Witty blog titles and a map of the week

October the 20th 2010 at 11 o’clock am

Abstract

I have an annoying habit of back-dating posts to the date written, not published, so I will briefly explain the contents and sequence of postings this week.

Also featuring comment on the blog-summarizing taglines

1. Map of the week’s posts
2. Bonus LsOL (‘laughs-out-loud’)
3. Blog titles
- 3.1. Why puns?
- 3.2. The titles themselves

1. Map of the week’s posts

Having written rather a lot this week, I will take a moment to explain what exactly I have put up here. A couple of days ago, I uploaded some descriptions of events from the end of the holidays (Monteverdi), then another, longer explanation of my posting practice (On posting). The plan has been followed pretty much as expected, with a longer expansion a few days later playing around with some of the ideas covered (On language, abstract frameworks, and the gospel). As far as thoughts go, I need some time to work together an initial flotation of some material surrounding relative consistency and size of worldviews (there is possibly some domain-specific philosophical verbiage for this, but I have not met it, so please excuse the meta-mathematical language—on which, incidentally, Adrian Mathias’ graduate Set Theory course is superb).

Rough updates covering concrete events are planned, but there is higher priority writing this week, worth carving out some time for. I would like to type up my paper notes outlining a response to the sorts of emotions in the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, which I sang in Friday’s recital, as I think it important to reconcile and colour a full application of the gospel to the performance, given there were some in the audience I want to express this to, and worse still some who are actually interested.

2. Bonus LsOL (‘laughs-out-loud’)

Why will wheat not grow in ℤ / 6 ℤ ? Because it is not a field. This example can be further generalised to any cereal crop. A corollary due to Matt Hickford is that conversely it is ideal to grow wheat in 0 2 4 . More exercises may be followed on @ComicSections.

3. Blog titles

3.1. Why puns?

This is actually a rather deep question I think. I have the opportunity to study a lot of mathematicians and other academics at very close range, and see a wide variety of personality expressions. I think it really bears a strong immersion in the culture to begin to understand the way certain introverted mind-sets work. It is easy to parody the extremes of -isms where it is genuinely hard to understand what other people are communicating unless it is very unambiguously parsable, but to be honest a lot of us in Cambridge need to examine ourselves and understand to understand where the root of these ideas is. Without being expansively theological, I am happy to suggest that people who struggle much or slightly with some sorts of communication come out of the experience with a fondness for puns, a play on the difficulty of transmitting meaning.

3.2. The titles themselves

3.2.1. A little kid with a big worldview

This one, not actually a direct pun, expresses some worldview ideas which are not exactly hidden. I have in fact spared my friends the ideas I have been fleshing out on relative dimension and consistency of worldviews, so exactly what my background ideas are on ‘big’ worldviews need to written up some time, when I can make them firstly coherent and secondly useful enough to clean up a swathe of related pensées at the same time. To do that though, I will need an Idea.

3.2.2. The Reformed criminal; the deliverance boy

I am Reformed. What more can I say? (College group: too much!)

3.2.3. Creating uptime in my downtime

This one is really quite apologetic; I need to subliminally message to my family that this blog is indeed created in downtime and not the fruit of valuable work energy.

3.2.4. Singing in the Reign

I particularly like the metaphors for this pun. The Reign is clearly meant to refer to the return of Jesus, that is, I am a musician to bring him praise and more broadly worship until he returns, but, the beautiful double meaning is way this gives us joy and perseverance even when we are for a time groaning (pathetic fallacy).

3.2.5. Broadcast thyself

Unashamedly evangelistic. Be bold, be strong, for the Lord your God is with you. (The original is YouTube, in case the reference is too geeky.)

3.2.6. Service with a byte

Unfortunately, there is no particular hidden meaning here, short of saying I am a CompSci. Perhaps this slogan is just going eight bits too far.