A Week of Sam Harris
I’ve been a big admirer of Sam Harris in recent years. His ideas can at times be controversial to both theist and atheist alike, yet he always remains lucid, calm and a strong advocate of rational thought.
Having watched a lot of debates and talks online over the years I’m finally going to get to hear him speak in person as he’s going to be in the UK promoting his recent book “The Moral Landscape”.
The real exciting thing is that his string of talks coincides with an easy week off work, and so I’m going round the UK to see all but one of them!
Tuesday it’s a double whammy of awesomeness as he discusses with Richard Dawkins on the same stage the topic, “Who say’s science has nothing to do with morality?“, for this one I’m driving down to Oxford alone (get it touch if you fancy meeting up).
Wednesday Sarah and I are driving down to Bristol Festival of Ideas for a stand alone talk by Sam on TML book itself, hopefully staying over to enjoy the town the following day.
Finally, on Saturday with Sarah and her father, it’s over to Cambridge for the WordFest. Here Sam will be in discussion with Ian McEwan, presumably along the same lines as the Dawkins event.
A rather pleasant week of rational thought and ideas, hopefully the weather wont turn too much.
I’ve read “The Moral Landscape” once through fully and am about halfway through my second reading in preparation for the talks. I’m also reading some of the heavy criticism it received as well as positive views of it to try and wrap my head around the issues in greater detail and form
Hopefully I’ll have my laptop with me and blog about it whilst I’m out and about. I know that the Dawkins discussion has definitely sold out but if anyone’s going and wants to meet up before/after for drink and talks get in touch. The other events may still have tickets available, check the links above.
dB
A Fresh Start
Hi there to all; newcomers as well as people putting up with me changing this once again!
I’ve been messing around with various blogging platforms for as long as I can remember; livejournal, wordpress, blogger, posterous etc. I think I’ve been through them all, however I have never got into a consistent habit of actually writing content. Well I’m determined to change that this year and I’ve had a bit of an on-line service clear out.
I’ve decided to cut down what I’m using and put my content into two camps. Longer, composed posts on specific topics, and what I suppose I’ll call life blogging. WordPress has always been in my opinion the most fully featured and extensive system for the former, and I’ve finally decided that Tumblr works best for the latter.
For some time I was sure that Posterous was the perfect platform, however only supporting tags not categories really prevents it being useful for long posts and organising. Posterous also doesn’t have the same community drive that Tumblr has making it less useful for life blogging. The themes available, whilst becoming more numerous are not as slick as Tumblr either.
I think I got caught up in Posterous because of my slight OCD tendencies to sync and normalise data across different places. Basically the “auto posting everywhere” that Posterous can do made me obsess on maintaining so many different services and accounts, that eventually I’m thinking less about content and more about ironing out the auto posting quirks and errors.
Regarding the auto posting, I’ve realised that people only really care about Facebook and Twitter! So by coupling Tumblr to fb and twitter, all my life and photo blogging bases are covered. WordPress can also be coupled to twitter and fb provides a more structured forum for longer subject composed posts on religion, atheism, scepticism, Arabic etc.
By letting go of my strange psychological need to use and understand every platform out there, I can try getting focussed on writing and posting more interesting stuff. And if I really need/want to, I can manually copy and paste between Tumblr and WordPress for the overlaps.
So, that’s it…I’m going to start making a concerted effort to post at least once a week here, and well I guess whenever the mood strikes for Tumblr.
David
