Hi again all. Posts are a bit infrequent at the moment, but it’s been nuts the last little while.

Stuff I’m working on at the moment:
Leveraged v2.0, my new job,
CPS, my other job,
building a new desk, harder than you might think,
and writing, writing writing, about all manner of craziness.

Sometimes it’s weird to be thinking thoughts like ‘Language is not thought’, and there being a serious chance that I could defend that as a position in academia. I won’t say much more for the moment, but I’m really looking forward to a chance to write a real polemic. I’ll probably tear it up straight away, but there you go.

If I’m being incoherent, I apologise.

Thesis update: I’m writing the first paper for my subject this session: a textual comparison of Barry Barnes and Jerome Ravetz, and how the finitism and implicit knowledge theses of the first support the craft knowledge theses of the other and vice versa.

To do at some point: Finally post something to the ‘musings’ page. Maybe I’ll post my reading option paper, and the paper I did for the Cosmology distinction course I did in year 12.

Who knows.

Again, it’s been a while since my last post…

Sorry.

Currently my academic engagement is a textual concordance of books by Barry Barnes and Jerome Ravetz on the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK). The aim is to show that some of the material put forward by Barnes can be used to underlay the somewhat shaky foundations of Ravetz’s work. Gotta hand in a writeup of this by the end of October.

I’m also reading Personal Knowledge: Towards a post-critical Philosophy, by Michael Polanyi. Still only a little way into it, but it sounds *very* interesting. It seems that he has similar feelings to me with respect to the experience of ‘discovery’.

I feel that the experience of discovery, or to use a more ‘religious’ word, revelation, is fundamental to our existence as human beings. The feeling that mathematicians describe about particularly beautiful mathematics, or that a programmer will describe about a beautifully crafted piece of code, is, I think, the same feeling as that felt by those who have religious experiences of the first magnitude. For those of us who, on occasion also experiment with mind-altering substances, we all know that you can experience a similar experience with their help too.

I think that until people who study science realise that the awe that one feels in these situations is just as important for what they are studying as for anything else, the study of science, and indeed science itself will be all the poorer.

Had an interesting idea today. Put in its most pithy form, it goes: Philosophy of science is to sociology of science as physics is to engineering. PhilSci is concerned with ideal situations and states of affairs, while sociology of science is most concerned with what actually goes on. Perhaps one day we’ll even get to the stage where the two fields will speak to one another enough to make some use of each other.

Yay /.! Here’s a cool site that compares scenes in the Matrix with scenes from Ghost in the Shell, two of my favourite dystopian movies. It does point out some of the scenes I noticed, like the shooting-the-pillar scene, but also some I didn’t notice too.

Well, It’s been a while, and much craziness has occurred since I last posted. The Olympics have begun, rocked, and ended, Shay bought a DVD player, and I’ve got a new job! (Well, the job is really Leveraged Work v2.0, since I’ll be working for Adelaide bank at Leveraged equities doing customer support, getting paid niiiice money.)

A sobering article (again from a link at /.): a letter written by a guy from twenty years in the future to himself now. Possibly a little bit extreme, but reductio ad absurdum always has been and always will be a valid argument. Link here.

Just noted a cool post at /.: apparently GE is taking the names of early adopters for their new in-home fuel cell power generator. Nothing like generating power from propane… Anyway, check out the GE info page here.

OK. Anyone who comes here has to check out DHMO.org, an information site about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxygen.

Why?

It’s a rule.

Well, it’s been a busy weekend of Olympics shenanigans. I thought the opening ceremony was quite cool, especially the cauldron craziness. I had a grand old time chuckling while I imagined the cans talk…

Went to see Australia v Nigeria in the soccer, and that was certainly entertaining. The women’s hockey on Sunday night was also very cool.

Only one more thing left to go to: Judo on Thursday afternoon. Should be fun.

Check this out!

Slashdot | IP Tunneling Through Nameservers. Some crazy people have put together a protocol that allows the use of IP through a nameserver, allowing you to use Microsoft PPP connections for free! Free Internet for all! Hurrah!