The weblog of Matthew Walker: MatthewWalker.net.nz, Otautahi, Aotearoa / Christchurch, New Zealand  
I believe in God,
only I spell it Nature.
— Frank Lloyd Wright

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  • Key: past three months [all time]
  • Word count: 1394 [172615]
  • Online for: 2268 days
  • Total posts: 10 [1357]
  • Posts / day: 0.12 [0.60]
  • Words / post: 139 [127]
  • Words / day: 17 [76]
  • Total comments: 5 [1050]
  • Comments / post: 0.50 [0.77]

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  • Wednesday, 29 November 2006

    • The lack of faith community

      A survey by the British Humanist Association discovers that most British are actually humanists.

      It makes the point that simply surveying people and asking what religion they are is not a good way of discovering what percentage of the population are religious. I know a number of people who would respond to that question with a religion who (in my view) are not actually religious in any meaningful sense. I think to many people it is much like asking what country you are from — it's a fact of history rather than a choice.

      So why don't we hear more of them? Because humanists don't join "communities" with other humanists. They just get on with their lives, try to behave morally as best they can, and pay attention as science makes new discoveries.

      Posted by Matthew at 11:17:55 PM | Permanent link | Comments (4) | Email Matthew | Society / community | Back to top

    • More words

      • revenant
        Someone who returns after death as a ghost. The root is the same as for revenue: revenir, to return.
      • amuse bouche
        A small serving before the meal or between courses (often a single mouthful). This word is interesting as it has two mouths. Firstly, 'bouche' is French for mouth. Secondly, although the words 'museum' and 'music' derive from the Greek Muses, 'muse' and 'amuse' do not. Rather they come from the Latin 'musum' for muzzle.
      • akimbo
        hands on hips and elbows bent outwards — generally arms akimbo, but also be applied to legs. 'bo' derives from 'bow', to bend. But nobody knows who Kim is.

       

      Posted by Matthew at 8:54:46 AM | Permanent link | Comments (1) | Email Matthew | Books / writing | Back to top

  • Saturday, 25 November 2006

    • Craptacularity

      Listening to Dr. Minsky took me back to the robot novels of Asimov (indeed, he collaborated with Asimov on one of them). Who, in this era of internet-obsession, bothers to keep on dreaming about Jetsons-style home robots or intelligences outside of our PCs? Minsky does. And he blames our failure to invent such things on a number of bugaboos: the declining numbers of American students pursuing basic research (for which he cites no statistics, but I've written about it previously, here), the death of the big private labs (like Bell labs) and the craptacularity of modern programming languages. ("All AI researchers program in LISP, [and have for decades]" he asserts.)

      Posted by Matthew at 9:23:52 AM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | Email Matthew | Books / writing | Internet / Computers | Back to top

    • Perversions of the natural order

      This is the term for a reinsurance company that seeks reinsurance from an other reinsurance company. A reinsurance company is a company that insures insurance companies. The risk here is that a reinsurance company may actually end up insuring itself. This is called a reinsurance spiral. According to Wikipedia,

      In the 1980s, the London market was badly affected by the intentional creation of reinsurance spirals, which concentrated risks into the hands of a few reinsurance syndicates. A series of catastrophic losses in the late 1980s bankrupted these syndicates causing many ceding insurance companies to lose their effective coverage.

      I discovered these arcana while reading about Swiss Re's environmental policies.

      I then went and read about pseudocopulation at SciAm, which is a technique that male crayfish use to establish dominance.

      Posted by Matthew at 9:08:44 AM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | Email Matthew | Books / writing | Science | Back to top

  • Thursday, 23 November 2006

  • Wednesday, 8 November 2006

    • Perfumes honouring scientists

      Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds, but with a delicate floral hint.
      Posted by Matthew at 10:06:26 PM | Permanent link | Comments (2) | Email Matthew | Back to top

    • Vampires in New England

      The New England vampire belief in based on a folk interpretation of the physical appearance of the tuberculosis victim and the transmission of tuberculosis. As the name consumption implies, the disease caused sufferers to "waste away" and "lose flesh," despite the fact that they remained active, desirous of sustenance, and maintained a fierce will to live. This dichotomy of desire and "wasting away" is reflected in the vampire folk belief: The vampire's desire for "food" forces it to feed off living relatives, who suffer a similar "wasting away." The vampire folklore tradition is also consistent with modern knowledge of the transmission of tuberculosis.

      The method of dispatching a vampire, also known as an apotropaic remedy, centers around the destruction of the vampire's body. In the New England folklore, if blood is found in the heart of the exhumed vampire, the apotropaic remedy was to burn the heart, in the process ridding the family of the vampire's actions. Most historic accounts indicate that upon exhuming the vampire, the body was found undecomposed and that blood was present in the heart. Barber's examination of the vampire belief in Europe indicates that the appearance of a vampire in the grave (i.e., bloating, hair and fingernails growing after death, the evidence of "blood" in the heart and chest) is attributable to the process of postmortem
      decomposition.

      In the present case, however, the action is focused on the skeletal remains. Taphonomically, the physical arrangement of the skeletal remains in the grave indicates that no soft tissue had been present at the time of rearrangement; no heart remained in the body. We hypothesize that, in the absence of a heart to be burned, the apotropaic remedy was the place the bones in a "skull and crossbones" arrangement. In support of this hypothesis, we note that decapitation was a common European method of dispatching a dead vampire, and that the Celts and Neolithic Egyptians were known to separate the head from the body, supposedly to prevent the dead from doing harm.

      Posted by Matthew at 5:45:19 PM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | Email Matthew | Back to top

Recent photographs

Smallness
Ocelot
Black
Stina and square
Royal spoonbills
Bachelor's button
Mimulus repens
Sea primrose
Saltmarsh ribbonwood
Eelgrass
Mudsnail
Selliera and glasswort