Today was running the Pink dolphins use sticks and stones to impress the ladies story just as I was drifting up towards conscience this morning. My first thought was that it was all part of some weird dream. I mean, pink dolphins? What was I drinking last night?
Once I was sure I was really sure that I was hearing what I was hearing, I got all confused about the date. Tuesday already? Where did the weekend go?
Please, Today, don't do that to me again.
Ullapool? Funny - I thought it would have been Birmingham. That's the biggest hole I know of...
Camille in London - I do not want to miss this. Camille is fabulous.
I think I'm in love:
Anyone else up for it?
Update: Ooooh! New album on Monday!
Update: Sadly, her new website is dreadful. Can't make head nor tail of it.
This old post of mine has an old-style Guardian URL in one of its comments. Click on it, and you'll end up at a new style URL.
Not much to see, I'll admit, but I'm pleased - Matt and I made that happen.
Where's your "I've got a new Mac, and it's lovely" post, Matt?
Miss Bimbo is indeed a dreadful thing - "yea lol our choice 2 go on this site they should leave it alone hehe". That the land of Shakespeare and the King James bible should sink so low...
Still, I'm not too worried. My eldest spent most of the weekend buried in Wesnoth.
Automated book recommendation.
Can it recommend a book that's not at all like The Da Vinci Code?
BTW, have you spotted The Shakespeare Secret? How blatantly fucking cynical can you get?
Via rebecca's pocket.
The Death of the Relational Database (via Media Influencer).
Sigh. I've been hearing about the death of the RDBMS for nearly twenty years. And the recurring problem with this thesis is not that the RDBMS is perfect, but that everything else is worse. Until someone comes up with an idea for a persistance mechanism that's better then an RDBMS across large parts of the problem space that the RDBMS solves, this is just idle hand-waving.
"There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone." - Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++.
This effect had now moved on to the electric kettle. The new model in the office has multiple reservoirs so that you can fill it yet boil only enough water for one cup. Great idea. Trouble is, we had to have a session during our morning stand-up to demonstrate its use.
Wow - The Guardian is having a bit of an anti-atheist moment.
In The Atheist Delusion (see Godless evangelicals for a précis with comments enabled), John Grey says For Dawkins and Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Martin Amis, Michel Onfray, Philip Pullman and others, religion in general is a poison that has fuelled violence and oppression throughout history, right up to the present day and These writers come from a generation schooled to think of religion as a throwback to an earlier stage of human development, which is bound to dwindle away as knowledge continues to increase. Now I think that they are certainly saying the former - and I agree with them. But I don't think that they all think that religion is bound to die out, only that it would be better it it did. Certainly there seems little evidence that the majority of people are becoming more rational, and if some of that irrationality is siphoned off into fringe beliefs like homeopathy and UFO belief, I think that's always going to be a limited group.
Yet Dawkins seems convinced that if it were not inculcated in schools and families, religion would die out. This is a view that has more in common with a certain type of fundamentalist theology than with Darwinian theory. So, Dawkins is a one dimensional character, is he? He's not allowed to hold opinions not directly related to Darwinian theory?
The idea of free will that informs liberal notions of personal autonomy is biblical in origin (think of the Genesis story). The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith, and like most varieties of atheism today, Pullman's is a derivative of Christianity. I don't think anyone's saying that nothing that's ever come out of any religion was good. For example, Christianity's inclusivity was a major step forward for its time, with no built-in outgroup to despise. Christians have had to invent their own outgroups - mainly other Christians, for some reason that I'll never understand. Splitters!
Dawkins's "memetic theory of religion" is a classic example of the nonsense that is spawned when Darwinian thinking is applied outside its proper sphere. Unfortunately, the theory of memes is science only in the sense that Intelligent Design is science. Strictly speaking, it is not even a theory. This isn't entirely unfair, in so far as I've not heard of any serious work to verify memetic theory. But it seems quite falsifiable to me, in principle, so there's a least the germ of a theory there.
Wow - less than halfway through. More later. But once again, all this misses the crucial, central part of Dawkins' thesis, without which all the rest is minor, trivia: Religion, it's all just not true.
Tourettes Machine. Not safe for work - but who wants to play safe?
Do you lock your machine when you go to lunch? Mwahahahahaha!
I've always said, the Web is the sum of all human knowledge plus porn.
Via El P, a classy piece of journalism.
The comments are great - I've not seen so many euphemisms in one place since the Profanisaurus.
He dumps her on Wikipedia, then she sells his stuff on eBay. Magic.
And there was me that thinking that the way to dump someone these days was to mark yourself as single on Facebook. Clearly I'm not as Web 2.0 as I thought I was.