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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That was a bit surreal. Radio 3 just played a very nice setting of Ut queant laxis and didn't so much as mention Guido d'Arezzo or solfeggio.
(Apparently some cathedral somewhere has, or had, a musical clock that plays the hymn; Iain Burnside is celebrating The Day The Clocks Go Back with a set of time-related pieces. I don't think the version of the hymn they played has the same melody as the plainchant Guido used.)
Page changed: books/oosc.html
Correct an embarrassing slip that's gone unnoticed for ages: I wrote "covariant return types" when I meant "covariant parameter types".
New page: thesis.ps.gz
My PhD thesis, which personal/maths.html has long claimed is here but for some reason never was before.
Right, I'm fed up of Haloscan. I've put together my own commenting system. It's flaky and broken and ugly, and right now it probably doesn't even work at all, but it'll get better. And even if it doesn't it's better than Haloscan.
My choir had a rehearsal today at the chapel at Churchill College. I was pleased to find that there were trees nearby, so that I was able to lean my bike up against some oak.
The story of the founding of the chapel is interesting. Some of the fellows of Churchill were passionately opposed to there being a chapel at the college, and so the chapel is not in fact the chapel of Churchill College; it is owned and operated by a separate trust, and merely happens to be located on Churchill's premises.
This wasn't enough for Francis Crick, who resigned his fellowship in protest at the building of the chapel. He had an exchange of letters with Winston Churchill along the following lines:
Crick: I am resigning my fellowship in protest at the institution of a chapel at Churchill College.
Churchill: I'm sorry to hear that. I don't really understand the problem. The chapel will be an amenity for the benefit of those students who want to use it, and no one else will ever have to set foot in it.
Crick: Very well. I enclose a cheque for ten guineas towards the founding of the Churchill Brothel. I am sure you will agree that there can be no reasonable objection to this; it will be an amenity for the benefit of those students who want to use it, and no one else will ever have to set foot in it.
(Actually Crick, being an erudite chap, called it the College Hetairae. The "cheque for ten guineas" was a reference to the fact that when the colleged had decided some time before that it would not spend any of its own money on a chapel, some eminent chap -- I forget who -- had immediately sent them a cheque for the same sum towards a chapel-building fund.)
As I did for our last concert, I've put together some rambling notes on the texts for my choir's next concert, in the hope that they'll be useful to other choir members. I'm putting a link here in case anyone else is interested.
Update, 2007-10-11: actually, not everything there is in our next concert; in particular, we aren't doing the Bach until December.
Other random remarks:
Robin Hanson has enough faith in markets' ability to make accurate predictions that he thinks they could form the basis for an effective form of government; he also believes that by paying a few hundred dollars per year to Alcor (to freeze his brain when he dies) he's "buying a >5% change of living for thousands of (subjective) years". Unless he really thinks that a few hundred dollars per year is comparable in value to a 5% chance of living for thousands of years (which seems to me like it requires a very steep discount rate indeed), or that Alcor is run by extreme altruists, something's wrong with this picture.
I thought Jim Macdonald's detailed analysis of Betty and Barney Hill's story of alien abduction (from back in 1961), over on Making Light, was rather excellent.