An Unusual Memorial to a Great Scientist.

Last month, while visiting Grantham for the first time for more than forty years, I noticed it now has an Isaac Newton Shopping Centre.

Divine Responsibility

There’s one aspect of the priestly child abuse scandal that, to my knowledge, has never been discussed.

To what extent is God responsible?

I ought to rephrase that. I, and most of my friends, think there is no God, so what I really mean is:

If there were a God, how far would he be responsible?

Theologians say that evil is the fault of sinful humans, acting in spite of God, and anyway he’s so powerful that if he intervened to prevent evil it would reduce us all to the status of robots so we shouldn’t have the opportunity for character building by using our free will to resist temptation.

That may have a little superficial plausibility (but see the discussion in chapter 7 of my Philosophy notes) However at best the first argument only precludes our blaming God for everything on the grounds that he supposedly created the world; the second argument excuses him only from intervening ostentatiously at maximum power, denouncing sin in a voice of thunder and turning the unrighteous into pillars of salt. He could still have anonymously emailed a few incriminating digital photographs to police or journalists without drawing attention to his omnipotence.

The abusive priests got away with it for so long because they were perceived to be God’s agents. A Human employer aware that employees were using their jobs as a cloak for criminality would be expected to intervene. Why should God try to wriggle out of his responsibilities by hiding behind a metaphysical quibble?

Of course, if there were a God he wouldn’t, so there isn’t.

My Virtual Christmas Card

I decided to make my own Christmas card this year. I then decided to go one step further and get people to read it on my website, with the option of printing a copy if they wish.

Follow the links on my website.

'Last Best Chance'

I recently heard that phrase in a broadcast comment by the Leader of the Opposition.

I don't remember what he was talking about; my horror at his choice of words distracted me from his subject matter.

Did he mean 'this is the best chance, and it's also the last' or 'this is the best of the remaining chances'. I suspect he didn't mean anything so definite, but felt rather than thought that two superlatives were better than one.

I fear that others will now adopt the phrase - verbal ineptitude tends to be catching.

Alistair Cook once attributed the word 'normalcy' to President Harding's ignorance of the word 'normality', and we still hear that word from time to time.

Quadaric Equations and the Media

Several times in recent weeks I've heard people on the television or wireless cite quadratic equations as examples of recondite Mathematics.

I can still remember being taught to solve quadratic equations by completing the square. I was 12 at the time, and remember being most impressed by the ingenuity of the method. Ever since I've considered quadratic equations perfectly straightforward.

There are many intriguing mysteries in Mathematics, but quadratics are not  among them.

Visitors to this Blog

By far the most popular entries in this blog are the two or three describing my misadventures with cable modem and broadband Internet access; more than half the last month’s visitors  looked at at least one of those, even though all were posted more than six months ago.
The most surprising thing about it is that most of those visits result from the use of search engines. Information must be very scarce if my inexpert chatter appears high enough in search results for people to notice it.

‘Differently Abled’

That phrase suggests to me someone in whom one of the usual faculties  is replaced by an unusual one. It would apply to someone who is blind, but has the echolocation of a bat, to someone deaf who uses telepathy instead of hearing, or to someone with no legs who has wings instead.

So far as I know, no one is differently abled in that sense; the phase is just one of the many dreary euphemisms used by sentimental people pretending that the world is a fluffy cuddly place.

Riparian Parameters

At least twice today the BBC news programmes have included an eyewitness account of the flooding in Cumbria containing the words:

"The river is back within its normal parameters"

At last we have a clue to the journalistic meaning of "parameter" ; it means "river bed"

The Philosophy of Sport in Gloucestershire.

On this morning's Radio 4, a lady was introduced as Professor of the Philosophy of Sport in the University of Gloucestershire.

I'm not sure what is oddest: that there should be such an institution, or that there should be a professorship in such a strange subject.

'They gave their lives'

I am infuriated by the sentimental intellectual dishonesty of such language.

It conjures up a picture of someone opening a little door in the chest, and inviting some governmebnt offical to remove the heart and use if for the Public Good.

In reality those killed in war did all they could to stay alive, and many of them died, not only reluctantly, but extremely painfully. In the so called 'World Wars' many who died were conscripts, forced to fight. In the first world war many soldiers for sent on suicidal charges into machine gun fire, urged on at pistol point by officers prepared to shoot any who appeared reluctant.

A peaceful evening

I'm relieved to have had no 'trick or treat' visitors tonight.

Perhaps the habit is dying out in England? I hope so; I've never liked it. A putative joke with a hint of menace is one of the tricks of the bully.

I wonder if one can buy trick sweets? Pepper filled chocoloate, or chilli fudge would be useful. Chinese shops used sometimes to sell tamarind candy, a soft sqishy sugar coated confection containing a geat deal of chilli. That was very useful one year when the first of April  fell in College term time.

All I had this year was a little dish of innocuous sweets. I planned to leer at uninvited vistors and reply to their 'Trick or Treat?' with 'That all depends on you. Can you tell which of these are the tricks, and which are treats?'

It would have been only a feeble jest; I'm glad it wasn't called for.

The Interpretation of Dreams

For a moment I thought I was remembering something that had happened,

Junior cat had leapt through the air, leaving behind her a little cloud of burning gas, from the conflagration of which I inferred that she had farted in mid flight, and her effluvia had been ignited by a candle flame, though it was puzzling that there was no candle or equivalent to be seen.

Then I realised that the event had no definite location, and no antecedents or consequences, and I concluded that I must have dreamt it, perhaps last night, or perhaps the night before last.

Some people claim to interpret dreams. I wonder what they would make of it.