Fri, 03 Sep 2004

Anarchist Sneakers

Hitchens

I read letters to a young contrarian last night. I enjoyed Hitchens' writing quite a bit. He's funny, self-deprecating, but also erudite and lets you know it. His relentless anti-religiosity is sort of a relief in these -- what? -- nothingness-forsaken times.

He does include a long defense of reductionism that I thought missed the point. Most questions don't resolve to simple moral principles where we can take an unqualified stand; people adding unnecessary complexity to a situation can (and his own principles support this) be attacked on the grounds of disingenuousness; and finally one might suspect reductionism simply because "all the wrong folks are doing it." (There's a funny, but private, story about this phrase, but I was too lazy to find another way to put it.)

He did call himself a "soixante-huixtard", a term I've always rather liked, just because I was born in 68 and feel a sort of literal affinity for it as a good year :-).

The idea that "only an open conflict of ideas and principles can produce any clarity" could be said to be one of the underlying principles of free software.

Word Freak

I also read Word Freak. This is an interesting look at both Scrabble and consequently obsession. I found it quite gripping, though at times (perhaps necessarily) predictable in terms of its format and topics. I'd recommend it even to non-Scrabble enthusiasts.

Reading about Maven (not the Java Maven, the Scrabble-playing program Maven) reminded me of my long-shelved plan to write a program to play Clue (Cluedo for Europeans). My problem playing Clue was always finding a nice way to represent all the information going by, I thought it would be nice to have an omniscient assistant. I looked a little but couldn't find a free software program for this.

posted at: 23:47 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry