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Air India Crash: Update #1

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Fun With A Pun

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Air India Crash: When 2 + 2 Does Not Compute

Air India Crash: When 2 + 2 Does Not Compute2 + 2 Does Not Compute, But 1 of 4 AND 1 of 4 DoesOn...

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Patrick LockerbyRSS Feed of this column.

Retired engineer, 79 years young. Computer builder and programmer. Linguist specialising in technical translation. Interested in every human endeavour except the scrooge theory of accountancy. Interested... Read More »

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An open Letter to the World's Leaders

An open Letter to the World's Leaders

Mar 28 2009 | comment(s)

An open Letter to the World's Leaders

Honorable Leaders,

As our climate continues to change due to our extravagant use of fossil fuels, new sources of those fuels are being discovered in the Arctic regions.

Given that it is our own profligate use of fuels that has caused these new sources to be revealed, does it not make sense to conserve them?  Is it not blindingly obvious that burning these fuels will make climate change  worse?

And yet there is a race to be first to reach, extract, and profit by this new 'wealth'. Some of the Arctic oil and gas is already in the pipelines. Much has already been consumed.
Intelligence Made Simple

Intelligence Made Simple

Mar 28 2009 | comment(s)

Intelligence Made Simple
Part #1 of 2

What is Intelligence?

I intend to show how intelligence is best understood by getting well away from ideas based on human intelligence. I shall work from humans down to primitive life-forms and then the atom itself.  I hope to demonstrate a useful definition of intelligence, but there are some essential underlying ideas that need to be discussed first.

I shall start by turning the question around. The question to be answered now is:

What is Stupidity?
A Theory of Time - Part Two

A Theory of Time - Part Two

Mar 26 2009 | comment(s)

Part 1, which begins our examination of the question 'what is time?' can be viewed here.
Part 2 Some travels through time.

This is a slightly whimsical interlude, presented as a break from the 'hard' stuff.

The first part of what follows is a speculation about a journey back through time. 
At some point in this fiction-science journey, fact begins to creep in.

"the end of our exploring,
Will be to arrive where we started,
And know the place for the first time."
TS Eliot, 'Little Gidding'

A Brief Journey Through Time
Sea Level Change and Semi-Buoyant Ice.

Sea Level Change and Semi-Buoyant Ice.

Mar 26 2009 | comment(s)

It is commonly held that if floating ice melts, then it makes no difference to sea levels.

This is true only of free-floating ice.

When a sheet of ice is attached to  land, basic principles of mechanics show that the weight is partially supported by that land.  A sheet of ice attached to land is a semi-cantilever. 
A cantilever is a beam supported at one end only.
An Essay Concerning Wings

An Essay Concerning Wings

Mar 25 2009 | comment(s)

Note:
The ideas developed here were prompted by my reading a recent blog.
Thank you Becky Jungbauer.


What you are reading is a mix of whimsy, ethics and philosophy applied to a problem in politics.  It does not offer a solution to any specific problem. It may direct the attention away from what is unimportant in current debates about evolution.
One can only live in hope.


An Essay Concerning Wings
What is Pragmatics ?

What is Pragmatics ?

Mar 24 2009 | comment(s)

What is Pragmatics?

This is a very brief introduction to pragmatics, intended to whet your appetite and encourage you to want to know more.

Pragmatic investigations cover the fields of both linguistics and philosophy.
I shall cover the area of linguistics, the study of how language works, first.

Pragmatics and How Language is Used.

In language studies, pragmatics is a very wide field. It examines our use and our understanding of the language we speak and hear, read and write. Pragmatics examines the importance in language studies of our general knowledge, and the importance of common-sense knowledge of our world.