Tim was musing that he'd like to hear the laughing song (Pokpok Alimpako) again. So I fired up Winamp and played it (to locate the file), then sent it to him.

At this point, my sister happened to be in the room, and she commented on how awful the song was. When it came to the end, when they started laughing, she exclaimed: "Oh god. It's hideous", "What's wrong with having some melody?" and "What melody?" (with regards to the song).

I told her that ACJC choir songs are all like that (they are), and that this was why I didn't listen to modern classical music, since much of it was like that.

When I relayed these sentiments to Tim, he commented:

Tim: hahaha :)
you have to hear it live

Me: yeah it's worse then
I think I've heard it live before
it's worse. cos you can't press "stop"

***

My sources inform me that the MSN Messenger 7.0 beta screws up ICQ. Tut tut.

It's been in beta for an awfully long time. And I notice even relative technophobes are switching to it in droves. Perhaps this is a devious plot to deliver the coup de grace to ICQ, since they can wait for more and more users to switch to the MSN 7 beta and dismiss complaints about ICQ crashing with the refrain "it's only a beta", until no one is left using ICQ.

***

I may not have fully understood what the author's text was trying to say, but I laughed out loud when I read the following passages:

"Descartes had… [asked] how an isolated mind could be absolutely as opposed to relatively sure of anything about the outside world. Of course, he framed his question in a way that made it impossible to give the only reasonable answer, which we in science studies have slowly rediscovered three centuries later: that we are relatively sure of many of the things with which we are daily engaged through the practice of our laboratories. By Descartes’s time this sturdy relativism, based on the number of relations established with the world, was already in the past, a once-passable path now lost in a thicket of brambles. Descartes was asking for absolute certainty from a brain-in-a-vat, a certainty that was not needed when the brain (or the mind) was firmly attached to its body and the body thoroughly involved n its normal ecology. As in Curt Siodmak’s novel Donovan’s Brain, absolute certainty is the sort of neurotic fantasy that only a surgically removed mind would look for after it had lost everything else. Like a heart taken out of a young woman who has just died in an accident and soon to be transplanted into someone else’s thorax thousands of miles away, Descartes’s mind requires artificial life-support to keep it viable. Only a mind put in the strangest position, looking at a world from the inside out and linked to the outside by nothing but the tenuous connection of the gaze, will throb in the constant fear of losing reality; only such a bodiless observer will desperately look for some absolute life-supporting survival kit."


"It is possible to go even further along the wrong path, always thinking that a more radical solution will solve the problems accumulated from the past decision. One solution, or more exactly another clever sleight of hand, is to become so very pleased with the loss of absolute certainty and universal a prioris that one rejoices in abandoning them. Every defect of the former position is now taken to be its best quality. Yes, we have lost the world. Yes, we are forever prisoners of language. No, we will never regain certainty. No, we will never get beyond our biases. Yes, we will forever be stuck within our own selfish standpoint. Bravo! Encore! The prisoners are now gagging even those who ask them to look out their cell windows; they will “deconstruct,” as they say—which means destroy in slow motion—any one who reminds them that there was a time when they were free and when their language bore a connection with the world.

Who can avoid hearing the cry of despair that echoes deep down, carefully repressed, meticulously denied, in these paradoxical claims for a joyous, jubilant, free construction of narratives and stories by people forever in chains? But even if there were people who could say such things with a blissful and light heart (their existence is as uncertain to me as that of the Loch Ness monster, or, for that matter, as uncertain as that of the real world would be to these mythical creatures), how could we avoid noticing that we have not moved an inch since Descartes? That the mind is still in its vat, excised from the rest, disconnected, and contemplating (now with a blind gaze) the world (now lost in darkness) from the very same bubbling glassware? Such people may be able to smile smugly instead of trembling with fear, but they are still descending further and further along the spiraling curves of the same hell."

- Various extracts from Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope, Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Chapter 1: "Do You Believe In Reality?" News from the Trenches of the Science Wars


In other news, my sister complains about Descartes and epistemology, but finds Kant easy to understand.

Go figure.