The Face of the Moon

Feeds, Then and Now

2011-03-07T21:19:00.002Z

I changed my mind about redirecting the new site's Atom feed to the old Feedburner URL (after I decided to set up a new Feedburner address that didn't use the 'Face of the Moon' name, and then realised that if I didn't keep them separate I'd be redirecting one Feedburner feed into another), so the new Atom feed is here. [Update: there is no Feedburner redirection as of 27/10/2012.]

We Are Moving!

2011-03-06T02:00:00.004Z

After months of preparation (because I'm a busy man), I have a shiny new personal site, hither: RFJSeddon.net. Accordingly this weblog comes to its end only to rise, Phoenix-like, here.

For people who drop in from time to time, therefore, there's a new URL to note. For people using RSS or Atom feeds, I'll be switching over the Feedburner source in a day or two so you might not need to do anything, but failing that, the new Atom feed is here. That leaves the four people using Blogger's 'Follow' feature, who will have to fall back on one of the other options, I'm afraid.

The tone and content of this place have been a bit fluid over their course (with some of these pages being evident juvenilia), and I'm uncertain how the new continuation will turn out, although the snarkiness will no doubt continue. I'd like to do more miscellaneous philosophy again, and I'm sure some geekiness will remain intact, although right now I haven't much time for debug room delving and the like. I'm at the stage where I'm thinking hard about what my potential future employers might be like and what they might scrutinise, but I don't intend to become moribund to satisfy dread imaginings of bureaucratic drones with crushed souls.

Yes, Vice Chancellor

2011-02-24T02:33:00.002Z

Humphrey Appleby Jr. would appear to work in academic administration:

"You can't ignore rankings, because you're in a market. If you're going to organise things along market lines then consumers have to have information about products. The fact that the information isn't worth the paper it's printed on doesn't matter."

Remix Reviewing

2011-02-12T16:15:00.003Z

Let no one say the book reviews in this Journal are anything other than scrupulously objective. (I live alone in a fifth-floor apartment on Calle Belgrano, in Buenos Aires.) Butterworths' Modern Law of Patents has 1921 numbered pages, of which 915 make up the appendices. (One evening a few months ago, I heard a knock at my door.) The front matter runs to an additional ccxxxvi (236) pages. (I opened it and a stranger stepped in.) It weighs 1.48 kg and is 4.5 cm thick. (Everything about him spoke of honest poverty: he was dressed in grey and carried a grey valise.) Comparable figures for the current (16th) edition of Terrell on Patents are 1206 numbered pages (of which 494 pages is statutory materials; there are also civx pages of front matter). Its weight is 1.86 kg and it is 6.8 cm thick.

The rationale? 'The Modern Law of Patents may not quite be as all-encompassing as Borges' Book of Sand, nor does it even contain the equivalent of 900,000 volumes, but it is remarkably close to being a library in one volume...'

There's even a footnote adding that great minds think alike.

Qualifiers Are Useful

2011-01-31T12:22:00.001Z

"This isn't anti-social behaviour—you're talking about shootings, knife incidents, serious youth violence."
B.B.C. News

The Squeaky Wheel

2011-01-30T20:47:00.001Z

In modern academia, many matters clamour for attention...

Disappointing

2011-01-08T23:43:00.002Z

From the B.B.C. News syndication feed: Crow attacks 'partying' bankers.

From the actual page: RMT boss Bob Crow attacks 'partying' bankers.

Dark City Floorboards

2010-12-22T16:01:00.005Z

Owing to my being busy with thesis write-up and other commitments, along with gradually preparing what will when finished be my personal website and weblog continuation, I've been rather remiss in posting material here recently: I think I altogether missed writing about another unused scene in SaGa Frontier which I managed to activate with a little RAM manipulation. (Following a suggestion in the comments, it turned out that this map has a warp to 2nd Division—next to Hiroyuki Kuwata, of course.) Anyway: following a lead here, since I happened to have once made a location code for Sword of Mana, I thought I'd look around the Hot House maps to see whether the missing 'Hot House - Pet' map was lurking there; instead, I found a helpfully labelled debug room which from what I can find seems to be previously unrecorded for posterity.

