It may come as a surprise to some people, but I actually remember bits and pieces of the physics that I learnt at university. This fact is actually recognised by the BBC. (There’s every chance that page will change within the next week, so here’s a copy.)

Off to the (soon-to-be-)in-laws for lunch and then down to my parents. ISTR my father claiming to now have broadband and maybe even a wireless network, so perhaps civilisation isn’t put on hold this year.

Hope anyone reading this (yes, you, you know who you are) has a good Christmas. Eat too much, drink too much, argue with your family, play games you never play the rest of the year, watch too much telly, rip open presents in a fever even though you’re 99% certain it’s a book you already own. Ah.

The Bill has in the last few years totally abandoned all pretence of being a realistic depiction of the police. And once us old time viewers get over that change it’s become very, very fun.

And the world weary Inspector Gina Gold would be a great creation in any programme.

Um, that’s it. No further point to this post.

The percentage of users who report using pop-up or ad-blocking software increased from 26% in April 2003 to 69% in September 2004

Most Hated Advertising - Jakob Nielsen reporting on research carried out into online advertising.

That’s a lot of pop-up blockers. Most of those will only be blocking pop-ups created at the onload and onunload events, they will permit popups created via onclick and onsubmit and also new windows launched via the target attribute. But some will be more aggressive pop-up blockers that block all pop-ups. I have Norton Internet Security installed and that falls into the latter category.

The new menace is DHTML effects that position a layer above a web page. It has all the same negative effects as a pop-up but is much harder to detect and block.

“He talks to himself sometimes because he’s the only one who understands what he’s saying.”

So without googling, where’s that from?

Funny word isn’t it. Veritable. A sort of emphatic true. But if I’d called this blog Veritable Things it wouldn’t have had the same ring to it.

Anyway, there’s a banner up in the high street advertising a “Veritable French Market” that’s coming to “West - Norwood” (sic) tomorrow. I suppose that distinguishes it from all the “sort of, but not really” french markets?

You are a Sceptic.

Philosophical skepticism originated in ancient Greek philosophy. One of its first proponents was Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360-275 B.C.), who travelled and studied as far as India, and propounded the adoption of ‘practical skepticism. Subsequently, in the ‘New Academy’ Arcesilaos (c. 315-241 B.C.) and Carneades (c. 213-129 B.C.) developed more theoretical perspectives, whereby conceptions of absolute truth and falsity were refuted. Carneades criticised the views of the Dogmatists, especially supporters of Stoicism, asserting that absolute certainty of knowledge is impossible. Sextus Empiricus (c. A.D. 200), the main authority for Greek skepticism, developed the position further, incorporating aspects of empiricism into the basis for asserting knowledge.

Greek skeptics criticised the Stoics, accusing them of dogmatism. For the skeptics, the logical mode of argument was untenable, as it relied on propositions which could not be said to be either true or false without relying on further propositions. This was the argument of infinite regress, whereby every proposition must rely on other propositions in order to maintain its validity. In addition, the skeptics argued that two propositions could not rely on each other, as this would create a circular argument (as p implies q and q implies p). For the skeptics logic was thus an inadequate measure of truth which could create as many problems as it claimed to have solved. Truth was not, however, necessarily unobtainable, but rather an idea which did not yet exist in a pure form. Although skepticism was accused of denying the possibility of truth, in actual fact it appears to have mainly been a critical school which merely claimed that logicians had not discovered truth.

Which Hellenistic School of Philosophy Would You Belong To?

(via The Virtial Stoa.)

P.S. Look at the image. Obviously scepticism has spread as far as questioning whether we can ever know the true way to to spell certain words. “trutjh”?

Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer? (requires Flash, boo).

One Baryonyx miniature from eBay. Including postage, etc. - £20.15.

Running total is now £84.09.

[Update December 9th 2004] - Barry (as I’m calling him) arrived this morning and a very fine critter he is too. The quality of the sculpting in the HLBS dinosaur line really improved with the later models, which is why it’s even more of a shame that only the older ones are still available.

In other news I bought another Rebel Storm booster (back down to £8.00 at Orcs Nest). No Ithorian Scout this time! Grand Moff Tarkin, an Imperial Officer, a stormtrooper, rebel trooper, Bespin guard (got way too many of those), Bothan spy and Mon Calamari mercenary. A good selection.

Running total is now £92.09.

This happened, as reported by Lettice…

A man was sitting in the cab of his lorry drinking milk form a carton. A passerby yelled “Bitty!”

Oh well, it’s been a good decade since “Milky, milky”.