Month: September 2004

Thanks to Rivets for these gems.

Strangers on my Flight (Needs sound on.)

The Official God FAQ

BBC Radio4 Today Programme this morning 16th Sept, discussing a book by ex-Aussie-PM speech-writer Don Watson and comic Adam Hill(?). About the “generalisation” of management speak actually reducing the number of core words, particularly adjectives, in the language. Many “portmanteau” words with many meanings from trivial to important. It’s partly political correctness, using euphemisms to avoid a taboo or unpleasant word, when everybody knows that’s what you actually mean from the context. Since we all know downsized means sacked, why don’t we actually say sacked ? This is the hypocrisy.

This was contrasted with “strine” creative Australian dialectic use of the language, and a suggstion that the stereotypical rising questioning intonation, or the habit of leaving sentences unfinished, was actually adding meaning to the original phrase.

Captsolo – a semantic web / social networks blog. Or is it just an aggregator ? Or is Planet RDF the aggregator ?

Blogged earlier on the “strong opinions, lightly held” theme, but didn’t recognise the Nabokov connection to his “Strong Opinions”. Jorn has a relevant Nabokov page [Robot Wisdom] Some excellent quotes in there.

“the greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery”

“I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more”

Read Owen Barfield’s “Poetic Diction” and “History in English Words” a year or so ago, and blogged several items. [here][here][here]. I was doing a search on Barfield today in preparation for reading more of his work and came across two interesting sites.

This review of Barfield’s “Saving the Appearances – A Study in Idolatry” on the somewhat odd doyletics site.

Liked this 1933 Hoffenstein quote, about the reductionist dangers of logical positivism, “cutting one’s own throat with Occam’s razor” as I’ve called it, the ruthlessness of the analytic “knife” to use Pirsig’s metaphor, or “scientific fundamentalism” as James Willis coined it.

Little by little we subtract
Faith and fallacy from fact
The illusory from the true
And starve upon the residue.

(See also Wordsworth’s “we murder to dissect”)

And this comprehensive Barfield site updated recently by David Lavery.

An old friend Denise contacted me via a hit on my music photo gallery pages about 70’s London pub rock band “Scarecrow“. Interesting enough in itself, to reminisce about old London pub stomping grounds, but spookily, now she runs an interesting business in psychological career counselling (what, who, me ?). And she blogs. Echoes of the Russo piece on recognising your life’s work in being good at what you’re really interested in as opposed to the day job. Many a true word.

Joi Ito reporting on being blocked from using Blogger whilst in China.

Strange, I have to say I’ve done so successfully several times in the past year, and blogged about it in the process [example-1][example-2]. Now the Beeb, that’s a different matter.

Suw Charman reviewing Shaun of the Dead.

Having just witnessed the gore in The Passion (post earlier today) and come away preferring Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill, I have to say you can’t have too much gore as long as it’s done with wit. Play adds value. Realism adds nothing.

(You’re not bringing that Krikkit bat to BlogWalk are you Suw ?)

Arrangement and Context. [Amy Gahran][via Julian Elve]

Information, facts, statements, ideas etc are social, nothing in themselves, rarely new, but brought to life by interaction and linking. The outcome is “emergent behaviour”, not causally predictable from the “specific pieces”.

At someone’s request – just switched my XML subscription button to Full RSS publishing (rather than just title), using the Blogger feature, no frills.