Full Blog Archive

  • The Most Difficult Language in the World

    I mentioned to my sister that Japanese would take at least four times as long to learn as French (which she has already studied), and she asked me where that was from. A quick Google turned up a webpage of language learning difficulties for English speakers. If we assume that these difficulties are roughly symmetric,…

  • An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding

    Yesterday, I finished reading David Hume’s An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. It was, naturally, interesting. Although I read his Treatise of Human Nature years ago, and taught the causation and induction sections for something like ten years at Cambridge, I’d not previously read the whole of the first Enquiry. One of the most notorious sections…

  • Writing Japanese

    I wrote a really long post for my Japanese blog today; about 2000 characters. The rough-and-ready conversion is that two Japanese characters equal one English word. Certainly, the number of times you have to hit the keys is around there. Thus, the Japanese post is about equivalent to 1000 words of English. It took me…

My Old Pages

These are links to my old webpages, from back before I moved to a wordpress-powered blog. Back when I wrote the HTML by hand in a text editor. Yes, really. The formatting on some of the pages has broken a bit, and there are newer versions of some of the content in the current part of the site. Nothing here is maintained, nor likely to have anything done with it in the future.