Priestess

Pilgrim

Roads

Lately at home it’s all been variations on “why did the chicken cross the road?” When my ones get too nerdy and obscure for my kids, you have to read them here.

Why did the voluntarist cross the road?
Because she wanted to.

Why did the hedonist cross the road?
Because it felt good.

Why did Nietzsche cross the road?
Because it was his will.

Why did the materialistic determinist cross the road?
Because it was the inevitable consequence of a vast sequence of physical causes and effects, which if traced backwards in time would ramify rapidly outwards but which would then ultimately be seen to converge back upon the beginning of the Universe.

Why did the Buddha cross the road?
There is no road.

Why did Lao Tze cross the road?
It was not the true Way.

Why did Epimenides the Cretan cross the road?
“To demonstrate that all those who cross roads are liars,” he replied.

Why did Zeno of Elea cross the road?
He couldn’t.

Reincarnations

Poet v Philosopher

Monads

Haskell – the programming language I’m teaching myself in odd moments – has monads. Monads are difficult to explain, so Google gives an entertainingly bizarre list of things that “monads are like”:

burritos
roach motels
nuclear waste containers
closure operators
space suits
assembly lines
lawnmowers
raiiiiiyayn, on your wedding day
ordinary monoids
objects
analogies
building a car out of bicycles instead of walking
souls
the Hotel California
recipes
playing at someone else’s house

Several of these are facetious references to the monad explanation problem itself, one is actually a reference to Liebnizian monads that got left in the list by mistake, and one is just something I threw in to be silly.

If you want my opinion, and I haven’t got deep enough into it to be much more than snide about it, which is why this post is here rather than on my programming blog, I think monads are like general algebras, or models of computational forms. And they are also a way of representing a temporal sequence as a chain of functional compositions, which is how the eternal static Spinozan plenitude of a Haskell program can actually get its hands dirty and do something useful.

Whether this is right, and how it all really works is something I don’t expect to understand until I write one of my own.

W G Sebald’s Kitchen Corner

Alternate reality TV

This week’s recipe: Demerara Cake.

1 cup milk
75g plain flour
125g butter (at room temperature)
1 egg
200g demerara sugar
vanilla essence
100g icing sugar
2m black crepe paper

Preheat the oven to 190°C. Melt 100g of the butter in a small frypan. Sift the flour into a mixing bowl and make a small well in the middle. Gently beat together the milk and egg and pour into the well. Beat the mixture until smooth. Gradually add the melted butter. Fold in the demerara sugar and add a drop of vanilla essence. Pour the batter into a greased cake tin and bake for 45 minutes or until the cake has risen.

Sift the icing sugar until it is the consistency of fine dust and fold it into the remaining butter. Beat it until soft peaks form. Ensure that the cake is cool before icing.

Place the black crepe paper in your kitchen drawer until the day arrives when you will need it to mourn your loved ones.

Alternatively, they may use it to mourn you, should you die before them.

Note: I invented this recipe without testing it. Any person who should attempt to make this cake is doomed to fail, as are we all.

On introspection

The Marketplace

Aphorisms (iv)

To the young. Though you are the inheritors of the earth and all its works, you rush from one fad to the next, in a ceaseless quest for novelty. Thus youth has ever gone, and ever will. Yet in every generation, there are some few of you who will heed the disquieting voice that whispers: in spite of all the mayfly changes of fashion, people are still wearing baseball caps.

To a woman. Your eternal complaint to men is that we do not pay you enough attention, and yet when we linger in the alleyway or stalk you online, you are haughty and proud, and take out an apprehended violence order. Ps. I still have your copy of Die Harzreise. Perhaps we could, I don’t know, meet up for a coffee or something.

The shadow. To whom has this not happened? You pause, as if for a moment your soul had fallen into shadow, and, as your will shudders with hesitation, you ask yourself the fatal question: why am I standing here in the kitchen?