste time in an office…
• Jedi Trainer: You know you want to be a jedi…
• Dice Wars: Like the idea of Risk but can’t be bothered to spend hours and hours playing it? Or don’t have any friends to play against? Dice Wars is the answer.
• WordPress: Start a blog. Ramble about nonsense. Beats working, right?
• Casual Collective: Invite only (I might be able to help there…) but this is a great little site. There are currently 3 games, all of which are terribly good. Each game only lasts a couple of minutes but you always end up playing 3 or 4 games…

There are load more. Expect part 2 to follow shortly. Because compiling this list is itself a good waste of time…

I’ve updated that spreadsheet of important people’s dates I made a while ago. I still haven’t found a good “timeline” making program. I was thinking instead of writing a program that would print all the people who were alive at the same time as your input. Or everyone alive and their age in a given year. For example:

user> Newton

Program> Descartes, Oldenburg, Boyle, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, Berkeley, Euler, Hume, Kant

It wouldn’t be too hard. The tough part, as far as I’m concerned would be extracting the info from a spreadsheet into an object python can read. That would be handled by a separate “extract” program. But I’m certain it is possible. When I feel the need to waste a lot of time I shall look into it. For now I am busy drafting an essay about Boolos’ two different interpretations of second order logic and why he was wrong to abandon his first position (the one from “On Second Order Logic”).

God, I’m such a crazy fun loving guy.

I went to a sign language society meeting today. It was really interesting. I missed the first week, but I managed to catch up with the fingerspelling relatively quickly. We moved on to learning colours and a couple of other things. It was really cool. My favourite sign so far is the one for “philosophy.” You sort of wiggle your fingers by the side of your head.

I should, at some stage read that paper for maths on thursday. To be is to be the value of a variable. If you say so Mr. Boolos.

I’m working my way through Rome season 2. I’m enjoying it. Yes the acting is shaky, yes the dialogue is sometimes awful, yes it is quite often unnecessarily graphic in depicting sex or violence, but despite all that I think it’s fun, well made and it feels authentic. I do kind of like the characters and I do care what happens to them. That’s the important thing for me. That’s what I never had with Lost. I spent so much time going “WHAAT?” I never really warmed to any of the characters. I watched up to halfway through series two just because I want to know what was going to happen next and if it would explain anything. But I didn’t really care much about any of the characters. Locke was a hero though. I like him. I might look up Lost on wikipedia when they’ve finished it so that I know the story, but I don’t want to have to watch the dozens of hours of TV it would take to find out the whole story through watching it…

I fried up some chicken in madras curry paste and put in in a bun. It made a very tasty sandwich. Next time, though, I’m going to get some less spicy curry paste. The hot madras one is a bit too much.

I’m also rocking Gutsy Gibbon now. I don’t like the new default font. I should change it. The “!” is particularly crappy. I might change my general font to Gentium. If I can find out how…

It’s blog action day, apparently. Please please please recycle. Seriously. How much effort is it to go to the bottle bank every once in a while? I don’t have many bottles, but what I do do is recycle my newspapers. Don’t make unnecessary journeys and all that. Carpool. Come on people. You all know the little things you should be doing. Do them. Or Holland will disappear underwater.

I feel I’ve done my bit now. I should donate a day’s wage to Blog Action Day, but I don’t have a wage. If BAD wants a days worth of my debt they’re welcome to it.

So I went to the library today looking for a translation of a paper by Max Born which I needed to read for Physics. But of course, the only copy of the book was out. And in the physics library which I don’t know where it is… or… whose location I am ignorant of. Anyway, I left the library and popped into Waterstones, as you do. I sort of accidentally ended up buying three books. Oops.

In my defence, two of them make tangential allusions to Henry Oldenburg, so they might provide some background for my putative essay topic for the history course next term. And the third one is about the history of maths. (Nicolas Bourbaki, to be specific.) So they were all sort of a bit almost relevant to stuff. Kind of… I also got 10% off with my new shiny Waterstones card… So I really only bought 2.7 books.

OK. The Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox. That’s why I’m here. I need to vent a bit. What? Seriously. It’s bonkers. I know Bohr and friends went a bit crazy with the “indeterminacy is a feature of the world not a defect of the quantum theory” thing with no evidenc. But EPR seems to make similarly unfounded claims about the “reality” of physical quantities witout really explaining what a quantity is or what it means for it to be real. For example is “hage” (=height*age) a real quantity? I don’t know. Its all very silly. I hope Bohr’s reply, which I have yet to read, is a decent paper…

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I’ve noticed the italics in the “resources” post doesn’t really help to distinguish the free links. I will find some other way of indicating the free ones if I ever get round to revising it.

I’ve been interested in Henry Oldenburg since reading The Courtier and the Heretic which mentions his correspondence with Leibniz. He came up again in reference to this manuscript in New Scientist and that got me thinking that this Oldenburg guy seems pretty interesting. The only book available on amazon about him was priced at £80 so I decided to drop that line of approach. I haven’t been able to find much out about him otherwise…

I’m taking a course on the history of science next term and I might look more into it then. He is mentioned in a couple of places including a John Gribbin book and something by Kuhn. So “the influence of Henry Oldenburg on late 17th century science” might well be my essay topic for that course…

So according to this site my habit of not smoking 20 cigarettes a day since I was 16 has earned me about £8000. I sort of guessed the price of cigarettes and the exchange rate but that’s still not too shabby. Better than how much this site suggests I’ve earned. (but the site is 6 years old…)

The best thing about this way of earning money is that it is completely tax free! I wonder what other non-habts have earned me money…