Trams, Trains and Ways of Passing The Time...

Things I need to stop doing on Trams:

1) Making faces at babies to make them laugh. Eventually someone is going to misunderstand my desire to entertain their offspring.

2) Pretending to have multiple-personality disorder and having arguments with myself. Alternatively, start muttering profanities, then when someone asks say "yeah, you can really hear my thoughts. Wanker."

3) Whenever someone's on the phone, pretending to be the other half of the conversation, and seeing if I can distract them.

4) Reading excerpts from Edgar Allen Poe/Shakespeare.

5) Dancing.

Actually, that last one requires some explanation. I'd just got a new set of speakers for my iPod, and I wanted to see if they worked. So I cranked them out, plugged them in, and ten minutes later I got at least three people to do the Macarena. And then I did this to them.

I also dance to music on my iPod. Yeah. River-dancing is fine, but not at Flinders Street Station when no-one else can hear the music.



Okay, that's enough of that.

A few things that warrant sharing around the internet:

Firstly, this from our old friend Wikipedia:
Reductio ad Hitlerum, also argumentum ad Hitlerum, or reductio (or argumentum) ad Nazium – dog Latin for "reduction (or argument) to Adolf Hitler (or the Nazis)" – is a modern informal fallacy in logic. It is a variety of both questionable cause and association fallacy. The phrase reductio ad Hitlerum was coined by an academic ethicist, Leo Strauss, in 1953. Engaging in this fallacy is sometimes known as playing the Nazi card.
The fallacy most often assumes the form of "Hitler (or the Nazis) supported X, therefore X must be evil/undesirable/bad." The argument carries emotional weight as rhetoric, since in most cultures anything relating to Hitler or Nazis is automatically condemned. The tactic is often used to derail arguments, as such a comparison tends to distract and to result in angry and less reasoned responses.

(Oh, check out this from Jeph Jacques's Questionable Content)

Go here for an MP3 of Senator Ted Steven's speech on Net Neutrality that included the famous phrase "The Internet is a series of tubes". Yes, he really did say that. And yes, he is a Senator.

I would also recommend anyone with an atheistic vein, check out the homepage of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. A decrease in the number of Pirates is to blame for Global Warming. And there's a graph to prove it.

Richardson's Morality Theorem: created by my good friend Tom Richardson during a philosophy lesson when we were bored, it runs that "whenever you smile at a rainbow, a unicorn appears and gives you morality". When pressed to provide evidence, he replied "look, it's invisible, alright? That's why you can't see it".

Also in a philosophical vein, I hate Iris Murdoch. More on that later, but the biggest distinction between Male and Female philosophy students is that guys like Nietzsche and hate Murdoch, girls like Murdoch and hate Nietzsche.

Au Revoir.