Repeating myself
The Rorty quote from yesterday is also quoted in my diary in November, right after I read Philosophy and Social Hope.
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The Rorty quote from yesterday is also quoted in my diary in November, right after I read Philosophy and Social Hope.
I won the previous round of Advocacy, which is a game run by Mark-Jason Dominus (whose web page is really cool).
It's a fun game. Advocacy exists in part to ridicule the advocacy that goes on in the real world all the time, the ability to justify anything, no matter how absurd, without regard to its real merits or drawbacks. Mr. Dominus is the author of a piece called "Why I Hate Advocacy" which attacks that kind of advocacy.
As the winner of a round of Advocacy, I got to lead the new round. So far, there have been fairly few entries. This might mean that people are on vacation, or that my proposal was uncreative or uninspiring, or that there are too few people actively involved in the game. I can do something about the last possibility: if the idea of Advocacy (kind of like Fictionary with justifications for an idea, but all the explanations are spurious) appeals to you, you can join in by subscribing to the mailing list. Some rounds can be extremely amusing.
Mark-Jason Dominus's Internet domain is plover.com; this makes me wish that, when you visited the home page, a hollow voice would say "plover".
slashdot had a piece on a solar thermal power plant to be built in Australia and be the world's largest-ever structure (until and unless they construct one of those orbital towers we hear so much about). It's short on technical details, but sounds inspiring enough to me. We need projects like this to happen, and we need to push the edges of what's possible here?
Willey Ley, calling Willey Ley, where are you, Willey Ley?
Engineering is romantic (and you don't have to an Ayn Rand fan to see that) and engineering is glorious!
Nick has been hard at work on the GAR Archive Resource (earlier tentatively called the GNU Anarchy Resource), and it's a fine piece of work which has made building packages for the BBC extremely easy and straightforward. It's kind of like the BSD ports system implemented in GNU Make. Woohoo!
Don Marti invented a clever thing called message/x-mail-me-this which allows you to get messages from mailing list web archives re-sent to you in a convenient way. If you use Unix, it's totally straightforward to set up practically any web browser to support it. I got it working in under a minute today, and it worked perfectly!
I can only say, as Leonard Richardson said in March,
I salute you, Pete Peterson, for making us laugh about love... again.
or, to use a different salutation from a little longer ago,
"Grates," inquit, "tibi ago, summe Sol, vobisque, reliqui Caelites..."
Contact: Seth David Schoen