I suppose it was mildly daft to plunge into blogging about Alan Weir’s TTP just as the beginning of term looms. There’s now a flurry of other things which I really need to be thinking about, just as I’m getting into the book, and puzzling through the next chapter. There’s admin as Chair of Examiners for Tripos to be done, plus putting together some handouts for my last lectures on Gödel’s Theorems (the last for this academic year, at any rate), thinking about the response I’m down to give to one of the papers at the Phil. Logic & Maths conference here (about Brandom of all people), and that’s not to mention sorting out the techie logic seminar and preparing an initial talk to that. So the discussion of Alan’s book will stutter a bit for the next couple of weeks. Sorry about that.
For light relief, it is time for trips to the CUP Bookshop sale again. This is a great annual institution which I’ve mentioned before. The Press damage some books by stamping “damaged” across the title page, and then flog them (this year) at £3 for any paperback and £7 for any hardback. And during the week or ten days of the sale they keep putting out new stock in a random way, so you have to keep slipping back, just in case … It is amazing what turns up.
However, having badly run out of book shelving space, and then some, I really really do have to restrain myself. But I couldn’t resist the ‘Cambridge Companions’ to Haydn and Schubert, and David Crystal’s fun-if-you-like-that-kind-of-thing book on Shakespeare’s language.
And, erm, another category theory tome. Despite all the empirical evidence, I think I must subconsciously believe in a magical theory of learning-by-osmosis. Put the book on your shelves and the knowledge slowly seeps in … doesn’t it?
As for the MBA, that is, of course, a MacBook Air to you. Let me just say that the new version is awesome. I had an original version MBA, which was lovely but s-l-o-w and had a pretty poor battery life. But I’ve been given one of the new models, and the difference is impressive (it is the machine the original one almost promised to be, but fell quite a bit short of). Subjectively very fast, wonderful screen, and ludicrously long-lasting battery for academic writing/reading/surfing/mailing use. (For fellow Appleheads: I have the 13″, as I find the visual proportions of the 11.6″ unhappy — I can’t shake the sense of peering through a letter box — and I want big-enough side-by-side LaTeX windows. The base configuration with 2gb memory is more than just fine if you are not doing anything very fancy with it. If you have been wavering, treat yourself.)