Monthly Archives: April 2003

A tax on wankers

Posted on April 30, 2003 by acb

I didn’t make this up. I really didn’t. But if you want an instance of the utter self-deluding lunacy of the Kansas legislature, “this”:http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/5719022.htm beats creationism into a cocked hat. The state is broke, of course, and the Democrats had … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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strange noises

Posted on April 29, 2003 by acb

It’s panic backup time. There are strange noises coming from the large box on my desk: I imagine a wombat with metallic whiskers sniffing and rustling in the drive cage. If I disappear more than usually, that’s going to be … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Is this mike live?

Posted on April 28, 2003 by acb

Rosie asked me on the train back from Marburg, apropos nothing in particular,how much a piece of neutron star the size of a grain of sand would weigh. Does anyone know? Rupert? Continue reading →

Posted in Blather | 11 Comments

At very long last

Posted on April 28, 2003 by acb

The latest “milestone release”:http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/644/ of OpenOffice 1.1 beta has actually got the regex search working (and it has fixed all the annoying bugs I had found in the beta 1 release, which broke the word count and all sorts of … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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theological distinction

Posted on April 28, 2003 by acb

I have known for years of the distinction between the God of the philsophers and the God of the believers, but only in Marburg did I manage to express it clearly: The god of the believers _couldn’t_ exist, whereas the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Away

Posted on April 21, 2003 by acb

I’m gong to Marburg tomorrow, for the rest of the week. I might have posted from there, but I plugged the thinkpad into the Church House switchboard a month or so back, and the inbuilt modem fried instantaneously and so … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Religion Explained

Posted on April 21, 2003 by acb

I have been too busy this weekend to keep this blog up to date, and one of the things that have been keeping me that way is Pascal Boyer’s book _Religion Explained._ I really think he’s succeeded. Consciousness may yet … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in God | 2 Comments

“libertarian trotskyist”

Posted on April 17, 2003 by acb

sounds to me like a contradiction that can only be resolved in science fiction: that’s to say, I find great temperamental similarities between programmatic technolibertarians and 60s trots, so I dislike both. Both of them want a universe ruled by … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Journalism | 1 Comment

What can we learn from the worm

Posted on April 16, 2003 by acb

I have just been filling out an incredibly long and detailed author questionnaire for Columbia University Press. One test was to provide half a dozen questions for journalists to ask who are too -lazy- busy to read the book. I … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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research tool

Posted on April 16, 2003 by acb

It’s a hard life being an “Opera”:http://www.opera.com/windows/changelogs/710/?session=77c61a2a7c9ddf2c8f509bb18477d3da bigot. Even Mozilla users sneer at you; I’m not sure why, since I am funding an independent and genuinely competitive company, and they are sponging off AOL Time Warner. Perhaps they can afford … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Software | 1 Comment