Monday, December 07, 2009
Eris Gets Her Due!
An Android-based phone named after Eris! How amazingly cool is this?!? The Droid Eris, makes me wish I was a Verizon customer...
Thursday, December 03, 2009
All This For One Little Rhyme?
Lemon Demon has a delightful little tune about the infamous Spring Heeled Jack (lyrics). I make this post only to document my quoting of this line:
And people in the area reek of mass hysteria
For some reason, this line has been making a lazy circuit in my head (completing a lap once every two and a half hours, which, perhaps, sheds light on the size of my head...)
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Currently Reading
+ Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Godel (by John W. Dawson)
+ Against the Day (by Thomas Pynchon)
+ If Einstein Had Been a Surfer (by Peter Kreeft)
Just started Logical Dilemmas. Kurt Godel was the greatest logician of the 20th century. John W. Dawson is one of the scholars responsible for the publication of Godel's Collected Works and is therefore well-qualified to write a biography and commentary on Godel. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems were the subject of my master's project in theology (basically a warning about how not to apply them to philosophical and theological topics).
Against the Day is long, to the tune of over a thousand pages. Mostly, my fiction reading these days is a bit shy of that (by some 700 plus pages). So far, the story is interesting, like most of Pynchon's work, and is filled with a cast of intriguing characters, crazy adventures, and deep wit. I know this will take me a while to finish, but so far, I am glad to be spending time in the company of the Chums of Chance. Hopefully, this will warm me up for the other two large novels I'm committed to reading in the coming year: Anathem (by Neal Stephenson) and The Brothers Karamazov (by, of course, Fyodor Dostoyevsky).
Peter Kreeft has never published a book that I have not (a) thoroughly enjoyed, and (b) been challenged and inspired by. Even his textbook on logic caused me to rethink my long standing prejudice against the "old" logic in favor of the "new" mathematical logic. If Einstein Had Been a Surfer is a conversation among three characters who individually represent science, philosophy, and mysticism (and yet, these are no two-dimensional allegorical personifications. Kreeft's characters are real people, even if they do not really exist). This book is about the search for a "Theory of Everything." The book itself does not present the details of such a Theory (no Nobel Prize in physics for Kreeft for this one!), but by talking around and through and about the issue, the reader is lead to understand better what such a theory would entail. As always from Kreeft, this work is a creative, well-reasoned piece of scholarship that is easy to take as entertainment (I'd say "mistake" but I rather suspect the reader is supposed to be entertained, in much the same way Plato entertained and instructed us with the Socratic dialogues). Recommended if you like thinking about everything.
+ Against the Day (by Thomas Pynchon)
+ If Einstein Had Been a Surfer (by Peter Kreeft)
Just started Logical Dilemmas. Kurt Godel was the greatest logician of the 20th century. John W. Dawson is one of the scholars responsible for the publication of Godel's Collected Works and is therefore well-qualified to write a biography and commentary on Godel. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems were the subject of my master's project in theology (basically a warning about how not to apply them to philosophical and theological topics).
Against the Day is long, to the tune of over a thousand pages. Mostly, my fiction reading these days is a bit shy of that (by some 700 plus pages). So far, the story is interesting, like most of Pynchon's work, and is filled with a cast of intriguing characters, crazy adventures, and deep wit. I know this will take me a while to finish, but so far, I am glad to be spending time in the company of the Chums of Chance. Hopefully, this will warm me up for the other two large novels I'm committed to reading in the coming year: Anathem (by Neal Stephenson) and The Brothers Karamazov (by, of course, Fyodor Dostoyevsky).
Peter Kreeft has never published a book that I have not (a) thoroughly enjoyed, and (b) been challenged and inspired by. Even his textbook on logic caused me to rethink my long standing prejudice against the "old" logic in favor of the "new" mathematical logic. If Einstein Had Been a Surfer is a conversation among three characters who individually represent science, philosophy, and mysticism (and yet, these are no two-dimensional allegorical personifications. Kreeft's characters are real people, even if they do not really exist). This book is about the search for a "Theory of Everything." The book itself does not present the details of such a Theory (no Nobel Prize in physics for Kreeft for this one!), but by talking around and through and about the issue, the reader is lead to understand better what such a theory would entail. As always from Kreeft, this work is a creative, well-reasoned piece of scholarship that is easy to take as entertainment (I'd say "mistake" but I rather suspect the reader is supposed to be entertained, in much the same way Plato entertained and instructed us with the Socratic dialogues). Recommended if you like thinking about everything.
Finding Love in Moonlight
What follows is fiction. This is not about anybody. Don't make any such assumptions, because you would be grievously mistaken...
