Sound and Fury

The English language is full of stupid phrases that annoy me. For example “Subject to availability.” What does that mean? How could anything fail to be subject to availability? Surely this isn’t the kind of caveat that is really necessary.

Another one is “due to planned maintenance works.” Why the hell should I care whether the works are planned or not? If I wasn’t aware of them and they disrupt my journey, I take absolutely no consolation from the fact that the works were planned. I recently saw a sign saying “Changing room closed on tuesday due to emergency maintenance works.” Again, I don’t care how much planning is behind the current or near-future inconvenience.

“If you’d just like to…” This annoys me too. “If you’d just like to take a seat here…” or “If you’d just like to put your card there…” First of all, it’s not a proper sentence. And secondly, it is useless verbiage. It’s simply a way for someone to tell you to do something while still sounding polite. I can imagine a mugger going “If you’d just like to hand over your wallet and phone, then I won’t kill you.” Perhaps you wouldn’t feel quite as “mugged” because of that supercillious politeness. And in fact, the mugger at least finished the damn sentence properly!

I bought some juggling balls online on Tuesday. They arrived today in the most unnecessarily oversized bag I’ve ever seen. They were in this paper bag like thing which could have held a package three or four times bigger at least. It was weird. Now, I could have chosen to spend an extra £4 for next day delivery. That would have meant that my order would have arrived a whole day earlier. I can’t imagine being in a situation where I am in such desperate need for juggling balls that I pay for that kind of extra. If I really really desperately needed to juggle as soon as possible, I’d buy some oranges and juggle with them. It would probably cost me less that the extra postage would.

Also, I would really like to juggle with raw eggs. If only I could find some excuse to do so…

Given a circle, what’s the best way to find it’s centre? Is it true that the midpoint of every chord of a circle goes through the centre of that circle? How would you prove that? I’m sure it would only take a minute to show if I could be bothered (and if it is true, obviously).

I’m glad to see that none of the restrictive amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill got through the free votes over the past few days.

I just found a great way to end my essay on Galileo. It’s a shame I still need to write another 1000 words, because coming up with such a great conclusion makes me feel I’ve finished. I really am running low on stuff to say now. Essay fatigue has really set in.

Also I am physically exhausted because I went to the gym yesterday and foolishly agreed to go through my friend’s gym routine. It was a bit much for me. However, it was good to do some exercise.

8 days to go until essay deadline frees me from this niggling feeling I should be working harder. At least for a while. Until I begin to feel I should start working on my dissertation.

There are some instantly recognisable pictures. Images so famous you’ve probably seen them a thousand times. That picture of Einstein with his tongue out. Marylin Monroe on the air vent. Audrey Hepburn with the cigarette holder. I wonder how widely recognised these pictures are. I’d be interested to see what other pictures people think are in this category. It’s not simply that the person in the picture is recognisable. There is something about the particular shot too. This is all a bit incoherent. Let’s try the ostensive definition method. Pictures like these:

These are all black and white. And all the first GIS result for the surname of their subjects. I’m sure there are other equally well recognised pictures. But I can’t think of any others at the moment. Any suggestions?

Instead of doing what I am supposed to be doing today (reading about Galileo’s philosophy of science) I am reading about Francis Bacon on wikipedia. In my defense, I was originally looking up Bacon to see if his Novum Organum might have influenced GG at all. But I got sidetracked reading about all the interesting things Bacon might have been- writer of Shakespeare’s plays (unlikely), Elizabeth I’s son (likewise), homosexual (quite possibly), Rosicrucian, Freemason…

And in the style of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, we can extrapolate facts from these wild musings. Bacon was in fact Shakespeare’s lover. Or possibly Christopher Marlowe’s? And between the three of them, like gay musketeers they penned the plays with the patronage of King James I as D’Artagnon (also gay). And they were all high-ranking Knights Templar (also speculated to have performed homosexual orgies).

Fact.

This stuff is easy. But I should probably get back to reading about Galileo. Sigh.

(Since starting this History of Science course, my Scientists and Philosophers Dates spreadsheet has nearly doubled in size since last time I added stuff to the google one…)

I have complained about the misuse of mathematical language before. Philosophy of biology is a serial offender here. But I recently came across a really good use of maths concepts to convey an idea. In John Dupre’s paper Natural kinds and biological taxa he explains the apparent reasonableness of thinking of species as natural kinds as follows:

If it were possible to map individual organisms on a multidimensional quality space, we would find numerous clusters or bumps. In some parts of biology these clusters will be almost discrete

Now there is obviously no suggestion we do this. But it is a really neat way to get across the idea that members of a species really do have a lot in common, and it is fair enough to imagine species as being natural kinds.

