Ahh, a neat thing to find -- my laptop, thanks either to the new sound system in kernel 2.6 or the new version of flash, actually displays flash content pretty well. Hurrah.

Yahoo broke GAIM compatibility again. It'll probably be fixed soon though..

Today, in the philosopy group I'm in, we talked about causation, in particular how we can identify it and what it is. Two interesting subdiscussions -- first, can we identify causality that, while narratively or episodically progressing from past to future, not doing so in a global time sense. I brought an example of some things I read about in physics journals, and the theoretical notion of time travel was also discussed. Secondly, we distinguished different kinds of causal beliefs, and the relationship between joint caused events and a causes b events. Regretfully, I forgot to mention something that I talked about at lunch today with my lunch companion -- predisposition that's not strong enough to be a cause ... we then talked about personality types, and of course free will. I think I had my most coherent yet description of the spiritual notions of free will, creativity, and choice, which I'm all in favour of stomping out. One companion offered alternate definitions for them which, while I felt were strange, were not incompatible with materialism. It was a really long and interesting discussion that, alas, I don't recall all the details of. We closed the discussion after a moderate-length topic of genetics and the destiny of the human race.

Another advance in materials science: Amorphous steel...

Zzzzz