It's taken me about a week, but I've reached the climax of my medieval fantasy short story. Men have been hitting each other over the heads with swords for too long, and it's just going to have to come to an end. Actually, this one will probably turn out to be longer than a short story. It'll be a novella/novelette/whatever the next up is called. It's been a while since I've written a short piece this long. I think that's because most of what I've written recently has been character driven, and this one is unashamedly plot driven. For some reason, plot driven seems to come out longer. Maybe that's because a character driven story bases itself on the character's arc from one emotional state to another, at least in the stories I write, which can be a fairly short process, while a plot driven story goes through several plot convolutions as well as doing the same character arc as above. No doubt this is simply a function of the way I write stories.

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I've found myself unnecessarily arguing in another place(*) about the nature of science and mathematics. The person I have unnecessarily argued with states that science and maths are inherent to the universe and that we, as scientists and mathematicians, are simply discovering these laws written into the "book of the universe". Me, I don't buy that, and I'm not sure how many scientists and mathematicians do. I'm arguing that both science and maths are simply predictive models based on limited observations rather than anything fundamental. The "big book" argument seems rather arrogant to me: it assumes that everything is knowable, and knowable by humans with a few pounds of grey goo in their skulls. More importantly, it seems to ignore the way science and maths develop. Can one really argue that these "laws" are fundamental and that if we didn't build them from our limited sensory perceptions (e.g., if we had "eyes" that detected gravity rather than the limited part of the electromagnetic spectrum that they do, or if we had senses that detected something hitherto undetected by humans with our puny detectors) that the laws we came up with would be exactly the same laws we are discovering? Add to that certain basic assumptions we make in developing any theory (e.g., that evidence is reliable, that there are patterns to be discovered, that results must be reproducible, etc.), and I find it difficult to believe that there is this big book of the universe waiting to be read. Perhaps someone who knows a little more about the philosophy and fundamentals of science and mathematics can explain to me where I'm going wrong.

(*) Note on "another place": the British parliamentary system is ridiculously archaic. By too-long tradition, the two houses of parliament (the House of Commons and the House of Lords) don't ever refer to each other by name. Instead, they call each other "another place". I have not been debating this issue in either of the houses of parliament, but at another 'nother place altogether.

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It's a wonderful spring day today. The sun is out, the air is warm, and I am stuck in the office. Nonetheless, winter, I think, is finally over (not the first time I've said that this year. I'm hoping spring will last through to the weekend. I don't resent having to work during most the year (well, not much), but I really do resent it when the weather is beautiful.