I’ve been continuing to put a lot of time into Quill, a build system for Tcl software projects (and so not into my Clojure project). I’ve gotten two significant pieces of feedback about Quill so far. One fellow mentioned that he’d like to try it, but Quill requires that you be using TCL v8.6, and he’s still using TCL v8.5 (which is not at all unreasonable). Consequently, my focus for Quill 0.2.0 is making Quill work with whatever version of... Read more
“Byker Hill” is an English folk song about coal miners in Newcastle; and not coincidentally, my eldest came to me a couple of days ago and asked if I’d buy a particular recording of it for him. That recording is by a group called the Cottars, of which I know nothing except that they do a really good “Byker Hill”: It’s sung to several tunes, the but the one I first encountered is a rather frenetic folk-rock version with klezmer... Read more
Being an absolute ruler today was not as simple as people thought. At least, it was not simple if your ambitions included being an absolute ruler tomorrow. — Terry Pratchett, Going Postal (On Lord Vetinari’s philosophy of government.) Read more
Recently I re-read Jack McDevitt’s “Alex Benedict” series, which begins with A Talent For War and continues through four more volumes to Firebird, with Coming Home due this fall. Alex Benedict is an antiques dealer on the planet Rimway about 9,000 years in our future. 9,000 years is a long time, ample opportunity to accrue just oodles of lost civilizations, abandoned space stations, derelict space ships, and similar archaeological treasures, and they are all out there just waiting for an... Read more
One of my friends at Patheos, Rebecca Hamilton, recently wrote a post about the monstrous actions of the Islamic State in the Middle East, and noted that she prayed for the conversion of the Muslims. Someone commented on this, to another Patheos blogger, I could barely get past “I prayed for the conversion of the Muslims”, a statement as oppressive as anything Isis has done. The comment stuck in my head. I wonder what the commenter thinks “the conversion of... Read more
We’re blogging through St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae, sometimes called his Shorter Summa. Find the previous posts here. Now Thomas moves on to one of the fundamental notions of classic theism: the divine simplicity. A similar course of reasoning clearly shows that the first mover must be simple. For any composite being must contain two factors that are related to each other as potency to act. But in the first mover, which is altogether immobile, all combination of potency and act is impossible,... Read more
In last Tuesday’s post I referred to an image with superimposed text as a “meme”, and one commenter justly took issue with that. He said, Well, as long as we on the subject… 🙂 I object to calling a slogan-based statement combined with a pretty picture a “meme”. It may be *intended* to become a “meme”, but it ain’t yet. So….what is a meme, anyway? I first encountered the term in the pages of Douglas Hofstadter’s book Metamagical Themas, a... Read more
When you’re writing a game based around a game world of some kind, be it a text adventure like Zork, an action adventure like The Legend of Zelda, or any number of other games, there’s stuff your game needs to remember. A lot of it has to do with the player: where is he, how much health does he have, does he have the Iron Mitts of Cooking that let him invade and conquer the Iron Chef Temple of Cuisine?... Read more
Pray for us. Read more
Apropos of absolutely nothing, here’s a track from one of the stranger albums in my collection: The Fury of the Aquabats, by a mod/ska band with a superhero fascination. Believe it or not, this was my eldest’s favorite album when he was little. This particular song is about—wait for it—fast food chicken restaurants. But it’s upbeat and happy! And then (why not) here are a couple of more from the same album. First, a horrifying tale of being “Attacked by... Read more
Cry 'Woof'
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