Since my room change code behaves a bit oddly (producing different results depending on the exit used on the previous map), I can't be certain the 'Pet' map isn't there, but since the debug room seems to come sequentially next to the Hot House maps, one possibility is that it overwrote the former Pet room.

Gmail’s New Privacy Advice

2010-12-05T14:53:00.002Z

I'm not sure what Google is trying to tell me:

Where Can I Get a Copy?

2010-11-04T01:21:00.002Z

I don't know about the classical scholarship, but genre-wise this sounds like an inventive combination of exegesis and memoir...

I also received all kinds of packages. One handsome, self-published paperback began with a plausible discussion of recent Plato scholarship. The second chapter veered off into an account of an attempted seduction by the author's Classics tutor in the 1970s, and the whole concluded with a lengthy, carefully referenced demonstration that Plato used the word "soul" as a symbol for "anus".

British Broadcasting Cartesians

2010-10-26T10:02:00.002+01:00

Headline from the B.B.C.: Libido Problems 'Brain Not Mind'.

One hears a lot about the Corporation's alleged Leftist bias, but this may be the first sign of a Dualist bias.

’Twas Ever Thus

2010-10-20T14:10:00.001+01:00

Interesting developments in Malmesbury:

Hobbs (whose family may have connections to Thomas Hobbes) has been appointed a town philosopher. The role is yet to be clearly defined and she says the wage is "a glass of white wine".

This Post Is Valueless

2010-10-15T19:58:00.004+01:00

This is... bizarre:

"Right now if you buy a bottle of water it's £1," he said. "A piece of music is a valuable form of art. If you want the person to respect it and value it, it's got to cost them not a huge sum of money but a significant sum of money."

It isn't altogether clear what kind of value is being posited here. If a piece of music is being said to be fiscally valuable, then of course nobody will value it at £X if its market price is lower than £X, but to explain price in terms of price is hardly enlightening. If the value in question is æsthetic, cultural, etc. then the claim appears to be that people on the whole cannot know about or respond suitably to that value without guidance in the form of a retail price: so I can judge that the works of Shakespeare are æsthetically worthless because Project Gutenberg makes them available for free, but you can be satisfied that the doodles on my notepad are of some cultural worth because I decline to part with them for less than a two-figure sum.

I suppose it is true that the care I take with an object is connected to the potential cost to me of replacing it: one does not, for example, treat a First Folio lightly, since few exist and none is exactly like another. If only a digital audio file were the kind of readily copiable item which could be limitlessly reproduced at negligible cost...

Edited to add: this post is not subsidised by the government of France.

Scintillating Insight

2010-08-26T12:49:00.001+01:00

Which? also urged commuters to think carefully about where they begin their journey as that also can affect the amount they will pay for their ticket.
B.B.C. News

Another Underrated Genre

2010-08-22T20:03:00.002+01:00

In a mood of grim humor, I sometimes imagine myself lying on a hospital bed with a grave illness, and two or three philosophers of this stamp outside my room debating if it would be logically appropriate to turn off my life support system or not. Death by logic! Ionecso could perhaps have written a nice little scene around the idea.
PhilPapers forum comment by Derek Allan

I suppose I ought to take away something more profound than 'clinical ethicists should whisper'.

Scenic Durham for Philosophers

2010-07-15T21:18:00.002+01:00

The atmosphere of the BPPA conference is clearly infecting Durham at large:

It looks set to be a decent conference, although if I ever get my hands on a time machine I'm going to change the history of manners by somehow killing off the convention of standing up all the time at wine receptions; besides my usual difficulty with height differences, it ensures that I overheat quickly and have to keep wandering outside.

