2010 — 27 October: Wednesday

Next thing I know1 it's once again somewhat after midnight and the shades have well and truly tumbled. Haven't heard a dickie-bird about my forlorn collection of broken bookcase bits — it's been suggested I leave them out in the rain (or threaten to). Not really my style. I have one episode left of Boston Legal season #3 but that can easily wait. I spent some time on a so-far-fruitless search for my little set of USB memory sticks but they are now so ridiculously cheap I may well simply buy a couple of new ones.

On that thought... G'night.

Return of the twinges...

... will send me back to my dentist if they don't die down. Grrr. It's a mere 07:56 — not the ideal way to start the new day. And it's still doing its rainy thing out there, on and off. And the clocks go back this coming weekend. Double grrr. But I have a nice fresh cuppa and the amiable youngster on the Breakfast Show has just done a little "duck rap" to cheer me up. Plus John Landis will be a guest on Sunday evening. Despite my being in a minority of about one I still regard his 1985 film2 "Into the Night" as an overlooked gem.

I deduce from my server logs that Big Bro may possibly now be in the Ukraine. I can think of nobody else I know there, and he was supposed to be moving six Boeing aircraft there from Brunei at some point about now.3 As for Moldova, I don't even know where it is, let alone know anyone online there.

My bedtime reading...

... for the last few nights has been the excellent "Whoops!" by John Lanchester. I'm certain he'd be nodding his head in agreement over every word of this piece about IBM's disgusting financial engineering proclivities for the last decade or more. Source and snippet:

Share buybacks are what companies do when their stock is in the gutter because their business is on the rocks, and when they have a lot of cash sitting around. It is what companies do when they can't figure out what else to do to feed the Wall Street beast. Perhaps the answer is to let it starve and instead go and create great technology.

There will be four quarters of hell to live through (at least) once you go down the more-creative road — but by then, you're down that road and you can't hear the moneymen yapping any more.

Timothy Prickett Morgan in The Register


Indeed, here's a blast from my past on a related theme:

This week also marked the day when I ceased to be an IBM shareholder. Back in 1986 I started saving for shares under a scheme where they gave me a matching share and a 20% discount for each one I managed to afford. Of course, back then we all said "Gosh, they'd have to fall an awfully long way before we lose money on that deal" which is, of course, exactly what they proceeded to do, in spades. (In 1992, for example, IBM shares lost over $28,000,000,000 in value!) Now that they have painfully clawed their way back up to about what I paid for them, I decided to offload all the blighters in one swell foop. Lucky to get the chance, I suppose.

Date: 17th May 1998, from a letter to dear Mama


I even returned to the topic a few years later, though she never told me what she thought:

We have (I'm delighted to report) our own set of bonus-hungry execs in IBM, of course. During the first three months of the year they once again arranged the buying back of several billion dollars worth of their own shares to retire them (supposedly raising the value of the billions of issued shares still out there in mouldy old trunks [investors were traditionally advised never to sell IBM] and in their own capacious pockets). These people get more money per year than I will see in a working lifetime but still they seem to want/need/expect more.

Date: 17th April 2005, from a letter to dear Mama


I've just returned...

... from the End of the Hedge by a fairly circuitous route (past the West End hospice where Christa died, in fact) as (a) I wished to avoid the congestion building up following a motorway accident on the homeward side, and (b) I was quite happy to listen to the complete "Drumming" by Steve Reich. I was picking up my next (spare) supply of salt for the water softener having just emptied the last of the first 25kg into it since its installation. I also got myself a 4GB USB stick (that I successfully argued down from £9-99 to £7-99 as that was what it had said on the shelf price tag) from the World that is PC, and then somehow drifted into Asda for a couple of DVDs.

By my reckoning, that makes it time for some lunch, and to ponder Brian's emailed contribution to issues of wealth:

Wealth

Aliens have landed

Buried here (if you only know where to click!) is an image of the book I bought on 4th October 1979 in Staines before popping into the cinema there to watch "Alien" and get the cr*p scared out of me. Fast forward 31 years, and say 'hello' to "Rover" (who similarly conceals today's cinematic treats):

Youth in Revolt + Planet 51

Asda also had Blu-rays of the Alien "quadrilogy" and the "Back to the Future" trilogy. I resisted.

Amusing Star Trek 2 trivium

Buried in a fascinating interview...

Did the filmmakers consult you?
Not at all! To my disappointment, this film nowhere credited my scientific publications. Star Trek 2 was made by Lucas Films; they simply bought my 1977 book, Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension, which was not an extravagant investment for them! [Laughs]. The mountains in the film were made using a variant of my method. When the film was first released in California, I did not go to the pre-release show, simply because I did not think that it was worth the travel. However, when it came to my neighbourhood, something quite surprising took place. One of my assistants who had seen the film conveyed the bad news that the special effects created with fractals had been edited out. The next day my wife and I went to the film, and the fractals were staring at both of us. My assistant had been misled by the realistic treatment; he had not seen the fractals, as he was still not used to them.

Benoit Mandelbrot in Edge 330


It's 18:00 and therefore almost time for a meal before I head out for an evening of video nirvana in Winchester.

  

Footnotes

1  A short list, trust me.
2  Brief plot summary here and a picture here.
3  Not so, he tells me. "I am actually now in Singapore having arrived 4 hours ago from Brunei. Nowhere near the Ukraine and unlikely to be there for a long while yet!" Hard to keep up with him.