Not for the first time in my life, I went to the Apple Store, saw, was tempted, fell …
So I’m writing this on a spanking new 15″ MacBook Air. With a pretty good trade-in price for my not-so-old 13″ MBA, an education discount, and a generous Fathers Day gift-token, it wasn’t too outrageously self-indulgent. And I’m loving it, seems perfect for its intended role as a stay-at-home, but move-from-room-to-room, work machine. The additional screen real-estate is definitely worth having e.g. for LaTeX.
Setting this up has been a distraction from matters categorial. Yes, of course I know you can get a new Apple machine to painlessly and very quickly clone your old one. But I accumulate a lot of rubbish in three years (never used trial apps, never-read downloads, etc. etc.) — don’t we all? So I find that it is in the end worth the time and effort to do a spring clean when I get a new machine. What nerdy fun …
(For those who might care about these things, I got the base model again, as I have not once had memory problems with the base model M1 MBA; the memory pressure indicator stays steadily green for me. And after a couple of Space Grey MacBooks, I’ve reverted to the classic Silver. It’s classic for a reason, as the Daughter remarked … And one look at the condition of the Midnight machine in the store was enough to tell me that the fingerprints issue would drive me spare.)
Actually, that’s not the only thing that has just got in the way of finishing Category Theory I. I’ve decided to say just a bit more about toposes and about ETCS that originally planned, and I’m just needing to think through how to arrange things. Nerdy fun of a different kind.
Though hours have just disappeared because a search (just prompted by a prior search) revealed that I’d used the word “just” just about ridiculously often. Seven times on one page was the record. Easy enough to go through, rephrasing, deleting, replacing with ‘only’, ‘simply’, ‘merely’, as seemed best. But bang goes most of an afternoon …
Well, this is as good a place to ask you (off the off-topic): Have you seen/read A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960
By: Nikhil Krishnan
?
I haven’t read the book. But I had lunch a couple of days ago with my old friend and colleague Jane Heal, who said she was reading it with enjoyment and recommended it. (Of course, having been brought up in Oxford at the end of the period it covers — she’s the daughter of William and Martha Kneale — it has a special interest for her!)
I have just finished reading the book and enjoyed it despite its flaws. It read as a series of sketched tied together loosely in terms of place and culture at the time. There is some repetition and narrative discontinuity – a further round of editing would have helped.
I read much by Ryle, Austin and Strawson in the 1980’s and the portraits correlated well with the authorial voices I remember. Apart from that it prompted me to add Iris Murdoch’s first novel to my reading list.
Oh, quite apart from the context, Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net remains a very enjoyable read!
My humble opinion is that A Terribly Serious Adventure is very well-written and coherent.