Occasional Tales

Teasing out the problem. So far I've been trying to summarise the philosophy problems, but today it's hard to do that. I'm not sure whether this problem comes from the pen of Lewis Carroll himself, but it's a list of sentences in a random order. In spite of that, it appears that you should be able to reconstruct a coherent argument from them. Everyone in the world has an interest in saving it and protecting the environment. Everyone, if they eat and drink a lot, is part of the ecosphere. If I don't like someone, I avoid them. No one is naturally a meat eater, unless they have a psychological problem. (I assume this means "eats meat to the exclusion of other types of food".) Nobody interested in saving the world could possibly fail to eat lentils at least once a week. All my friends are just other people out there somewhere in the world, people like you and me. Politicians are not part of the ecosphere. All lentil eaters are closet carnivores. When someone ...

The burning barrel. The people next door seem to have been quite busy this morning. I got out my door to find them burning stuff in a barrel, and when I got back from the shops, I noticed that they had the table just near their front door set up like a shrine with pictures of a couple of people flanked by incense. Sum of the angles. From British-born Chinese Blog , there's this story about maths tests in China and England. The scary thing is that I think I can remember how to do all the things in the latter, which I'd regard as high school geometry at most. The sort of maths that kids do here at high school would probably be beyond most undergraduates at British universities. I don't know why the Chinese insist on doing such advanced maths at school level. Like learning English, it's a waste of time for large numbers of pupils here who, once they leave school, will never need calculus or advanced geometry. I still think that for most of us, logic would've been a fa...