bigideas

Rich Cochrane will be running a highly interactive session on Oulipo techniques for writers on 30 August at the Treehouse Gallery in Regent’s Park.

There’s been a bit of agnosticism in the air recently, and it reminded me of a popular argument against the existence of God. I think it’s a bad argument, and I’d like to try to set out why. For our purposes here, “God” can stand for any supernatural something at all — I’ll try to stay out of theology.

Robert and I finished the last walkthrough of Align yesterday, and the music is finalised (more or less — I reserve the right to tweak). So here, for the anoraks I know are among you, is the list of what I’ll be playing (bits of), not in order of appearance.

I was looking at The Lost Science of Measuring the Earth by Heath and Michell this morning in connection with the upcoming Align performances (if you haven’t signed up, it’s not too late). In Michell’s section I noticed a couple of claims that are wrong, but in interestingly different ways.

“Nice People Take Drugs“, said the ad on the side of buses.

As some of you may know, BigIdeas has recently jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. Since Twitter seems to be reaching a Facebook-in-2007-like critical mass, all kinds of widgets have been added to it to make it more useful. Unlike Facebook, none of these seems to be about werewolves or fish, which is a Good Thing.

As prep for last night’s event I wrote up some notes based on some rather ancient research work, largely to limber up and remind myself of some things. I’ve posted them below — be warned, this is a bit long and pretty sketchy, but at least those who were there might find it useful.

Aren’t we just loving the story about MPs’ expenses that the Telegraph cheerfully eked out to us over the course of last week? Yes we are! But why?

The Mail today is reporting excitedly that “House sales hit 18-month high as prices rise for FOURTH month in a row”. And in other news, if temperatures keep going up at this rate we’ll all be dead by December.

On the TES forums and The Scotsman we’ve recently seen an outbreak of confusion about division by zero, which actually turns out to be an interesting topic. Here’s our cut-out-and-keep guide to this oft-debated topic.