Turtles All The Way Down

Well this is the first time I have actually got hold of a version of Windows in the same month it came out and very impressive it is. I have to admit that somewhere I think there is still an application I wrote still running under Windows 3.1 so to be on Windows 7 this early is a big thing at deWeyden towers. It starts up in seconds, displays myriad wireless networks belonging to the neighbours and connects automatically giving for wire-free working (darn those pesky power cables) and looks and feels like the future. I know that Apple people have been used to this sort of shiny, happy interface for a long time (and on such dinky devices) but let me revel in this quantum leap. Youngest was most happy to find out that all his Thomas games would run on the new machine though I was disappointed to discover that my disk of Stephen Hawking reading all of A Brief History of Time does not have the requisite number of bits to run at all and so we must just imagine that gravelly computer voice as we read the words on boring old paper.

I only tried the Stephen Hawking program because it opens with Bertrand Russell making a speech in the style of Monty Python as part of a dialogue with a lady who believed that the universe was "turtles all the way down" and indeed there is a Turtle pictured in Logicomix where it supports four Elephants who in turn hold up the Earth on their backs. Logicomix also has a beautifully measured scene of Russell seeking out Cantor who has gone mad as Guass predicted of anyone who stared directly at infinity. Cantor of course found that there was more than one type of infinity and so maybe his madness was compounded by this - infinity squared anyone - we've not got past infinity-plus-one in our house. Youngest uses infinity-out-of-ten to describe how happy he is which is technically infinity so all hunky-dory here then.