Consolations of Philosophy, Day of the Triffids and All Thanks to James Burke.

I finally got beyond the first page of The Consolations of philosophy and found it more flowing than I expected. I finished The Day of The Triffids as well and found myself making huge numbers of links between both books. I was so convinced of the commonality between than that I was even going to blog yesterday (Sunday). However, family time got in the way (drat, damn and blast!!!) and it all went out of the window. Of course this has saved you from having to read many arguments which were totally against the ideas examined in the first chapter of TCOP which were the basic ideas of Socrates which in my opinion boiled down to Just because a million people believe a stupid thing, it doesn't mean it's not a stupid thing. You will of course remember from you school days that Socratic argument takes everything to a perfectly logical conclusion and very often on the way it blows perfectly logical sounding statements out of the water. Yesterday my head was full of so many things I have heard recently which can certainly be described as flawed arguments which so many people believe without any logical thought as to why they are true. Revisit the archives of this site and find many flawed arguments to start you off.

I probably have mentioned that I complained to my aunt that so few people seem to bother to understand even the basics of the technology that they use every day. She replied that even Television was a mystery and I am proud to say that my two-minute explanation was clear enough for her to say that she now understood the basics. I of course admitted that the exact details were lost on me as well. Thinking of this made me realise that despite the fact that the field I work in is a complex and challenging one, many of the basic principles of the hardware I work on are lost on me as well.