Currently playing on iTunes is the new-ish Mull Historical Society album ‘This is Hope’. It’s every bit as baroque as ‘Loss’ and ‘Us’, every bit as giddily catchy in places and perversely dissonant in others. Colin Macintyre is one of those people who’s way too talented to ...
Once upon a time, and scarily not-so-long ago, I was lucky enough to work somewhere that also happened to be a big Internet hub in Britain, and which — because of that — was one of the first places to get the Mosaic web-browser. World-changing stuff, but it just seemed curious at first. Quirky and ...
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 ...