Logicians be craaazy...

So, it's summer and I have nothing to do for a week and I can therefore read for pleasure again! To celebrate, I stole Scumface's copy of Logicomix, which is as the name suggests a comic about formal logic. Hence (or otherwise) it is rather brilliant. It mostly focuses on Bertrand Russell and what a total fuck-up his life was (I mean, the guy got taken to live with his grandparents when he was young because his parents had "gone away"; he didn't find out for a looong time that they were actually dead and his gran just hadn't told him. And it just gets worse from there...), and occasionally branches out to show Russell meeting other logicians, showing what fuck-ups their lives all are (and occasionally what fuck-ups he makes their lives into *cough* Whitehead *cough*) and just generally being pessimistic about the whole thing. Poor logicians and their inability to not be completely crazy.

Goedel (umlauts are for the weak) is the worst, of course . Grows up, permanently destroys any hope of a complete system of logic with his incompleteness theorem, gets paranoid and ends up starving himself because he's convinced people are trying to poison him. Poor chap. Plus, look at him. I just want to cuddle him and give him a puppy and read bedtime stories to him until he cheers up.

And the saddest part of all, Mein Herr, is that I am too stupid to be able to appreciate your theories fully and will therefore never be studying you as part of my Formal Logic course. Nope, I'm stuck with Turing. You know, the guy who did all that code cracking in World War II and then got injected with oestrogen after being convicted of homosexuality 'cause it was the only alternative to a prison sentence. God it sucks to be a logician.

(Hmm. I wonder if logicians have fucked-up lives because they are logicians, or if people with fucked-up lives are more likely in some way to become/have become logicians because of some quality that fucked-up people share?)

My other uses for free time include cycling to Sandford, reading "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (a copy of which mysteriously arrived in my pidge from 4Chan earlier today...), wandering around looking like a vigilante, playing Jazz Jackrabbit on DOSbox and finding new solutions to my snake cube. What an exciting and varied life I lead.

Oh, and I'm back in Cambridgeshire for a couple of days tomorrow, which will be nice. If my cycles around Oxfordshire in the last week have taught me anything, it's that I bloody well LIKE being able to see for miles when you get to the top of the only "hill" in the region and the Thames valley just can't deliver when it comes to that. Rolling pastoral countryside be damned, I want a fen. Well, not actually a fen. Huntingdonshire. And my prayers will be answered. Tomorrow.