Monthly Archives: January 2005

Grumpy old liberal

Posted on January 27, 2005 by acb

It’s disillusionment about human nature that makes me progressive. HEB, the original “grumpy old liberal,”:http://theenlightenmentproject.blogspot.com/2005/01/trust-academic-integrity-workshop-day.html puts this very well. bq. Currently the received wisdom seems to be that Liberals believe that people are inherently good so that Trust is warranted … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Blather | 2 Comments

Notes from the war with Eastasia

Posted on January 26, 2005 by acb

I try not to do agitprop too much. It almost all comes back to “I told you so” and the only people who listen are those who were also telling them so. But this is [“Rafe Coburn”:http://rc3.org/cgi-bin/less.pl?arg=6733], whom I have … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in War | 3 Comments

A vignette from the Palace

Posted on January 26, 2005 by acb

So my friend <mmmmph> rings up and says how nice it was to see me in London the other night, and how we must meet again at some party without the Archbishop of Canterbury hosting it. The conversations circles for … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Journalism | 4 Comments

A neat gimmick

Posted on January 23, 2005 by acb

“Yahoo Desktop search”:http://desktop.yahoo.com/ is elegant. It’s not perfect, but it’s very quick, and has important advantages over Google’s. It doesn’t rely on IE; it can be tweaked to search openoffice files and display their context in plain text — actually … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Software | 3 Comments

shame and guilt

Posted on January 22, 2005 by acb

I was thinking yesterday about the difference between shame and guilt: guilt, it seems, is where you have wronged someone. They feel you have behaved badly towards them and you agree. Restitution is possible, at least in theory. It can … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

A brilliant propagandist

Posted on January 20, 2005 by acb

Of all the people I have discovered from blog reading, the most journalistically talented is “Billmon,”:http://billmon.org/archives/001650.html whoever the hell he is. It’s not so much that he is a good writer: there are lots of people out there who can … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off on A brilliant propagandist

tsting 3.14

Posted on January 19, 2005 by acb

OK. A long day mostly wasted, but I should now have finally upgraded to MT 3.14. When Six Apart launched MT 3.0 there was a huge flurry of complaint that they had sold out, gone all corporate, etc. But my … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Housekeeping | 3 Comments

semantic styles

Posted on January 17, 2005 by acb

As usual when work presses, I bubble over with brilliant procrastination. Here’s a bit. Now that OOo has an invisible attribute for text, an MS Word style outliner is just a bunch of macros away. The only hard bit would … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in OOo | Comments Off on semantic styles

A choice of lectures

Posted on January 15, 2005 by acb

On Wedensday 22 February, the Darwin Centre at LSE finally restarts, with a lecture by Richard Dawkins. On the same night. Simon Conway Morris is “lecturing at St Mary le Bow “:http://www.stmarylebow.co.uk/news/boyle2005.htm on _his_ version of Darwinism. Which to attend? … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in God, Science without worms | 2 Comments

No more research needed

Posted on January 13, 2005 by acb

The _Times_ was delighted with “this”:http://women.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,2120-16149-1436161,00.html story. %(sane)”Believers go on rack to prove God relieves pain”% said its headline. %(sane)”People are to be tortured in laboratories at Oxford University in a United States-funded experiment to determine whether belief in God … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Science without worms | 1 Comment