Cheesy title, I'm aware, but Montreal just got something like 30-60 cm of snow, depending on which weather report you read, and it's gorgeous.
I live on the 26th floor of my apartment building and from up there it's a bit difficult to see just how much snow we got. I get to the street level this morning and I see snow banks higher than my waist. I don't remember having this much snow since I was in primary school, and I was smaller then so my memories might be playing tricks on me.
Someone at work commented that, one night, she got into a long rambling discussion about the intersection between art and science. I said that art and science don't intersect, and she said she disagreed.
It's possible that there is a disagreement over terminology. When one says that art and science "intersect" I have in my mind some kind of act that combines the two, i.e. discovering some objectively reproducible feature of the universe by painting a nice picture would count as an intersection between art and science because by doing one, you're doing the other.
I went to my friend Neil's bachelor party last Saturday (July 28th). I met the group at the Saint-Sulpice around 2:30pm and I didn't leave till 10:20pm or so. It was a fun day.
It ended up being a kind of a mini pub crawl, and one of the places we ended up was Foufounnes Electriques, a punk bar on Saint-Catherine Street. I had been in there only once before but it was only now that I actually noticed the decor and ambiance.
Evelyn's birthday passed a few months ago. We were at a bar with her friends and I somehow got into a discussion with some guy about the nature of seeing green.
I'm sure the thought has run though many people's heads in some form or another. It basically goes like this: what if your green is not my green? Ignoring colour-blindness, when I look at the grass I register it as "green" and so do you. We are both, of course, able to verbalize this, but there's no way to tell if we're really seeing the same "green". What if "green" to you is really what I consider to be "red"? There'd be no way of knowing - you'd still call it "green", it's still the colour we both associate with grass, etc.
At the moment I'm using blosxom to generate this blog. I'm using blosxom for the following reasons:
the HTML is completely under my control.
there is no database or PHP required.
the codebase is tiny, which means I have a better chance of fixing whatever problems crop up and also of integrating it into my site.
I'm using Markdown to write this blog entry. I've converted all my other entries to use Markdown as well. Markdown is cool.
One of the annoying things about Blosxom (and perhaps other blogging tools) is the need to write the entries in HTML. Now, I have nothing against HTML and, as I've mentioned before, I insist on having full control over the HTML that gets used on my site, especially for layout purposes. But for writing actual text, I find the markup a bit tedious, especially since I always end up using the same tags over and over again.
Several months back I won a free gliding session with Vol Recreatif in a raffle. My natural laziness, combined with my nervousness about heights, combined with the fact that gliding is only fun if you have good weather, meant that I only managed to get myself to the airfield this past Saturday with the help of a friend of mine who actually has a car.
English spelling is notoriously...arbitrary. Any and all attempts to pin down a spelling rule will be met with at least six different exceptions - and you can be sure that the exceptions will be words that you will actually want to use. A study in English spelling is basically a study in evolutionary history. It's a study of various French invasions and vowel shifts. And, most of all, it's an exercise in brute memorization.
I have strong opinions on certain topics, but unlike some people I know, I try to justify my opinions (see, for example, my philosophy page). Whether I succeed or not is another matter, but I think that the attempt at justification deserves at least some credit. And I've been known to change my mind if I'm convinced I'm wrong.
So I've finally gotten a blog. They've only been around for, what? Ten years? I guess I'm not a bandwagon jumper.
Lately though, there've been a couple of instance where a) I've had an opinion that I wanted to share with the world and b) I didn't feel like writing a full-blown essay to express it. I guess this is where a blog fits the bill.