2015
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November 30th; Monday. Back on Saturday wrote articles for two British magazines: A & B. Seems both pieces have been accepted.

November 29th; Sunday. Recent stimulating meetings include Telecom John, Marion for a wonderful dinner discussing ethics, Jean-Michel, Guillaume, & Mohammad.
November 28th; Saturday. Nicely-written article: The Shopping Mall subverts Islam.

November 27th; Friday. Trailer for forthcoming film 'Zoolander 2', a second comedy about deeply dim male models. I saw the main actor in a recent interview modestly muttering about making a sequel to a film "no-one watched the first time", though I recall watching the first film with Mariannpsy at her keen insistence. I think she was trying to tell me something ---but what?? (*confused frown*)
November 26th; Thursday. Hawai'ian congresswoman tries to stop CIA military operations, while fingers of suspicion increasingly point at Turkey's government funding Daesh.

November 25th; Wednesday. Seems to be growing interest in charming English physicist Julian Barbour who wants to remove time from physics. He explains himself to a woman interviewer with a French accent and in an 8-minute, vaguely arty Polish film in monochrome.
November 24th; Tuesday. Les filles francaises dans le swinging soixantes, sont trop crazy!

November 23rd; Monday. Exciting exploding sun history news.
November 22nd; Sunday. An online version of one of those art directors' magazines that sit around in the lobbies of ad agencies, counterpointing the disturbing furniture.

November 21st; Saturday. 3 or 4 days ago, landlady asked me to photograph the gas meter, so I snapped it with a copy of that day's newspaper pegged on, as if it was a kidnap victim. That green-papered daily still sits around the flat, taunting me to make it into something papier mache.
November 20th; Friday. Two excellent short films by slightly overperky science explainer, first on Zipf's Law, + with admirable ambition, the Banach-Tarski Theorem.

November 19th; Thursday. Akos & I have a beer over the road. He explains how futile making a business case for new workflow & testing software is. Nice little animation about another cellular automaton: Langton's ant.
November 18th; Wednesday. Entertaining rant hails the death of some cuisine fad I didn't know was born. Via zexy Catheline.

November 17th; Tuesday. Go with Mohammad to an evening talk by an English philosopher Tom Stoneham. Stoneham, with a careful sympathetic style, tries to outline a view of his own he calls 'objectualism', with which he hopes to unpick G.E. Moore's claim that distinguishing 'pink' from 'experiencing pink' entails a contradiction. The goal seems to be to do away with 'experiencing pink' as a separate category altogether ("My view is that perception is the paradigm case of consciousness, but that perceiving does not involve a mental state"). Stoneham in his open-necked white shirt is very charming, joking about how empty he feels himself to be when he denies all the rich inner experiences other people believe they have. Going the full distance, the final sentence of his 5-page hand-out slips in that this view (perceiving not involving a mental state) entails dreams being fictitious entities, experiences that none of us in reality have. "The objectualist ---den[ies] that it seemed to the dreaming/hallucinating subject as if F was being perceived: the reports of dreams and hallucinations, however couched in 'seems' and 'as if' qualifiers, are false." Naturally, I ask for clarification afterwards, and Stoneham confirms that yes, he really claims that dreams don't exist as experiences. I ask if he means that we rapidly fabricate a false memory of having experienced a dream narrative in the instant of waking, and he hesitates, looking mildly ill at ease, saying only that there's no evidence we dream at all. This of course means 'evidence' in a sense in which first-person uncorroborated accounts never count as evidence, because I think I woke out of rather vivid dreams every morning this week, but of course have no-one & nothing else to back me up there. I thank him for his clear answer, privately relieved to find another closely-argued view I needn't take seriously. Then a woman academic insists her dog dreams, they chuckle about whether the dog's twitching limbs really show a narrative experience of running, and Stoneham cheerily says "Well if the dog could talk -" to general laughter. Of course, I'm a dog that can talk and my unsupported testimony wasn't good enough a moment earlier, but no worries. Mohammad and I sneak out of the room during final applause in search of another coffee somewhere nearby.
November 16th; Monday. Photo of girl and bit of London everyone wants to live in: wait - is she in front of a backdrop, or is the sky really that dark?

November 15th; Sunday. Two upbeat 1970s party tunes sandwich lotus-eating mantra: It Ain't Fair But It's Fun / Cheeba Cheeba / Thieves in the Funkhouse.
November 14th; Saturday. Tiresome headcold continues. I want to find a way to make bacteria & viruses pay rent. Articulate long-form essay about Russian romance versus perky 45-second monologue (*warning*) about American hedonism. Note sceptical chatshow person with laptop.

November 13th; Friday. Over 100 people killed in Paris by a co-ordinated set of terrorist attacks, apparently Islamist, claimed by Daesh.
November 12th; Thursday. Rumours growing that Apple deliberately slows down old iPhones / Someone Hungarian-sounding might have found how to solve the graph-matching problem in quasi-P-time / Household machines are ganging up on you / Facebook deliberately slack on taking down copyright violations?

November 11th; Wednesday. Forget peak oil supply, are we at peak oil demand?
November 10th; Tuesday. Women use funny deep voices for status? Surely not.

November 9th; Monday. New study: The New Deal prolonged The Great Depression?
November 8th; Sunday. High-IQ Eurocrats have decided that hyperlinks are wicked.

November 7th; Saturday. One article denounces parallel universes as a fantasy, another claims one or more are real enough to be "leaking" into our universe.
November 6th; Friday. Slavering Slavoj explains why Calvinism is the Christian sect he, a Marxist atheist, most approves of.

November 5th; Thursday. Following yesterday's lead, here's + a lush, compelling film trailer. For anyone who likes any of: foggy permafrost, John Hurt, emotional drama, mysterious distant planets, or meticulous close-ups. How to pull an audience into a story & a character.
November 4th; Wednesday. Antarctic gaining ice. A mini-ice-age?

November 3rd; Tuesday. Online college courses don't suddenly transform us.
November 2nd; Monday. This article says Palestine/Israel feud is all about holy sites.

November 1st; Sunday. Wander over to the graveyard for the usual evening stroll this All Saints' Day. Unlike Hallowe'en-observing countries, Hungarians feel it is tonight that the membrane between this and the next world is thinnest, that tonight is the night of the year when the dead roam abroad and wish to be remembered. Though it isn't too chilly among the candlelit tombstones and mausoleums, I'm still living without style or grace, wearing shoes without socks in cold weather, so I don't spend too long in the misty dusk with the groups of wreath-bearing relatives. A girl tells me one unlabelled mini-temple with giant cement cherubs is in honour of late-19th-century music-hall singer Lujza Blaha. Already a big junction named after her.

Mark Griffith, site administrator / markgriffith at yahoo.com