Month: June 2007
-
Baby News
I’ve got a bit behind on the absolutely fascinating news concerning our incipient child. People with no interest in the entirely normal process of pregnancy can ignore this article. So, we went to the clinic on Monday, and there’s almost no news. Which is good, because it means that Yudetamago is developing normally. She’s now…
-
Foundations of Ethics
There’s an interesting article in this week’s Nature (well, strictly last week’s now, but still the most recent one I have here), on research into the neural basis of disgust, and its links to ethical judgements. (Nature 447 (2007), 768-771) It would seem that, when people judge things to be ethically disgusting, they are using…
-
The Cults of the Roman Empire
The title of this book is a little misleading; there is almost no coverage of the state cults of the Roman empire, the cult of the emperor, or the indigenous cults of western Europe. The original French title (it’s a translation) referred to the “oriental cults”, which is more accurate, but still not completely so,…
-
Author’s Vicissitudes
I had another big job to do to a very short deadline through the latter part of May and the beginning of June. I developed an outline, got it approved, and wrote 40,000 words, in four weeks. At the end of last week, I had an email discussion with the editor which went, paraphrased, like…
-
Storage Space
Today, we rented some storage space. One disadvantage of flats is that they don’t have lofts or cellars that can be filled to bursting with junk, er, items of great sentimental value. Or, in my case, books. However, because there are a lot of flats around here, there are also a lot of companies that…
-
The Satyricon
The Satyricon is another Roman novel, this one written in the first century, by Petronius, who was the emperor Nero’s arbiter of good taste. Which, to be honest, sounds like the ultimate nightmare job, and Petronius was forced to commit suicide in 66 AD. The Satyricon is not complete. We have maybe a fifth of…
-
Perils of Japan
We had an earthquake about an hour ago. Level 3 on the Japanese scale, here, which means that the windows rattled quite decisively and a couple of books fell over, but no real damage. It was magnitude 4.6, according to the current reports, and the epicentre was quite some way north of here. There was…