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 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 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 →

Posted in Software | Comments Off on At very long last

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 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