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Seeing Brunel and his team of dancing victorian engineers was great
fun. <br>
<br>
"Isambard Kingdom Brunel was like the Wolverine of the early
Victorians. He was short, ripped, had big sideburns, smoked 50
cigars a day, AND KICKED EVERYONE’S ASS!!"<br>
-2D goggles<br>
<br>
C.f. <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/talk-to-the-hand/">http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/talk-to-the-hand/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
On 28/07/2012 04:46, spike wrote:
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<div class="WordSection1">Brits, may evolution save the queen. I
hope your athletes win a pile of medals, a tall, wide and deep
pile of them.<o:p></o:p><br>
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<br>
Evolution save the queen? That actually makes sense. Britain seems
to be based on the meta-principle that you are allowed to add new
stuff as long as you keep all the old. Layer upon layer, just like
how evolution builds organisms by exapting previous systems and
adding superstructures on top of them. Hence weird things like the
City of London being a 10,000 inhabitant town inside the city
*called* London, with a special representative in parliament and
voting rights for medieval guilds and corporations. Or Oxford
University, built on institutions that were originally monastic
lodging-houses and kept together by a library and a shared distrust
of the townspeople. Or that Magdalen Street is not pronounced
"Magdalen" but "Maudlin" - but the church on it, St. Magdalen, has
the normal pronounciation...<br>
<br>
Of course the downside is that all the existing weirdness constrains
the functionality of anything new. I doubt we are ever going to see
good railway services or plumbing here since they have to follow the
patterns set by early pioneers. But the cool thing about a seriously
retrofitted society is that everything is unique and complicated...
which is of course also a major annoyance. <br>
<br>
(As for myself, I think I feel about as British as I feel Swedish...
I'm probably just an internationalist with a fondness for north-west
Europe. )<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University </pre>
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