Speaking of maths concepts in biology, I spent a while this afternoon thinking about the “sameness relations” Dupre uses to build classifications of animals. I struck upon the cool fact that if you demand that your relations be equivalence relations, then the classification will automatically have lots of nice kinds of consistency, because equivalence classes will always partition the space! I thought that was pretty cool.

Also today we were talking about the difference between Whitehead’s process philosophy and a more conventional ontology taking onbjects to be primitives. I started thinking of it in terms of category theory. So processes are arrows (maps morphisms whatever you want to call them.) and objects are objects. Now, I believe there is an alternative way of starting category theory which takes only the arrows as primitives, and defines objects in terms of special arrows: the identity maps. I then started thinking about taking just objects as primitives and defining arrows as ordered pairs of objects. (I don’t know if this is really legitimate…) So then I started thinking that maybe the two kinds of ontology weren’t really that different in that what you take to be basic doesn’t really matter. But maybe I was missing the point of the debate because category theory was clogging up my brain.

I also started thinking about logic and how some of the operators are interdefinable. So if you have NOT and then one of AND, OR and CONDITIONAL (and possibly BICONDITIONAL?), then you can define all the operators in terms of that. So normally you’d just take all of the symbols on board at the start. Because it doesn’t really make a difference in the end.

So I suppose my mind works in quite a mathematical/logical way. Does that make it strange that I dislike the misuse of maths language? Or does that make it more understandable? I don’t really know.

p.s. Dupre should have an accent and I could put in the logical symbols instead of AND etc. But I’m feeling lazy. Sue me.

Yesterday’s xkcd got me thinking. Cross a spoon with a fork, you get a spork. xkcd takes that further. Now, what would happen if you crossed a spork with a spork? Would you get another spork? Or would you get back a fork or a spoon? 25% spoons, 25% forks and 50% sporks? or maybe 25% sporks, 25% foons?

Now, if you cross a knife with a fork, you get a cake fork. Next step? Quite clearly the cake spork!

Believe it or not, there were so many awesome Belgians I’ve split this into two separate lists: fictional Belgians and real Belgians.

My favourite fictional Belgians

1. Tintin
2. Hercule Poirot
3. Maigret
4. Papa Smurf
5. Dr. Evil (Apparently, yes. He is Belgian…)

My favourite non-fictional Belgians

1. Rene Magritte
2. Manneken Pis
3. Adolphe Saxe
4. Georges Remi (Herge)
5. Georges Simenon

If you object to there being to Georgeses on the list, or if you don’t think Manneken Pis, a statue, should have been allowed to compete, then have that one struck off and give the fifth place to Jaqcues Tits, the man behind the Tits group; a finite simple group of order roughly 18 million. That’s nearly two elements for every person in Sweden!

Holy crap. For a country of only 9 million and some people, Sweden certainly punches above its weight.

Some Swedish companies you may have heard of: AstraZeneca, Ericsson, Electrolux, H&M, IKEA, Saab, Securitas, SAS group, Volvo…

And some notable people: Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, Ingmar Bergman, Carolus Linnaeus, Alfred Nobel, Bjorn Borg, Sven Goran-Eriksson…

Sweden also has quite a collection of musical acts that you will have heard of. (if not actually that many you might like): Ace of Base, The Cardigans, Europe, Opeth, The Hives, The Knife, Yngwie Malmsteen… Oh and ABBA. Obviously.

Not bad eh?

Coming soon: Interesting people that have come from Belgium. (Or have I already posted that list?)

Behold the duck
It does not cluck
A cluck it lacks
It quacks

-Ogden Nash

I have spent much of today failing to write anything useful about Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina so I thought I’d write something here, just to reassure myself I am still capable of stringing the odd sentence together.

I bought a new razor recently, because I couldn’t find new blades for my old one. I succumbed to the mighty advertising clout of Gillette and bought a FUSION! razor. If you live under a rock, I’ll remind you that the FUSION! line of razors is advertised by Thierry Henry, Roger Federer and Tiger Woods. I don’t know which sportsman’s total lack of personality drew me to their product. All I know is that I now command the comfort of five blades AND the precision of one. Fear me. For I have experienced the miracle of FUSION!

Adam and Joe were talking about new holidays today on their BBC 6music radio show thinger. It was rather good and stuff. I’ll link to the podcast when it shows up (around 6 tomorrow, apparently). I didn’t text in any of the genius ideas I have had in the past. But theirs were specifically new days for sending cards on. Apparently they got the idea off the Apprentice. But I haven’t seen any of it this year. Or any year, for that matter.

I watched Any Given Sunday yesterday, because I’d picked it up at Borders for £2.99. Bargain! Anyway. Yes it was worth every penny of my three pounds. I also picked up The Talented Mr Ripley, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and… some other film. All going for a song. Marvelous.