User:Matthew Stannard

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Matthew with daughter Chloe
Matthew with daughter Chloe
A man at 50 has the face he deserves
A man at 50 has the face he deserves
My grandmother with my two sons
My grandmother with my two sons
Knot of Eternity
Knot of Eternity
Grafitti
Grafitti
  • Go to my Talk page
  • Email me on mstclair87@hotmail.com with wikipedia in Subject Line
  • "Who needs a life when you've got Wikipedia?" Ollie and Sarcasm
  • Interested in doubt vs belief vs certainty
  • Making contributions on behalf of Derek St Clair-Stannard, Byron scholar
  • See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1958237.stm
  • "Does all this wisdom make us any wiser?" - John Weak

Contents

[edit] Activities

[edit] Politics

  • Me (born 1954): Economic Left/Right: -1.62, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.00
  • Guy, eldest son, (born 1982): Economic Left/Right: -0.88, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 0.46
  • Chloe, daughter, (born 1989): Economic Left/Right: -1.63, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.74
See [1]

[edit] Home

A party occurred for my daughter's 18th. We hired bouncers.

[edit] Work

Find me on Linked In.

I signed the confidentiality agreement.

[edit] Play

I have a good friend named Bharat Patel. He is fond of cricket. His name is an anagram of "alpha batter" and, what is more serendipitous, is also an anagram of "alphabet art".

If one person can see clearly for 15 miles from the top of a tower, how far can 10 people see clearly for? If a guy with a telescope comes along and with it can see clearly for 20 miles, whose views would you prefer about what's out there: the 10 people who, between them, can only see for 15 miles, or the one guy who can see for 20 miles?

[edit] Religion

Not long ago I had an email from a colleague inviting me, along with other team members, to join him after work to celebrate the end of Ramadan. I replied that I would be happy to celebrate the fact that I was not celebrating the end of Ramadan, since I am not a Muslim. Another non-Muslim team member expressed dismay that I should have made such a reply, but the one who invited us, a delightful fellow, did not seem in the least put out, and we enjoyed a drink together, each of us celebrating in our own way.

I wrote to Richard Dawkins and New Scientist to remind them that it was Martin Luther King who said, "Understand the concept of love." and how would you get people to do that without the teachings of Christianity or the other great religions? I didn't get a reply.

[edit] Dualities

There are two types of people:

  • the type of people who divide the world into two types of people and the type who don't.
  • There are those who follow the maxim that a mind expanded with a new idea never contracts to its original size, and Ogden Nash wrote: "The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly."
  • All humanity is divided into three classes: those who are immovable, those who are movable, and those who move! -Benjamin Franklin
  • There are relativists (who believe that your truth and my truth might be different) and there are absolutists (who believe that there is only truth).
  • There are opportunists and there are planners. (Maybe there are people who plan to be opportunists and their plan goes wrong and they end up being opportunistic planners. Eh?)
  • Failures are divided into two classes - those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought. John Charles Salak
  • Some people change when they see the light, others when they feel the heat. Caroline Schoeder

[edit] Quotes

  • All thinking men are atheists. — Ernest Hemingway. See also http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=15009
  • What we cannot think, we cannot think; we cannot therefore say what we cannot think. Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales ... To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing. Bertrand Russell
  • The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. Albert Einstein
  • To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. -Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963) Aldous Huxley
  • To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' - this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats. -ibid.
  • It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them. - Mark Twain author and humorist (1835-1910)
  • Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never, Never, Never, Never give up. Winston S Churchill

[edit] Links

[edit] Readability

http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx

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