Fuddland

Entries containing personal information about Fuddland's author [that is, yours truly--i.e. me].

This category also has the following subcategories [number of entries in brackets]:

• In Time [2]

Some things that I achieved or did in my twenties that have had and will have a lasting impact on my life, in roughly chronological order:

• The tumultuous ride that is a university degree, forming some invaluable friendships along the way. Emerged four years later with a ridiculously-titled Master of Mathematics in Mathematics degree.

• Got a tattoo. Never regretted it once.

• My friend threw a banana at me and I swung a ruler I happened to be holding at it with such force that the banana sliced cleanly and precisely in two lengthways. Subsequent attempts to repeat this feat have all ended in failure.

• Had three serious girlfriends, and still on good terms with two of them, which I’m very proud about because it took a lot of work to remain friends.

• Discovered I have one or two musical bones in my body.

• Worked in London as an actuarial assistant for nine months, which was about nine months too long. Some of the people I worked with were smashing and I had a laugh, but the work was the most mind-numbingly dull thing I have ever attempted.

• Went back to university and, after a bit of effort, got myself a PhD. Hardest thing I’ve ever done and my proudest achievement to date [aside from the above banana incident].

• Perfected my chilli recipe.

• Got interested in taking photographs and even started successfully selling a few of the better ones.

• Volunteered for Crisis Open Christmas.

• Moved to China, quit the job I initially had rather than be placed somewhere I didn’t want to be, and relocated to another city where things currently seem to be going fine.

Tomorrow I leave my twenties and enter my fourth decade on this planet. I’m not certain what I thought, at the age of twenty, what my life would be like when I reached thirty, but I’m fairly sure I assumed I’d be married with a steady job, house, etc. [I know I was thinking along these lines in my mid-twenties.] So I’m making no predictions whatsoever for where I’ll be when my fortieth rolls along — besides, it’s ages away, right?

here’s bill bailey:

‘i’m a relaxed empiracist, i’m not a staunch empiracist — someone who demands actual tangible proof of something before they believe it to be true — i’m more a relaxed empiracist, which means i only believe something to be true if somebody a little bit cleverer than me tells me that is pretty much what happens.’

having an effective vetting system as to whether you believe the source of information, be it a book, person or website — a vetting system that you trust — is very important, but i don’t think it should ever be the sole reason to believe something.

here’s an example, which i’ve taken from john diamond’s excellent beginnings of a critique of alternative medicine, ‘snake oil’.

scientists have no idea how aspirin works.

now, your first reaction might be, “well, don’t be silly. of course they do.” but then some doubt might creep in. aspirin has been around for ages — over a hundred years. it is only relatively recently we can engineer drugs to specifically target certain things — genes, organs, whatever — in our body. you take aspirin, it gets rid of your headache. how? could it be that this was discovered by accident, trialled, found to be wondrously effective and not harmful? who cares if no one knows how it works when it works so well?

Read the rest of “man on the moon”…

spilt tea on white t-shirt. tea stain on white cotton. immediate action required.

dabbed tea stain with damp leafy-patterned kitchen towel. result: green stain on t-shirt where leafy pattern has transferred to shirt.

one of the other demonstrators went home sick this morning, so we were a person short in all three of the labs i taught in today. i would write about how we were consequently rushed off our feet with the extra work, but to be honest there wasn’t a noticable queuing of people with questions. i couldn’t possibly comment on whether this was because there were not many questions or because the person off sick usually does bugger all anyway.

one of the students in the first class is convinced he knows me from somewhere, but can’t figure out where. i don’t recognise him at all, and he’s not from anywhere i’ve spent any considerable time, so i’m slightly intrigued as to why he thinks he knows me. the only thing we’ve managed to rule out is that i’ve never been involved in a duke of edinburgh award scheme.

it’s quite possible he just knew somebody who looks like me. i remember a night out at the student union when my pal paul came up to me and said he’d just been talking to a guy for several minutes thinking it was me. i looked and there was a very unnervingly similar-looking bloke leaning against a pillar smoking a cigarette. apparently paul marched up to this chap and opened the conversation with, “what the hell are you smoking for?”, which i found very amusing and wished i could have been listening in to the part where paul realised it wasn’t me at all.

the only other time i can remember being mistakenly identified was when i was greyhounding across canada. at one point a bona fide redneck sat down next to me and drawled, “did you find your friends?”. i think i just sat there stuttering, being rather nervous, until he realised i wasn’t who he thought i was.

now if you’ll excuse me, those nice people at clonaid want some more tissue samples…

in no particular order.

honorable mentions to steve koo and mike malone, my secondary school and tertiary college maths teachers.