2008 — 13 May: Tuesday
I find (and have always found) this sort of weather exhausting. So, relatively early to bed (midnight or so) and just a placeholder for now. Not one word, therefore, about the Blair's contraceptive mishap (one might almost say cock up) at Balmoral in the late 1990s. Hang on! Aren't they Catholics? And, by the way, isn't this just about the ultimate get-out clause?
A God who can be spoken of comfortably and clearly by human beings cannot be the true God. Si comprehendis, non est Deus, said St Augustine: 'if you understand, it is not God'.
Which can really only be countered by a more modern equivalent, from Richard Feynman: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." Time for sleep!
Amazing, this software stuff...
Until less than an hour ago this morning, I was blissfully unaware of the fact that if you Googled for "how to recover a deleted Outlook Express folder" you got 243,000 search results. And now (09:49), one of them is already chugging its way through my neighbour Pauline's hard drive to see if it can piece together the bits of hubby Bill's Cricket-related email, which it seems he accidentally despatched to the seventh of Dante's circles four days ago. (Yes, I checked in Deleted Items first, but their current setting is, it seems, to empty that every time they shut down the email program — I'm not even going to speculate whether that is Microsoft's default setting.) So, just time to shovel in a spot of brekkie before nipping back to inspect progress.
In the scale of things (Burmese cyclone, Chinese earthquake) I realise this is only a mini-disaster, but I also know only too well the numb feelings induced by local, personal (data and other!) loss. Let alone those induced by a summons to attend an ailing Aged P in the Midlands. I could wish the tide would occasionally recede in the sea of troubles that ebbs and flows around us! History (and, I think, Life) is just, as Alan Bennett reminds us, one f*****g thing after another.
And now we face high, and continuing, UK price inflation. Been there, done that, in the mid-1970s.
It's 12:03 and poor Pauline's PC is only just over 10% through its chugging. I shall do something about lunch earlier today than yesterday, methinks. A nice breeze is also moderating both the temperature and the pollen count, by the feel of things. But a chap (a Professor) being interviewed on the BBC has just said "The idea that oil is running out is quite misleading..." and that North Sea oil revenue was mostly wasted in the 1980s giving people tax cuts so they would continue to vote for La Thatcher (aka Attila the Hen) and her crazy ideology.
I acidly observe that the forecourt price of petrol has gone up by over 10% in the seven months since I started to drive. But now that Darling chap in the Treasury is going to give me a one-year-only £600 rise in my tax-free allowance to compensate me for the idiot who failed to realise that eliminating the lowest (10%) rate of tax would hit the lowest paid (including this pensioner) harder than the rich. Could there be an election looming? In the next year? Is "New Labour" that close in spirit and tactics to "Old Tory"? Does the Pope s*it in the Vatican?
Captions and fonts
Big Bro has been asking a series of questions about digital photo captions that has kept Mike and me quite busy researching. During this NZ-based inquisition he sent over one of his aircraft slides1 which I cannot resist turning into one of my occasional "mystery objects". Click the pic:
Right! Time to do lunch. 13:00 is late enough.
46 years ago (here he goes again) I bought a book called Great World Mysteries by Eric Frank Russell.2 Scared the pants off me, some of it. Russell was (although I didn't know it at the time) a great fan of the work of Charles Fort (but that's another story). Anyway, for some reason, I was reminded by reading this tale of a ghost3 that was a bug.
Being as how...
... we're back from a cuppa at Hillier's and a fresh plastic teat of cow juice I guess it's time (16:58) to mosey back over to assess palpable (or other) progress with that errant Cricket email material. Well, it's scoured nearly 33% of the disk, and has found 1,600 items so far. Fortunately (in this case) Bill and Pauline have neither defragged their drive nor emptied their recycle bin in over two years so there's going to be a fair amount of recoverable data lying around.
Next up... tea. Sixty deaths in Lebanon in the last week alone. I can hear Christa saying "Good God!" And they talk about martyrs. We are a truly stupid, ignorant, primitive species. In my blacker moments, I find myself wondering how much future there is for humanity with its conspicuous lack of humanity.
I had to postpone tea since Pauline tapped on the door to tell me the great email recovery program had stopped, having identified 19,054 deleted items (about 19,000 of which, of course, had been deleted intentionally). These can all be viewed (though not cut'n'pasted) but since nothing can be done to recover them until the $40 has been paid and a licence key plumbed in, I predict young Bill will be sitting down in front of a hot PC with pencil and paper for quite some time to come this evening. I've left them to, as it were, their own device, and retired for the delayed tea. It's now 20:47 and a very pleasant temperature up here in the study. There's good music (live, from Spiritualized) on the radio, and quite a lot right with my little world I guess. Apart from the aching Christa-shaped void, of course. Let's see if I can find another nice photo of her to scan and publish.
Kluge revisited
Yesterday, I linked to a letter in the NYT by the author (Gary Marcus) of the book "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind". Today, a review of the same work, with a very tasty opening paragraph:
Despite the fact that humans have been known to be eaten by bears, sharks and assorted other carnivores, we love to place ourselves at the top of the food chain. And, despite our unwavering conviction that we are smarter than the computers we invented, members of our species still rob banks with their faces wrapped in duct tape and leave copies of their resumés at the scene of the crime. Six percent of sky-diving fatalities occur due to a failure to remember to pull the ripcord, hundreds of millions of dollars are sent abroad in response to shockingly unbelievable e-mails from displaced African royalty...
And this is for Junior, an avid user of text messaging. Read it and weep. While this is for his Dad! (Needs Flash for the intro, and .NET Framework 2.0 SDKs etc etc etc...) And for people who thought Black Holes were all safely out in space. There was one in Auckland when I looked — watch out for it, Big Bro!
