Timewasting notes

• A new hazard of technology: Roz Kaveney complains that every time she asks in a department store for a black beret, she is sent to the electronics department.
• A nice touch from Gideon Rachman’s FT blog:

As we were assembling, Presidents Bush and Putin were meeting not too far away in Sochi in Russia. Their squabble about American plans for a missile defence system in Central Europe continues. President Bush is determined to press ahead. But not all of his compatriots are convinced. One conference participant memorably described the scheme as “a system that won’t work, against a threat that doesn’t exist, paid for with money that we don’t have.” Sounds like quite a good epitaph for the entire Bush administration to me.

• Someone on one of the pharyngular blogs comments that the superiority of science is prroved by the fact that all religions are different, because everyone’s imagination is different, whereas all science is convergent because the facts are the same everywhere you go. Up to a point, I suppose, but so what? Is he proposing to live without imagination? Science is about the search for those facts which are the same everywhere you go. Does that mean these are the only facts in the world, or the only ones we should care about, or the only ones we should enquire into? More deeply, can there be non-propositional knowledge?
• I haven’t actually gone fishing yet this year, but I have loaded the car boot with everything I might need, and it would seem that this year I need half a dozen rods which looks tremendously extravagant, given that three of them are the same length (nine foot) and there are two in every line weight between four and six. But they don’t represent nearly the extravagance I might, in some moods, reproach myself with. The oldest two were anyway presents for my wife, twenty years ago; each of the others does something unique, even if that is only “fits into carry on luggage”. No — what I should be feeling guilty about is the extreme improbability of arranging the year so that I have a use for all of them. I’m going to try to get a fortnight in Sorsele this summer, or possibly Ammarnäs, but I doubt very much I’ll have time to drive there: it’s three days for lunatics and four if I only drive eight hours at a stretch.