I have a friend who, every 18 months or so, tries to read James Joyce’s Ulysses. And each time he gets about 100 pages in and ends up throwing it across the room in disgust. He even persuaded me to try reading it some time - I think he wanted confirmation that he wasn’t being an idiot - so I bought myself a copy. I freely admit I didn’t even get a quarter as far as he did before putting the horrid thing on ebay, vowing never again to have it in the house. I’m assured it is a work of genius, but I just found it long-winded, tedious and pointless. Perhaps I have no soul. Or perhaps we are both idiots.
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It would certainly appear so.
In Scott Huse’s book The Collapse of Evolution, Darwin is quoted as saying:
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
– Darwin 1872
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Good news about Global Warming for once.
Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley university has begun a new study into global temperatures, using a much larger station network than any other study, and crucially they will make available all their data and source code to anyone who wants it. It’s very early days, but they have a website where the curious can get some additional information about the project. The site is here: http://www.berkeleyearth.org/.
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