Posted by: cwlh on: 28/10/2006
I spent three hours this afternoon looking at human bodies (clothed) and realised that I have completely underestimated the number of ways one could walk, stand and bow. I sing, and this afternoon attended a master class on the topic of walking on and off stage with one’s accompanist.
The rules are basically simple: regardless [...]
Posted by: cwlh on: 26/10/2006
I know, I know, but I still want to share the link to Josh Parsons’ home page. I found it by the normal method of leaping randomly from tussock to tussock through the Internet’s hyperspace and I’ve had so much fun this evening playing with the Vorld Vide Wittgenstein – the Tractatus Generator. This delightful [...]
Posted by: cwlh on: 23/10/2006
I’m just back from my evening stroll. Some evenings I wander through the park and wonder about dog owners, other evenings I wander into the town centre and wonder about nightclub customers. Tonight, the latter.
There is a bookshop chain (think of a sort of physical manifestation of Amazon) in Canada called Chapters and some years [...]
Posted by: cwlh on: 22/10/2006
While away from home recently I needed something to read in bed and bought a copy of Great English Essays from Bacon to Chesterton edited by Bob Blaisdell. Here are the great bloggers of their day: Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Robert [...]
Posted by: cwlh on: 21/10/2006
There are several excellent second-hand bookshops here in Ottawa. Perhaps the best is a physically tiny shop standing next to the Bytown cinema (Ottawa used to be called Bytown after Colonel John By. He constructed the canal from Ottawa to Kingston to allow supplies to get to the troops in Kingston during the war of [...]
Posted by: cwlh on: 14/10/2006
This is the second post I’ve made about an article in the London Review of Books. The issue that arrived in Ottawa yesterday is dated 21st September 2006 so I suppose it was dispatched from London by sailing ship before being put onto a dog sledge in Quebec City for the trip up river.
Anyway, [...]
Posted by: cwlh on: 08/10/2006
Walking through the park yesterday evening I was discussing the state of elementary mathematics education (up to the end of secondary school). A rough calculation indicates that, when a student enters the infants’ school at the age of five, about 1400 hours of mathematics education lies ahead of her before she leaves high school. That’s [...]
Posted by: cwlh on: 07/10/2006
As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I am apparently to become a grandfather for the first time next month. While others have been considering cots, clothing and misshapen animals, I have been contemplating the new family member’s library. It would certainly be impolitic to shower someone whose interests are unknown with “improving books” (whatever [...]
Posted by: cwlh on: 01/10/2006
It’s a very simplified picture but most subjects can be understood at at least three levels (let’s call them alpha, beta and gamma) and I am becoming increasingly convinced that much of the mischief in the world, including many of the (religious) wars, is caused by people with alpha understanding talking to gammas with the [...]
