Gimlé

Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity.

It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.
C.S. Lewis—“The Screwtape Letters – Letters from a senior to a junior devil.”

Life is, of course, too busy. More presentations last week than I would have liked. Busy telling people about things that have already happened. Only one of them was teaching-related and that one ended up being my worst presentation for a long while.

Frustrating.

All in all, though, there is the feeling of forward motion. The teaching part is gelling together. Will be focussing on discussions and seminars in a couple of weeks time, something I’m not that bad at.

Pulling together a few backend scripts for the implementation side of the project. Using Ruby partly because it has an interesting YAML implementation, but mainly because I felt I should learn a new language.

Not that I’m doing anything complicated (altogether short and simple things) but it feels good to be doing something practical alongside the theory.

I will be doing some teaching and support for the Foundations students soon. If all goes well that extra money might end up being used making my computer situation slightly more bearable.

The “Death of the Blogger” essay sparked quite a few interesting discussions.

I did partake in the discussion at Burningbird’s although I do need to do a proper “Blogger Post-Mortem” at some point.

It bears noting that most of the criticisms are valid, although none of them quite address the point of the essay. My simplistic representation of memes is partly based on Godwin’s essay in Wired on Godwin’s Law and its creation.

And I feel that I need to address Dorothea’s critique of academia because I don’t think it has been properly addressed yet. Dorothea is pointing out the flaws she sees in academia. Some of them fundamental problems. Some of them not.

To address that critique I feel that you’d need to present a clear separation between academic principle, academic methodology and the common academic system.

Then, you’d need to look at the problems Dorothea points out, figure out whether they are problems with the principle, the method or the system and analyse them accordingly.

The reason for this separation is that problems with the system and methodology change over time and can generally be overcome by good people.

But if the problems are inherent in the principle then no condemnation will be too harsh, because then the whole kaboosh is unfixable and will bleed into everything else academic.

Most academics know for a fact that the system and methodology are flawed and most of those flaws can be surmounted by good people. They’ve seen it and so they often present that as evidence that academia is fixable.

Fair enough. But it doesn’t answer Dorothea’s questions.

So much to do. So little time.

Baldur Bjarnason
Clifton, Bristol.