Richard Murgatroyd

Author: murgy

  • My So-called Career

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    murgy

    In the 1967 science fiction horror film Quatermass and the Pit, the ambitious Colonel Breen complains to Quatermass that this episode won’t help his career. The professor replies acidically: “I’ve never had a career. Only work”. That’s me. My career is something that’s just happened to me, changing only when I’ve had a chance to…

  • Books I Have Read

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    murgy

    Not every book I’ve ever written, but starting from a few years ago. And some of these took years – I’m a slow reader.     Format Rating (1=terrible, 10=brilliant) Homo Faber (German!) Max Frisch Blue fire 5 The Blind Watchmaker Richard Dawkins Paperback 7 The God Delusion Richard Dawkins Paperback 6 The End Of…

  • Language

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    murgy

    A list of things that annoy me in English usage. Not that I’m a pedant – that would make me a hypocrite because I make as many errors as anyone – but there are things that just irritate me. This list started an article by Jeremy Butterfield in The Guardian weekly 10/4/15: (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/03/bad-language-bugs-me) Plus this: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170904-how-americanisms-are-killing-the-english-language…

  • Tribalism

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    murgy

    Alluded to in one of Laurie Taylor’s podcasts (Ignorance, 15/7/20) where a Michael Klinsmann talks about the Apollonian (more or less rational, individual) way of thinking & deciding vs the Dionysian (group belief or tribalism). V interesting. I disagreed completely with the American Woman Lindsay though, who says a problem (more with corporations than politicians…

  • Science

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    murgy

    Prompted by listening to a Radio 4 (OK that’s stretching “popular” a bit) drama series called Bitter Pill I’m struck by the sad but hilarious inattention to any of the reality of drug development.  Partly excused by being set 10 years in the future but it’s hard to know where to start: what’s the objective…

  • UK Constitution

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    murgy

    Brexit (don’t laugh) and the collapse of trust in democracy – a comparison between British chaos and Swiss glacial consensus.  Thus (from my extensive list of Things That Are Obvious to me), the need for constitutional reform in the UK.  But consider this: the British (non-) constitution is a perfectly self-sustaining system: its very nature…

  • Stuff

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    murgy

    Consensus Something which all parties accept, but which no individual does OR something to which everyone agrees but with which no-one does Probability and Discontinuity Inability (or refusal) to understand a cumulative probability distribution. See also Dawkins on The Tyranny of The Discontinuous Mind. Further example: the (terrible) Peter Fleming book, The Death Of Homo Economicus (“capitalism…

  • God and Religion

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    murgy

    Oolon Murgatroyd’s demonstration of the probability of a deity Religion is a largely destructive force, used as a cover for tribalismReligion perpetuates itself through dependence on a lack of evidence i.e. faith and on belief in purely received knowledge – neither of which may be challenged thus absenting itself from the possibility of disproof Inspired…

  • Web software

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    murgy

    I’m gradually getting to know this new WordPress software after several hours of struggle. I more-or-less got to know the previous version but now it seems not to work any more, so I’m going to copy some of it here. Navigation is still a total black box – I’ve finally worked out how to create…

  • Motorcycles

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    murgy

    Motorcycles: are they really dangerous, and more dangerous than, say, horses or the sides or slopes of mountains?  Why do so many miss out on trying the sheer joy of riding a fast motorcycle around a twisting road (or track) because they think only of the risk?  Without naming names, I now know of two…