January 2010
11 posts
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Errata
A friend gave a useful critique of the Spelling post (since removed), which is bad and wrong on several counts. I hope anyone reading this knows that most of these entries are rubbish - writing experiments rather than argument experiments. I don’t think I’ve ever written something I didn’t disagree with…
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Writing about writing 03: An experiment
As part of my efforts to write more, I am going to try something.
Tumblr has a “queue” option - I’ve set it up so that anything I post will be temporarily held in limbo. The top post in the queue will be automatically published each day around noon.
The idea is to give myself some sort of deadline as a motivator. I must always have a couple of things queued up. When they run...
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My position on atheism
My position on atheism can be described simply, bluntly, thusly: We have no idea how, when, why, or from where the universe came into being. We don’t even know if these are sensible questions. I suspect they’re not. I fail to see how any religion sheds any light on any of this whatsoever. (Regarding “when”: We can of course agree on the time since the big bang, but...
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Writing about writing 02
I have recently been trying to write more for this blog. I’ve always found that doing anything worthwhile is addictive - when I play guitar more, I want to play guitar more. So I’m trying the same with writing. This inevitably means a lowering of the quality standards. Hopefully as the amount of writing increases, I’ll have the ability and motivation to go back and fix things...
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Skepticism is not fashionable.
“Being “skeptical” is just the latest fashion! How silly!” I doubt that skepticism will ever be fashionable in the positive sense because it involves so much telling other people that they’re wrong. Or at least thinking it. I also don’t think that skepticism is or will be fashionable in the derogatory sense. “Fashionable” does not mean...
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Writing about writing 01
This post (or series of posts) will be about my ongoing efforts to write a half-decent article. Starting with “I want a Macbook”. A method I’ve used before, to write something people might actually want to read, is to take a germ of a topic and then expand it. No one really cares about whether I want a Macbook or not. But there’s any number of larger, over-arching topics...
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I want a Macbook.
First draft. Bit rubbish. Suggestions? I want a Macbook. When I was growing up, one could almost have been lynched for saying that. Everyone knows Macs are stoopid, right? And too expensive, and bought only because they’re shiny, and have you seen that “Mac Sucks” video? Dude, Macs suck. But it’s all bollocks. It’s amazing how inconsistent people can be when they find...
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Vocal progress
Some progress with the ol’ vocal apparatus. I remember a couple of years ago I experienced a strange thing: I woke up with my voice deeper than normal. Considerably so. Now, it hardly seemed likely that it had broken again, so what was going on? Over the next few hours my voice lost the depth went back to normal. I reasoned that maybe I was ordinarily tensing something that had spontaneously...
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Apt Aptitude
Holy moly, I just realised that Aptitude is a measure of being Apt! Today’s life-changing realisation brought to you by…
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