Years ago (early eighties) I was part of a discussion about building God’s Kingdom today. There were lots of undergraduates enthusing about how we could all live in communes and share everything equally. I interrupted their warm and pious fantasies to ask “Who will shovel the shit?” After a shocked silence – We’re in a […]
I’ve set up a little routine for getting my slow, authorial brain started in the mornings. I have a file listing the 6,000 most frequently used words in modern English. I draw a random sample of 20 from the list and then force myself to write a short story using all those 20 words, in […]
There is a strange attractor in Wikipedia: if you follow the first link on a page, and then go to the first link on that page, and so on … you will nearly always end up at the page for Philosophy. There’s an article about it on the New Scientist site: Feedback: Wikipedia’s strange attractor – […]
I’ve had a cold for the past few days. Nothing serious, but it affects my ability to think. The funny thing is that my loss of brainpower is very gradual. Over a period of three or four days my (admittedly tiny) intellect slowly leaks away. Then it stays away for about five days (the cold […]
Years ago I worked in an Astronomy department. One of the students there was a man with cerebral palsy. He was not seriously disabled, but he had some problems with controlling his limbs, especially if he was excited or thinking very hard. Once, when talking to a distinguished visitor, he became so involved in […]