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Diary of a B+ Grade Polymath ([personal profile] tcpip) wrote2009-02-05 12:23 pm

Love and Cosmology, Work Failures, Book Reviews

Last Sunday Rev. Dr. David Sammons, Visiting Professor of Unitarian Universalist Heritage & Ministry, Star King Ministry, gave his a presentation on "That Confusing Word Called 'Love'". He made an extension to what is commonly called "the Unitarian-Universalist trinity" of freedom, reason and tolerance - by extending it to 'honesty' and 'compassion' which he considered to the key features of the notion of love. After the service, I led the discussion for the Unitarian Philosophy Forum which had an excellent turnout for a discussion on Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and particularly its relationship to the scientific method. We made good use of the BBC programme Most of our Universe is Missing. I have since started writing a paper on the issue and discussion, but find myself sidetracked by holographic principle.

Life at VPAC hasn't been fun for our users of late with three hardware failures on one of our storage nodes in a two-week period. Having 14 drives fail due to a faulty LSI card in the space of six minutes can be sort of scary, especially when we have to restore over twenty million files and almost 8 terabytes of data. It has meant an extended outage on our supercomputers, however users have been most understanding. On a work related topic from some years ago, the proposal that Martin McGuire of ConnectIE and I put together to convert East Timor's ccTLD into a revenue-raising international telephone directory has been taken up; but for a commercial interest and not for East Timor.

When Ticonderoga Online restarted at the very end of last year a number of my book reviews were included; The Last Witchfinder (historical fiction, entertaining, well-written, informative), Hidden Empire and A Forest of Stars (plain-vanilla space opera, somewhat unimaginative) and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (typical Phillip K. Dick - which is good). Still have a small mountain of other books I've promised to review.

[identity profile] direwolf23.livejournal.com 2009-02-05 04:08 pm (UTC)(link)
I've always thought exploring the facts about space and physics gives us better insight into philosophical pursuits. ^.^ There's just so much left to learn and discover.

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2009-02-05 08:49 pm (UTC)(link)
Indeed. Once I cut down my PhD to the requisite word size (oh, only 10,000 words to go!) I'm thinking that I'll start a science degree.

Will probably follow one of my colleagues and do a double major in astronomy and computing.

(I have a long term plan of getting a PhD in social laws, one in the physical science and then one in the fine arts...)