I suppose this is what they call a blog. Except that blogs are supposed to be updated more often than this is.
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Well, that was pretty good but it's still too hot and humid. Can we have another thunderstorm, please?
Update 2006-07-27: it turns out that the answer was yes, but we still need more.
I took (and comfortably passed) my driving theory test today. Two minutes after I left the test centre I came within a second of walking straight in front of a bicycle. But never mind; at least I know I have good hazard perception skills.
Lewis Thomas's elegant and charming (perhaps a bit too self-consciously elegant and charming) The lives of a cell.
From one of the essays in Lewis Thomas's very nice book "The lives of a cell":
Even when technology succeeds in manufacturing a machine as big as Texas to do everything we recognize as human, it will still be, at best, a single individual. This amounts to nothing, practically speaking. To match what we can do, there would have to be 3 billion of them with more coming down the assembly line, and I doubt that anyone will put up the money, much less make room. And even so, they would all have to be wired together, intricately and delicately, as we are, communicating with each other, talking incessantly, listening. If they weren't at each other this way, all their waking hours, they wouldn't be anything like human, after all. I think we're safe, for a long time ahead.
Oooops.
Emma: ... and he said, And so we say, not goodbye but ...
um, what's the French for "auf wiedersehen"?.
Gareth R:
The French for "auf wiedersehen" is "hasta la vista".
I was thinking about what we should encourage Child to call the grandparents-to-be, and it suddenly occurred to me: if we were to revive the rather old-fashioned words "Grandpapa" and "Grandmama", we could tweak them to disambiguate between maternal and paternal grandparents: you have Grandmama and Grandmapa, and Grandpama and Grandpapa. And, even better, this gives a simple way of referring to people further up the tree: Grandmamapama, etc.
J L Mackie's The miracle of theism gives theism a pretty fair hearing but finds it seriously wanting. Mackie's book is showing its age a bit now, but is still well worth reading for anyone interested in the subject.
Still way behind with my original plan. Anyway, Feynman's letters are enjoyable reading, though there are no big surprises for those already reasonably familiar with the canon of Feynman hagiography.