Pretty interesting stuff, though the overall picture is pretty familiar from second-hand reading. The ideas are very lucidly expressed, though you have to keep quite a bit in memory to follow the more complicated arguments.

It's interesting how religious the Phaedo seems. It definitely seems to me to prefigure Christianity, with the noble teacher willingly embracing death in order to fulfill his beliefs, leaving followers with a hope of how to lead better lives. The specific arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul don't really seem particularly convincing to me though: they may follow logically from Platonic idealism, but if you don't accept that then the arguments don't really work.

I did find myself thinking, "that's all very well, but what about X," only to find the interlocuters raising argument X later on, several times. While I was thinking in terms of the soul as the software running on the body's hardware, they raise the same distinction with the soul being the harmony emerging from the body's lyre; and therefore the soul being unable to survive the body's destruction.

I'd say all these dialogues are worth reading. Phaedo is probably the one to read of any, since it describes the death of Socrates. Symposium is a bit long-winded, but seems to most dramatic: it has various guests at a dinner party discoursing on Love. The Apology is Socrates trial defence. Crito is where Socrates explains why he'd rather submit to death than flee.

Me
My grandmother's not well. Has a serious problem: they're waiting for test results to come back next week. Just heard a few minutes ago that they reckon she's just got a few weeks left. Not sure whether to go down and visit her now, or go down next weekend. Mum and Dad will be there this weekend, so next might be better.

Work is busy: gradually getting on top of things. The problem now is that there's so many different things to do. After so many rounds of redundancies we only basically have one person who understands each system, and when I complain the CTO just says we don't have resources to train more than one person. So while I'm supposed to be working on super-high-priority system A, I also have to simultaneously launch B,C and D because they're all interdependent and nobody else knows anything about them.

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Video: Unsubscribe Me: Amnesty anti-torture campaign. Inside an engine.

VoxEU New service sector jobs still geographically concentrated, expected to change.

So what did we learn from the Mary Rose? Construction, armament, boring artefact database.