(no subject)

Anyone else get a weird sore throat when their period starts? Before I twigged about the timing, I always thought I was coming down with a cold.

omg!

Got the most delightful card from rainbowjehan! Thanks love! :-x

The Gawd Delusion

Yesterday I read the Harpers review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. I am still flinching from reading the book, but if the review is accurate, Dawkins has made some embarrassingly basic cockups of fact and logic, some of which even I could have pointed out. I commented recently on how infuriating it is to be derided, or to see someone derided, on the basis of strawmen. I think I'd better wait to read the book until the dentist has made me that appliance to stop me grinding my teeth.

The Gawd Delusion redux

Also online is the New York Times review of The God Delusion, which deals at some length with Dawkin's insistence that God must be more complex than His creation. This appears to be another strawman, but it struck me as particularly odd given how many scientific examples there are of the simple giving birth to limitless complexity. Natural selection; the equation of the Mandelbrot Set; the low-entropy initial state of the universe. (Interestingly, mythology is full of simple initial creations which were succeeded by complexity - the inert, homogenous oceans of Mesopotamian and Egyptian religion are examples.)

The review also states (my emphasis): "Dawkins’s gullible-child proposal is, as he concedes, just one of many Darwinian hypotheses that have been speculatively put forward to account for religion. (Another is that religion is a byproduct of our genetically programmed tendency to fall in love.)" omg, that's a delightful idea! I must track it down!

( Now with additional grumbling )

(no subject)

On bookshops and libraries:

"Sometimes I feel a sense of oppression and inadequacy or lack of opportunity as I survey, in these collections, the mass of knowledge in its broadest sense that I do not have but want to acquire."

- Andrew Schuller, "Reflections of a Bookman". Testify, brother!

Two things that make me feel old

1. Gareth David-Lloyd in Absolute Power.

2. This quote: ... I'm not sure our ability to support our opinion, negative as well as positive, is seen as an essential skill for educated individuals in a civil society any more. Just having the opinion is enough, it seems. And then you take every opportunity to air that opinion, with the kind of bullying dogmatism that makes the debate as quaint and archaic as coloured pencils." - Rosemary Sorensen, "Really Reading"

Surprising true facts!

1. Welsh is pronounced just as it's spelled.

2. Jon and I work out twice a week. (It's true. I'm still "pumped", as the kids say. Fat burned, legs pressed, abs crunched, tricepses extended, mill trodden, most of it to Weird Al. Makes you forget all your woes, it really does.)