Welcome

This is the entry point for the Oracle Scratchpad –  a static page that indexes various ‘non-blog’ pages on this site and a few other sites.

If you want to use the more traditional “most recently published” blog entry point you can bookmark this URL for ordinary postings, which is also the URL for the page referenced to the right as All Postings. Alternatively you could bookmark the “Catalog Catalogue” which is a slowly growing catalogue of all the postings on the blog, listed by category. This is also the URL for the page referenced to the right as Main Catalogue.

In the panel to the right there is a link to “How to Comment”. Some of the usual html tags do not work as expected in the comment editor. This is a side effect of the theme I have chosen, which seems to be the only one that makes code samples look reasonably tidy. If you remember to use these guidelines (which are especially important for code extracts) it will make your comments more readable for other users.

Contact Details:

Email: JLewisOracle@gmail.com

Cell Phone: +44 (0)7973 188785

A few Inspirational Thoughts:

Anon: Science. If you don’t make mistakes, you’re doing it wrong. If you don’t correct those mistakes, you’re doing it really wrong. If you can’t accept that you’re mistaken, you’re not doing it at all.

Granny Weatherwax (auth: Terry Pratchett): Trouble is, just because things are obvious doesn’t mean they’re true.

Mark Twain: It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Richard Feynman: It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

Stephen Hawking: The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.

Isaac Asimov: Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.

Carl Sagan: The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.

Cicero (De Natura Deorum): In discussion it is not so much weight of authority as force of argument that should be demanded. Indeed, the authority of those who profess to teach is often a positive hindrance to those who desire to learn; they cease to employ their own judgement, and take what they perceive to be the verdict of their chosen master as settling the question.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.

Buddha: Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

Arthur C Clarke: For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert; but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact

Albert Einstein: Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Charles Darwin: Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

Stephen Jay Gould: The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.