Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Web links - an index of sorts

It may not look like it but I have been busy. Apart from working for a living - which is not what you see here - I have been creating or updating a few blogs and image galleries... like...

My portals
My Alfa pages
My bike racing pages
My myths and Legends pages
My sustainable business pages
My overly long list of blogs
My image galleries
Community and networking pages
Sponsors and other pages

Surely that's enough for now!

Friday, August 25, 2006

Rob's reading list, part 1

Way out but worth it

Because I can, I will share here some weirder choices from my personal bookshelf. You may not agree with 'weird', indeed weird is the wrong word. Nevertheless I use it advisedly in the sense that I will cover subjects beyond literal truth. And I use truth advisedly as mathematics is the only provable truth. Everything else is either awaiting a mathematical proof or is a belief, a theory or an assumption.

Just to explain my thinking: you may believe in what you can see, hear and/or touch, and that's cool; but it's not necessarily a literal truth. Even if a thousand people see, hear and/or touch that thing it doesn't make it true. It may be real enough to the people concerned but it's not an incontrovertible truth. It may be an illusion. It may be a shared thought. It may be a shared assumption. It's something, but it's not a literal truth. To be a literal truth requires proof. To my mind we can only be certain of mathematical proofs, as I haven't seen any other proof that convincingly lives outside the mind or perception of man.

And I could be wrong about maths. Perhaps there is no independent proof? Ahhh, but that's an undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns....

So to the first installment of my 'way out but worth it' booklist, in no particular order:

  • Bill Shakespeare's works in full. An essential lesson in the use of the English language, up there with Fowler's.

  • The Elegant Universe (by Brian Greene. Post-Einstein string theory to get you thinking.)

  • Anything by Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould. As I said, there are mathematical proofs and there are theories. Some theories are more compelling than others.

  • The Torah (the Pentateuch, the Book of Moses: a lively read, basis for Judaism and the Old Testment and a fascinating read on any level)

  • The Bible (Greek for 'Books'; The Old and New Testaments: basis for the Christian cults and a brilliant read)

  • The Koran (Arabic for 'Recital': another excellent piece of writing and the basis for Islam. I have the Dawood translation)

  • The History of Magic (by Eliphas Levi: a great, compelling read. Spot the a ha! 'Harry Potter' moments and see the footprints of Rowling's research)

  • The Theory of Celestial influence (by Rodney Collin: immensely detailed, it wallows around trying to 'prove' a case scientifically but falls magnificently short. Can be heavy, clumsy and painful to read... but still worth it for the determined!).

That's just for starters. Let me know what you think.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 9:51 am and is filed under No idea where this one goes, Writing, Religion and Essential Truths. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Monday, July 03, 2006

Resources at KlausenRussell.com

Folks, this is a community project focused on the Russell and Klausen families in Australia. It's also a way by which I can stretch my own understanding of various web tools and techniques. So you can not only see how various products or tools like Blogger or Textpattern work, you can see some reasonably interesting content as well.

On with the show. We have the following resources here to amuse you (or maybe just me).
  • Written in pure HTML we have the Russell, Klausen, Matthews, Brown and O'Brien and family photo archive and the attached family genealogy blog by courtesy of Blogger.com
  • We also have a family Gallery to which others can register and submit relevant images
  • And we have the PHP-Nuke-CMS based and joinable KlausenRussell.com-munity which contains a growing array of articles, images and links plus a forum
  • We have other image galleries, too. Start from here and then go here as well
  • In the spirit of trying different ways to do the same thing we have a test of Textpattern called Rob's Folly
  • And a business resources blog called the spiel on business once again by courtesy ofBlogger.com by which I can share some items of possible interest to MBA students
  • Not to mention a test of WordPress to create the bike, environment and business blog Out Out Damned Blog
  • And lastly Rob's other folly, a Writing Blog, once more provided via Blogger.
Please enjoy and/or feedback via comments.

Monday, June 12, 2006

Welcome to the KlausenRussell.com-munity!

Folks, this is the portal for access to the klausenrussell.com community. It's comprised of forums, galleries, blogs and articles. The focus is on family, philosophy and the environment - although you'll find lots of Alfa and bicycle content, too.

Have fun prowling around!

Cheers, Rob.