i dreamed of Francis Crick

Posted on June 20, 2002 by andrewb

This morning, I awoke at six, from a dream in which Francis Crick was talking to me about worms. The odd thing was that I was interviewing him in bed. He wasn’t in bed: he was sitting on the next bed in the room, dressed in dark clothes, and looking like a dolicephalic Berthold Brecht.

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she jumped

Posted on June 20, 2002 by andrewb

Times Online

“THE Church of England has chosen the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Rowan Williams, to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.” — well, that’s what the story says.

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Missionary activity

Posted on June 19, 2002 by andrewb

There was a perfect fundie story in today’s Guardian, at the end of the World cup section. Not online, so I shall type in the par I loved.

It came from an interview with the 22 missionaries of the Northwest Bible Tabernacle Church, from Dallas, Texas: “We like to greet people as they come to the gound and talk to them. We also have a lot of free gifts to give away, including some videos and a booklet. The Ultimate Goal . The booklet contains quotations from the Bible, and also testimonies about Christ from some of the world’s greatest soccer players, including Brazilian defender Lucio and Liberian goalkeeper Louis Crayton.”

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Narrow road to the deep shit

Posted on June 19, 2002 by andrewb

From Cringely

Now Dash-O no

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taking flight

Posted on June 17, 2002 by andrewb

We travelled yesterday to the Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh, to look at some of the work being done by Helen Gilbart, a painter currently working in the Geological museum in Cambridge.

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a social disease

Posted on June 15, 2002 by andrewb

someone has put one of my addresses in the “from” of a spam. The first I knew about it ws this morning, when there were ten bounce messages in my own incoming spam folder; apparently I have been selling life insurance all night to people at dial.pipex.com addresses who don’t exist.

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news on the brink

Posted on June 14, 2002 by andrewb

A friend of mine rang up about half an hour ago, from one of the papers. They had had a tip — well, a suggestive silence — from a member of the Crown Appointments Commission, the committee that shortlists the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

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worms engender wit

Posted on June 14, 2002 by andrewb

They are the most marvellous creatures. They can even make top ten jokes funny. The reason I had been going to the Ward lab was that it has quicktime of worm sperm so repulsive I needed to footnote the URL in my book.

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rowan williams

Posted on June 14, 2002 by andrewb

Yet another article praising Rowan Williams in this morning’s Times. He is the outstanding candidate to become Archbishop of Canterbury. No journalist has seriously argued otherwise, no matter what bias they started with. The more closely he has been examined, the better his chances have become.

This is clear, I think, to everyone except professional Christians. Williams stands for everything the present Archbishop, Dr George Carey, has been trying with great success to eliminate from the Church of England. Yet if anyone else gets the job, he will be crippled from the start by the perception among broadsheet newspaper readers — who are the core constituency of the C of E — that he is a second-rater forced on the church by lobby groups.

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counting words

Posted on June 13, 2002 by andrewb

Word processors are written by programmers but used by writers. There are two things that show this in the case of OO. It has a command to select words by the line — which is a syntactic unit in programming and some forms of poetry. but completely arbitrary in prose — but no command to select by paragraph, which is a meaningful unit of prose. And it has its word count buried.

So when I started playing with it, I first made a document field that counted the number of words. This was unsatisfactory, as it would scroll off screen. Then I discovered how to write a simple dialogue box that showed a word count.

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