Matt Hellige / blog

Alexandre Borovik:

Certainly, concepts of infinity have provoked much 'metaphysical' reflection in terms of our place in the universe, our finitude, our relation to something greater. And it was precisely this that Wittgenstein warned philosophers about. He had a strong mystical streak himself, indicated by his love of Tolstoy, but he thought it completely wrong to approach this dimension through metaphysical commentary on mathematical treatments of the infinite. All that was gas.

"(Note: if you are a physicist, your mind is of a different sort. I shall address your psychology on another day.)"

And I love quines almost as much as I love quine-lovers.

HAHAHAHAHA

Well, related to my last post, there's always Dawkins. It's pretty nice, and this is very generous of him:

For better or worse, ours is historically a Christian culture, and children who grow up ignorant of biblical literature are diminished, unable to take literary allusions, actually impoverished. I am no lover of Christianity, and I loathe the annual orgy of waste and reckless reciprocal spending, but I must say I'd rather wish you "Happy Christmas" than "Happy Holiday Season".

On the other hand, I doubt I'll be wishing anyone a good Newtonmas this year...

What? Shouldn't that have been the word of the year in, like, 2001??

So everybody's talking about Android. I was watching this launch video, and was not particularly surprised to see my old friend Brian Swetland at about 1:25:

Go Brian! As soon as they mentioned Danger, I wondered whether he was involved... Anyway, it looks like a nice platform. I spent a few minutes playing with it yesterday, trying to get a Scala program running on the emulator. It didn't work, but it turns out this exposed a bug in the Scala compiler, and now it works. Neat! I doubt I'll suddenly get involved in mobile software, but still this is cool, and if I had an easy way to do it, I'd probably write a few things for my phone.