Epistemology Sausages, and science 6 Dec 2009 One should not see, goes the old saw, laws or sausages being made. This is also true of science, for a reason. Before something is published, scientists argue, insult each other, discuss things in casual ways and use unclear jargon and terminology that looks like, to an outsider who is… Read More
Administrative Interlude of peace and love 13 Feb 2008 Have you ever noticed that there are occasionally periods in which things just work, particularly with computers? I find that there is a confluence of coherence about every four years. I’m not sure if it’s just because the vendors – the Evil Apple Empire, or Micro$oft, whoever – recognises that… Read More
Humor Duck Family Tree Shows Hybridisation 9 Feb 2009 I think Disney has a lot to answer for with all this miscegenation. Read More
That joke was old when done there. The best ones are really old. I think that goes back to “1066 and all that”.
I’m reminded of a panel in the comic “The wizard of Id” where the king, on being informed that the peasants are revolting retorts “You can say that again”
It’s that old, is it? I first encountered it in Robert Manson Myers’s From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf (1951), in which we learn “…when Wycliff [of Dover] translated the Old Testament into the New, he was condemned as hereditary and burned as a steak. Following his death several “University Wits” instigated the so-called Pedant’s Revolt, upon which occasion Henry VI Part III made his astute observation: “The pedants are revolting.” An excellent book if you like that sort of thing. Still in print the last time I looked. Oh, BTW: “Chief among medevil dramatists was Mahatma Dante, whose Divine Comedy has become the favorite farce of all time. … He stood with one foot in the Muddle Ages, while with the other he hailed the dawn of a new day.”
Where were all these excellent texts when I was an undergraduate? Or are they the texts that undergraduate essayists write?