Archive for the ‘books’ tag

The meme formerly known as the Chutry Experiment

Thursday 13th November, 2008 @ 3.53pm GMT Europe/London by Pandammonium

I see the meme formerly known as the Chutry Experiment is doing the rounds again. The instructions are more or less the same, but this time, you pick page 56 instead of 123, and the wording is slightly altered. The meme formerly known as The Chutry Experiment thusly states:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

It’s also an unordered list now, instead of an ordered one; to my mind, ordered lists are better than unordered lists for instructions, but there you go.

Anyway, the nearest book to me is Reichenbach’s Elements of Symbolic Logic, and the requisite sentence is:

There are also expressions of a mixed nature, containing both uninterpreted constants and free variables.

A very short one, by Reichenbach’s standards, and luckily, no mad symbols like some of the others on that page.

Incidentally, I have now met one of the authors of the book I used in the previous meme.

posted in Memes | Tags: books | No Comments »

Second Life

Thursday 14th September, 2006 @ 5.24pm BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

I’ve just finished a book, Wicker, today, which is set in the near future and has this computer game in it called Shadow World. It’s a virtual version of the world (or supported cities, at least). The other day, I discovered that there was a similar thing in the real world, Second Life, so naturally, I downloaded it. Of course, it was down when I was ready to play it, and when it came back up again, I had to install an update. The “Second Life Updater Window” is useless, because it does is tell me how much, in figures, it’s downloaded. I don’t care about that; I want to know how long it’s going to take, or at least, how much is left to go.

After it had finally downloaded and installed, I ran it, and it crashed twice or thrice. Grr. I ran it again, but I’d foolishly downloaded some updates for Windows, which needed a reboot to complete the process. Windows doesn’t seem to understand that when I mean restart later, I mean later, not quite soon and don’t forget to remind me when it is quite soon. So I had to quit the game then. I started again later on, and had been happily faffing about, making friends and such like, when the system came up with a million pop-up announcements to tell me I had to log off again in 10 minutes, and that the system would be down for 5 minutes. So I went to start it up just now, and I have to go through the whole rigmarole of downloading and installing an update again. Argh!

posted in Computing | Tags: books, games, Windows | 4 Comments »

Spanish novels

Sunday 12th March, 2006 @ 12.19pm GMT Europe/London by Pandammonium

I have a couple of books translated into Spanish from English, but what I really want is a book that was written in Spanish in the first place. I looked in a big bookshop in town yesterday, but they all seemed to be most depressing, all about war and misery. It’s all very well reading stuff in a foreign language to practice my reading skills, but if I’m not interested in the subject matter, there’s really no point. I ended up with a copy of Charlie y la fábrica de chocolate that C found. I’ll read that when I finish El curioso incidente del perro a medianoche, then maybe I’ll make a start on El hombre del traje de color castaño - that’s going to be much more complicated. I’m daunted.

I could really do with the Spanish versions of the likes of Mark Billingham, Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, Lee Child, Michael Crichton and so on, dagnammit! Anyone know of such Spanish authors?

posted in Art and literature, Romance languages | Tags: books | 6 Comments »

Trying to study…

Tuesday 17th May, 2005 @ 10.17am BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

When the cat sits on the book you’re trying to read and plays with the pen you’re trying to take notes with, it makes it a bit tricky to study.

posted in MA, Morphology | Tags: books, Dusty, studying | No Comments »

Reading Spanish

Monday 9th May, 2005 @ 11.33pm BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

My head is hurting; I can read no more Spanish tonight. I don’t know what’s worse, reading Stump or reading Spanish (Gramática de la lengua española by the Real Academia Española). I suppose the Spanish will get easier with practice. But do you know, the worst thing is, the book is one of those old, musty ones, and it’s making me sneeze! At least Stump is a brand new shiny one from the CUP shop.

That is not a compliment to Stump’s work, is it? Oh, well. He should have tried harder. It is my mission to improve upon his work!

Just not tonight.

posted in MA, Morphology, Romance languages | Tags: books, linguists, Spanish | No Comments »