(no subject)

I have the cheap pair of glasses, but with the recent prescription. Now I just have to worry if the weirdness is from having new glasses, or if they are quite right. (Can anyone suggest anything to reassure me?)

The promotional giveaway with them was a strange round gummy sweet (embedded in a plastic square), with the design of an eye? Who thought of that? It's fairly obvious, but it was rather squick biting into it! On the other hand, I'm advertising them.

(no subject)

One of the thoughts about different aspects of atheist belief is that the natural one is not believing "God exists", but some people do believe something like "If He does exist, He's a bastard."

But it occurred to me, that's basically the point of the Northern Lights trilogy. The central message is "God doesn't exist because he's a bastard". If that sounds confusing, well, exactly, that's why the message the books send seems to be confusing :)

It's not a wrong way to go about it. Narnia could be described as partly carrying the message "God *does* exist because he's nice," and does it very well indeed. Using God's metaphorical absence as a metaphor for his literal absence is a good metaphor -- I can see if the books had clicked for me more, it might be quite exciting, if instead of having no unifying message, atheism was a crusade against an uncaring God and a malicious power-hungry arch-angel. Yay!

For that matter, in some sense, it's a real argument: if you say "If God were running the world, I don't like it," you might get from there to "then He isn't," via "if he's not doing it right, he's not God or not there".

But Pullman's presentation didn't really work for me, and so all the flaws in the presentation continued to bother me.

Contrariwise, sometimes people do over-seize on the second aspect of atheism, especially if they're used to their religion being the default and assume an atheist *is* not someone factually thinking God doesn't exist, but someone morally choosing not to follow Him.

Follow-ups: Pasta

* I did some more brief cooking experiments. Coating raw spaghetti in oil or pesto didn't seem to make any difference.

* Any spaghetti can be brought into the mouth with a lip-over-lip and tongue action. Cooked spaghetti can be brought into the mouth keeping the mouth, cheeks, tongue and lips entirely stationary but pursed, and sucking. (It's quite distinctive, it goes slitherslitherfast and then the end waves forlornly and then smack.)

* But even dipped in oil, cooked spaghetti didn't seem to be sucked in. However, this is far from conclusive -- there's nothing to say the coating is enough to make the friction of the raw and cooked spaghetti strands the same. Or, for instance, perhaps raw spaghetti has a rough surface you can't make a good seal on.

* If anyone wants to settle this, the open questions are still:

1. An air-pressure explanation of why sucking a floppy object would work. (Discussion still going on in the first post, Lisa had thoughts I've yet to respond to.)
2. Are we agreed you can suck cooked spaghetti solely by air pressure, without any pushing from the lips and tongue?
3. Is the matter of not sucking raw spaghetti its friction, or its compressibility or what? This ought to be obvious, I'm sure, but I don't feel concluded yet.

Followup: The King's Breakfast

At poohsoc last week I got to examine the songbook I mentioned before.

* I think it's The Pooh Song Book, comprising "The Hums of Pooh", "The King's Breakfast", and fourteen songs from "When We Were Very Young".

* IIRC, the music was written to Milne's words by H. Simon-Fraser, but I might have got that completely wrong.

* However, the essay in question was, IIRC, my Milne himself, and the professors in it (IIUC) were fictional. However, what I'd missed in the hurly-burly of the first meeting was the conclusion, which states the authorial intent, being that (a) certain artistic liberties were taken, however, (b) the cow was sent to bed in the morning because she has frolicked irresponsibly on the King's Buttercups.

* Authorial intent isn't always definitive. There's still questions you can consider (like, how much weight do you put in these people's behaviour, who, if anyone, acts reasonably, and is this a good model to present to children -- probably so, but if so, why?)

* But in this case, I'm willing to accept it. It's certainly consistent, and it also explains why the cow is suspiciously sulky at being asked for milk. So I think this knowledge isn't necessary -- simply trusting that the events can be taken at face value is fine, but I think this interpretation (likely retroactive it may be) adds to rather than detracts from your understanding, in that it resolves questions comfortably, consistent with both the facts and the tone of the poem, without raising any more.