cloudsoup

We didn’t get quite as far as Billings, Montana last year, when we visited Yellowstone last year. I had no idea tornadoes got up that far north.

There’s something about Drupal that makes me feel disinclined to post blog updates. Just one more page to hurdle before you’re into an edit box, perhaps that’s all it is.

So. WordPress again then

I haz it.

[Update] : Any invites I send out aren’t processed by Google immediately. In their usual charming way they explain they have lots of stamps to lick

[Update] : All invites gone

Dreamhost, excellent hosting company on the whole but I had a php cron job setup that worked fine from my browser but failed with strange error messages when run from the command line.

Could it be, I wondered, that the path to php I’d given in my cron job wasn’t the path to the version of php I was running on the website. And that was the problem. My website was running 5.x but from the command line I was running 4.x

A quick fix so that the cron job referenced the path to php 5:

30 14 * * * * /usr/local/php5/bin/php [path to my script]/writeHolidayArray.php

and everything worked fine.

PC World has what it calls a Collect@Store deal for some of its offers. When I tried to pick up a Toshiba A300-1bz laptop, it turned out that the only laptops the offer applies to are ex-display or refurbished. The Currys website says that: the PC World website doesn’t, which is sharp practice at least and I’d call it dishonest.

Complaining to PC World’s Customer Services was, of course, a huge waste of time; if they bother training their staff at all, they train them to stonewall potential customers.

The company has a history of being found guilty of misleading the public. The Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint that PC World was advertising a notebook that it couldn’t supply, which is somewhat similar the problem I had today – their Customer Service department agreed that there wasn’t a single retail outlet in the UK that had one of these laptops in stock as new; and again, PC World’s parent company was found guilty of mis-selling computer equipment after a case brought by the Trading Standards Authority in which secondhand laptops were sold as new.

PC World is in the bottom10 in a survey asking shoppers to name the worst high street shops in the UK, according to The Independent.

So I bought a better laptop elsewhwere, paying several hundred pounds more – the price was never my only concern – and I’ll never, ever buy anything at all from PC World, Dixons, or Currys again. I’d advise everyone  else not to deal with them while they do business in this way.

Here’s a useful observation: The Golden Ratio is roughly the same as the ratio between miles and kilometers. As successive terms in the Fibonacci sequence approximate the Golden Ratio, the sequence comes in handy for quick conversions.

Here are the first 20 terms:

Using the Fibonacci, we approximate 987 miles (F16) as 1597 km. Google’s conversion tells us that 987 miles equals 1,588 km.

Not bad, eh?

When Google went public, its IPO announced a intention to raise $2,718,28,183. The transcendental number e is, of course, roughly 2.71828183….

As we’re off to Denver shortly for a tour of the … what do you call the area … the Southwestern States? The Mountain States? Well, anyway, we’re probably going to be taking in bits of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona.

A couple of years ago two black bears ran right past us as we sat picnicking in the Shenandoah National Park, Virginia.

View Larger Map

And a few years earlier, I think we very nearly came across a mountain lion (cougar) when we climbed up to a fire watch tower in the Sierra Nevada, California:

View Larger Map

On the first part of the walk, before we started climbing up the rocks to the fire tower, we walked along a sandy path between the fir trees; on the way back down, there were large cat-paw prints in the sand that hadn’t been there before.

So, bears and a cougar on previous visits to the States. I’m wondering what we might encounter this time. Colorado’s a pretty wild State so I’m breaking the list up by category. First off, the Serpentes.

Venomous Snakes

Osage Copperhead

Western Rattlesnake

Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnake

Western Pygmy Rattlesnake

Non-venomous snakes

New Mexican Blind Snake

Glossy Snake

E. Yellow Bellied Racer

Prairie Ringneck Snake

Great Plains Ratsnake

Plains Hognose Snake

Texas Nightsnake

Common Kingsnake

Milk Snake

Green Snake

W. Coachwhip

Northern Watersnake

Bullsnake/Gophersnake

Texas Longnose Snake

W. Ground Snake

S.W. Black-headed Snake

W. Blackneck Garter Snake

Texas Brown Snake

Lined Snake

Rubber Boa

I saw the original of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer‘, (‘The wanderer above the sea of fog’), or a painting very like it, several years ago, in a travelling exhibition in Edinburgh titled, ‘The Romantic Spirit in German Art’ (which I’d misread as, ‘The Romantic Shirt in German Art”).

This particular Romantic Shirt painting by Friedrich is used on the front cover of my battered old copy of ‘Ecce Homo‘, Nietzsche’s collection of engagingly barmy essays published shortly before his permanent breakdown and the final 10 or 11 years of silence from him, which I bought and tried to read long ago in a bout of moody teenage autodidacticism. I understood … not very much of Nietzsche’s excited ranting but I was quite taken with his little aphorisms and strange snippets of advice. I very much concur with his recommendation about walking in the open air, in the mountains:

Remain seated as little as possible … put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open to the accompaniment of free bodily movement..all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking

A few weeks ago, for example, walking on the fells (the hills) of the Cumbrian Lake District, Helen and I got into a conversation about the Mind and Brain, during which she produced the best knock-down case against epiphenomenalism I’ve ever heard.

Every year, Helen teaches a new intake of more-or-less interested pupils a little about the philosophy of consciousness and the Mind, taking them on a quick tour of dualism, monism, eliminative materialism, qualia and the other members of the exotic bestiary. Although the course module, Freewill and Determinism, contributes relatively little to the final grade, the cleverer students, who will almost never have come across the debates and ideas before, find it fascinating.

One of the supposed explanations of Mind, mental states, and mental events is Epiphenomenalism, the position that mental events are not causal. Although this is a rather improbable claim on the face of it, it has attracted some support because it tries to get around the problem of dualism by denying mental events the capacity to effect behaviour. The commonest brief analogy to help people think about the idea is to liken mental events’ relationship with behavior to the froth on waves. The notion has received a little fillip in recent years following the experiments by Libet which have been taken by some to imply that unconscious neuronal activity precedes apparently volitional acts that experimental subjects believed had been consciously inititiated.

Helen’s objection points out, quite simply, that we are the products of evolution and although there might well exist several, or many, human characteristics that are spandrels, in the accidental, circumstantial, contingent sense that Stephen Jay Gould argued for, and against which Dan Dennet took issue, it would be nonsensical to suggest that consciousness could be such a non-adaptation, needing no explanation. Yet if consciousness – Mind – the sense of volition – is purely epiphenomenal then it could never have been selected for through Natural Selection because its existence or otherwise would have no phenotypic effect which could be operated upon by the forces of evolution.

I haven’t read anyone else make this point although it seems very clear and irrefutable.

So, Friday the GP told me I did have rheumatoid arthritis after all … after a practice nurse told me over the phone my blood test had been negative for the rheumatoid factor (RhF) antibody. In fact I have a high RhF measure. My appointment with a consultant rheumatologist should be dropping through the letterbox within the next two weeks then it’ll be a long decline into severe pain, disability, joint deformity and early death.

If I’m unlucky.

If I’m lucky, my RA will be manageable, though not curable, and I will have, as they say, many years of active life ahead of me; which is an improvement, of course, on my previous expectations. Of course, if I was even luckier i wouldn’t have RA at all. 1% of the population, with a 3:1 female to male ratio and I manage to get it?

I just noticed a paper on PubMed suggesting a link between Toxoplasma Gondii and RA so maybe I can blame the cats.

Rheumatoid Arthritis: let’s blame the cat

I’m setting up a new blog to indulge my self-pity, at Rheumatoidia.