September 30th;
Sunday. Seems "Africa's youngest billionaire" isn't even a millionaire.
September 29th;
Saturday. World's youngest billionaire is a human tax dodge?
September 28th;
Friday. Cute amateur video on Philip K. Dick's belief the future had sent him messages. One of the best things is it took me to a rather wonderful video of people filming aeroplanes seemingly standing still in the sky.
September 27th;
Thursday. Back at the crypto start-up in the Buda Hills I visited on Tuesday (where I saw the first fire of the year burning in a hearth) in their large rambling sunlit villa, furniture still being moved around and assembled.
Recalling this tune from many moons ago. Apparently it prompted a lawsuit, not from the Pearl & Dean cinema advertising channel, but from Led Zeppelin, the rotters. From about the same time, a meticulously fake-Cockney Swedish studio outfit only spoil their British act by two of the three being just a bit too good-looking.
September 26th;
Wednesday. Latest article at Salisbury Review up: about WW2 soldiers who say the EU was what they fought for.
September 25th;
Tuesday. Prize-winning dog gets excited watching footage of her own competition performance.
September 24th;
Monday. Several large firms no longer demand only graduates. And a shrewd discussion of the gender/racism craze as a guilt-cleansing status game: The Great Awokening.
September 23rd;
Sunday. Flashback to flying kittens playing metal in Viking outfits. Masterful use of limited resources.
September 22nd;
Saturday. Very worthwhile article by Dalrymple/Daniels on Johnson versus Voltaire: thank you, Guy! Budapest weather cools.
September 21st;
Friday. A few Linux developers getting cross about gender/identity politics. World might fall apart etc.
September 20th;
Thursday. Some historical revisionism on the "Robber Barons".
September 19th;
Wednesday. Facebook to use some kind of "AI" to detect videos that are fake but look plausible. Expect discomfort when the first bit of official footage fails this test. Schrodinger's Cat gets a new story line.
September 18th;
Tuesday. Still getting used to not being locked out any more. Seems that J. Paul Getty had a harem. I don't remember being told about that.
September 17th;
Monday. Up early with Tim & Erika, sitting in dressing gowns on their back patio or deck, as the Americans would say, watching the early warm sun on their garden and a wheeling group of birds in the sky. The group seems to be slowly growing from around 15 birds to 30 birds over the quarter hour we watch, perhaps assembling a team for a big migratory journey. Phone a locksmith that has been recommended by a friend of a relative of Erika, and amazingly an appointment for 3pm today is arranged. Until now locksmiths either said they couldn't do it, "might" be able to days hence, or just didn't call back. When afternoon comes, it takes the two men about 15 minutes to drill through the lock. After several smaller bits fail, in the end they resort to a massive two-handed tool about the size of a vacuum cleaner. Giant yellow sparks spray out of the lock like a firework display. They instal a nice new lock with a smooth, firm turning action. The cash I have on me is just enough. After 18 nights locked out, repeatedly washing one shirt and one pair of trousers, I'm back into Michael's flat. An odd episode, stressful but also strangely like a holiday from being me. Here's an attempt to use Occam's Razor to decide if there's a God. Not too convincing. A bit like Anselm's proof backwards.
September 16th;
Sunday. Anti-depressants might worsen antibiotic resistance.
September 15th;
Saturday. Finish a book I find at Tim's, 'Beauty', by Roger Scruton. He relies heavily on Kant to bring harmonious order, personality, and beauty together. He skips over evolutionary psychology a little quickly, considering it has a lot of information about how and why we find certain people beautiful, but Scruton is after bigger fish. He sees beauty as both a kind of fitting in and a kind of invitation to appreciate the individual in the general. Nicely presented, but the argument's readability disguises its subtlety a bit.
September 14th;
Friday. Tim & I try to see a film on his laptop-based film-seeing system. First 'CQ', which we cannot find, then 'Death of Stalin' which unfortunately keeps stopping, though first few minutes suggests it's good.
September 13th;
Thursday. Curious piece about how high-speed Chinese rail might have been a huge mistake.
