2009 — 2 March: Monday
I'm thinking maybe I should be trying to get to bed before 2 or 3 a.m. for a while. Just as an experiment.
Tonight's picture of Christa reminds me that, besides making all of Peter's clothes, and the colourful little blanket you can see here, she started work on her footstool1 in Old Windsor, way back in 1980:
Last night's film was a newish one from Jodie Foster — "The brave one" — directed by Neil Jordan. An interesting and well-made "take" on vigilanteism in New York. Rather dark but not gratuitous. It can be very hard, sometimes, not to sympathise with old Hammurabi and his codes of law. Unsettling stuff, in fact. Foster was superb, as usual.
I should hate to think that Windows has been incompetently programmed, but I've just "installed" the same critical update for the fourth time on one of the PCs. Oh well, g'night at 00:57.
Sunny start
Albeit frosty roof tiles. So, food shopping can wait and another walk is on the cards. On with the breakfast show. It's 09:07 and I'm hearing from the epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson that the more unequal the society, the greater the set of nasty social and health problems within its borders. Now there's (not) a surprise. I hadn't heard the phrase "status competition" before. I'm not sure I want to hear it again, either. Given the upward surge in inequality in the UK starting in the 1980s, guess which glorious lady leader picks up some of the blame? (Tee hee.)
Reading this reminded me that it's nearly 35 years since I first had to describe the process of sorting (in the context of assembler-level programming of a polyphase tape sort/merge operation on an ICL 1900 Series mainframe). Plus ça change! This, too, is an interesting list. But now it's time to assemble a packed lunch...
Somewhat later
It's now 17:01 and I'm wrapping myself around a cuppa, chomping a couple of oranges, and have been quarter-listening to that blood-pressure-raising radio programme "Beyond Belief". We had a nice walk around Mottisfont — about 7.5 miles with occasional sidetracks. It was sunny for most of it, but still quite chilly. I've also treated the Yaris to its next drink of petrol and am now contemplating the evening's entertainment and amusement. First task will be to investigate the existence of an equivalent to Irfan file viewer on Linux. My goal here is to be able to view my DVD cover artwork (lovingly scanned,2 recall, to a resolution of 1080 pixels depth) on the plasma screen. (Storing the artwork up in the loft would free up about half a cubic metre of space in the living room.)
Grrr! The bank I moved back into (that Christa used since 1973) has just led a share price slump by asking for £12,000,000,000 to shore up its finances. Smoke and mirrors, I tell you, smoke and mirrors.
The war on terror
I don't like "terrorists". I don't like what they do. I don't like their hate-filled ideologies. I don't know how to tackle the problem they represent. But (crucially) I also can't stand the inevitable loss of freedom, privacy, and civil liberties that current "anti-terror" initiatives all involve. And I absolutely hate the witless arguments put forward by our idiotic politicians that simplistically assert "if you're innocent, you have nothing to fear". The argument against data-mining is beautifully presented here:
There is one very significant issue that will always make data mining unworkable when used to search for terrorist suspects in a general population, and that is what we might call the "baseline problem": even with the most brilliantly accurate test imaginable, your risk of false positives increases to unworkably high levels, as the outcome you are trying to predict becomes rarer in the population you are examining...
We are invited to accept that everybody's data will be surveyed and processed, because MI5 have clever algorithms to identify people who were never previously suspected. There are 60 million people in the UK, with, let's say, 10,000 true suspects. Using your unrealistically accurate imaginary screening test, you get 6 million false positives. At the same time, of your 10,000 true suspects, you miss 2,000.
Send in the (mobile) infantry
Cast your mind back to an experiment from January 2008. It involved the quality of upscaled video images from standard definition NTSC, ditto PAL, and high-definition Blu-ray variants of a frame from that "Big Bug" movie Starship Troopers. Played back, of course, on a motley mixture of hardware.
Using my tripod (to ensure a fixed viewpoint and distance from the plasma screen), an ISO setting of 400 (to avoid flash), and full zoom on my Canon's standard lens on (as nearly as I could make it) the same paused frame (from, in turn, my Region 1 NTSC DVD, Mike's Region 2 PAL DVD, and his Blu-ray BD), I have now repeated this experiment in (as it were) the comfort of my own living room, playing back each disc on the new Blu-ray player. In all cases the screen was showing a 1080p image. This image is a tiny part of the full frame...
Standard definition NTSC
Standard definition PAL
Blu-ray
A brief chat...
... with Brian has also given me the hints I needed to find and install gThumb image viewer on the Linux Media PC, so I can now scan through the DVD cover artwork in full screen and as a slide show. Now that's what I call a digital photo frame.