I first saw you on the first of December. You were the moon, gently reflecting the light of the sun, bringing his light to my cold and empty night. Daylight is too bright for a sinner like me, too much of his revealing light shining in every crevice of my lies. You brought his light in slowly, waxing first from a mere sliver, giving me time to adjust to what I was beginning to see. At first I mistook you for a star, a twinkling angel in the firmament of my twilight, a bit of dazzle to distract me from the vast dark expanse of my vision. As the nights wore on, you shone more brightly, more fully, until at last I could not help but realize that you were no star, but a reflection of our star, the one true sun that lights our lands. So, you were the moon, and in your fullness, at your brightest, I saw only the light of the sun and learned therein that the day was not my enemy but rather my home. Funny, how at your brightest, I saw more clearly your flaws, your craters, which cast the only shadows in his light upon your face. Yet far from despising you, I loved you more, both for the individuality of those "flaws" and for the courage to allow his light to reveal them to everyone. For you cared only for the truth, for bringing a bit of the sun's light to those of us who crawl around in the night, covered in mud and slime, fearful of the heat of day. Men like me, who lived more like worms than men, until one night we might by chance look up from our blind writhing to see you there, smiling down at us. What I did not realize at the time, what I could not have understood at the time, was that I only saw your smile because of his light. Everything that I came to see, everything that I came to love, starting with my love for you, was only possible because of the sun's light. Without sunlight I would never have seen more than shadows, without the reflected sunlight on your face, I would never have known the beginnings of beauty. Though I now walk in the day, under the fullness of the sun's life-giving light, I cannot look upon his beauty directly. I still must see it reflected, his light bouncing from every created thing on this earth to bring joy and wonder and delight to my newly-opened eyes.
Sometimes, I miss you. I miss our long walks under the night sky, back when the only light I knew was what you reflected. I miss our animated discussions, our silly jokes, the enchanting sound of your voice: your singing, your laughing, your soft whsipers of love and hope. I miss you, and the missing hurts like a lost child. Without the moon, they say there is no life on earth. Yet, I still live. I live, and I am grateful... grateful that you brought light into my life, gave me the courage and the hunger to enter the daylight, to live as a human creature should live. You were the moon, and you gave me my first taste of real light, which led to real life and real love. It is too late to say everything I want to say, and that merely is what it is. But it is never too late to look up into the sky and whisper, "thank you." And so I say, "thank you."
I first saw you on the first of December. You were the moon, gently reflecting the light of the sun, bringing his light to my cold and empty night. Daylight is too bright for a sinner like me, too much of his revealing light shining in every crevice of my lies. You brought his light in slowly, waxing first from a mere sliver, giving me time to adjust to what I was beginning to see. At first I mistook you for a star, a twinkling angel in the firmament of my twilight, a bit of dazzle to distract me from the vast dark expanse of my vision. As the nights wore on, you shone more brightly, more fully, until at last I could not help but realize that you were no star, but a reflection of our star, the one true sun that lights our lands. So, you were the moon, and in your fullness, at your brightest, I saw only the light of the sun and learned therein that the day was not my enemy but rather my home. Funny, how at your brightest, I saw more clearly your flaws, your craters, which cast the only shadows in his light upon your face. Yet far from despising you, I loved you more, both for the individuality of those "flaws" and for the courage to allow his light to reveal them to everyone. For you cared only for the truth, for bringing a bit of the sun's light to those of us who crawl around in the night, covered in mud and slime, fearful of the heat of day. Men like me, who lived more like worms than men, until one night we might by chance look up from our blind writhing to see you there, smiling down at us. What I did not realize at the time, what I could not have understood at the time, was that I only saw your smile because of his light. Everything that I came to see, everything that I came to love, starting with my love for you, was only possible because of the sun's light. Without sunlight I would never have seen more than shadows, without the reflected sunlight on your face, I would never have known the beginnings of beauty. Though I now walk in the day, under the fullness of the sun's life-giving light, I cannot look upon his beauty directly. I still must see it reflected, his light bouncing from every created thing on this earth to bring joy and wonder and delight to my newly-opened eyes.
Sometimes, I miss you. I miss our long walks under the night sky, back when the only light I knew was what you reflected. I miss our animated discussions, our silly jokes, the enchanting sound of your voice: your singing, your laughing, your soft whsipers of love and hope. I miss you, and the missing hurts like a lost child. Without the moon, they say there is no life on earth. Yet, I still live. I live, and I am grateful... grateful that you brought light into my life, gave me the courage and the hunger to enter the daylight, to live as a human creature should live. You were the moon, and you gave me my first taste of real light, which led to real life and real love. It is too late to say everything I want to say, and that merely is what it is. But it is never too late to look up into the sky and whisper, "thank you." And so I say, "thank you."
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