I have been playing around with R the last few days. This is an open source mathematics software that comes with Linux systems. It is a bit esoteric; it is a command prompt program (meaning that there is no graphical user interface) and the syntax is a bit odd, so it is nowhere near intuitive to use. However, I find the process of figuring out such systems quite satisfying. I have similar feelings toward psychological research; there is certainly a feeling of empowerment that develops from discovering real patterns in experimental data. Philosophy is far less concrete; you can run in circles all day without discovering anything. However, when you find effects from empirical studies, there is no doubt (as long as there were proper controls) that the results reflect some sort of real difference between the conditions. Though, of course, the proper interpretation of that data can be far less clear. And it is also quite nice to figure out how to use technology to model empirical data. Too bad I’m not all that talented at it…