September 12th;
Wednesday. Take the bus out to the village of Paty to see Tim & Erika. Still locked out of Michael's flat, tonight is the 14th night. They kindly welcome me to stay for a couple of nights. // Multidimensional maths might model neurons.
September 11th;
Tuesday. This Teacher's Pet speech might be important.
September 10th;
Monday. Finish a book at Robin's, 'The Will To Live: selected writings of Arthur Schopenhauer', edited by Richard Taylor. These are essays collected from several of Schopenhauer's works. The most startling thing is how up-to-date he sounds, with his thesis (that the animal will to live is more important than minds or ideas in explaining the world we experience) sounding very much like post-1970s evolutionary psychology (or 'evopsych', as some call it). Darwin is nowhere mentioned since this is the 1830s and 40s, although evolution in some sense was clearly being passionately discussed, with Lamarck being both praised and mocked by Schopenhauer. He actually suggests that Lamarck is foolish to describe a change in animal structure emerging over long periods of time (exactly the feature that we now find so convincing about Darwin), suggesting rather that the will to live is "outside time". His section on women, full of jibes such as the line that men are often professionally jealous of certain other men within their specialism, but women of all other women because "women only have one profession", is startlingly close in some of the claims (if expressed less diplomatically) in evolutionary psychology. The pre-ghost of what Nietzsche and Freud were to call the unconscious fifty years later is here in some brief sections. He describes a kind of hidden will making the individual animal serve the species at its own expense. Schopenhauer makes the shrewd claim that sexual desire is the real mainspring of most human action, even as we lie to ourselves that it is something more lofty. As Freud slowly fades from sight, Schopenhauer's simpler, clearer claims come back into focus: deeper & sharper.
September 9th;
Sunday. Rather like the look of this book. A probably tongue-in-cheek discussion of theology using game theory.
September 8th;
Saturday. Interesting account of how a peer-reviewed journal buckled to pressure to repress some unfashionable science.
September 7th;
Friday. Men have better sex with emotionally-unstable women? Did they correct for hot/crazy correlation though?
September 6th;
Thursday. Christian arrives, escorting Sophia to candlelit dinner at Robin's. Krisztian, however, fails to attend. Spicy sauce cooked by painter Julia.
Meanwhile in Britain, a banned Iranian TV crew somehow films inside a Labour constituency meeting where a "pro-Israel" Labour MP is losing a vote of confidence.
September 5th;
Wednesday. Machine to
type one-handed. Is it nifty?
Evening drinks outdoors over the river in Buda with Robin, Ernst and his gorgeous chocolate brown vizsla dog, dishy Russian/Greek/Romanian art gallerist Sophia, along with artist Julia and film-maker Erika.
September 4th;
Tuesday. Parrots' economic decisions better than socialists'.
September 3rd;
Monday. Interesting article about director of 1st three James Bond films, and his links to
'Agent Zigzag'. Still staying at Robin's on Csengery waiting for money to come through for locksmith to open Michael's door across town.
September 2nd;
Sunday. Finish a copy of 'The Moon and Sixpence' by Somerset Maugham, a book I remember seeing lying around among Mother's books, and have been vaguely meaning to read for decades. Maugham's first writing success was in the 1890s, and although this followed twenty years later in 1919, it made me realise how much he remained an 1890s writer. Vaguely modelled on several painters - a bit of Cezanne, a bit of Matisse - the life path of the central character Strickland partly follows Gaugin, in that he leaves finance and goes to Tahiti. A staid, conventional stockbroker until the age of 40, he suddenly abandons his wife and two children in middle-class London, escaping to Paris to begin living alone and painting, facing a new condition of poverty with steely will and lofty indifference. The book is very much about three women who love him, and Maugham stresses the perverse intensity of women's love, their desire to be mastered in particular, in a way almost impossible to openly write in print already by 1930. From another angle an eerie foreglimpse of the libertarian, romantically individualistic 1960s spirit. Right to the end unsure why "moon and sixpence". Perhaps I didn't read closely enough.
September 1st;
Saturday. London busstop ads attack Israel.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
