I forgot to mention yesterday that Mani was born on that date in the year 216 in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, Babylonia and died on Feb 26, 277 in a dungeon of the Persian Emperor Bahram I. I mention this, because I am studying Mani and his teachings in preparation for my June talk on Mani’s World religion called Manichaeism.

I mention this, because I am studying Mani and his teachings in preparation for my June talk on Mani’s World religion called Manichaeism.

Later this morn coffee with Elisabeth at Waves; both of us are still coming to terms with the passing last Monday of our mutual friend JK. See yesterday’s daily entry for a photo of him singing the preceding Sunday evening.

Yesterday’s coffee at Glenmore Landing with Thomas lasted an hour and a half. We discussed our life experiences, his trips and of course also the passing of JK, with whom he was much closer associated. I lent him my Van Gogh museum catalogue, which I bought there in 1999 when travelling with Tom.

On the way back from that coffee, I stopped by at Chapters to check on the computer books. One new CSS book is coming in May and I spotted a new book titled ‘PHP in twenty lessons‘, which looked so attractive to me that I bought it.
I still have two PHP projects on the back burner, one is on sorting my daily entry subjects and the other on reducing camera image files for the web in an efficient and convenient manner, using a form.

Not simple projects, but then neither was setting up my website. I like a programming challenge, which is something I discovered in the year 1966. At that time I was introduced to Fortran 2 and 4 in my civil engineering program at UoT and stayed close to computers ever since. In 1960/1 the dailies referred to the computer challenge almost daily, but no one had a handle on it. It became one of the reasons for me to start my studies at UoT in September of 1961.

Last Friday’s ‘Writings’ held the promise called “Later”. Now is later! This reference was a reminder to myself to return to my notes in the ‘Celestial Planisphere’ notebook entry of the fore going evening [04-09]. This I will summarise below.

On Agency: It is as if the evolving organism has this built in destiny to at least change and hopefully evolve.

The notes relate to J. Gould’s notion of ‘agency’ as mentioned in Chapter 1 of his ‘The Structure of Evolutionary Theory’, SoETh for short here. My issue with this idea of agency is that though it places the impetus for evolutionary change with the organism and not outside it, biological dynamics that would drive such a process are not even hinted at. It is as if the evolving organism has this built in destiny to at least change and hopefully evolve.
Time to go for that coffee with Elisabeth; 9:25am.
And now 9:28pm!