Why? Why not?

I tell you what, it sucks being a guy and looking for share accommodation. At least 25% of the listings in the paper are always ‘Female only’ – I can see how that would be more comfortable for females, but man, it’s irritating.

By this you may have gathered that yes, I am looking for a new place to live, yes, I am looking to share, and no, I am not having much luck. Anyone wanting to move in the Randwick/Coogee area who doesn’t mind having PCs around, email me.

The New York Public Library’s Image Library has started to come online – the plan is to complete the scanning of their images by 2004. I particularly like the New York City Street views (1896) collection, but The Art of the Cigarette Cardis also quite cool.

No light posts here today, sorry.

My grandmother has Alzheimer’s. So this article has a large amount of topical relevance for me. (You need to supply some info to get to it – anything will do.) It’s a story by a Washington Post staff writer whose mother has the disease, and it’s heartbreaking. It made me think of the last time we went to see her, for a family Christmas dinner early in December last year. We all went down to Bega. The tmies we spent with her were the hardest. She kept asking “What are we doing?” and similar questions – she’s not up to not remembering who we are yet, though one can see she’s close. I think she knows very well what’s going on, and seeks refuge in routine. At least she lives in a nursing home now, where the staff can keep a bit of an eye on her.

Personally, I find the whole idea of Alzheimer’s utterly horrifying. To be slowly drowning in your own thoughts, to know in those brief moments of lucidity how much you are losing.

So, today, this one’s for my Gran. Here’s to her.

News from me:

I finally got a non-region-coded DVD player! Yay!

Had a good, if busy weekend – this is shaping up to be the case for the rest of January. Oh well, such is life.

Some Harry Potter news for those of you who don’t know already:

• The book is listed in a Barnes & Noble website in the US as coming out on the 31 July, Harry’s birthday. Not all that reliable, but certainly indicative that we can expect book five around the middle of this year.
• Apparently Gary Oldman is in talks to play Sirius Black for the Prisoner of Azkaban movie – this one also looks reasonably good. HSX have had him up as a member of the cast for most of this week now.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned edge.org here before, but it’s well worth a look. It’s a forum where various intellectuals discuss various things – a vague description I know, but one of its yearly highlights is the annual question. This year’s asked the respondents to imagine they were asked by Dubya to be the White House’s science advisor, and were asked: “What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?”

Great answers in particular from Alan Alda and Freeman Dyson, amongst others such as Steven Pinker, Marvin Minsky, Paul Davies – there’s a stack!

Alan Alda’s in particular was just excellent. Funny, but insightful as well.

Also particularly worth looking at are the “What now?” question from late 2001, especially Freeman Dyson’s piece on how terrorism is not a military problem – it’s a problem of peoples hearts and minds. Actually, here’s the last paragraph:

The only wisdom that I can extract from these memories is that the problem of terrorism is not a military problem. It is a problem of people’s hearts and minds. Attempts to solve it by military means will only make it worse. I don’t pretend to know how to solve it. A good way to start would be for our country to stop telling the rest of the world how to behave. We must learn to live with the world as it is, not as we want it to be. We must treat our enemies with respect, so that we do not appear to be trampling on their cultures and traditions. The ultimate goal must always be, not to destroy our enemies but to convert them into friends. And meanwhile, do whatever we can to defend ourselves without killing more thousands of innocent victims.

Indeed.

Happy New Year to everyone!

I had a great New Years – it was nice to see that the view I’ve been paying extra rent for all these months was worth it.

Well, I’ve started full-time employment today, and it also looks like I won’t be getting a PhD scholarship for this year. That works out OK – means I get a chance to live with some money for a while, buy some toys and so on before it’s back to being a poor student. So it looks like being a fun year!