Our research institute recently moved out of the centre of Amsterdam. While I miss the lunch options we used to have, one of the benefits of the new location is the view. My office looks out on a lake (I’m lucky in that; the other sides of the building point at a train track and a construction zone) and quite a lot of land around it has been left to grow wild.
Looking out the window just now I saw a pheasant (!) crossing the road. There’s a shag drying its wings in the distance, a crow (or rook or raven — bearded, in any case) investigating a rubbish bin, and a magnificent goose surveying the lakeside. I should bring my bird guide to the office. (And until I do, no I don’t know what kind of goose it is. Would feed about four or five though is my estimate.)
Over the weekend I put together a rough-as-guts instrument rack. It’s just dowels drilled into a plank which in turn is screwed to the wall, but it does the job quite nicely:
To Dutch students starting out in Artificial Intelligence!
It’s going to be great fun, shaping their innocent beginning-programmer minds. The course is about half Prolog and half AI-as-search; and I’m completely In Charge. (There will be assistents for the lab sessions, we expect about 30-40 students so it’s a bit much for one person to give individual help.)
Anyone who has talked to me in the last six months will know that I’ve been a bit stressed about my prospects after graduation. The job market for programmers is depressed, and for recent philosophy-of-language graduates it’s nonexistent. Not being from the EU makes life even more difficult — indeed, for a while I was worried that I might have to leave the country even before my defence. All those problems look set to evaporate now, at least for another half-year. If I do a good job they might even want me back, who knows?
Here’s a nice setup. John Holbo and Belle Waring write a book about Plato: translations by Waring, commentary and illustrations by Holbo.1 They reserve e-publishing rights, so as well as the whole ink-and-paper business they can put it online, where you can read it in the surprisingly functional flash interface at issuu.com. You can download the pdf (with printing disabled). And in the final days before it goes to print, they’re asking for proofreading — and getting it.
Pretty neat. More details plus legalities plus why-they-did-it-that-way at the book site.
Notes:
The same John Holbo who writes Squid and Owl. Multi-talented, that man. [↪]
I’ve updated the page showing our rather excessive collection of musical instruments. Newly included are photos of the oud and guitar-lute, as well as long-overdue thanks. Also new to the site, a page just on the guitar-lute, which is a lovely but quite bizarre addition to our collection.
Small Beer press have an insane Buck a Book sale on. They have to clear out old stock to avoid having to pay for longterm storage — that must really suck given the state of the economy… So go help them out and score some great books really cheap! (I particularly recommend Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial.) The only thing stopping me from ordering everything is shipping costs (especially painful for hardbacks, dammit).
Olga had a conference in Lithuania, and found cheap tickets with a layover in Stockholm. She’s got family there, so she arranged for a weekend visit and managed to convince me to come along. Here are a few photos from the trip. If you don’t want the commentary, just check out the gallery; if you stay for the commentary, click through the photos for full-size and possibly-not-square versions.
This one comes from flatmate Ella, it happened to a friend of hers (not deliberately).
Choose a nice complicated mystery novel you haven’t read before. One where you’ll have to keep track of lots and lots of clues and remember who knows what when and so on.
Buy it as an audio book, with chapters as separate tracks.
Shuffle.
(B.S. Johnson wrote a book designed to be read this way, The Unfortunates. It was published with the chapters separately bound, in a box.)
Apparently my family don’t understand anything I write on this blog any more. This post isn’t going to help. The good news is, I’ve got a bundle of photos from Stockholm which I hope to put up sometime over the weekend. Travels in Scandinavia, that’s not geeky at all, right?
