Little things annoy me that nobody else in the world could possibly care about. One of them is E-Bay's message at the end of every sale: "You have bid £3.40 for the item. Hope you win". Who hopes I win? E-Bay the corporation? The browser? Clearly I'm the only one inferring meaning here, so maybe I mean it, but I'm not …

Read More

My basic education included 11 years of French classes, and I don't know any more French than 'le chat'. Those lessons could hardly have failed harder in Britain's schools. I recall the counting in Maths, and most people can square something, and understand what, roughly, Maths can do. I still read well, so evidently …

Read More

1 When you're eating bacon... 2 3 4 I don't each bacon. 5 6 7 Right, but when someone eats bacon... I find this sort of thing happening routinely. I suspect everyone else feels more comfortable with waiting for the meaning of a sentence to emerge later. Whatever happened to saying 'one', as short for 'someone'? It …

Read More

We're not all in power, by definition. (Ricky Gervais) Pouring the rest of my soup into a Tupperware container, my girlfriend-at-the-time asked me to stop. "That won't fit", she said. "Obviously it will", I replied, pointing to the remainder of the pot. And it did, with a millimetre to spare. "Oh, you're one of those …

Read More

I like half-listening to brainless YouTube videos. A good chunk of people complaining about the world dumbing with YouTube click-bait no doubt saw the kind of nonsense I watch and thought 'the BBC showed much more enlightening and informative content than this modern drivel'. This comparison doesn't work. We shouldn't …

Read More

Native English speakers commonly muck-up every sentence thrown at them in a way one doesn't normally find with Spaniards, Serbs, Finnish, or Germans. This cannot come from the same reasons that few Europeans can pronounce Cantonese words - that we simply don't have those sounds. We have 'con', but cannot say 'pivo'. …

Read More

The most efficacious piece of Philosophy written this century was buried in a software licensing agreement, and the Philosophy faculties of every major university have missed it. While clicking 'I agree', to all those licences, everyone will have come across this piece at some point. 1## Preamble 2 3The GNU General …

Read More

I have a personal rule concerning arguments. I accept only two. I've made this a tight habit. If anyone protests (as they have) that they didn't put forward their strongest argument at the start, then I say this indicates a waste of time even more. Why put forward bad reasons, if you have good ones? This saves time, …

Read More

A group of Victorian gentlemen called the 'Eaterateri' wandered various Scottish restaurants, trying all they could. The now well-known Adam Smith and David Hume regularly talked in the group about their ideas. I don't know if Hume felt bold enough to speak about Atheism, but Adam Smith may well have developed those …

Read More

Any time I hear a patronizing sneer towards hopeful political thinking, I imagine just how insane representative democracy must have sounded when it first reached circulation. Oh young one! So you think you have a fun idea to bring down the king. God himself has ordained that he rule, but you disagree. And instead of a …

Read More