How Comforting...

2010-07-12T16:01:00.002+01:00

...to learn that there are professional plagiarism-enablers promising a 'zero-tolerance plagiarism policy'. The art of philosophical paradox is alive and well...

Ennui

2010-07-11T12:34:00.002+01:00

Dark Roasted Blend grapples with the search for meaning in the face of human mortality:

You know how they say: "1000 destinations to travel, before you die", "1000 awesome things to try, before you die", "1000 ways to prepare pasta, before you die" (really, they should sell a book "One simple way to prepare a poisonous mushroom, before you die").

An Underrated Genre

2010-06-29T14:25:00.002+01:00

What makes the British censor reports worth reading are their bizarrely detailed accounts of violence. [One extract] could have simply said "there was a lot of bloody violence," but instead goes into gruesome detail about exactly what horrific delights... gore aficionados can expect. There almost seems to be an air of the critic in this one, expressing disappointment at the lack of realism. Add to this the clinical, bureaucratic tone that seems totally at odds with the subject matter and they often end up reading like the diary of a psychopathic English civil servant.
The Escapist

There's an idea for a novel in there, if some twisted fan of Sade and Yes, Minister cared to write it...

81% to go...

2010-06-24T01:45:00.003+01:00

Among other things, they are emailing home their assignments: 19 per cent of students surveyed say their parents proofread their university papers, often in apparent violation of institutional rules.
T.H.E.

Perhaps all those scribblings of 'Please proofread' on essay margins are doing the trick—or a trick, anyway.

It’s a Hard Life Supporting Scare Stories

2010-06-11T13:05:00.004+01:00

By creating their own porn sites researchers found that many consumers were vulnerable to known bugs and loopholes.
B.B.C. News

Thank goodness other kinds of website presumably can't exploit those same vulnerabilities. I'd love to know what the research proposal looked like.

Public Sector Cuts...

2010-06-08T11:56:00.003+01:00

...have clearly begun.

Social Worker (Children and Families)

Employer: MORGAN HUNT

Posted: 27 May 2010

Reference: CMP998

Contact: Chris Pritchard

Location: Middlesbrough

Industry: Government - Local government

Contract: Temp

Hours: Full Time

Salary: £20 - £28 per annum

Did He Fall...

2010-06-06T13:24:00.004+01:00

...and was he pushed?

Police said he fell 40ft (13m) after being hit by a non-lethal munition... Officers eventually tried to subdue Mr Hill with what the police say was a "less than lethal munition", but he fell and later died.

It reminds me of those puzzles about causal overdetermination, the doctrine of double effect and so on.

Repeating History

2010-05-10T22:11:00.004+01:00

The New Politics is seemingly hovering around the idea of several not-actually-so-very-different-now-they-think-about-it parties coming together to form an anti-Tory super-organism composed of Labour and some phantom limbs. The not-the-Tories party refers to itself as the 'progressive alliance', but since I don't know what 'progressive' means, let's call them the Whigs for short.

Update: phantom limbs indeed... According to this, the Lib. Dems. are saying that 'the Labour Party never took seriously the prospects of forming a progressive, reforming government'. So whoever are the progressive ones?

That Explains a Lot

2010-05-08T20:32:00.002+01:00

Until recently rookie lawmakers were left to sink or swim. That all changed after the last election. Officials were on hand to help MPs find their feet - and the loos.

Politicians were seen wandering around Westminster with carrier bags stuffed full of papers and leaflets.

It turned out it was all a bit too much for many of the honourable members.

When House of Commons staff cleared out the Parliamentary lockers after the election was called a few weeks ago they found lots of five-year-old carrier bags full of unread hand-outs.
B.B.C.

So now we know why intellectual standards in the Commons have frequently been unimpressive: fearsome party whips? Exhausting constituency surgeries? No, they're just constitutionally incapable of reading briefings. 'Never attribute to malice', etc.