One of the most useful ideas which spins off philosopher and cognitive scientist Margaret Boden’s categorisation of human creativity into the ‘P-creative’ and the ‘H-creative’, is that it asks us to value the P-creative far more than we might otherwise. P-creativity (the ‘P’ stands ...
Okay, I feel rambly today. We’ll start one place and end up somewhere else. This one isn’t going to explode the Death Star, so much as take a few pot-shots at Mos Eisley, then scoot around aimlessly on Hoth, before spending a few centuries stuck in a swamp on Dagobah, and finally shooting at the ...
It’s true I tell you. A. and I spent a wonderfully peaceful and bucolic afternoon last Sunday at the LA Open Cricket Tournament, organised by the Southern California Cricket Association at Woodley Park in Van Nuys. It was the last day of the three-day event, involving twelve teams from as far away as Chicago and ...
Paul Grice’s analysis of the pragmatics of conversation, which concludes that conversation is a cooperative act which, if it’s to be effective, should follow certain maxims, defines informal protocols for getting the message across effectively. It applies to both speaker and listener. To the speaker it says: ...
Sometimes I feel like I’m walking in a wide corridor, filled with other people, except they’re all heading in the other direction, and I can’t figure out why. Example: this slashdotted piece on DrunkenBlog, which touches on various Digital Rights Management issues, but especially the idea of the ...
I read a piece a while ago, but can’t remember where (hey, I’m super-informative, aren’t I?), which bemoaned the fact that most web-browser users actually use them in ways that the designers scarcely intended, and also make use of very very few of the features that would help them to get results that are ...
It’s only a couple of years since Attack of the Clones pushed digital film projection into the mainstream, but I don’t think it’ll be too much longer before it starts to take over, and it can’t come too fast for me. A. and I have been used recently to seeing films at The Arclight in ...
Don’t tell me that science can’t be moving, and beautiful. Don’t tell me that truly understanding something is any less inspiring than marvelling ignorantly at its prettiness, never mind any less than the wishful myths that humans use as security blankets against the darkness of not knowing. Francis Crick ...
One day in French class at school, I was given a sentence to translate that entirely baffled me. Unlike one of my Latin teachers, who would choose translators pseudo-randomly, which allowed him the freedom to give me the thorniest sentence in the piece (which he typically did, the bastard), the French teacher would simply ...
To Beverly Hills, early yesterday morning, in my informal capacity of IT-guy to my Famous Philosopher Friend. He’d called me a couple of days before to say that he was having problems with a new printer he’d just got, and now neither printer nor computer (an Apple G4 Cube) was working properly. It’s not ...